In May 1942, at the height of World War II, one of the most daring and dangerous diplomatic missions in history took place in absolute secrecy. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov embarked on a high-stakes journey from Moscow to London and Washington, D.C.

On May 25, 1979, American Airlines Flight 191 lined up for takeoff at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The McDonnell Douglas DC-10-10 was bound for Los Angeles with 258 passengers and 13 crew members on board. What should have been a routine transcontinental flight transformed within seconds into the deadliest aviation accident in United States history (excluding the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001).

For the vast majority of its existence, Earth spun through the cosmos without a single human being to witness it. In the modern world, it is easy to adopt an anthropocentric view of history, seeing the planet as a stage built specifically for human civilization. However, empirical data from geology and paleontology tells a starkly different story.

During the Second World War, the treatment of prisoners of war (POWs) by Nazi Germany was dictated not only by logistics but heavily by racial ideology and the tenets of the Geneva Convention—or the deliberate disregard of them. Food was weaponized as a tool of control, segregation, and, in many cases, systematic extermination. The daily rations provided to millions of captured soldiers varied drastically depending on their nationality, reflecting the brutal hierarchy of the Nazi camp system.