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

People have been eating outside of the home for millennia, buying a quick snack from a street vendor or taking a travel break at a roadside inn for a bowl of stew and a pint of mead. In the West, most early versions of the modern restaurant came from France and a culinary ...read more

When George Washington took command of the Continental Army in 1775, America was fighting a war on two fronts: one for independence from the British, and a second for survival against smallpox. Because Washington knew the ravages of the disease firsthand, he understood that the ...read more

A recession is defined as a contraction in economic growth lasting two quarters or more as measured by the gross domestic product (GDP). Starting with an eight-month slump in 1945, the U.S. economy has weathered 12 different recessions since World War II. On average, America’s ...read more

The unprecedented death and destruction wrought by World War I leveled economies the world over, but the situation was different in the United States. In fact, 1914 to 1918 were mostly boom years for the U.S. as the federal government poured money into the wartime economy. ...read more

When the 13 United States of America declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1776, the founders were attempting to break free from the tyranny of Britain’s top-down centralized government. But the first constitution the founders created, the Articles of Confederation, ...read more

Voting is the cornerstone of American democracy, but the United States Constitution doesn’t say exactly how Americans should cast their ballots in elections. Article 1, Section 4 simply states that it’s up to each state to determine “The Times, Places and Manner of holding ...read more

The plague ravaged large cities and provincial towns in northern and central Italy from 1629 to 1631, killing more than 45,000 people in Venice alone and wiping out more than half the population of cities like Parma and Verona. But strikingly, some communities were spared. In ...read more

In 1934, a doctor at a private boy’s school in Pennsylvania tried a unique method to stave off a potentially deadly measles outbreak. Dr. J. Roswell Gallagher extracted blood serum from a student who had recently recovered from a serious measles infection and began injecting the ...read more

Almost 700 years ago, the overwhelmed physicians and health officials fighting a devastating outbreak of bubonic plague in medieval Italy had no notion of viruses or bacteria, but they understood enough about the Black Death to implement some of the world’s first anti-contagion ...read more

Since the opening of the first modern Olympic Games in 1896, the international sports competition has only been canceled three times: once during World War I (1916) and twice during World War II (1940, 1944). Until the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, which postponed the Summer Olympic ...read more

As human civilizations flourished, so did infectious disease. Large numbers of people living in close proximity to each other and to animals, often with poor sanitation and nutrition, provided fertile breeding grounds for disease. And new overseas trading routes spread the novel ...read more

In 1636, according to an 1841 account by Scottish author Charles MacKay, the entirety of Dutch society went crazy over exotic tulips. As Mackay wrote in his wildly popular, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, as prices rose, people got swept up ...read more

In the late summer of 1918, the devastating second wave of the Spanish flu arrived on America’s shores. Carried by World War I doughboys returning home from Europe, the newly virulent virus spread first from Boston to New York and Philadelphia before traveling West to infect ...read more

The horrific scale of the 1918 influenza pandemic—known as the "Spanish flu"—is hard to fathom. The virus infected 500 million people worldwide and killed an estimated 20 million to 50 million victims—that’s more than all of the soldiers and civilians killed during World War I ...read more

Two centuries before Twitter, U.S. presidents understood the power of communicating directly with the people. From George Washington to Donald Trump, presidents have always adopted the latest media and technology to connect with voters and forward their political agenda. George ...read more

George Washington, the “Father of the Nation,” had no biological children of his own. But during his 40-year marriage to Martha, the Revolutionary War hero and first president presided over a Mount Vernon estate filled with her children and grandchildren, and by their accounts ...read more

With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the territory of the United States doubled overnight. Months before the $15 million deal was finalized, though, President Thomas Jefferson won approval from Congress to send a team of intrepid explorers to find a passable water route west to ...read more

The United States Constitution is clear about which branch of government has the power to declare war. In Article I, Section 8, the Constitution states that “Congress shall have the power… To declare war.” But that simple statement has left room for interpretation, and centuries ...read more

In late September 1952, only months after a rash of “flying saucer” sightings over Washington, D.C. made headlines around the world, dozens of military officers participating in NATO exercises in the North Atlantic were struck by their own UFO fever. Exercise Mainbrace was the ...read more

Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States, is an outsized figure in American politics. He became president in 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley, and the brash and independent Roosevelt quickly remade the presidency in his own image. More than a ...read more

In 1950, an American B-36 bomber on a peace-time training mission crashed over British Columbia, Canada carrying a Mark IV atomic bomb, a weapon comparable in size to the nuke dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. According to testimonies from the surviving crew members, they had safely ...read more

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark are known as trailblazing explorers of the American West, not pioneering scientists. But during their 8,000-mile journey from Missouri to the Pacific Ocean and back between 1804-1806, Lewis and Clark discovered 122 animal species, including ...read more

On December 14, 1944, American GIs stationed in the Belgian-German border town of Bastogne were in a jolly holiday mood. Hollywood star Marlene Dietrich was in town on a USO tour performing songs for a crowd of fresh-faced new arrivals and war-worn infantry on much needed R&R. ...read more

When the Founding Fathers met in Philadelphia during the 1787 Constitutional Convention, they represented a loosely held confederacy of Atlantic states recently freed from British rule. If the American experiment was going to work, the founding fathers knew that they had to ...read more

A U.S. president is impeached when the House of Representatives votes by a simple majority to approve one or more articles of impeachment. But what happens next? The process moves to the Senate for a trial. A two-thirds vote on at least one article is then required to convict and ...read more

There’s no holiday that’s more quintessentially American than Thanksgiving. Learn how it has evolved from its religious roots as Spanish and English days of feasting and prayer to become the football-watching, parade-marching, gut-stuffing event it is today. 1541: Spanish ...read more

On September 12, 1960, less than two months before Americans would choose the next president of the United States, Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy was in Texas giving a speech to a Houston gathering of Southern Baptist clergy. This wasn’t a normal campaign stop. Kennedy was ...read more

In the summer of 1886, the legendary Apache medicine man and guerrilla warrior Geronimo was being pursued across hostile desert terrain by nearly a quarter of the standing United States Army. Geronimo had reneged on yet another surrender—one of his favorite ploys—and was on the ...read more

One of the greatest American political dynasties of the 20th century was funded, in part, by alcohol. Rumors have swirled for decades that Joseph P. Kennedy, whose nine children included President John F. Kennedy, and U.S. Senators Robert and Edward Kennedy, made his early ...read more

Only three U.S. presidents have been formally impeached by Congress—Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. So far, no U.S. president has ever been removed from office through impeachment. In addition to Johnson, Clinton and Trump, only one other U.S. president has faced ...read more

Even 150 years later, the eerie spirit photographs taken by Boston photographer William Mumler pack an emotional punch. A mourning mother is visited by the angelic silhouette of her departed daughter, the young girl resting her tiny hand on her mother’s lap. A mutton-chopped ...read more

On August 3, 1492, Christopher Columbus and his crew set sail from the port of Palos in southern Spain on three vessels: la Santa Clara (Niña), la Pinta and la Santa Gallega (Santa Maria). Two of the ships, the Niña and Pinta, were tiny by today’s standards—only 50 to 70 feet ...read more

In 1215, a band of rebellious medieval barons forced King John of England to agree to a laundry list of concessions later called the Great Charter, or in Latin, Magna Carta. Centuries later, America’s Founding Fathers took great inspiration from this medieval pact as they forged ...read more

Brown v. Board of Education was the landmark Supreme Court case that ended racial segregation in schools in 1954. But it wasn’t the first to take on the issue. Eight years earlier, in 1946, a group of Mexican American families in California won the very first federal court case ...read more

At 9:37 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a 62-year-old Pentagon employee and retired Air Force communications specialist was sitting in traffic west of the Pentagon when a roaring jet engine passed so low overhead that it clipped the radio antenna of the car behind him. The airplane, ...read more

For more than two centuries, the Achaemenid Empire of Persia ruled the Mediterranean world. One of history’s first true super powers, the Persian Empire stretched from the borders of India down through Egypt and up to the northern borders of Greece. But Persia’s rule as a ...read more

Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, and the invention of the mechanical movable type printing press helped disseminate knowledge wider and faster than ever before. German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436, although he was ...read more

Middle-schoolers who trudge home each day with a 50-pound backpack and hours of homework would have had an easier time in 1901. That’s when the anti-homework movement was at its peak and the state of California actually banned all homework for grades below high school. From the ...read more

The “outsider” candidate running against “Washington insiders” has become a familiar figure on both ends of the political spectrum. But back in the 1820s, there was no such thing as an anti-establishment, populist candidate—until Andrew Jackson invented it. At the time, the 50th ...read more

Many Americans get the Pilgrims and the Puritans mixed up. Common thinking is: They were both groups of English religious reformers. They both landed in modern-day Massachusetts. And they were both stuffy sourpusses who wore black hats, squared collars and buckled shoes, right? ...read more