From Hello Kitty to Pikachu, the country changed what the world considers adorable. But do these characters represent joy — ...

Imagine being a Byzantine Emperor and all of a sudden, deciding to abandon everything and become a monk in a monastery.

"[I]f anyone in sound health has castrated himself ... John Chrysostom, Homilies on Romans 24 (A.D. 391). "[I]n truth, all men know that they who are under the power of this disease [the sin ...

electrified rod (“the Cane”) for shocking the genitals, nail extractors, leather-thonged whips, small rubber hammers, scissors for castration ... General Rene Roman Fernandez, an in ...

April Fools’ Day origin #2: The ancient Romans did it Some historians have ... After several festival days devoted to fasting, castration, mourning, and scourging, the hilaria gave everyone ...

“A lot was lost,” says Dr. Markus Egg, an archaeologist at the Roman-Germanic Central Museum ... fraud and that Otzi was nothing more than a castrated Egyptian mummy, planted in the mountains ...

The Romans had a curious punishment for parricides ... highway robbery, burglary, arson, castration, buggery, sodomy, bestiality, dueling where death occurs, hiding a slave with intent to free ...

Negroes who refused to work for white men, or who seemed to flourish on their own, were thrashed with whips; somewere hanged, some castrated ... Negroes, Roman Catholics (whose “dago” Pope ...

Before his death in 814, Charlemagne had extended the Frankish kingdom far beyond Roman Gaul, to the Elbe and Danube Bend ... The brothers were skinned alive, castrated and decapitated, and the affair ...