It's tough to know what happened on Earth thousands of years before anyone started writing anything down. But thanks to the amazing work of anthropologists and paleontologists like those working on National Geographic's Genographic Project, we can begin to piece together the story of our ancestors. Here's how early humans spread from East Africa all around the world.
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New York's Financial District is the economic center of the entire US — but it's also one of the city's most historically gruesome, gory, and bloody neighborhoods.
Although its cobblestone streets might seem innocent, the next time you're in the area just remind yourself: More than 120,000 bodies have been buried on top of each other in the famous Trinity Church cemetery. City Hall Park is said to still be haunted to this day from all of the public hangings and lynchings that happened there in the 1800s.
Boroughs of the Dead, founded by Andrea Janes in 2013, leads unconventional walking tours that explore New York's dark, strange, and downright chilling nooks and crannies.
Just in time for Halloween, the company is running on double time, with multiple tours happening throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. I chose to take a tour through the Financial District with Janes herself.
Although Janes made it clear that she doesn't claim to be "clairvoyant by any means" there were several stops on the "Forgotten Dark Histories of Lower Manhattan" tour that she promised were "nauseating, intense, and overwhelming" due to their history. Below, a few highlights from our two-hour tour.
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We began our tour outside the National Museum of the American Indian, where Janes shares the gruesome story of the massacre of the Algonquian Indian tribe. Led by Willem Kieft, the director general of New Amsterdam in the 1640s, the bloody battle began at the very site where the museum can be found today.
When the tribe refused to pay taxes that Kieft had attempted to enforce, Kieft was more than a little upset. He decided to kill every man, woman, and child of the Algonquin tribe, focusing on the women and children. Fort Amsterdam was decorated with the heads of the slain American Indians.
To this day, there are tales of the ghost of a Native American woman wandering through the Bowling Green area.
If you work near the intersection of Pearl and Broad Streets, you might frequent Fraunces Tavern for happy hour. The tavern is well known for its rich history: George Washington and the Sons of Liberty would come to the Tavern before the start of the Revolutionary War, and Washington held his extremely emotional farewell banquet on the third floor after the War was over. There was also reportedly a murder, and a suicide occurred on the premises in 1712.
Many unverified reports of "paranormal instances" have been said to occur in this tavern. People have reported feeling a slight pressure on their back as though they're being pushed, doors have mysteriously slammed shut, keys have been seen gently swaying as though someone — or something — had brushed their finger along them. Janes also told the group a bartender's tale of both a night porter and a bouncer who once quit mid-shift for undisclosed reasons.
As Janes led us to Federal Hall on Wall Street, she told the group, "If you are a tour guide who loves 18th-century history, you will think of Wall Street not as a place where money was traded, but where human flesh was bought and sold."
In 1736, at the foot of Wall Street closer to the water, she explained, you would find a slave market. In fact, after Charleston, North Carolina, New York was the single largest slave-owning port city in the British colonies.
Back in 1741, Federal Hall was known as British City Hall. On the top floor was a jail, and in the basement, a dungeon. During the slave rebellion of that year, more than 100 men were captured and imprisoned in the dungeon and kept for the entire summer. Many of the prisoners were killed without warrant.
Now that we can thank McDonald’s restaurants for serving breakfast all day, we should take the time to thank fatigue-clad troops for not having to leave our cars to get it.
Despite the Army and Air Force’s current relationship with Burger King, their first love was McDonald’s and Mickey D’s was more than willing to accommodate that love by mediating the one thing which kept our troops from easy access to the Golden Arches.
In 1975, Army regulations near Fort Huachuca in Sierra Vista, Arizona prevented soldiers wearing their olive-drab fatigues to leave their cars.
McDonald’s heard their plight and added its first drive-thru to McDonalds stores in Arizona, then to Oklahoma and Georgia to serve the soldiers in those areas.
The first drive-thru came way earlier, however. In 1931, a Los Angeles franchise called the Pig Stand opened the first restaurant where motorists could roll around and get a bag of food, packaged to take home. The first burger chain to feature a drive thru was an In-n-Out in Baldwin Park, California in 1948.
In May 1999, that historic location closed forever so that a new McDonald’s restaurant could open next to it. The first McDonald’s drive-thru was torn down and replaced by a parking lot to serve the new McDonald’s.
Burgers, cars, and troops: the triad of American life.
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Today I found out about Audie Murphy, the most decorated U.S. World War II veteran.
Murphy was born on June 20, 1925 in Texas. His family was extremely poor, partially due to having twelve young mouths to feed.
When his father abandoned the family when Audie was fifteen years old, he was forced to pick up some of the slack by hunting and doing what work he could to keep food on the table.
Unfortunately, his mother died just a year after his father left.
Shortly thereafter, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Audie attempted to join the various branches of the U.S. military but was turned down in each case owing to his age and diminutive stature -five and a half feet tall (1.66 meters) and weighing only about 100 pounds (45 kg).
About seven months later, just ten days after he turned seventeen, he tried again.
Having gained some weight (getting up to a whopping 112 pounds / 50.8 kg) and with falsified testimony from his sister claiming he was actually 18, this time Audie was able to get into the army. He was then shipped off to North Africa and later deployed to Sicily.
Despite his small size, Murphy proved to be a phenomenal soldier. In 1944, after witnessing the death of a friend during Operation Dragoon, he charged a group of German soldiers, took over their machine guns and other weapons, and proceeded to take out the other enemy soldiers within range using their own artillery.
He was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for his actions that day, the first of many medals.
During another battle shortly after this, to cover retreating Allied soldiers, he jumped onto a tank that had been hit and was on fire, exposing himself to the advancing enemy soldiers.
Why did he put himself in such an exposed position on a tank that could potentially explode at any minute? There was a .50 caliber machine gun on the tank.
As Private Anthony Abramski said of the event,
It was like standing on top of a time bomb … he was standing on the TD chassis, exposed to enemy fire from his ankles to his head and silhouetted against the trees and the snow behind him.
Nevertheless, over the course of the next hour, he held off six German tanks and several waves of enemy soldiers, who were all trying desperately to take out the little American who was the only thing in their way at that point.
He only retreated when he ran out of ammo. Once this happened, having sustained a leg wound and completely exhausted, Audie said in his book To Hell and Back,
I slide off the tank destroyer and, without once looking back, walk down the road through the forest. If the Germans want to shoot me, let them. I am too weak from fear and exhaustion to care.
Despite the leg wound, as soon as he caught up with his retreating soldiers who had now re-formed, he turned them around and managed to reclaim a stretch of forest from German occupation. According to the official report, in that battle, he killed or severely wounding at least fifty German soldiers by himself.
For this act of bravery and for “indomitable courage and his refusal to give an inch of ground [saving] his company from possible encirclement and destruction…” he was awarded the U.S. Medal of Honor.
He rose through the ranks and was a captain when he was pulled out of the war in 1945. All in all, he earned 33 awards and decorations for his exemplary service during the war.
He was just 20 years old at the time and, as one movie critic later put it, knew more of death than he did of life.
When Murphy returned from the war, he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that often went undiagnosed at the time. After being featured on the cover of Life magazine, he found himself in Hollywood without work, sleeping in rough conditions.
He caught his big break in 1949 when he starred in the film Bad Boy. That same year, he released the aforementioned autobiography titled To Hell and Back, which topped the bestseller charts.
He went on to star as himself in a movie with the same title in 1955; it was Universal’s top-grossing film for nearly 20 years until Jaws usurped it.
Acting seemed to suit him. He made no less than 44 feature films while he was in Hollywood, many of them westerns, and also filmed a 26-episode western TV series called Whispering Smith, which aired in 1961 on NBC.
It was criticised for being too violent, however, and cancelled after just 20 episodes were aired.
A man of many talents, Murphy also dabbled in poetry and song-writing as well as horse breeding and racing. Thanks to his earnings from acting, he was able to purchase a ranch in Texas. He was living an incredibly comfortable life, far grander than what he had known as a child.
Yet all was not well with Murphy. Back to his post traumatic stress disorder, he became dependent on sleeping pills to combat the insomnia he experienced after the war. Realizing he had become addicted to them, he locked himself in a motel room for a week, while he worked through the withdrawal symptoms.
He ended up beating the addiction and went on to break the taboo of talking about the mental disorders many soldiers suffered when they returned home. His willingness to do so opened up discussions about psychological care for veterans upon their return to the US.
Murphy ended up marrying twice, divorcing his first wife after just two years, and having two sons with his second wife.
He appeared to be happy with his family, with more than enough money in the bank to keep them comfortable (though he squandered much of it on gambling in his later years); had acted in dozens of movies; and had amazing war stories to tell his grandkids about.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to get to that stage of his life.
On May 28, 1971, Murphy was in a private plane flying on a business trip from Atlanta, Georgia to Martinsville, Virginia.
The weather conditions were less than ideal: rain and fog shortened the pilot’s visibility considerably, and he had a questionable instrument rating.
He called in to the Roanoke, Virginia airport to say that he would be landing shortly due to poor conditions. The plane, carrying five passengers including Murphy, never landed in the Roanoke Valley. It crashed into Brush Mountain twenty miles away, close to Blacksburg.
Everyone in the crash was killed. Murphy was just 45 years old. The site of the crash has since been turned into a monument, and in the 1990s, the Appalachian Trail was rerouted to go past it.
That wasn’t quite the end for Murphy, though. After a funeral in Arlington Cemetery, where his grave remains the second most visited (after Kennedy’s), he was posthumously awarded his final medal, the Texas Legislative Medal of Honor.
It was presented to his last remaining sister, Nadine Murphy, on October 29, 2013 by Governor Rick Perry.
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NOW WATCH: Startling facts about World War II
Your epitaph — the text written on a headstone — is the last thing you can say to the world.
Sometimes it's a matter of getting your own account of your life out there. Richard Nixon, disgraced by Watergate, wanted to be remembered a peacemaker.
Others highlight a favorite line from their major works, like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Martin Luther King, Jr.
Or you might just want your bones to be left alone, like William Shakespeare, who was buried with a curse.
Keep scrolling for the best in headstones.
This week, the National Security Archive at George Washington University published a newly declassified 1990 US intelligence-community study that revealed terrifying details about the 1983 US-Soviet war scare.
The report found the US and Soviets came unnervingly close to going to war in 1983 after the US conducted a large-scale military exercise in central Europe called Able Archer.
The Soviets incorrectly suspected the US was using the exercise as a cover for a real nuclear first strike. The report found the US missed nearly every sign that the Soviets were serious about going to war in order to preempt such an attack.
The report is full of unpleasant surprises about the state of the world during the Cold War. It documents how fear of an American first strike within the Soviet Union morphed into a kind of corrosive conventional wisdom that war was actually imminent — a fear that nearly became self-fulfilling in late 1983.
But the strangest part of the report has to do with how the Soviets convinced themselves they were so vulnerable. It turns out that Soviet leaders' assessment of their strategic balance with the US was partly created through a KGB-operated computer program called VRYAN, a Russian acronym for "Surprise Nuclear Missile Attack," according to the report.
As the report puts it, "During the war scare [the Soviets] were highly dependent on a computer model." VRYAN used a "database of over 40,000 weighted elements" to identify "inherently unstable political situations in which a deterioration of Soviet power might tempt a US first strike."
Over 200 KGB employees were responsible just for "inserting fresh data" into the system. This data consisted of military, political, and economic-related information that could indicate if conditions were ripe for a US nuclear attack. Much of the data consisted of classified information that came from all over the Soviet government.
The size and scope of VRYAN indicates its importance within the Soviet Union's threat-assessment infrastructure during the war scare. Its purpose was to sort through the noise of global and domestic affairs and produce a single number value for the Soviet Union's power relative to the US. The US' power would be expressed as 100; VRYAN would assign the Soviet Union a number representing Moscow's strength as a percentage of US strength.
According to the report, the Soviets believed that if VRYAN produced a value of 60 or higher, the Soviet Union was strong enough to prevent the US from undertaking a nuclear first strike, with 70 representing a "desirable margin." The "critical threshold" was 40: "Below this level, the Soviet Union would be considered dangerously inferior to the United States," the report reads."[Redacted] if the Soviet Union ever fell below forty percent, the KGB and the military leadership would inform the political leadership that the security of the USSR could not be guaranteed."
At that point, the Soviet leadership would have a semiautomated green light for nuclear war: "[Redacted] the USSR would launch a preemptive attack within a few weeks of falling below the 40% threshold."
By 1984 — amid a flailing war in Afghanistan, frozen relations with the US, and a declining economy — VRYAN was producing values of 45%, perilously close to the point where Soviet decision-makers could begin to contemplate a preemptive nuclear strike.
As the report notes, it's unclear what role VRYAN actually played in Soviet decision-making. The program "apparently was not tied to any military operational plans," according to the report. There's also no sign of the Politburo acting on its conclusions.
But the report ominously notes that Politburo security decisions in the early 1980s were in the hands of a very limited number of people. The computer program only had to convince the majority of a small high-level clique in order to contribute to a push toward war.
The report suggests the most important role of VRYAN was to confirm the existing biases of the Soviet security establishment.
The entire computer program was built on the assumption that the US would take advantage of the Soviet Union's weaknesses to launch a nuclear first strike. Its role wasn't to assess if the US was willing to start World War III. It was to figure out when the US would be likeliest to launch it.
And that's not the system's only analytical leap. VYRAN seemed to connect Soviet vulnerability to a nuclear first strike to the US' desire to actually launch one, a causal connection that even a small army of analysts would have difficulty proving.
At the time VRYAN was set up, the Soviet Union was in fact vulnerable in the event of a US nuclear attack and was seeing its hypothetical second-strike capabilities fade in light of the US's increasing military strength. But that doesn't mean the US would actually have attacked the Soviet Union.
VRYAN shows how anxiety about the Cold War strategic balance mutated into a fateful misunderstanding of the enemy's intentions, to the point where an elaborate computer program reinforced the Soviet Union's system-wide paranoia.
The story of VRYAN, and the larger report, is a chilling portrait of a country's leadership convincing itself they're in existential danger — and building both machinery and actual policy around that assumption.
The irony is that the Soviet Union really was in existential danger. By 1991, unsustainable military spending, US geopolitical pressure, plunging quality of life, the fall of Moscow-dominated communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and the stagnation of the country's political and economic order had destroyed the Soviet Union.
And the US didn't have to fire a single nuclear weapon.
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NOW WATCH: Animated map shows every nuclear-bomb explosion in history
In early 1941, Lyudmila Pavlichenko was studying history at Kiev University, but within a year, she had become one of the best snipers of all time, credited with 309 confirmed kills, 36 of which were German snipers.
Pavlichenko was born in 1916 in a small town in Ukraine.
She was described as an independent, opinionated tomboy who was "unruly in the classroom," as the Smithsonian notes.
At the age of 14, Pavlichenko's family had relocated to Kiev, where she worked as a metal grinder in a munitions factory.
Like many young people in the Soviet Union at that time, Pavlichenko participated in OSOAVIAKhIM, a paramilitary sporting organization which taught youths weapons skills and etiquette.
“When a neighbor’s boy boasted of his exploits at a shooting range,” said Pavlichenko according to the Smithsonian.
“I set out to show that a girl could do as well. So I practiced a lot.”
On June 22, 1941, Hitler broke ties with Joseph Stalin and German troops poured into the Soviet Union. Pavlichenko rushed to join the Soviet army and defend her homeland, but she was initially denied entry into the army due to gender.
"She looked like a model, with well-manicured nails, fashionable clothes, and hairstyle. Pavlichenko told the recruiter that she wanted to carry a rifle and fight. The man just laughed and asked her if she knew anything about rifles,"Soviet-Awards.com wrote of Pavlichenko's effort to join the military.
Even after Pavlichenko presented her marksman certificate and a sharpshooter badge from OSOAVIAKhIM, officials still urged her to work as a nurse.
“They wouldn’t take girls in the army, so I had to resort to all kinds of tricks to get in,” explained Pavlichenko.
Eventually, the Red Army gave her an "audition" by giving her a rifle and showed her two Romanians downrange who were working with the Germans. She shot down the two soldiers with ease, and was then accepted into the Red Army’s 25th Chapayev Rifle Division.
Pavlichenko then shipped out to the battle lines in Greece and Moldova. In very little time she distinguished herself as a fearsome sniper, killing 187 Germans in her first 75 days at war.
Snipers in these battles fought between the enemy lines, often far from their companies. It was extremely dangerous and careful work, as she had to sit perfectly still for hours on end to avoid detection from enemy snipers. After making a name for herself in Odessa and Moldova, Pavlichenko was moved to Crimea to fight in the battle of Sevastopol.
Her reputation earned her more dangerous assignments, eventually facing off one on one with enemy snipers. The Smithsonian reports that she dueled and killed 36 enemy snipers, some of whom were highly decorated themselves.
“That was one of the tensest experiences of my life,” Pavlichenko reportedly said.
She spent eight months fighting in Stevastopol, where she earned a praise from the Red Army and was promoted. On several occasions she was wounded, but she was only removed from battle after taking shrapnel to the face when her position was bombed by Germans who were desperate to stem the tide of her mounting kill count.
She had become a well known figure in the war, as a protagonist in the Red Army's domestic propaganda, and the scourge of German soldiers all over the Eastern front. The Germans even went so far as to address her over loud speakers, offering her comfort and candy should she defect and join their ranks.
Pavlichenko became a sniper instructor and was soon invited to the White House.
She became the first Soviet soldier to visit the White House, where she met with President Franklin Roosevelt and first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt.
Pavlichenko became angry at the US media for the blatantly sexist way they questioned her about the war. Her look and dress was criticized. When she was asked if she wore make up to battle she responded, “There is no rule against it, but who has time to think of her shiny nose when a battle is going on?”
“I wear my uniform with honor. It has the Order of Lenin on it. It has been covered with blood in battle. It is plain to see that with American women what is important is whether they wear silk underwear under their uniforms. What the uniform stands for, they have yet to learn,” she told Time Magazine in 1942.
Pavlichenko was one of 2,000 female snipers who fought for the Red Army in World War II, and one of the 500 who survived.
Her score of 309 kills likely places her within the top five snipers of all time, but her kills are likely much more numerous, as a confirmed kill has to be witnessed by a third party.
After the war, Pavlichenko went back to finish her Master's Degree at Kiev University.
In April of this year, Pavlichenko's story was immortalized in a film called "Battle for Sevastopol" in Russia and "Indestructible" in the Ukraine.
The film was shot during the 2013 EuroMaidan protests in Ukraine, and financed by both Russian and Ukrainian backers at the start of a conflict that would become bloody and divisive, however the film is a testament to the outstanding career of Pavlichenko, a common hero among both parties.
Until an earthquake in 226 BCE knocked it down, the Colossus of Rhodes, a 98-foot-high iron and bronze statue of the Greek god Helios, sat near the harbor of Rhodes, Greece, for 54 years.
Now, a plan put forth by a small team of scientists seeks to rebuild the ancient statue and boost tourism and local jobs in the process.
The plan calls for a a new statue that's way taller than the ancient one. At 400 feet tall, the new Helios would be nearly four times the height of the original. The proposal also includes an interior library, museum, cultural center, exhibition hall, and, of course, a crowning lighthouse that's visible for 35 miles.
One obvious change to the new structure is that it would use modern construction techniques and technology to make it earthquake-proof. The exterior would be completely covered in golden solar panels, making it entirely self-sufficient, which is appropriate for the Greek god of the sun.
It's estimated that the project can be completed in three to four years at a cost of 240 to 260 millions euros ($264 to $286 million). Funding is expected to come from cultural institutions and international crowdfunding.
In addition to renewing and extending Greece's tourism season, the statue's construction would bring much-needed jobs. Whether or not this will all come together depends on how much support and money the team behind the plan can raise. No construction dates have been released.
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After masterminding the attacks at Pearl Harbor, Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto knew that his country’s dominance of the Pacific Ocean would not last against the U.S.’s industrial might.
He began forming plans for a weapon that could terrify the U.S., especially eastern cities like New York and Washington D.C. He thought a campaign of vicious attacks on the east and west coasts would convince the U.S. to quickly sue for peace.
At the time, some submarines carried a reconnaissance plane. Yamamoto asked his engineers if they could devise a submarine that would instead carry three bombers each and have range to carry the bombers around South America to the east coast of the U.S.
What the engineers returned with would be I-400 class submarines. At 400 feet long and displacing 6.560 tons, they were the largest subs of the war. Each massive ship could sail for 37,500 miles without refueling and had a 115-foot long watertight hangar for the aircraft and an 85-foot catapult to launch them.
The planes landed on the water and were recovered using a crane on the deck. The M6A1 Seiran torpedo-bombers were designed for the I-400. They had wings that rotated and folded along the fuselage and even the tail folded down to fit in its tiny hangar.
In addition to their aircraft, the subs carried a 140mm cannon, 4 anti-aircraft guns, and had 8 torpedo tubes.
To help the subs avoid U.S. Navy sonar, the subs were coated in a rubber and asphalt blend that absorbed sound waves.
Progress on the subs were slow and the initial order for 18 of them was eventually cut to just five due to materiel shortages. Yamamoto would be shot down and killed by U.S. Army Air Corps pilots before the first sub was launched.
By the time the first sub took to the water at the end of December 1944, Japan was in rapid retreat across the Pacific. The original I-400 mission to attack the U.S. mainland had been scrapped long before.
The idea of using the planes to deliver biological weapons was considered, and then a Kamikaze attack on the Panama Canal was planned and canceled.
Finally, the I-400 and I-401 were sent to destroy the U.S. carrier fleet at Ulithi Atoll before they could invade the Japanese mainland. The subs were to send their six bombers on Kamikaze attacks against the 15 carriers there.
To maximize the chance that the planes would reach their targets, the Japanese admiralty ordered the planes be painted silver with U.S. markings. Though the pilots protested, the illegally camouflaged planes were placed in the subs and sent to sea.
Luckily, Japan surrendered while the subs were staging for the attack. Both subs were captured by the U.S. Navy. American officers studied the ships but then sank them before Soviet officers could ask to see them. There was concern that the Soviet Union would develop its own version if it saw the I-400.
The subs were then lost for decades, but the I-401 was found in 2005 and the I-400’s final resting place was found in 2013.
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NOW WATCH: Everything you've ever wanted to know about life on a US Navy submarine
Amateur photographer Charles W. Cushman traveled extensively in the US and abroad from 1938 to 1969, capturing beautiful portraits of everyday life.
His archive has been donated to and maintained by Cushman's alma mater, Indiana University, which has kindly given us permission to publish his gallery of New York City photos taken in 1941 and 1942.
These images give a great glimpse into what everyday life in Chinatown, the Financial District, and Midtown was like over 70 years ago.
SEE ALSO: 21 pictures of New York City in the early 1900s
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Photo: Courtesy of Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection / Indiana University Archives
Photo: Courtesy of Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection / Indiana University Archives
Photo: Courtesy of Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection / Indiana University Archives
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In 1917, while Britain's Royal Navy was plagued by Germany's formidable U-boat offensive, visual artist Norman Wilkinson realized that traditional camouflages wouldn't help British ships avoid the onslaught. So he proposed the "extreme opposite."
Wilkinson, a volunteer in the Royal Navy at the time, had the idea for "dazzle ships," or ships painted with high-contrast patterns intended to disorient U-boats.
He wrote the admiralty of the Royal Navy, and soon found himself in Devonport, painting scale models.
Impressed with his ideas, and desperate to save lives as the war in the Atlantic raged, the Royal Navy adopted this novel paint scheme.
Camouflage is meant to make an object blend in with its surroundings. In contrast, the dazzle pattern used stark lines and hard contrasts to make it difficult to judge the speed and orientation of the ship.
Dark and curved lines towards the bow and stern gave way to bright patches, which make it difficult to estimate the exact dimensions of the ship, it's speed and direction of travel, and its type. U-boats hunted enemy ships by periscope in those days, so a dazzle pattern could effectively skew the enemy's targeting.
During World War I, no scientific inquiry could be conducted into the effectiveness of the dazzle ships. But a study from the School of Experimental Psychology found that dazzle paint on moving Land Rovers made rocket-propelled grenades 7% less effective, according to the BBC.
“In a typical situation involving an attack on a Land Rover, the reduction in perceived speed would be sufficient to make the grenade miss by about a meter," Nick Scott-Samuel, the researcher who led the study, told the BBC. "This could be the difference between survival or otherwise.”
SEE ALSO: Meet the world's deadliest female sniper who terrorized Hitler's Nazi army
On November 5, 1915, a plane was launched from a ship by catapult for the first time in history.
And, despite the prevailing ideas at the time that naval aviation was an outlandish endeavor, the flight was a success.
The pilot for that historic flight was Henry C. Mustin, a naval aviator who helped to found the Naval Aeronautic Station at Pensacola, Florida in 1913. Mustin, using an early catapult system, managed to launch himself successfully from the armored cruiser USS North Carolina at the naval station.
Nov 5, 1915 - First catapult launching an airplane from a ship, by US. pic.twitter.com/6uvrAfT2Sq
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) November 5, 2015
After that risky start in 1915 US aircraft carrier abilities quickly advanced. By 1922, the US operated the USS Langley, an aircraft carrier that could carry 30 planes.
Here's what a catapult launch looks like today: 
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On Wednesday, November 6, 1985, members of the Colombian guerrilla group M19, or the April 19 movement, stormed Colombia’s Palace of Justice and held all 25 of the country's Supreme Court justices, and hundreds of other civilians, hostage — reportedly with the backing of the country's most powerful drug lord, Pablo Escobar.
Over the next two days, the Colombian army mounted an operation to retake the building and free the hostages. By the time the crisis was resolved, almost all of the 30 to 40 rebels were dead, more than 100 hostages had been killed or “disappeared,” and 11 of the court’s 25 justices had been slain.
The M19 rebels, a left-wing group that later became a political party, took the court with the goal of forcing the justices to try then-President Belisario Betancur and his defense minister for violating a peace deal the Colombian government had reached with the rebels a year-and-a-half earlier.
M19 also opposed the government’s move toward extraditing Colombians to the US, a point on which the rebels and Colombia’s powerful drug traffickers, led by Pablo Escobar, agreed. According to according to both Mark Bowden's "Killing Pablo" and Escobar’s son, the Medellin drug boss paid M19 $1 million for the job.
During a radio broadcast from inside the court after the rebels seized the building, an M19 member said that their aim was “to denounce a Government that has betrayed the Colombian people.”
The initial response of Betancur was: “Restore order, but above all avoid bloodshed.” But after that, he reportedly“encouraged the army to do its dirty work in the name of preserving legality,” and refused to end the siege.
He also refused to take phone calls from the president of the Supreme Court, Justice Alfonso Reyes (who was being held hostage), or order a ceasefire to permit negotiations.
Not long after the rebels seized the five-story building, government forces used explosives and automatic weapons to retake some of the lower floors. In the process, they reportedly rescued about 100 of the hostages.
Colombian security forces soon launched more attacks on the rebels, eventually using tanks to assault the building. On Wednesday night, a fire broke out and destroyed many of the documents that court was using to decide whether to extradite drug traffickers.
Records for about 6,000 criminal cases were destroyed, including files for the criminal case against the cartel boss Pablo Escobar, according to Bowden.
In 1989, a judge ruled that the fire had been intentionally set.
Witnesses said the security forces lit the blaze, while some have suggested the rebels set the fire at the behest of the drug traffickers who wanted to destroy evidence against them.
By the afternoon of November 7, the siege was over, and reporters were allowed to enter the building.
Freed hostages said that rebels had decided to kill their prisoners, including Supreme Court justices, that morning, “when they felt their situation was ‘hopeless.’”
At the time, news reports quoted Col. Alfonso Plazas, who commanded government troops during the assault, as saying that the rebels had been “annihilated.”
But testimonies and rulings that have been issued in the decades since depict an army that was indiscriminate in its efforts to end what some have called Colombia’s “holocaust.”
The attack had immediate political consequences for Colombia. According to Bowden’s account, the siege “crippled the Colombian legal system” and sank President Betancur’s efforts to reach peace agreements with both M19 and FARC rebels. (M19 disarmed and became a political party in 1989; FARC rebels have only recently agreed to a peace plan.)
In the three decades since the Palace siege, numerous reports and allegations have implicated government officials and security forces in human-rights abuses related to the attack.
Mounting evidence suggested that civilians were taken into custody and tortured by government forces after the attack. A report composed after the attack contained photos that suggested some hostages were killed by someone other than the rebels.
In June 2010, Col. Plazas, who led the army’s assault, was convicted of the forced disappearance of 11 people who survived the attack on the building but were taken away by the army afterward and never seen again.
A US embassy cable from 1999 that was released by George Washington University’s National Security Archive corroborated the finding against Col. Plazas, saying that Col. Plazas’ soldiers “killed a number of M-19 members and suspected collaborators hors de combat [“outside of combat”], including the Palace’s cafeteria staff.”
Allegations of rights abuses and extrajudicial killings have persisted, and in a 2012 session of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), IACHR President Jose de Jesus “was unequivocal in his conviction that Colombian authorities had ‘coordinated’ torture and forced disappearances” during the Palace siege.
In that same session, the Colombian government admitted that it deserved some blame for the deaths and disappearances, with a government representative saying that “the Colombian state will not cease efforts to know the truth and create justice.”
Since that admission, investigations — and accusations — have continued. A lawyer working for many of the families of the disappeared said a 2013 Truth Commission showed that some in the military knew of M19’s plot, but let it happen, hoping to launch a “ferocious response” against the guerrillas.
Humberto Murcia, a judge who witnessed the killing of some of his fellow justices, said a few days after the attack that authorities should have anticipated it. "And I remembered a month before, in the court chamber,"said Murcia, "I had read letters from the justice minister and security forces in which they told us they had discovered a terrorist plan to assault the Justice Palace."
In 2014, retired Gen. Jesus Armando Arias was sentenced to 35 years in prison after being convicted for the forced disappearance of a judge, several court workers, and Irma Franco Pineda, an M19 guerrilla who was seen leaving the building alive.
In October 2015, Colombia’s attorney general announced an investigation into 14 members of the military and security services, including Iván Ramírez Quintero, a senior intelligence official at the time of the attack.
The attorney general said there was “sufficient evidence to infer the participation and knowledge of senior military commanders in the torture carried out.”
The convictions of Plazas and Arias are viewed by many as positive steps after so many years of impunity for abuses committed during the siege and throughout recent Colombian history.
For some, though, it hasn't been enough.
“The basic truth, which we have always longed for, has not been provided because there has not been a policy by the state to seek out the truth behind the events,” said Jorge Franco Pineda, the brother of Irma Franco Pineda.
SEE ALSO: Colombia's most beloved literary figure may have worked with the country's most infamous drug lord
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Archaeologists were working at the site of two burial vaults on Nov. 6, just days after construction workers discovered two chambers of human bones on Nov. 3 and 4 along the eastern edge of New York City's Washington Square Park.
The first vault, which contained scattered skeletal remains, was discovered Nov. 3, when contractors with the Department of Design and Construction began breaking ground to replace a 100-year-old water main with new distribution lines.
The second vault was discovered a day later, which includes an unknown number of bodies enclosed in fully intact wooden coffins.
"Its not unexpected, but it's definitely interesting," Alyssa Loorya, the principle investigator and archaeologist with Chrysalis Archaeological consultants told Tech Insider. "It's not a common find, we don't find this all the time, but we're aware of the history."
The archaeologists were taking measurements and discussing new ways to photograph the vault's insides, which are currently closed to all foot traffic.
The team has been using high resolution cameras and a rigged lighting system to peer inside. One of their tasks was to measure the vault's size — which Loorya preliminary estimates to be about 15 feet wide.
"Hey, you know what? It's bigger than many studio apartments in the city," Loorya said.
"After one of the epidemics of yellow fever, they had a decree that anyone who died of yellow fever had to be buried in potter's field because they were so afraid of it," Joan Geismar, an archaeological consultant told Tech Insider.
There was also a church yard on this block, which the vault is likely associated with, though the team isn't sure which church it belongs to.
"The closest thing we know is that it was the Presbyterian Church, possibly," Alex Agran, an archaeologist at Chrysalis Archaeology, told Tech Insider. "That's the most likely candidate, though it's unknown if other churches were sharing the space or not."
The two vaults likely date back to the early 19th century — an estimate based upon the construction of the vault and the style of the coffins. High resolution photos uncovered a hint of a year on a date plate on one of the coffins, Loorya said, which begins with the number 18.
Loorya's team is still trying to get an accurate estimate of the number of bodies in the vault, but they believe that there are most likely between nine to 12 individuals in the first chamber. They are still doing counts for the second.
Back in 1965, Con Edison workers had reportedly encountered a burial vault on the same block, though few details of the encounter are known. But they could possibly have been one of the two discovered this week, Agran said.
The city's policy is to leave any human remains unearthed during a construction project untouched, but it's possible that the Con Edison workers had removed some of the bodies from the first vault during that initial discovery.
"The bodies [in the first vault] are kind of jumbled together, there are no intact coffins," Agran said. "In the second chamber, the coffins are pretty much intact."
This may mean that the workers had disturbed the site of the first vault in the 1965 encounter, though this is pure speculation, Agran said.
Loorya and her team are currently discussing better options for recording the space, which could include rigging a camera onto a boom to extend further into the vault.
And whether or not this means that there are more bodies lying elsewhere beneath the city is still yet to be determined.
"We don't want to speculate how many other bodies might be lying around NYC," Loorya said. "There have been burial grounds found in the city before"
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In this excerpt from The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, Frederick Taylor, a German historian, describes the moments leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall by weaving together history, archival materials, and personal accounts.
At around 11:30 p.m, a group of East Berliners pushed aside the screen fence in front of the border crossing and everyone swarmed into the checkpoint area en masse.
Checkpoint commander Lieutenant-Colonel Harald Jäger decided that he was not prepared to risk the lives of himself and his soldiers. He ordered his men to stop checking passports, open up fully, and just let the crowd do what it wanted.
And the crowd knew what it wanted.
Within moments, thousands began to pour through the checkpoint. They simply walked or, in most cases, ran into West Berlin. The sensation of running freely over the bridge, of crossing a border where such an action, just days or even hours before, would have courted near-certain death, brought a surge of exhilaration that, if we are to believe those who were there, all but changed the chemical composition of the air and turned it into champagne.
Large crowds had already gathered on the Western side. They greeted the Easterners with cries of joy and open arms. Many improvised toasts were drunk.
By midnight, all the border checkpoints had been forced to open. At the Invalidenstrasse, masses 'invaded' from the West and met the approaching Easterners in the middle.
It was now twenty past midnight, and the entire East German army had been placed on a state of heightened alert. However, in the absence of orders from the leadership, the 12,000 men of the Berlin border regiments remained confined to barracks. The night passed, and the orders never arrived.
Between one and two a.m., human swarms form East and West push their way through the Wall at the Brandenburg Gate. Some are still in their sleepwear, ignoring the November cold.
Thousands luxuriate in the sensation of walking around the nearby Pariser Platz — embassy row — an elegant city landmark closed for thirty years by barbed wire, concrete blocks and tank traps, turned by state decree into a deadly no man's land. People are clambering on top of the Wall to caper and dance and yell their hearts out in liberation and release and delight.
A mix of hype and hope has defeated bureaucratic obfuscation. A little over six hours after a fumbled press conference and a Western press campaign that took the fumbled ball of the temporary exit-visa regulation and ran with it, a revolution occurred.
One of the swiftest and least bloody in history.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, like its construction, took place in a single night. Just as on 13 August 1961, a city and a people awoke to find themselves divided, so on the morning of 10 November 1989 that division was no more.
Although, how many people actually woke up to this revelation is debatable, since during that night in Berlin many had not slept a wink.
Excerpted from The Berlin Wall: A World Divided by Frederick Taylor, (HarperCollins Publishers, 2006). Excerpted with permission by Frederick Taylor.
Today marks the 101st birthday of Hedy Lamarr, a scientific legend, a classic Hollywood actress, and an all-around babe.
She designed a communications system that would help the Allies win WWII and eventually form the basis for modern WiFi.
To celebrate her achievements, Google dedicated today's Doodle to the Austrian-born inventor:
Catch the @GoogleDoodles for actress & inventor #HedyLamarr's 101st bday? Her #WW2 patent: https://t.co/xhigdMWoTDpic.twitter.com/nuiN43ZF6V
— Today's Document (@TodaysDocument) November 9, 2015Join the conversation about this story »
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The Marine Corps, which turned 240 years old on Tuesday, has served a role in every conflict in US history.
That's because the Marines operate on sea, air, and land — unlike the other service branches — and can respond to a crisis in less than 24 hours with the full force of a modern military.
Today there are more than 220,000 active-duty and reserve Marines. To celebrate the Corps, we've pulled some of the best photos from the archives.
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Miles above the Earth, Sarah Parcak can see history hidden in the dirt.
She then uses that knowledge, gathered using infrared imagery from satellites, to protect ancient sites, shielding them from destruction by meddling humans (she also finds plenty of already-looted sites too, sadly).
It's a feat that just earned Parcak the $1 million 2016 TED Prize, an award given out once a year to help the winner launch an ambitious global project.
Parcak, a space archaeologist and Egyptologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, plans to use the prize money to pursue her ongoing project: using high-tech aerial imaging to uncover and preserve ancient sites in the Middle East.
You can think of her as Indiana Jones, if Jones operated from space (in fact, her Twitter handle is @indyfromspace).
According to Parcak, the last four and a half years "have been horrific for archaeology," largely because of rampant looting around historic sites and constant warfare that can damage precious pieces of history.
In Egypt alone, Parcak has found 1,000 tombs, 3,100 settlements, and 17 possible pyramids.
In the satellite image below, provided by Parcak, we can see looted artifacts in an area near Cairo, Egypt. Parcak has found hundreds of looting pits — including tombs — in Lisht, the former capital of Egypt in the Middle Kingdom (the period between 2000 BC and 1700 BC).
"I’ve spent a lot of time, as have many of my colleagues, looking at the destruction," she says in a TED post on the announcement. "I am committed to using this Prize to engage the world in finding and protecting these global sites."
Parcak's technique for finding these sites involves careful use of infrared imaging and computer software, both of which can suss out the noteworthy dig sites from the useless noise at at far greater accuracy than the human eye.
In 2009, she wrote a comprehensive textbook on the topic, called "Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology." In 2012, she followed up with a TED talk on her findings.
"The sheer scale of what remains to be discovered is a highlight for me," she writes.
In February, Parcak will share what exactly her $1 million will go towards.
Here's what we do know: The prize will allow her to expand her search for ancient sites around the world, ultimately producing a richer picture of how our present came to be.
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Republicans have used taxes as a talking point for decades, and Tuesday night's debate was no different.
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson elaborated on his idea of a flat tax rate based on the biblical concept of "tithing."
Despite GOP candidates' obvious revulsion toward taxes in general, the federal income tax actually started as part of a conservative ploy.
Conservative-leaning members of Congress introduced the 16th Amendment, hoping it would stop liberals from pushing for an income tax as part of a tariff, according to the National Archives and Records Administration.
The Supreme Court had ruled in 1895 that the income tax violated Article I of the Constitution, so the amendment was necessary to empower the federal government to impose the income tax.
But the story goes back much further than 1913, when the US officially enacted the income tax.
Income taxes were initially a temporary provision Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1861, which included a tax on personal income to help pay for the hefty expenses of the Civil War. Without proper enforcement, however, it raised little money. In turn, the Internal Revenue Act of 1862 created the Internal Revenue Service to solve that problem.
The new law levied a 3% tax on individual incomes between $600 and $10,000 (between about $14,000 and $230,000 today) and 5% on greater than that. The act reportedly produced about $55 million in government revenue.
Ten years later, however, long after the war had ended, the Grant administration repealed most of the "emergency" taxes, including the income tax.
Then, in 1894, the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act revived the income tax, imposing a 2% tax on incomes over $4,000. President Grover Cleveland, in cahoots with Congressman William Wilson (D-West Virginia), originally intended the law to lower tariffs, according to The New York Times. After its introduction, however, the Senate drastically altered it, turning the bill into a high-tariff one.
While Cleveland refused to sign the act, he didn't veto it either. And he still considered the law better than its predecessor, the McKinley Tariff.
The next year, however, the Supreme Court ruled the income-tax provision of the Wilson-Gorman Tariff was a direct tax, and as such violated Article I of the Constitution, which stated taxes had to be levied in proportion to a state's population. That didn't stop progressives from trying to once again attach an income tax to a tariff bill though.
For their part, conservatives wanted to put the kibosh on progressives' efforts to pass an income tax. Conservatives thought an amendment to allow an income tax would never pass, since three-fourths of states have to ratify an amendment for it to become part of the Constitution. So conservatives introduced the amendment, hoping to kill progressives' efforts to pass an income tax as part of a tariff.
Much to conservatives' dismay, state after state hopped on board.
The 16th Amendment, which established an official, federal income tax, was ratified on February 3 and went into effect February 25, 1913.
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