Listen and subscribe on Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps. In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, historian and author Edda L. Fields-Black tells us the fascinating and action-packed story of one of the most daring spy operations and raids of the entire Civil War—led by Harriet Tubman. Our podcast is an...

If America is truly the Land of Liberty, then one of the best demonstrations of that virtue can be found in a roadside park along a barren stretch of Highway 281 near the town of Harlan, Kansas. Here, a miniature version of the Statue of Liberty, rising nearly 8 ½ feet tall, stands proudly over a windswept prairie, with little else in sight. For...

This long-serving postbox sits outside the ticket turnstiles of Kent Station along the station's western wall, no ticket is required. It changed in color from red to green over the decades. Cork recently added a banner recognizing its record tenure in Gaelic and English.

Columbus, Indiana, is a city of just over 50,000 people located in the southern part of the state about 45 miles (75 km) from Indianapolis. At first, Columbus may seem like an average city, but Columbus is a haven for modern architecture filled with innovative and unusual buildings. The modernist architecture movement started in Columbus with the...

In the bylanes of Sadashiv Peth, an area in the historic part of Pune, lies this iconic ice cream parlor. First opened in 1947 by Manohar Waman Limaye, a former ammunition engineer, the shop specializes in hand-made pot ice cream. Limaye supposedly turned to his engineering skills when he took an old ice candy machine and reconfigured it to churn out...

In 2016, a Lexington, Kentucky, gift shop unveiled a taxidermied black bear that had been recovered by the store's co-owners, Whitt Hyler and Griffin VanMeter. It wasn't just any taxidermy bear—this is Cocaine Bear. In 1985, this bear overdosed on cocaine dropped by a drug smuggler in Chattahoochee, a story that inspired a movie almost 40 years later....