In 1992, six-year-old Terry McCarty suffered third-degree burns on seventy percent of his body as a…
Steven Jay Russell: America’s most famous escapee
Steven Jay Russell, born in late 1957, went down in American criminal history as a con…
Why Mukhina was paralyzed before the Olympics
In July 1980, just two weeks before the Olympic Games in Moscow, Soviet gymnast Elena Mukhina…
Love as illness: what did doctors prescribe?
In the Middle Ages, a broken heart was not merely a poetic metaphor. Lovesickness was treated…
Vesna Vulović’s Guinness record: what really happened?
In January 1972, twenty-one-year-old flight attendant Vesna Vulović survived a fall from an altitude of over…
How tall was Władysław the Elbow-High?
For centuries, legends circulated about a king who was only 120 centimeters tall. Władysław the Elbow-high,…
Robert Cornish and his experiments to revive the dead
In the 1930s, California biologist Robert Cornish conducted a series of experiments that were meant to…
Who was Gwenllian, symbol of Welsh freedom?
In 12th-century Wales, women rarely stood at the head of armies. Gwenllian ferch Gruffydd was an…
Kate Cooke: the prostitute who became Countess Euston
Victorian London was a city of contrasts. The splendor of aristocratic salons neighbored the misery of…
Pasqual Piñón. The Two-Headed Mexican
At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, American circuses experienced their golden age. Audiences…