Category: U.S. Historical News

The old newspapers are filled with claims of people dying at extraordinary old ages. On further research, some of the claims turned out to be…

Calamity Jane made a lot of claims about her accomplishments and many more people added their own stories and bits of knowledge about her crazy…

The Mill River Flood of 1874 is not a well known flood, but that can simply be because it happened so long ago. While all…

Blackwell Island, previously known as Hog’s Island, was originally an island owned a Robert Blackwell. New York City purchased the island from Blackwell and turned…

Ancient Egyptian mummies would be ground up and used for making paint. It is fascinating and gross at the same time — immortality in art,…

I thought that the whole telepathy things was super popular from the 1950s to the 1960s, but it turns out it was a popular subject…

Imagine going up into the attic and finding a mummy stashed away in a box. I’d be freaking ecstatic, as was the Peabody Museum when…

Growing up, absolutely loving cryptozoology, I never knew that old newspapers would be a great source for researching hunts for creatures like the plesiosaurus. Expects…

While the New York State Tenement House Act (1867) required tenement homes to have fire escapes, tragedies continued to happen. In the newspaper article below,…

Vaseline, a product generically called petroleum jelly, is a byproduct of oil drilling. It is the dirty sludge, called rod wax, that gunks up the…