In America, if we come across a site of historical significance, we memorialize it by transforming it into an outdoor living history space where the past comes alive or erecting a statue of Sylvester Stallone on the premises.

¡Hola! That is what the state of Arizona says to its Mexican friends and residents, to distract them from the knife being plunged into their backs at the same moment. The primary problem facing the foreclosure-wracked drought-plagued desert state of Arizona: Mexicans learning things. Arizona will put a stop to that—¡muy rapido!

Widener University in Chester, PA has dug down deep to find tragedy within tragedy, an Inception of tragedy, for an art gallery exhibit opening this month. Here's what they came up with: There were twelve dogs on the Titanic. And nine of them died.

In 1857, in the midst of the greatest political strife a young nation had yet known, a group of prominent intellectuals and activists — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and Harriet Beecher Stowe, among others — gathered together to create a New England literary magazine: The Atlantic. For more than a century, it was a leading voice for progressive causes, from abolition to civil rights, and a platform for some of the country's greatest literary voices. Today, it published a rage comic. "Props on the rage comic, Atlantic!" writes Newsweek.

The Census Bureau just released reams of data from the 1940 U.S. Census online (the website's been up and down all day; if it doesn't work, try later), and you are going to spend the next hour or so tooling around on the website. I know because I just did it myself.

The recipient of the world's first silicone breast implants is and was a total bad-ass. Here are some facts about her from the BBC News Magazine's A Brief History of Breast Enlargements:

After 72 years of being kept confidential, the 1940 census will be released on April 2. This is exciting news for historians with an interest in the Great Depression and general census enthusiasts. Actually, it is kind of neat, and the records will be available to anyone online. You just can't search by name, in case you were hoping to dig up specific dirt on your great-grandparents.

Forensics experts have used plaster molds of sailors' skulls excavated from the wreckage of Civil War warship the U.S.S. Monitor to create facial reconstructions that could provide clues to the identities of two men who perished when the ship was lost at sea in December of 1862.

A group of forensic anthropologists have completed a meticulous analysis of a set of real human anatomy displays from 19C Italy. Using CT scans and other chemical analysis, the group determined that, some 200 years ago, anatomist Giovan Battista Rini "petrified" the corpses with a mercury and other heavy metals. He injected some tinctures and used others as baths. The eyes are fake. Basically, Rini was modern medicine's first "Body Worlds" guy.

Once a leper colony and quarantine zone, North Brother Island is now home to nothing but crumbling walls and a healthy handful of ghosts missing their eyes and noses. Located a measly 350 yards from the Bronx in appropriately named, Hell Gate, it was shut down in 1963 and has been closed to the public since.

The last batch of President Kennedy's secret Oval Office recordings was released today, just barely missing the deadline for everyone's "Best Secret Presidential Recordings of 2011" year-end lists. Archivists from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library have been declassifying and releasing portions of the tapes, recorded so super duper secretly not even Kennedy's top aides knew of their existence before his death, since 1993.

Out of nowhere, the Miami Herald has dusted off and expanded upon one of Washington's oldest and juiciest political rumors: The one about a rising young beltway journalist and his gay affair with a powerful GOP congressman, and how the journalist shot himself in the head when his lover's political rival threatened to out them. According to the Herald, that rival may have been Newt Gingrich.

On the day Germany surrendered in 1945, legendary CIA chief Richard Helms—then an officer serving overseas in the OSS—somehow laid hands on some of Adolf Hitler's personal stationery. So naturally he jotted a note to his toddler back in the states about the nature of evil.

Well well well, it seems that The History Channel is a big cable success story. The fifth most popular channel on all of cable! Only trails ESPN among middle aged men! How has The History Channel done it? By having nothing to do with history, or "true" things at all!

Today we learned about the origination of one of modern culture's most important inventions: the sext. Sometimes it's fun to pretend that the day is 1531, the year of our lord, and that all our correspondence sounds like a Shakespearean sonnet. One commenter is a natural at this little game.

A visiting professor at West Virginia University has discovered a 16th-century erotic poem—written by a Catholic noblewoman to the condemned Protestant tutor of Edward VI—hidden inside an edition of works by Chaucer, leading to fevered speculation, in your head, over who will star in the movie. (Carey Mulligan, maybe? Emily Blunt?)

Many years from now, when you've settled down with a nice girl and stopped drinking the beer and being rowdy with the fellas and harassing bitches (but only the ones who wanted it), your young daughter, who was just perusing some old historical documents, will come to you and ask, with childlike wonder: "Daddy? What's a bro?"

Seems like it was only last week when we decided that we needed to come up with a new word for "bro." What a journey it's been.

What is Thanksgiving all about? It's about ringing in the season of conspicuous consumerism we call Christmas, right? So what better way to celebrate that than with a department store sponsored holiday tradition: The Macy's Thanksgiving balloons.

Right-wing blog mogul and political penis fetishist Andrew Breitbart makes his acting debut this week, in the Tea Party's adorable attempt at Hollywood glamour, self-financed drama series Courage, New Hampshire. Breitbart plays the "High Sheriff of 1770 Portsmouth." Here he is ordering the death of a lugubrious criminal who seems to have wandered in from a Monty Python sketch.