Tsar Nicholas I of Russia is credited with coining the phrase "sick man of Europe" to refer to the declining Ottoman Empire. Though, as documented in The Rise and Fall of the Ottoman Empire, Nicholas actually said, "We have a sick man on our hands, a very sick man." How far the mighty had fallen.
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As The Book of Absinthe describes, the ever-witty Oscar Wilde once said, "After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world."
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There are precious few statements that all music fans can wholeheartedly agree on, but it's probably fair to say that "Jimi Hendrix was a very good guitarist" is one of them. But would he live long enough to see the fruits of his success?
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There are a couple of schools of thought concerning the events which led Chuck Berry to hit Keith Richards so hard that his life Jumpin' Jack Flashed before his eyes. Here they are.
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Josef Mengele was a breed of monster all his own, a doctor who opted not to heal the sick but instead conducted torturous and often fatal experiments on Jews at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Here's how he died.
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Only half of the emperor of China actually died in office. And that's just the beginning. This is the tragic history of Chinese emperors.
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Mata Hari has gone down in history as the femme fatale du jour of World War I. Mata Hari is the classic archetype. She was exotic and alluring, a promiscuous dancer, a courtesan, a divorcee, and a seductive spy. But that isn't Hari's whole story. This is the crazy real-life story of Mata Hari.
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It would be easy to assume that Ringo Starr decided to leave the Beatles due to ego. Shockingly, it wasn't ego that drove Ringo to leave the Fab Four mid-recording session on August 22nd, 1968. To hear it described by those involved, it was the opposite: he didn't feel good enough.
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A three hundred year-old 'possessed' nun's cryptic, Satanic messaged has finally been decoded.
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If you're trying to hunt bears, guns help, of course, but what you need is a good dog. Especially a bear dog. You'll want the Blue Ribbon Champion of bear annihilation: the Caucasian mountain dog, bred specifically to help take down Mr. Bruin in the Caucasus region of Russia.
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Shaolin monk warriors seem to defy gravity and bend the laws of physics. This is the truth about the legendary Shaolin monk warriors.
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Take a moment to let the following sentence sink in: One time, Keith Richards fired a guy for doing too many drugs. That man was Brian Jones.
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America's Gilded Age was a time of industrial advances, a soaring economy, and an honest-to-goodness debate about whether or not doctors should wash their hands before sticking them into a bullet wound.
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Even the most mundane life would be difficult to sum up in five hours and change, but the life of Joe Exotic has been anything but mundane. Here's what the makers of the hit Netflix series Tiger King: Muder, Mayhem and Madness left out about the real story.
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Fans of the Netflix hit true-crime documentary series Tiger King may very well remember Bhagavan "Doc" Antle, the refined, theatrical South Carolina animal park owner. He is the kind of cool and collected character that the docuseries' main subject, Joe Exotic, aspired to be. Here's what he's up to.
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After her husband cheated and her mother died in rapid succession, Agatha Christie packed her roadster, and took off by herself. The car was found, abandoned, the headlights still on and Agatha's suitcase and coat inside. What was missing was Agatha.
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Who do you think has the most WWE matches under his or her belt? Surely, it's someone like Hulk Hogan, with his legendary status as a WWE star? Turns out, he doesn't even make the Top Ten. Let's find out which WWE star has wrestled the most matches in history.
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Part of the fun of history is that interpretations of events seem to shift every so often. One thing historians agree upon, more than 200 years after the fact, is that Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr didn't like each other very much.
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Modern historians have come to see William McKinley as an important POTUS who advanced America's global standing through assertive foreign policy. But Leon Czolgosz saw McKinley through the eyes of a man who had lost his standing in America and had possibly lost his mind, and wanted him dead.
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On his 31st birthday, John Dillinger, bank robber and murderer, became the first man to be dubbed Public Enemy No. 1 by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Not long after, he was dead.
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Pandemics seem to come from nowhere. But almost always, even hundreds of years ago, there were people who had a hunch that something bad was coming. And if only everyone else had listened, history might not have been so horrible. Here are people who knew a pandemic was coming before it happened.
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Law enforcement wasn't necessarily a great job on the Wild Frontier. Luckily, there were plenty of marshals and sheriffs to fight crime.
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Margaret Tudor was Queen of Scotland and older sister of England's Henry VIII. Normally people like that have massive memorials. But what if a mob destroyed the tomb, burned the remains, and tried to wipe that individual from the landscape? This is the reason you can't find Margaret Tudor's grave.
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America has long been defined by the proverbial mountains it has chosen to summit, and the rivals it has tried to outpace along the way. Where is America's can-do attitude when it comes to can doos?
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Some things are hard to rank. For instance, your favorite child. Or, if you're royalty, it's probably difficult to pick your favorite piece of jewelry when you have a ton. So did Queen Victoria have a favorite piece of bling? This is the story behind Queen Victoria's favorite piece of jewelry.
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Humanity loves surviving, and from time to time, our greatest minds join forces to punch mortality in the nose. Through acumen and fastidiousness, we've managed to chuck more than a few deadly diseases off the side of the skyscraper of history. Here are the diseases humanity has almost eradicated.
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Before the interstate system, roads were a patchwork at best, maps weren't necessarily complete, and GPS was the stuff of science fiction. But a dog's loyalty? As unquestioned then as it was in cave days and today. Here's the story of Bobbie the Wonder Dog.
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