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Cracked Archive - History

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Product Placement You Never Noticed in Famous Works of Art

Product placement has been reeking havoc on our major art forms ever since E.T. invented it by liking those Reece's Pieces so damn much. We asked you to show us what it might have looked like if this was always the case.

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5 Ridiculous Origins of Famous Urban Legends

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?

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6 Tiny Mistakes That Almost Ended the World

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.

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5 Baffling Discoveries That Prove History Books Are Wrong

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.

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The 7 Greatest Pieces of Trash Talk in the History of War

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

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25 Team-Ups in History That Would Have Changed Everything

Tesla and Mark Twain were homeys and Da Vinci and Machiavelli once worked together on a plot to steal a river. This got us wondering what other duos might have tag-teamed history if cost and the time-space continuum weren't an issue.

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The 5 Most Impossible Sniper Shots Ever Made

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.

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The 8 Most Incredible Things Slapped Together in a Day

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

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5 Terrifying Killers (That Turned Out to be Mass Panics)

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.

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23 Modern Images as Misunderstood by Future Archeologists

Napoleon's height was exactly average for his time. His enemies made up the short thing to make him look silly, and it stuck because he looked sort of small in a couple of paintings. This made us wonder how the images we leave behind will be misremembered.

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The 5 Most Badass Tales of Wartime Survival

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

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The 5 Most Clearly Cursed Expeditions of All Time

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

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5 Historic Artifacts You Won't Believe Still Work

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.

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6 Historical Events That Are Way More Modern Than You Think

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

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6 Mind-Blowing Ways Poop Created the Modern World

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.

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