Around 1721, a Welsh pirate captain named Bartholomew Roberts composed a document aboard his ship that opened with a startling declaration: “Every man shall have an equal vote in the …

Somewhere in the western suburbs of Sydney, a small group of people wades into an indoor swimming pool on a Sunday morning and re-enacts one of the oldest continuous religious …

Imagine a word so charged with fear that enemies of a medieval sect invented it as a slur — and it stuck so well it became a permanent fixture of …

Somewhere in England in 1586, a barrel of beer was quietly delivering state secrets. Hidden inside the cork was an encrypted letter from Mary Queen of Scots to a group …

Somewhere right now, someone is watching a music video, pausing it, and zooming in on a triangle formed by a singer’s fingers. There it is, they think. The Illuminati. The …

Something curious happened inside a hospital basement in Worcester, Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1979. A molecular biologist who had spent years studying under Zen masters sat down with a …

Imagine being purchased as a child, transported thousands of miles from your homeland, and handed a sword. Now imagine that this is not a sentence of misery — it is …