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How Justice John Marshall Expanded the Power of the Supreme Court
When John Marshall was appointed chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1801, the nation’s highest court occupied a lowly position. There was no Supreme Court Building in the newly completed capital, Washington, D.C., so the six justices heard cases in a borrowed room in the ...read more
Why Did the Beatles Break Up?
The four Beatles—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr—changed music forever in a relatively brief timespan, bursting onto the scene in 1963 with "Please Please Me" and recording their last albums, "Let It Be" and "Abbey Road," in 1969. The foursome came ...read more
‘The Great Escape’: The Audacious Real Story of the WWII Allied Prison Break
The mass escape of 76 Allied airmen from a Nazi POW camp in March 1944 remains one of history’s most famous prison breaks. Although the German Luftwaffe designed the Stalag Luft III camp to be escape-proof, the audacious, real-life prison break immortalized in the 1963 movie The ...read more
The NFL's First Playoff Game Was Played Indoors in a Hockey Arena
On December 18, 1932, with waist-deep snow and frigid weather plaguing Chicago, the Bears moved their NFL championship game against the Portsmouth (Ohio) Spartans from Wrigley Field to the indoor arena of the city's NHL team. The league's first playoff game—and first contest ...read more
The Surprising Origins of 7 Classic Toys
Many childhood memories include hours spent molding Play-Doh, or watching a Slinky glide down the stairs, or marveling at the transfer of a newspaper comic to a simple wad of Silly Putty. But those famous novelty toys didn't start out as products intended for kids. Failed ...read more
How the First Thanksgiving College Football Game Kicked Off a Holiday Tradition
Seven years after battling Rutgers in what is considered the first college football game, Princeton met Yale on November 30, 1876, in the first college game played on Thanksgiving. Fewer than 1,000 fans—mostly alumni and students—watched Yale win, 2-0, in Hoboken, New Jersey, in ...read more
Why the Wampanoag Signed a Peace Treaty with the Mayflower Pilgrims
In March 1621, representatives of the Wampanoag Confederacy—the Indigenous people of the region that is now southeastern Massachusetts—negotiated a treaty with a group of English settlers who had arrived on the Mayflower several months earlier and were struggling to build a life ...read more
The Native American Origins of Lacrosse
Lacrosse, America's oldest team sport, dates to 1100 A.D., when it was played by the Haudenosaunee, or Iroquois people, in what now is New York and areas in Canada bordering the state. The early versions of lacrosse matches played by Native American nations included 100 to 1,000 ...read more
What’s the Real History of Black Friday?
The first recorded use of the term “Black Friday” was applied not to post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping but to financial crisis: specifically, the crash of the U.S. gold market on September 24, 1869. Two notoriously ruthless Wall Street financiers, Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, worked ...read more
How the Industrial Revolution Fueled the Growth of Cities
The period of rapid technological advancement in the United States known as the Industrial Revolution may have taken place during parts of the 18th and 19th centuries, but its impact resonated for decades and influenced everything from food, clothing, travel and ...read more
NFL's Greatest Play: The Immaculate Reception
In the decades before 22-year-old rookie Franco Harris' "Immaculate Reception—considered the greatest play in NFL history—the Pittsburgh Steelers were mostly awful. From its inception in 1933 to 1971, the team posted seven winning records and no playoff victories. "They were a ...read more
The Black Trailblazer Who's the Only Person in Baseball, Basketball Halls of Fame
Cumberland Posey, the only person in the Baseball and Basketball Halls of Fame, was not only an excellent athlete. He also was one of the shrewdest businessmen and talent evaluators in the Negro Leagues, a fierce advocate for Black baseball and a sports pioneer. Early in the 20th ...read more
How Jim Thorpe Became America's First Multi-Sport Star
Decades before Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders starred in baseball and football, Jim Thorpe was America’s original multi-sport athlete. A two-time college football All-American and charter member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Thorpe played six seasons of Major League Baseball ...read more
The Inuit Woman Who Survived Alone on an Arctic Island After a Disastrous Expedition
Wrangel Island sits north of the Siberian coast in the harsh Arctic waters of the East Siberian and Chukchi Seas. Surrounded by ice for much of the year and buffeted by fierce cyclonic winds throughout it, it is the last known redoubt of the woolly mammoth and is the site of the ...read more
How Black Women Fought for Civil War Pensions and Benefits
Over two million soldiers enlisted in the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War. When it ended, the United States had many more veterans and surviving dependents than it had ever had before. In the decades that followed, military pensions became a major part of the federal budget, ...read more