Daily Content Archive

Word of the Day
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Article of the Day

Imhotep Imhotep was an Egyptian polymath who lived in the 27th century BCE and served as chief minister to the Egyptian king Djoser. He is remembered as a skilled physician, sage, and astrologer, as well as the architect of the step-pyramid at Saqqara, the first pyramid ever constructed. He was deified around the time of the Persian conquest in 525 BCE, and his cult reached its zenith in Greco-Roman times, when he was linked to Asclepius. He may have been the first to use what structure in architecture? More...

This Day in History

King Henry VIII of England Marries Sixth and Last Wife, Catherine Parr (1543) By 1543, Henry VIII had had five marriages, which respectively ended in one divorce, one annulment, and three deaths—two by beheading. He then married Parr, his sixth and final wife. She had a good influence on the increasingly paranoid king—her third husband—and developed close friendships with his children, even acting as guardian of one of Henry's daughters after his death in 1547. Why, then, did Parr send her beloved stepdaughter, the future Queen Elizabeth I, away the next year? More...

Today's Birthday

Oscar Hammerstein II (1895) The grandson of an opera impresario of the same name, Hammerstein studied law before beginning the theater career that made him one of the foremost songwriters in the US. In the early 1940s, he began a prolific and successful collaboration with Richard Rodgers that resulted in plays like The King and I, The Sound of Music, and the Pulitzer Prize winners Oklahoma! and South Pacific. How did New York City honor Hammerstein following his death in August 1960? More...

Quotation of the Day
The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance. Jane Austen (1775-1817)

Idiom of the Day
(one's) blood runs cold — One becomes seized by an acute and intense sensation of fear, panic, horror, or dread. More...

Today's Holiday
Kiribati Independence Day (2025) This island group in the middle of the Pacific Ocean was known as the Gilbert Islands until its independence from Britain on July 12, 1979. Independence Day is observed as a national holiday. More...