Three years before João Havelange won FIFA’s presidency, Peru’s Teófilo Salinas Fuller was organizing support beyond South America. Contemporary reporting and historical testimony trace the partnership, its outreach to Africa and…
Brazil celebrates Alberto Santos-Dumont as a father of aviation, while the Wright brothers hold the strongest documented claim to earlier powered, controlled airplane flights. The disagreement becomes clearer when public…
The Wright brothers have the strongest documented claim to the first sustained, controlled, powered airplane flights. That does not make them the origin of every idea behind aviation. George Cayley, Otto Lilienthal and other…
A sixteenth-century chronicle says Túpac Yupanqui sailed west, and the story helped inspire a Spanish voyage from Callao. Ancient DNA supports contact between South America and Polynesia, but it cannot identify an Inca…
The final drilling at Mount Rushmore took place on October 31, 1941. Four presidential faces were finished, but a vast hall remained a rough tunnel. The story of that ending includes the workers who carved…
As the centenary of Houdini’s death approaches, a surviving letter reveals the researcher behind the handcuffs. His escape routines, collection of spiritualist papers and contemporary death notices trace a career built on making…
On October 29, 1969, a UCLA programmer tried to log in to a computer at SRI. Two letters arrived before the receiving machine failed. The repaired connection marked an early ARPANET milestone, but the Internet…
On October 28, 1746, an earthquake devastated Lima and a tsunami overwhelmed Callao. The following months brought hunger, disease and a dispute over how to rebuild. The surviving records reveal both the disaster and the…
On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles staged a Martian invasion as radio news. Some listeners were alarmed, but nationwide panic is harder to prove. The recording, script and audience letters reveal the craft behind the…
