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History Sensei
Cool stories, strange facts, and forgotten moments from history
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The Little Curies: How Marie Curie Built X-Ray Trucks and Drove Them Into the First World War
When the First World War broke out, the world’s most famous scientist did not retreat to her laboratory. Marie Curie…
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The Morning Halifax Vanished: The 1917 Explosion That Rehearsed the Atomic Age
On a cold December morning in 1917, a burning munitions ship drew crowds to their windows. Then the north end…
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Miss Unsinkable: The Stewardess Who Walked Away From the Titanic, the Britannic, and the Sea Itself
Violet Jessop was aboard the Olympic when it was rammed, on the Titanic when it hit the iceberg, and on…
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The Doctor Who Discovered Clean Hands and Was Destroyed for It: Ignaz Semmelweis
In the 1840s, mothers in a Vienna maternity ward begged to give birth in the street rather than be admitted…
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Mad Jack Churchill: The Officer Who Fought World War II With a Longbow, a Sword, and Bagpipes
In a war of tanks, radar and industrial slaughter, one British officer went into battle carrying a Scottish broadsword, a…
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The Bear River Massacre: The Deadliest Day for Native Americans That America Forgot
On a frozen January dawn in 1863, U.S. soldiers surrounded a sleeping Shoshone village on the Bear River and killed…
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133 Days at Sea: The Sailor Who Refused to Die on a Wooden Raft
When a torpedo tore his ship apart in the South Atlantic, a young Chinese steward named Poon Lim found himself…
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Speedbird 911: The Sightseeing Detour to Mount Fuji That Ended in the Sky
In March 1966 a British airliner turned toward Mount Fuji so its passengers could admire the mountain. Minutes later, an…
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Thirteen Ships Against an Empire: Admiral Yi and the Miracle at Myeongnyang
Stripped of rank, tortured, and left with only thirteen battered ships, a disgraced Korean admiral turned a narrow strait’s roaring…
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The Good Maharaja Who Saved Hundreds of Polish Orphans
When starving Polish children fled the Soviet labour camps and no nation would take them in, an Indian prince opened…
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The Black Donnellys
An Irish immigrant family, a poisoned old-world grudge, and a barn-lantern night in 1880 when a masked mob rode into…
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“We Are Holding Our Own”: The Last Voyage of the Edmund Fitzgerald
On a storm-lashed November night in 1975, the largest freighter on the Great Lakes vanished from radar without a single…