A thousand years before modern boats crossed the waters of Lake Waccamaw, Native craftsmen were building vessels that could carry people, goods, and knowledge across the region.
Archaeologists recently recovered a remarkable 28-foot dugout canoe from Lake Waccamaw in North
82 years ago today, eight American sailors jumped onto a sinking Nazi submarine in the middle of the Atlantic.
What they pulled out of it changed the war. And the Navy buried the whole story for years.
First, you need to know that U-505 was already cursed. German sailors called her the unluckiest boat in the fleet. In October 1943, during a brutal British depth-charge attack, her own captain shot himself in the head in the control room, in front of his crew. He remains the only submarine commander in history known to have killed himself underwater in combat. His second-in-command calmly took over, rode out the attack, and sailed her home.
Eight months later, her luck ran out completely.
June 4, 1944. Two days before D-Day. Captain Daniel Gallery's hunter-killer group, built around the escort carrier USS Guadalcanal, had been stalking U-boats off West Africa. Gallery had an idea his superiors considered borderline insane: don't sink the next one. Capture it. No US Navy crew had boarded and taken an enemy warship on the high seas since 1815.
The destroyer escort USS Chatelain caught U-505 on sonar and fired a salvo of hedgehog bombs. The U-boat broke the surface 700 yards away. Gunfire raked the conning tower, wounding her captain. He gave the order to abandon ship.
The Germans rushed out so fast they botched the scuttling. The sub was flooding, but her engines were still running. She was circling the battle at six knots, empty, sinking, and very possibly rigged with demolition charges.
So Lt. Albert David and eight men from USS Pillsbury chased her down in a whaleboat, leaped aboard, and climbed down the hatch into a dark, flooding submarine that could explode or go under at any second. They shut the scuttling valves, disarmed the charges, and stopped the flooding.
Down there they found the prize: Enigma cipher machines and roughly 900 pounds of codebooks and charts. Current settings. The keys to the German navy's secret communications.
But here's the catch. The treasure was only valuable if Germany never found out. One leak and Berlin changes every code overnight.
So the Navy ran one of the great cover-ups of the war. The sub was towed 1,700 miles to Bermuda and given a fake American name: USS Nemo. Around 3,000 sailors were sworn to total silence. The 58 captured German crewmen vanished into a POW camp in rural Louisiana, hidden even from the Red Cross. Germany declared U-505 lost with all hands and notified the families. The dead men were alive in Louisiana, and their boat was working for the US Navy.
The secret held until the war ended.
Lt. David received the Medal of Honor, the only one awarded in the Atlantic Fleet in all of WWII.
And the submarine? In 1954, Chicagoans raised $250,000 to bring her home. She was towed across Lake Michigan and dragged through the streets of Chicago to the Museum of Science and Industry.
She's still sitting there right now. You can walk through her.
The most heartbreaking goodbye in Game of Thrones wasn’t between lovers.
It was between a little girl and the man who accidentally became her family.
What began as hatred slowly became one of the most tragic bonds in the entire series.
Arya wanted him dead for what happened to Mycah.
Sandor saw her as just another spoiled noble girl.
Yet somehow, after months crossing a war-torn Westeros together, they became the closest thing either of them had to family.
The Hound taught Arya how brutal the world really was.
Arya gave Sandor something he hadn’t had in years: someone who stayed.
Behind the insults, threats and constant fighting, there was a strange loyalty neither of them knew how to express.
That’s what makes their final scene so painful.
As Sandor lay dying by the cliff, he did something almost unimaginable.
For the first time in his life, he tried to save someone instead of himself.
He looked at Arya and saw the monster he could turn her into.
And with his final lesson, he begged her not to become him.
The Hound spent years teaching Arya how to survive.
In the end, his greatest gift was teaching her how to let go.
(Part2) Baskets have a massive historical and cultural significance in Cherokee tradition, traditionally woven from split white oak, honeysuckle, or rivercane and dyed using natural roots like black walnut and bloodroot.