Nothing fazes New Yorkers, or at least that’s what they thought, until they stepped out onto Manhattan streets and encountered a 10-foot sphere of real human hair rolling towards them! A giant 10-foot hairball called Tumblehair rolled through the streets of NYC, leaving pedestrians both repulsed and unable to ignore it. What was the giant…
Maggie Walz Photo credit: National Park Service Born Margareeta Johanna Konttra Niiranen in Tornio, Finland, in 1861, Maggie Walz came to the United States at the age of 20 with almost nothing, just $7 in her pocket and a determination to build a new life. According to the National Park Service (NPS), Walz arrived in…
Dickerson had built a career that included several notable firsts. (Anchorage museum photo) American lawyer and civil rights advocate Mahala Ashley Dickerson’s life took her from Montgomery, Alabama, to Alaska, where she broke barriers in both the legal profession and homesteading. Her journey has been featured by the National Park Service among important figures in…
Deep in the heart of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where mist clings to the ridges and the forest hums with life, stands a quiet log cabin. It is the home of the Walker sisters, six unmarried women who refused to leave their mountain home, even as the world changed around them. Their story is…
Representative Image (AI-generated) Seventeen years after surviving the famous O.K. Corral gunfight, former Tombstone lawman Virgil Earp embarked on a very different chapter of his life. In 1898, Earp claimed 160 acres of land near Prescott, Arizona, under the federal homesteading system. Because of his previous service in the Union Army during the Civil War,…
According to a report by People, Derrick Moore, 47, of Loganville, Ga., helped the girl to safety at Myrtle Beach but was then pulled under. A South Carolina beach vacation turned tragic when a father of four died after swimming into a dangerous rip current to save a young girl. According to a report by…
At times, things go wrong even when you try with all your might to ensure they are right. It was in the 1970s, that Times Beach, a small town in Missouri, attempted to solve a common problem for dirt roads by spreading residual oil to reduce dust. Years later, it was discovered that some of…
When Spanish explorers brought pigs to what is now the southeastern United States in the 1500s, the animals were intended as a practical source of food rather than a threat to native ecosystems. Centuries of escapes, free-ranging livestock and later introductions of Eurasian wild boar changed that. According to the US Department of Agriculture’s Animal…
Representative Image of the Lac La Belle shipwreck resting on the lakebed among aquatic life and quagga mussels (AI-generated image) On the night of October 13, 1872, the steamer Lac La Belle left Milwaukee for Grand Haven, Michigan, carrying 53 passengers and crew along with a cargo of barley, pork, flour and whiskey. About two…
Representative Image of a modern Texas nuclear reactor supporting advanced isotope production for healthcare (AI-generated image) Every day, more than 40,000 Americans undergo a diagnostic scan that depends on technetium-99m, a radioactive isotope used to image the heart, spot cancer and check kidney function. Every milligram of the molybdenum-99 that produces it currently arrives in…