History
838 verified facts in this category, showing 301–400.
- The St. Francis Dam in California, built by self-taught engineer William Mulholland, was constructed on a defective foundation with the surrounding canyon geology ignored.
- Guy Burgess's briefcase is among 20 objects from MI5's archives going on public display for the first time.
- A range fire at the Little Bighorn Battlefield served as the catalyst for Douglas Scott's focus on battlefield archaeology, enabling a multidisciplinary team to study the site with new field and analytical methods.
- The Louisiana Purchase cost the United States about four cents per acre.
- Nicéphore Niépce produced the first successful photograph from nature in 1826 or 1827, an approximately eight-hour exposure of the courtyard of his estate, Le Gras, made with a camera obscura and a pewter plate.
- The Stevenson Bridge in Winters, California, is a rare tie-arch bridge built in 1923 that is covered in graffiti and has sometimes been slated for demolition.
- President Jimmy Carter expanded the CIA's covert Operation Cyclone program to $50 million and approved channeling U.S. aid to the Afghan resistance through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, which distributed assistance to seven selected mujahedeen groups.
- When Soviet forces crossed the Amu Darya River and landed at Bagram Air Base on December 24, 1979, the Kremlin intended the intervention to last six months and to replace Afghanistan's radical communist leadership with less extreme leaders.
- Afghanistan had been at relative peace since 1933 until a revolutionary communist coup in April 1978 provoked an Islamic rebellion and factional violence.
- Vice President Albert Gore unveiled the first declassified CORONA photographs to the American press and public at CIA Headquarters on 24 February 1995.
- In February 1995, President William Clinton ordered the declassification within 18 months of historical intelligence imagery from the CORONA, ARGON, and LANYARD satellite systems.
- The first mentholated cigarette was created and marketed nearly 100 years ago as a 'throat cigarette.'
- The Bible of Count Rorico was moved to St. Maur des Fossés around 868 due to the threat of a Viking invasion, and entered the Bibliothèque Royale in 1622.
- The National Portrait Gallery purchased an 1846 daguerreotype of Dolley Madison taken by John Plumbe Jr., the earliest known photograph of an American first lady.
- Tobacco companies hired photographer Paul Thompson to create baseball-card imagery, and his photographs became the basis for many cards sold with cigarettes around 1910.
- Babe Ruth's 1921 auxiliary agreement specified monetary performance incentives while his ability to change teams was restricted by baseball's reserve clause.
- Dottie Ferguson Key of the Rockford Peaches stole 461 bases in 950 games while playing in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League from 1945 through 1954.
- The 1857 'Laws of Base Ball' was authored by former player Daniel 'Doc' Adams and established that bases would be 90 feet apart, games would have nine innings, and each side would have nine players.
- An 1825 Persian text titled 'History of the Origin and Distinguishing Marks of the Different Castes of India' was written by James Skinner, a Scottish-Indian lieutenant-colonel who served in the British military.
- Much of the Library of Congress's rare Persian-language collection came from Kirkor Minassian, an antiquities dealer who procured Islamic and Near-Eastern texts for the library during the 1930s.
- James Skinner's treatise on India's caste system was based on Sanskrit sources that were later translated into Persian.
- Philippe la Renotiere von Ferrari built a stamp collection over 40 years that was seized by the French government after his death in 1917.
- A 1918 U.S. 24-cent airmail stamp became rare and valuable because its airplane image was printed upside down.
- Charles Lang Freer offered his art collection and funds for a Smithsonian building in 1904 but retained the art for another 13 years before it was established.
- In 1899, Charles Lang Freer directed the merger of 13 car-building companies, including his own, to create the American Car and Foundry Company.
- Codex Washingtonianus, also called Codex Freerianus, contains the four Gospels arranged in the Western order: Matthew, John, Luke, and Mark.
- To rebuild its collection, Congress purchased former president Thomas Jefferson's personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950 on January 30, 1815.
- A fire on Christmas Eve 1851 destroyed two-thirds of the Library of Congress's collection.
- The Library of Congress replaced many books lost in the 1814 fire by purchasing Thomas Jefferson's personal library.
- During a national emergency, the Under Secretary of Transportation for Security was authorized to coordinate domestic aviation, rail, surface, and maritime transportation, and to oversee transportation-related responsibilities of federal departments and agencies other than the Department of Defense and military departments.
- The FBI's post-scandal guidelines remained hidden from the public for decades.
- The Church Committee found that the FBI attempted to damage civilian groups through smear campaigns and harassment.
- Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was held briefly at the CIA's 'Salt Pit' prison in Afghanistan before being transferred to the 'Cat's Eye' black site in Thailand, arriving on Nov. 15, 2002.
- Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was held briefly at the CIA's 'Salt Pit' prison in Afghanistan before being transferred to a black site in Thailand.
- Harry Truman was the first U.S. president to receive a daily intelligence digest, called the 'Daily Summary,' which began production in February 1946 and continued until February 1951.
- The overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, which the United States supported, occurred in 1953.
- In 1943 and 1944, Stalin deported hundreds of thousands of Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tartars, and other North Caucasus groups, claiming with little evidence that they were potential Nazi collaborators.
- In the 1980s, the U.S. military was restricted to providing no more than 55 advisors to El Salvador's government in its fight against the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front insurgents.
- Peter Naffsinger wrote that Arab trainees commonly dismissed blame with the phrase "min allah" ("It is from God") and responded to warnings against future misconduct with "inshallah" ("If God wills it").
- Peter Naffsinger's 1964 CIA assessment argued that 'face,' or honor, was the predominant cultural imperative in the Arab world, to which other values were subordinated.
- In 1964, CIA analyst Peter Naffsinger wrote an article titled "'Face' among the Arabs" for the Agency's in-house journal Studies in Intelligence.
- CIA staff historian Jack Pfeiffer wrote the fifth volume of the agency's internal Bay of Pigs history between 1979 and 1984, but his superiors rejected the draft for 'serious shortcomings in scholarship,' a 'polemical tone,' and failure to add significantly to understanding the controversy.
- When Frank Wisner retired in 1958, Allen Dulles chose covert-operations advocate Richard Bissell as his successor over espionage specialist Richard Helms, telling Helms that espionage seemed less important in Washington because it was 'relatively cheap.'
- The first public release of translated VENONA messages occurred in July 1995 and contained 49 messages concerning Soviet attempts to obtain information about U.S. atomic-bomb research and the Manhattan Project.
- American cryptologists needed almost two years to break the KGB's encryption used in VENONA-related communications.
- In 2012, Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky was one of 108 Democrats who did not vote on a resolution holding then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, and she was the only one of them to submit a statement saying she would have voted against it.
- NIE 15-90 contained no dissenting footnotes.
- The October 1990 NIE 15-90 judged that Yugoslavia's breakup would be violent and that the conflict might spill over into adjacent regions.
- In the 1980s, most members of Congress lived in Washington, D.C., with their families, socialized across party lines, and ran campaigns costing only a few hundred thousand dollars, according to Democratic Rep. Jim Cooper.
- The House voted to repeal President Obama's health care law at least 33 times during the 112th Congress.
- The three justices who issued a concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore that is considered the genesis of the modern independent state legislature theory were then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
- North Carolina Republicans gained control of both chambers of the state legislature in 2010 for the first time in more than a century.
- In 1980, Mike Gravel lost the Democratic Senate primary to Clark Gruening, grandson of Ernest Gruening, who then lost the general election to Republican Frank Murkowski.
- Mike Gravel won his first U.S. Senate term by defeating incumbent Sen. Ernest Gruening, a former Alaska territorial governor, in the 1968 Democratic primary.
- After being excluded from later Democratic debates, Mike Gravel ran for the Libertarian presidential nomination in 2008 but failed to win it.
- During a 2007 Democratic presidential debate, Mike Gravel confronted then-Sen. Barack Obama by asking, 'Tell me, Barack, who do you want to nuke?' regarding using nuclear weapons against Iran.
- Jeff Merkley previously spoke for more than 15 hours in 2017 to protest President Donald Trump's nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
- In 1963, only 20 U.S. states mandated that children receive several vaccines before starting school.
- In 1855, Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to require children to receive a smallpox vaccine before attending school.
- Caribou skins were preferred for prehistoric clothing because they were lightweight and excellent insulators, but their brittle hairs usually meant the clothing lasted no more than one winter.
- Göbekli Tepe was constructed in two stages: the oldest structures date to the Early Pre-Pottery Neolithic A period, ending around 9000 B.C., while the later, less elaborate Pre-Pottery Neolithic B remains date to about 8000 B.C.
- Göbekli Tepe's T-shaped megaliths are about 9 feet tall, with some carved with images of lions, ducks, scorpions, ants, spiders, snakes, bulls, foxes, and cranes.
- Göbekli Tepe covers about 22 acres (roughly 9 hectares) and contains at least seven stone circles.
- Göbekli Tepe's Building D measures at least 65 feet across and contains two freestanding central limestone pillars that are 18 feet tall and weigh an estimated eight tons each.
- New technology detected dozens of additional wounds on the Jebel Sahaba skeletons beyond the arrowhead impact marks previously identified.
- The Jebel Sahaba cemetery in northern Sudan is approximately 13,000 years old.
- Smaller versions of Göbekli Tepe's pillars, symbols, and architecture have been found in settlements up to 125 miles away.
- The tallest limestone pillars at Göbekli Tepe stand 18 feet high, weigh 16 tons, and are decorated with bas-reliefs of animals including gazelles, snakes, foxes, scorpions, and wild boars.
- A wooden post unearthed in south Wales in 2012 had previously been considered the oldest wood carving found in Britain.
- The Nottingham Tree-ring Dating Laboratory and the University of Groningen's Center for Isotope Research dated the West Berkshire wood artifact to between 4640 and 4605 B.C.E., with 95 percent confidence.
- Retired surgeon Derek Fawcett discovered a roughly three-foot-long wood fragment while digging a workshop foundation on his property in West Berkshire, 50 miles west of London.
- The tallest T-shaped pillars at Göbekli Tepe stand roughly 16 to 18 feet high and weigh several tons (estimates range from about seven to ten), and the largest stone enclosure measures about 65 feet across.
- Abu Hureyra consisted of two settlements: a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer village beneath a later farming town.
- Abu Hureyra was excavated between 1972 and 1973 before the Tabqa Dam's construction flooded the site, which now lies beneath Lake Assad.
- Felsina, on the site of modern Bologna, Italy, was founded by the Etruscans around 510 BCE in an area rich in Villanovan remains.
- Durrington Walls, overlooking the River Avon near Amesbury, is the largest known Neolithic henge in the United Kingdom.
- Apollo 7 made the first live television broadcast from an American spacecraft, during which the crew displayed hand-lettered cue cards reading 'From the Lovely Apollo Room High Atop Everything' and 'Keep Those Cards and Letters Coming In, Folks.'
- The Soviet LK lunar cabin, designed for a single cosmonaut, weighed approximately 12,257 pounds—about one-third the weight of the Apollo lunar module.
- Apollo 11 landed 4.2 miles from its intended target, the farthest off-target landing of the Apollo lunar missions.
- On December 11, 1972, Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan manually took control of the lunar module Challenger's landing at 300 feet by selecting computer program P-66, refusing to let the digital autopilot complete the landing.
- Humans first descended into Challenger Deep in 1960 using a U.S. Navy submersible.
- After her NASA career, Poppy Northcutt became Houston's first women's advocate and later became a criminal defense attorney in the 1980s.
- During the Apollo 13 emergency, Poppy Northcutt's team worked in a private room down the hall from the televised mission control room to troubleshoot the return-to-Earth program.
- Poppy Northcutt and her colleagues did not directly program mission-control computers; IBM personnel entered their programs, and parts of the code were sometimes lost in translation.
- Poppy Northcutt's job title at TRW was 'computress,' a gendered term for a computer worker.
- The capital of the Arabia Nome was Phacusa.
- The practice of retainer sacrifice in ancient Egypt gradually declined over time before eventually dying out.
- Ancient Egyptian retainer sacrifice was a practice in which servants were killed after a pharaoh's death so they could continue to serve the pharaoh in the afterlife.
- ORP Czapla participated in the September campaign of 1939 while still incomplete.
- Fritz Vincken gave a later account describing the Christmas Eve truce of 1944.
- The Užice Republic was a free territory controlled by Yugoslav Partisans in 1941.
- The Chetnik attack on Užice targeted Partisan-controlled territory known as the Užice Republic.
- At least one source credits Vitruvius, rather than Hero of Alexandria, as the first to describe the aeolipile.
- Many sources credit Hero of Alexandria with inventing the aeolipile.
- The German squadron including the Tirpitz turned back from intercepting convoy PQ 17 partly because the convoy had effectively ceased to exist as a unified entity.
- The German squadron pursuing convoy PQ 17 turned back due to the operation's riskiness and because the convoy had ceased to exist as a unified entity.
- The German squadron did not detect the K-21 submarine's torpedo attack on 5 July 1942.
- No torpedo hits were actually recorded on the German squadron during K-21's attack on the Tirpitz on 5 July 1942.
- Nikolai Lunin did not directly observe the result of K-21's torpedo attack on the Tirpitz but interpreted heard explosion sounds as torpedo hits.
- The Soviet submarine K-21 fired four torpedoes at the Tirpitz from a considerable distance on 5 July 1942.