What was the coldest game in NFL history?

Never have National Football League fans and players shivered as much as they did on January 10, 1982, when the Cincinnati Bengals hosted the San Diego Chargers in the AFC Championship Game. With a kickoff temperature of nine degrees below zero and a minus 59-degree wind chill, what would be dubbed the “Freezer Bowl” was…

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When Halloween Was So Dangerous It Was Nearly Banned

Did you know that Halloween was once so dangerous that some cities considered banning it? In the Gilded Age, Halloween was all tricks and no treats. The ghoulish holiday was free of candy and costumes and full of pranks, vandalism, and even violence. When immigrants from Scotland and Ireland brought their Halloween traditions to the…

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What Is the Real History of Lewis Strauss?

In the movie “Oppenheimer,” Robert Downey, Jr. plays Lewis Strauss, the nemesis of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Strauss took a most unlikely path to become one of the most important atomic energy advisers during the Cold War. Born into a horse-and-buggy world in 1896, Strauss devoured books on radiation and wave mechanics in high school,…

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The History Behind the Graffiti-Covered Coronation Chair

Lavish robes. Gilded scepters. Diamond-festooned crowns. With all that ornamentation at the coronation of King Charles III, you might expect the monarch to be taking in the ceremony from a plush throne fit for a king. The 700-year-old Coronation Chair, however, is an austere, oaken seat that looks so uncomfortable that it’s likely to induce…

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How Did Washington, D.C. Get Its Cherry Trees?

When globetrotter and travel writer Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore returned home to Washington, D.C., from a trip to Japan in 1885, she was smitten. Everything about the mysterious land in the Far East had enchanted the young woman, but the country’s flowering cherry trees had cast a particular spell on her. “The blooming cherry tree is…

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Did Benjamin Franklin Invent Daylight Saving Time?

Did Benjamin Franklin come up with the idea of Daylight Saving Time? No. While Franklin was an envoy in Paris in 1784, he was unpleasantly awakened one morning at 6 AM by the summer sun. He then penned a satirical essay in which he calculated that Parisians, simply by waking up at dawn, could save…

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Justin Dimick’s Civil War Mission of Mercy

Boston’s Fort Warren housed Confederate POWs during the Civil War, but it was no Andersonville. Only 13 Confederate prisoners out of the more than 2,000 rebels who were imprisoned within its walls died during the Civil War — or just over half of 1 percent, compared to the 12 percent mortality rate for Confederates in…

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Did Leif Erikson “Discover” America?

Forget about Christopher Columbus. Let’s talk about another European explorer who’s being commemorated this weekend–Leif Erikson. Did he lead the first European expedition to North America 500 years before Columbus? Why is there a plaque marking his former home–in Cambridge, Massachusetts? Were Vikings living in Minnesota long before the NFL showed up in Minneapolis? That…

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A Teddy Roosevelt Themed Edition of the Throwback

In the May edition of the Throwback, my free monthly e-newsletter, learn about how Theodore Roosevelt’s childhood molded him into a future president and find out about how he endured terrible tragedy to rise through the ranks of New York City politics on his way to the White House. Also, an incredible story about a man…

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