After Arachne beat Athena at a weaving contest, the goddess punished the mortal girl by turning her into a spider and forcing her to weave for all eternity.

Hired by financier J.P. Morgan to manage his collection of books, manuscripts, and artworks, Belle da Costa Greene broke barriers in New York high society as a young female rare books expert — all while hiding a big secret about her race.

On July 4, 1826, former U.S. presidents and Founding Fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died within hours of each other — exactly 50 years after the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence.

Project Iceworm envisioned a sprawling underground city in Greenland where the U.S. could house 600 nuclear missiles, but the project was shut down after less than a decade.

In 1907, Ida Wood emptied her enormous bank account and booked a room at the Herald Square Hotel — where she would spend the final two decades of her life in seclusion.

There were thousands of Sumerian gods worshipped in the cradle of civilization, from the powerful Lord of the Heavens, An, to the terrifying goddess Ereshkigal, who ruled over the Netherworld.

The wife of Emperor Franz Joseph I, Elisabeth of Austria was known for her beauty and for her frequent refusal to be seen in public before she was murdered by an Italian anarchist in 1898.

On April 18, 1775, William Dawes and Paul Revere were both dispatched to warn colonists in Massachusetts that the British were coming — so why is only Revere's story celebrated today?

John Casablancas' models were fashion icons like Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford, who earned enormously high paychecks, but Casablancas and his agency also faced significant scandals throughout his life.

In 1885, Sarah Elisabeth Goode was awarded a patent for a bed that folded into a roll-top desk, an invention she designed to save space in cramped Chicago apartments.