Damn Interesting

One of Poland’s most beloved and honored World War II veterans was not Polish at all: he was a 500-pound brown bear named Wojtek.

The 18th century misadventures of HMS Wager and her reluctant crew

The little known story of an age-old scam

The secret runaway success of Kenneth Gandar-Dower’s racing cheetahs.

The most expensive, bizarre, and obscure work ever created by Dr. Seuss.

Working almost single-handedly, visionary Argentine filmmaker Quirino Cristiani created full-length animated films between 1917 and 1931. He has since been all but forgotten.

In 1981, an international group of doctors identified the devastating disease behind a perplexing outbreak of paralysis in northern Mozambique.

Amanda Theodosia Jones was a 19th-century poet, entrepreneur, and inventor who found inspiration in some unlikely places.

The opening of a canal in 1848 led to the birth of modern financial derivatives, and the early demise of some of the men who traded them

In the 1950s, an anonymous terrorist planted a pipe bomb in a New York City public space. Then another. And another.

Britain’s practice of transporting convicts to American colonies was a fearsome punishment, but not for the chronic criminal James Dalton.

The story of a tragic hotel fire of Rube Goldberg proportions.

As a civilian, the beloved American Civil War general and two-term president failed at every attempt to make money. Except for one.

A 300-year-old hunt for the unsung hero of Salzburg.

He made a name for himself organizing the world’s most important economic conference, only to have it tarnished by an outrageous accusation.

During WWII, 36 American conscientious objectors volunteered as subjects in a brutal science experiment to measure the body's response to starvation.

A remote bay in Alaska is home to an odd and occasionally catastrophic geology. In 1958, a handful of people experienced this firsthand.

The 15th-century scholar who upset the Korean aristocracy by creating a native script for the Korean language, and thus wean it off Chinese characters.

A 1930s effort to reach the Earth's northernmost point via antiquated submarine.

Charles Waterton was a pioneer of conservation. He was also extremely nutty, in ways that suggest he may have over-identified with his animal subjects.