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The Diver Who Held Up a Cathedral With His Bare Hands β€” for Six Years, in Total Darkness

Winchester Cathedral covers roughly 53,800 square feet (about 5,000 square meters) of floor space, making it one of the largest cathedrals in Northern Europe. At 558 feet (170 meters) long, it’s also the longest medieval cathedral in the world. Neither the congregation nor the more than 365,000 tourists who visit each year to admire its […]

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The Last Battle of America’s Indian Wars Wasn’t Fought by the Sioux or the Apache β€” It Happened in 1918

In the United States, the phrase Indian Wars conjures a specific set of images: the Battle of Little Bighorn, the massacres at Wounded Knee and Sand Creek, the forced marches of the Trail of Tears, the decades-long manhunt for Geronimo. All of it is generally remembered as a 19th-century story, closed out by the early […]

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Mirin Dajo, the Dutch β€œInvulnerable” Man Who Pierced His Body with Swords and Swallowed Needles and Razor Blades

Fakir is a term of Arabic origin that can be translated as β€œpoor” and originally referred to a Muslim holy man, a Sufi saint, although since the Mughal Era it has also been applied to Hindu sadhus or ascetics, generally destitute wanderers who mortify their bodies as an act of penance in order to renounce […]

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