Dave Roos

The Silk Road wasn’t a single route, but rather a vibrant trade network that crisscrossed central Eurasia for centuries, bringing far-flung cultures into contact. Traveling by camel and horseback, merchants, nomads, missionaries, warriors and diplomats not only exchanged exotic ...read more

On April 29, 1975, as communist North Vietnamese troops closed in on the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, the United States ordered the immediate evacuation of U.S. personnel and several thousand South Vietnamese military and diplomatic officials. TV news cameras broadcasted ...read more

Paul Revere is best-known for his “midnight ride” celebrated in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1860 poem. But Revere’s role in the American Revolution extends far beyond that famous 1775 mission to warn the towns of Lexington and Concord that British troops were on the move from ...read more

European archeologists have uncovered hoards of Bronze Age weaponry dating from more than 4,000 years ago. Some of the larger and more elaborate weapons—like the 28-inch dagger known as the Oxborough Dirk—may have been ceremonial or prestige pieces, but others show clear markings ...read more

Without Robert Morris, the American Revolution may have been crushed under a mountain of debt and disarray. The self-made millionaire from Philadelphia never set out to be a politician, but was pressed into service by the Continental Congress when it needed a brash and savvy ...read more

More than 3,200 years ago, the Mediterranean and Near East were home to a flourishing and interconnected Bronze Age civilization fueled by lucrative trade in valuable metals and finished goods. The great kingdoms and empires of the day—including the Egyptians, Babylonians, ...read more

The most recent ice age peaked between 24,000 and 21,000 years ago, when vast ice sheets covered North America and northern Europe, and mountain ranges like Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro and South America's Andes were encased in glaciers. At that point our Homo sapien ancestors had ...read more

For 75 years, active-duty members of the British military have served as stewards at Wimbledon, the annual tennis “Championships” held at the storied All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club. Since 1946, uniformed men and women from the Army, Air Force and Navy have volunteered at ...read more

There have been two epic battles at the place known as Tannenberg. The first, in 1410, saw the defeat of a German religious order called the Teutonic Knights at the hands of Slavs and Lithuanians. Five hundred years later, Germany got its revenge in one of the earliest battles ...read more

There are two layers to every water polo match: the graceful athleticism above the water, and the rough play and cheap shots hidden beneath the surface. The 1956 Melbourne Olympics were a lot like a game of water polo. On the surface, they were billed as the “friendly games,” but ...read more

The Soviet hockey team, led by an iron curtain of a goaltender named Vladislav Tretiak, was the clear favorite to bring home the gold at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. The Soviets had won all four of the previous Olympics and had beaten the USA in all 12 ...read more

There are roughly 180 known impact craters worldwide and fully a third of them—including some of the biggest—are located in North America. These massive blast zones were formed by meteors, asteroids and comets that slammed into the earth’s surface with a force many times greater ...read more

In the spring of 1749, the billions-strong swarm of cicadas known today as Brood X emerged from the ground in rural Maryland, much to the fascination (and horror) of a 17-year-old Black tobacco farmer named Benjamin Banneker, who believed they were a plague of locusts. “The ...read more

Few animals command as much respect and instill as much healthy fear as bears. While fatal bear attacks are rare—there have only been around 180 deaths from bear attacks in North America since the late 1700s—they never fail to shock with their brutality. The following list is ...read more

At the dawn of the 20th century, the world’s military powers worried that future wars would be decided by chemistry as much as artillery, so they signed a pact at the Hague Convention of 1899 to ban the use of poison-laden projectiles "the sole object of which is the diffusion of ...read more

The Western Front of World War I is infamous for trench warfare, long and grueling battles fought from dug-in positions separated by no man’s land. But a lesser-known type of battle also raged underground as both Allied and German forces dug extensive networks of secret tunnels ...read more

Who succeeds the president in the event of death or incapacity? There’s a list of nearly 20 officials—starting with the vice president and the speaker of the House—whose top leadership roles place them squarely in line for the job. Then there’s the wild card: a “designated ...read more

At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was in the grip of a full-blown smallpox epidemic. During the five-year outbreak from 1899 to 1904, government health officials confirmed 164,283 cases of smallpox, but the real numbers may have been five times as high. To slow ...read more

In 1809, when President Thomas Jefferson reviewed New York’s ambitious plans for a more than 360-mile canal connecting the Hudson River (and therefore New York Harbor) to the Great Lakes, he dismissed it as “little short of madness” and refused to authorize federal funding. Less ...read more

To modern ears, the word “Celtic” evokes traditional art, literature and music from Ireland and Scotland. But the ancient Celts were a widespread group of people with origins in central Europe. See what historians have learned about this rich and complex collection of tribes.  1. ...read more

The Aztec Empire was a shifting and fragile alliance of three principle city-states. The largest and most powerful among the three was Tenochtitlán, the island city built by the Mexica people, also known as the Aztecs. The Aztec Triple Alliance exerted tremendous power over a ...read more

Since 1800, 14 sitting presidents have faced censure by either the Senate or the House of Representatives, but only a handful of those official rebukes were ever adopted by Congress, and the one that arguably stung the most was later “expunged” from the record. A censure is a ...read more

Early in the predawn hours of December 4, 1969, a Peoples Gas truck pulled up in front of an apartment building at 2337 W. Monroe St. in the West Side of Chicago. Fourteen plainclothes Chicago Police officers quietly filed out of the undercover truck, armed with pistols, a ...read more

It’s a grim but necessary calculation, counting those Americans who have died in service to their country, as targets of terrorist attacks, amid natural disasters or as victims of pandemic disease. Here are major events from history that have inflicted a devastating toll on ...read more

In the mid-19th-century, the two most powerful political parties in the United States were the Democrats and the Whigs. In two presidential elections, 1840 and 1848, Americans voted a Whig into the White House. And some of the most prominent political voices of the contentious ...read more

In 1901 a deadly smallpox epidemic tore through the Northeast, prompting the Boston and Cambridge boards of health to order the vaccination of all residents. But some refused to get the shot, claiming the vaccine order violated their personal liberties under the Constitution. ...read more

Americans borrowed the term “lame duck” from the British, who first applied the insult to bankrupt businessmen in the 18th century and then to 19th-century politicians whose time in office was quickly running out. Before the 20th Amendment was ratified in 1933, lame-duck ...read more

An unthinkable 50 to 100 million people worldwide died from the 1918-1919 flu pandemic commonly known as the “Spanish Flu.” It was the deadliest global pandemic since the Black Death, and rare among flu viruses for striking down the young and healthy, often within days of ...read more

The Egyptian military became one of the ancient world’s greatest fighting forces during the New Kingdom period (1550 B.C. - 1070 B.C.), but it did so using borrowed weapons technology. For much of its early history, Egypt relied on simple stone maces, wooden-tipped spears, axes ...read more

Sailing for more than two months across 3,000 miles of open ocean, the 102 passengers of the Mayflower—including three pregnant women and more than a dozen children—were squeezed below decks in crowded, cold and damp conditions, suffering crippling bouts of seasickness, and ...read more

Forty million years ago, horses first emerged in North America, but after migrating to Asia over the Bering land bridge, horses disappeared from this continent at least 10,000 years ago. So for millennia, Native Americans traveled and hunted on foot, relying on dogs as miniature ...read more

When the men of the 42nd “Rainbow” Division rolled into the Bavarian town of Dachau at the tail end of World War II, they expected to find an abandoned training facility for Adolf Hitler’s elite SS forces, or maybe a POW camp. What they discovered instead would be seared into ...read more

One of the biggest, most dominant corporations in history operated long before the emergence of tech giants like Apple or Google or Amazon. The English East India Company was incorporated by royal charter on December 31, 1600 and went on to act as a part-trade organization, ...read more

On the night of April 3, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson began to suffer from a violent cough. His condition quickly worsened to the point that his personal doctor, Cary Grayson, thought the president might have been poisoned. Grayson later described the long night spent at ...read more

When the Electoral votes were tallied in the 1800 U.S. presidential election—only the fourth election in the young nation’s history—there was a problem. Two candidates received exactly 73 electoral votes, producing the first and (so far) only Electoral College tie in American ...read more

Only since 1869 have there consistently been nine justices appointed to the Supreme Court. Before that, Congress routinely changed the number of justices to achieve its own partisan political goals, resulting in as few as five Supreme Court justices required by law under John ...read more

When the United States finally decided to enter World War I in 1917, there was opposition at home by those who wanted America to remain neutral in the European conflict and groups who actively opposed the draft, the first of its kind in the country. The most vocal dissent came ...read more

When naturalists like John Muir first entered the Yosemite Valley of California in the 19th century, they marveled at the beauty of what they believed to be a pristine wilderness untouched by human hands. The truth is that the rich diversity and stunning landscapes of places like ...read more

September 11, 2001 is an inflection point—there was life before the terrorist attacks and there is life after them. Nearly 3,000 Americans were killed on that clear, sunny morning when two hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, another ...read more

When David Hollister introduced a seat belt bill in Michigan in the early 1980s that levied a fine for not buckling up, the state representative received hate mail comparing him to Hitler. At the time, only 14 percent of Americans regularly wore seat belts, even though the ...read more

On April 12, 1955, every American newspaper and TV set jubilantly announced that Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was a success. Just three years earlier, during the worst polio outbreak in U.S. history, 57,000 people were infected, 21,000 were paralyzed and 3,145 died, most of them ...read more

On September 18, 1969, the U.S. House of Representatives voted by an overwhelming 338 to 70 to send a constitutional amendment to the Senate that would have dismantled the Electoral College, the indirect system by which Americans elect the president and vice president. “It was ...read more

Of the 58 presidential elections in the history of the United States, 53 of the winners took both the Electoral College and the popular vote. But in five incredibly close elections—including those for two of the past three presidents—the winner of the Electoral College was in ...read more

Christopher Columbus has long been exalted as a heroic figure in American history: the first explorer to establish a European presence in the New World. Americans have celebrated his arrival as far back as 1792, the 300th anniversary of his landing. But it would take almost 200 ...read more

The invention of the modern mumps vaccine is the stuff of medical textbook legend. In 1963, a star researcher at the pharmaceutical company Merck took a swab of his own daughter’s throat to begin cultivating a weakened form of the mumps virus. And just four years later, in record ...read more

In desperate times, the enemy of your enemy becomes your friend. During World War II, the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union would never have been three-way allies had they not shared a mortal enemy in Adolf Hitler. The Americans were isolationists, the Brits were ...read more

The Insurrection Act gives U.S. presidents the authority to deploy active duty military to maintain or restore peace in times of crisis. The Insurrection Act was invoked numerous times in the 20th century, most famously when Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne Division ...read more

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn in as president in 1933, he took the helm of a United States brought to its knees by the Great Depression. With unemployment as high as 25 percent, millions were out of work and an entire generation of young people had lost hope in their ...read more