History

History

Also much as it is today, it was a period of carousing and merriment. The weeks around Christmas were celebrated with feasting, drinking, singing, and games. Mummers would blacken their faces and dress up in costumes, often in the clothes of the opposite sex, to perform plays in the streets or in homes. Carolers, too, would sing door to door as well as in the home. Wealthy lords threw open their manors, inviting local peasants and villagers inside to gorge on food and drink. Groups of young men called wassailers would march in and demand to be feasted or given gifts of money in exchange for their good wishes and songs.

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Today is Thursday, Dec. 25, the 359th day of 2025. There are six days left in the year. This is Christmas Day. Today in history: On Dec. 25, 2009, passengers aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 foiled an attempt to blow up the plane as it was landing in Detroit by seizing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (OO'-mahr fah-ROOK' ahb-DOOL'-moo-TAH'-lahb), who tried to set off explosives in his underwear. (Abdulmutallab later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison.)

Name the six countries or territories Donald Trump has said or suggested he would like to annex, acquire or take control of. Photograph: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images The original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (of which only one survives) were located in which four present-day countries? Photograph: MR1805/Getty Images/iStockphoto 11-15 Name the only five Caribbean countries to ever qualify for the finals of the men's football World Cup. Photograph: Gilbert Bellamy/Reuters

For all their hard work, peasants had a fair amount of downtime. Add up Sundays and the many holidays, and about one-third of the year was free of intensive work. Celebrations were frequent and centered around religious holidays like Easter, Pentecost and saints' days. But the longest and most festive of these holidays was Christmas. As a professor of medieval history, I can assure you the popular belief that the lives of peasants were little more than misery is a misconception.

Between minefields and barbed-wire fences, millions of soldiers faced each other in trenches along the Western Front, sometimes only some 30 meters apart. The combat zone stretched from the English Channel through Belgium and France to the Swiss border. As the war dragged on, soldiers huddled in their dugouts, where rats, lice, the cold and poor food wore them down, and death hung over them.

Today is Wednesday, Dec. 24, the 358th day of 2025. There are seven days left in the year. This is Christmas Eve. Today in history: On Dec. 24, 2013, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II granted a posthumous pardon to code-breaker Alan Turing, who was criminally convicted of homosexual behavior in the 1950s. Also on this date: In 1814, the United States and Britain signed the Treaty of Ghent, which would end the War of 1812 following ratification by both the British Parliament and the U.S. Senate.

Do you enjoy solving puzzles? What would you do if given a foreign code to decipher but no guide to grammar and no dictionary? That is exactly the problem faced by archeologists and linguists with regard to a number of ancient writing systems that remain a mystery to this day, despite technological advances. They tell of advanced civilizations whose writing we cannot understand.

For decades, the military has announced the retirement of aircraft that were supposedly nearing the end of their usefulness. Yet many of those platforms are still flying today. Whether it's because replacements arrived late, failed to replicate critical capabilities, or just couldn't meet operational need, these aircraft refused to disappear. Here, 24/7 Wall St. is taking a closer look at military aircraft that just refused to retire.

The word vampire first appears in English in sensational accounts of a revenant panic in Serbia in the early 18th century. One case in 1725 concerned a recently deceased peasant farmer, Peter Blagojevic, who rose from the grave, visited his wife to demand his shoes, and then murdered nine people in the night. When his body was disinterred, his mouth was found full of fresh blood. The villagers staked the corpse and then burned it.

On December 6, 1917, in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, a Norwegian freighter called the Imo collided with a French cargo ship called the Mont Blanc. It happened that the Mont Blanc was headed for a military convoy loaded with some 2,300 tons of picric acid, 200 tons of TNT, 35 tons of benzol, and 10 tons of gun cotton, all destined for the battlefields in France. The collision shoved the Mont Blanc, now on fire, toward the shoreline.

Long before Christmas turkeys arrived shrink-wrapped in the shops, they walked to market on their own two feet. First introduced to England in the 1500s, the birds gradually gained in popularity to become a must on the dinner tables of London's wealthy. But before the advent of refrigeration and the railways, getting turkeys from Norfolk and Suffolk farms to the capital involved a long walk for the birds.

Born in June 1924 in a Jewish family, he describes how he had a relatively normal childhood until the Anschluss of 1938 - when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany - meant that life "took a completely different meaning and survival became the only aim". "Jewish shops and premises, synagogues, offices and anything where there was a Jewish connection quickly became a target for violence, fire, destruction, robbery, and personal attack," he writes.

The Kellogg-Briand Pact was an agreement signed in August 1928 by 63 countries, which all promised, after the horrors of the First World War (1914-18), to regard war as an illegal instrument of national policy. Unfortunately, this sentiment for peace and cooperation was not upheld by all future leaders, and the pact was broken several times through the 1930s by Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, to name just a few.

Today is Tuesday, Dec. 23, the 357th day of 2025. There are eight days left in the year. Today in history: On Dec. 23, 1972, in an NFL playoff game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Oakland Raiders, Steelers running back Franco Harris scored a game-winning touchdown on a deflected pass with less than 10 seconds left. The Immaculate Reception, as the catch came to be known, is often cited as the greatest NFL play of all time.

The barrow was discovered in an archaeological investigation during the construction of a new access route to Twentyshilling Wind Farm. In a pit in the center of a ring ditch were five urns in fragments. The burial pit and urns contain fill with a mixture of alder, birch and hazel charcoal. Some hazel nutshells were also recovered from the pit and the urns.

How­ev­er cel­e­brat­ed by his­to­ri­ans, scru­ti­nized by archae­ol­o­gists, and descend­ed-upon by tourists it may be, Pom­peii is not excep­tion­al - not even in the fate of hav­ing been buried in ash by Mount Vesu­vius in the year 76, which also hap­pened to the near­by town of Her­cu­la­neum. Rather, it is the sheer ordi­nar­i­ness of that medi­um-sized provin­cial Roman city that we most val­ue today, inad­ver­tent­ly pre­served as it was by that vol­canic dis­as­ter. The new Lost in Time video above recon­structs

The story of the birth of Jesus appears only in two of the four Gospels of the New Testament: Matthew and Luke. They provide different details, though both say Jesus was born in Bethlehem. The exact day, month and even year of Jesus's birth are unknown, said Christine Shepardson, a professor at the University of Tennessee who studies early Christianity. The tradition of celebrating Jesus' birth on Dec. 25, she said, only emerged in the fourth century.

Medieval underwear is supposed to be the ultimate non-subject: private, practical, and largely invisible. Yet medieval artists kept finding ways to show it-right at the moments when a body matters most. In manuscripts, panel paintings, and devotional imagery from Northern Europe, men's undergarments-usually called braies-appear when someone is working, humiliated, punished, exposed, or put on display for a moral lesson.

Research suggests that the introduction of monetary systems in Central Europe can be traced back to Celtic mercenaries. These men were paid for their services in Greece with coins and brought them back home with them. Around the middle of the 3rd century BC, the Celts began their own coinage, imitating gold coins of the Macedonian king Philip II (359336 BC).

For the modern scholar, Gómez's treatise offers a similarly rich array of information and insights. It provides an eyewitness account of a major environmental disaster affecting one of the most developed urban landscapes in Europe and shows how contemporaries analyzed the causes and consequences of natural disasters. It also offers a rich and varied example of how contemporary scholars could mobilize their written sources; exercise skills in reading and historical interpretation honed by their studies in law, medicine, and the classics;

Today is Friday, Dec. 19, the 353rd day of 2025. There are 12 days left in the year. Today in history: On Dec. 19, 2008, citing imminent danger to the national economy, President George W. Bush ordered a $17.4 billion emergency bailout of the U.S. auto industry. Also on this date: In 1777, during the American Revolutionary War, Gen. George Washington led his army of more than 12,000 soldiers to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to camp for the winter.

In 2023, two metal detectorists discovered an assemblage of five Anglo-Saxon gold and garnet jewels on a hillside near Donington on Bain in Lincolnshire, UK. Dating to the 7th century, they were found dispersed over a radius of 20-30 feet in plough soil, indicating they had recently been churned up by deep cultivation. The assemblage is the largest group of gold and garnet jewelry known from Lincolnshire.

In close air support, speed and precision matter, but trust matters more. Aircraft earn that trust by showing up under fire, surviving hostile environments, and delivering reliable support when ground forces need it most. Across generations of warfare, certain aircraft proved so effective that they reshaped how CAS missions were planned and executed. Close air support plays an important role in military operations because it delivers precise, immediate firepower to protect ground forces,

a little bit of personal satisfaction

To characterize the Mexican-American War as only a training ground for the officers who would later serve on both sides in the Civil War is a simplification and a disservice to all who fought between 1846 and 1848, but, at the same time, there is truth to the label. The Mexican-American War provided the theater in which many of the most famous Civil War generals learned the art of warfare firsthand, and they made use of those lessons later to great effect.

The first computers weren't coded with words or languages, but by manipulating physical entities to do fairly basic calculations. "Programmers" would plug wires into sockets, set switches, turn dials, and spin rotors. It was, at the time, considered "women's work" because it was mostly clerical. But setting that aside, it was all mechanical in nature. These workers didn't call themselves "programmers" but "operators" because they physically operated the machine.