The Lost Dauphin of France
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 What the Surviving Record Actually Shows Louis-Charles de Bourbon, second son of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, was born at Versailles on 27 March 1785 and became dauphin in June 1789 on the death of his elder brother. He was […]
The Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca Head: Roman in Pre-Columbian America?
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 A small terracotta head, no larger than a walnut, surfaced beneath a Mesoamerican pyramid in 1933 and has refused to settle into any single chronology since. The Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca head measures roughly three centimeters across and bears, to many trained eyes, the bearded […]
The Treasure of Forrest Fenn
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 For roughly a decade, a bronze chest weighing about forty-two pounds sat in a fold of the Rocky Mountains while several hundred thousand people, working from a twenty-four-line poem printed in a self-published memoir, looked for it. Five of those people died […]
The Etruscans: An Enigmatic Italian Civilization
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 The Etruscans called themselves Rasenna. Their neighbours, the Greeks, called them Tyrrhenoi; the Romans, Etrusci or Tusci, the root that survives in modern Tuscany. They flourished in west-central Italy from roughly the ninth century BCE through their absorption into the Roman state […]
Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic Voyage
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 7, 2026. What Was Shackleton’s Antarctic Voyage and Why Has It Survived a Century? Ernest Henry Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914 to 1917 was a planned crossing of the Antarctic continent that became, instead, an accidental masterclass in […]
Baalbek’s Massive Stone Blocks
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 7, 2026. What Are the Massive Stone Blocks at Baalbek? Baalbek‘s so-called megaliths are three colossal limestone blocks set into the western retaining wall of the Temple of Jupiter podium, in the Beqaa Valley of modern Lebanon, together with […]
The Southwest Script: Pre-Columbian Mysteries
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 7, 2026. What People Mean by a “Southwest Script” The phrase “Southwest script” gathers together a set of very different claims about pre-Columbian writing in North America, and the first task of any honest treatment is to separate the […]
The Disappearance of Raoul Wallenberg
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 What Happened to Raoul Wallenberg? Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who shielded tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews in Budapest in 1944, vanished into Soviet custody on 17 January 1945. He was thirty-two. Soviet officials produced a single 1947 prison-doctor memo claiming […]
The Maine Penny: Evidence of Norse in America
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Last reviewed: May 7, 2026. What the Maine Penny Is, and Why a Single Coin Carries So Much Weight The Maine Penny is a small silver Norwegian coin, struck during the reign of King Olaf Kyrre of Norway between 1067 and 1093, […]
The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine
By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 7, 2026 · Updated May 13, 2026 Jacob Waltz, the German-immigrant prospector whose nickname gave the legend its name, died of pneumonia in a Phoenix bedroom on the night of 25 October 1891. He left behind a wooden candle box of high-grade gold ore beneath his bed and, depending […]