On November 22, 1963, John and Jackie Kennedy visited Dallas where Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed Kennedy. Jackie became the world's most famous widow. While she was praised for her strength in public, in private she was devastated. Here's what Jackie Kennedy did the year following JFK's death.
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How much do you really know about our Founding Fathers? We're taught a lot in school, and it's often stories like George Washington chopping down the cherry tree. And that's not the only tall tale we've been told. Here are some false things you believe about America's Founding Fathers.
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Many of Tesla's greatest contributions to science came from his ideas, not necessarily the things that he was actually able to build. As you'll see, many of Tesla's designs would ultimately lay the foundation for today's technologies. We're fortunate that some of the others were never built.
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No one has pinpointed all four locations with certainty, but finding these waters have occupied the time of many scholars. It's not even certain that the Bible divulged the location correctly.
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Harriet Tubman -- abolitionist, suffragist, and former slave -- is one of the most influential political activists in American history. In recent years, advocates have proposed commemorating her many achievements by putting her face on the $20 bill, which is coming due for a redesign.
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Conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton were born in Brighton, England in 1908. Their mother was an unmarried barmaid named Kate Skinner; their father was unknown. Skinner soon handed over the twins to Mary Hilton, the woman who owned the pub where Skinner worked and had assisted at their birth.
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the presidency may be "the highest office in the land," but he is no autocrat, let alone dictator. After all, that's the kind of ruling class and non-egalitarian system of government that the United States' forefathers wanted to do away with.
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Tubman lived in Canada from 1851-1861, bringing with her many of the formerly enslaved people she saved, to live a free life. In those times, Canada had already outlawed slavery and provided shelter and work for many escaping the United States.
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To add insult to injury, it's pretty likely that once a Stone Age man, woman, or child died, their surviving friends and family would mourn their loss while simultaneously celebrating a sudden bounty of food by eating the deceased.
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We walked on the moon for the first time in 1969, and since then there's been a rarefied group of people who've set foot on our planetary satellite. The United States no longer sends people to the moon on missions, so the group remains small. (And no, there's no evidence we faked it.)
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A prison can't operate without staff, including Alcatraz. Many of the police officers, prison guards, and other staff who worked in the prison lived on the island with their families, including young children. There was another side to the island, where staff kept their homes and raised kids.
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The Biblical story of the Garden of Eden centers around four key characters: God, Adam, Eve, and the serpent. To many, the serpent is a particularly interesting character, representing cunning and evil, standing in opposition to God's goodness and grace.
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One of Tubman's encounters with danger stands out from the rest, but not because of a slave owner or someone on the hunt for her reward money. It came from a hustler who was uncommonly good at his job, who left Tubman beaten and bound in the woods of Auburn, New York.
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In August 1877, during a poker game, McCarty trades insults with a local blacksmith, Francis Cahill. The game turns violent. Cahill pins McCarty to the ground, and McCarty shoots. Cahill dies two days later.
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The 19th-century photographer Mathew Brady, who went from taking portraits of the rich and famous to taking death portraits on Civil War battlefields, is known for depicting the cost of war. The truth of Civil War photographer Mathew Brady is he funded the photojournalism himself and went into debt.
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With voguish gangsters and bootleggers like Al "Scarface" Capone and George "Machine Gun Kelly" Barnes capturing the public's attention, the government knew it needed an equally dramatic response to their sensational criminality, one that would strike fear in the hearts of potential lawbreakers.
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Religious texts explain more about the Garden -- for instance, that the Garden of Eden consisted of two gardens. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, there were both a "higher" and a "lower" Garden.
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Hypatia was born in Alexandria, Egypt. She was a scientist, educator, and intellectual, though many details of her life remain obscured. She was a brilliant woman who was deeply tied to Alexandra's reputation as a center of learning and progress.
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A charity event puts everyone to work toward a common goal and is usually for something that no one can argue about. Every once in a while a charity event occurs that is a disaster unto itself. Here are some of the biggest, grandest, charity disasters.
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From curses to enslavement to the downright weird, the Ancient Greco-Romans had it all. And, one of these revenge methods was certainly as strange as they come: using the enemies' names as toilet paper.
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Queen Victoria carried with her a royal curse, one that she passed on to other royals. Unlike that episode of Doctor Who, where Queen Victoria passed on lycanthropy to her heirs, her royal curse is more of a medical nature: She was a carrier for hemophilia.
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In the 2017 report, researchers speculated on whether the brace kept Kennedy sitting upright after he'd been shot in the neck by Lee Harvey Oswald. Had the president not been wearing it, he may have crumpled forward, making it more difficult for Oswald to fire the fatal second shot.
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When trying to locate the physical, actual inspiration for the Garden of Eden, you might assume that we'd be looking for a pretty lush, verdant expanse stuffed full of bountiful fruits. But there have been a lot of climate changes in the Middle East going back to, oh, 10,000 BCE or so.
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It was the Middle Ages; things were bound to be terrible compared to now. The sad thing is, even if people lived through the hunger and the wars, a doctor might end up killing them instead. Medicine, especially military medicine during the Crusades, was crude and often very dangerous.
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Alcatraz had one luxury that most other prisons lacked: "reasonably hot" showers. Showers weren't private, and had to be quick, but they were at least not frigid. It's suspected that this gesture was merely an attempt to prevent prisoners from getting acclimated to the cold water of the Bay.
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Is a "mountain man" precisely the kind of long-bearded, ax-hefting hermit you imagine him to be? Who exactly were these atavistic conquerors of tree and hill, these intrepid trappers of critters and traders of tabacky? Something a bit more authentic than who we see on The History Channel, mayhaps?
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Before Robert Koch discovered the tubercular bacillus in 1882, the lack of understanding of the bacteria and the disease it caused led to some wild theories and attempts to curb the spread of tuberculosis. Surprisingly, this intersected with vampire legends in an especially curious manner.
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