Cracked Archive - History

Maybe some of the ways we picture WWII looking -- all razor-jawed men charging through the mud in black and white -- isn't entirely accurate. Because we know for a fact that at least some of the soldiers were carrying floppy dong-shaped rifles into battle.

• By Eric Yosomono
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• May 22, 2012

Other websites like to tiptoe around the issue, but we've never hesitated to come out and just say it: The Nazis were bad. We're also going out on a limb with this once: They were stupid.

• By Jacopo della Quercia
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• May 20, 2012

It turns out our teachers, Hollywood and whoever we got our Thanksgiving mythology from (Big Turkey?) all made America's origin story far more boring than it actually was for some very disturbing reasons.

• By Jack O'Brien, Elford Alley
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• May 15, 2012

We don't expect our craziest urban legends to exist for good reasons, but we do at least expect their origins to be mysterious. If you can just point to the guy who made up the crazy story in the first place, what are we doing here?

• By Pauli Poisuo, M. Asher Cantrell
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• May 02, 2012

For those of us who grew up in the '80s and '90s, it's difficult to fully understand just how close to annihilation we actually came in the 20th century.

• By Chris J.
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• April 27, 2012

A generation of students found out the hard way that archaeology isn't anywhere near as much fun as Indiana Jones made it look. Still, experts in the field do have their exciting, and even shocking, days at the office.

• By Evan V. Symon
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• April 20, 2012

In situations where every day literally could be your last, sometimes an impecable wit is enough to get you through.

• By Jacopo della Quercia
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• April 19, 2012

Shooting from such a long range incurs a wide array of difficulties, leading to situations where making a successful shot is, by all logic and reason, impossible. It is in these situations where the best snipers sniff, wipe the sweat from their eyes and make the shot anyway.

• By Xavier Jackson, James Benoist
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• April 14, 2012

It's amazing what humanity can accomplish in a moment's notice.

• By Christina H
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• April 09, 2012

Humans are hard-wired to function in groups. But it's a double-edged sword -- it takes a lot of us to build a city, but as anyone who has ever witnessed a riot can attest, people's ability to act like idiots also multiplies in crowds. And this phenomenon can manifest itself in really weird and even fatal ways.

• By Pauli Poisuo
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• April 06, 2012

Every single person on this list puts Bear Grylls' tales of 'badassery' to shame

• By Chris J.
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• April 04, 2012

We tend to romanticize the age of exploration, like it was all grand exotic frontiers and tiny people tying sailors down with ropes. What we don't hear about so often is the scurvy and the starvation and the months of endless walking through landscapes full of awfulness. And that's too bad, because it actually makes their stories that much more bad

• By Eric Yosomono, Dustin Koski
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• March 31, 2012

Unless you're talking about diamonds, Twinkies or vampires, lasting forever usually isn't in the cards. Yet all over the world -- and universe -- there are machines, engineering feats and pieces of meat that never got the memo that we all have a use-by date.

• By Evan V. Symon
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• March 22, 2012

In which you'll discover that stuff you only thought existed in grainy old pictures continued until just a few years ago.

• By Robert Evans, Pauli Poisuo, Jacopo della Quercia , Xavier Jackson
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• March 12, 2012

We here at Cracked take pride in our research department's ability to make as many poop jokes in a 2,000-word article as is humanly possible. Especially when it's about poop.

• By Mohammed Shariff
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• March 11, 2012