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How Suffragists Pioneered Aggressive New Tactics to Push for the Vote
Sometimes, being polite just doesn’t work. As the 20th century dawned, American activists for women's suffrage were coming to the conclusion that decades of quiet appeals to reason and logic had failed to move the needle for their cause. Fresh strategies were required. A new ...read more
How Royals Tested English Support for the Crown in the 17th Century
For centuries, people have questioned the taxpayer’s role in funding the British royal family. During the reign of the Stuarts in the 17th century, that role was challenged to an extreme as a series of spendthrift monarchs treated their subjects like a bank that was always open ...read more
8 Groundbreaking Inventions from the Second Industrial Revolution
The Second Industrial Revolution, which lasted from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, saw a surge of new technology and inventions that led to dramatic changes in the economy and how people lived and worked in Europe, Great Britain and especially the United States. Steel mills, ...read more
11 Bold Women Who Changed the World
WATCH: 11 Underappreciated World-Changing Women 1. Sybil Ludington: The Female Paul Revere On the night of April 26, 1777, 16-year-old Sybil Ludington rode nearly 40 miles to warn some 400 militiamen that the British troops were coming. Much like the ride of Paul Revere, ...read more
How the Mirabal Sisters Helped Topple a Dictator
On November 25, 1960, three sisters—Patria, Minerva and María Teresa Mirabal—were reported killed in an “automobile accident.” Reports said a car they were riding in plunged over a cliff in the Dominican Republic. At least, that was the story in El Caribe, a newspaper sanctioned ...read more
Fukushima Timeline: How an Earthquake Triggered Japan’s 2011 Nuclear Disaster
The 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was the worst nuclear event since the meltdown at Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union 25 years prior. It started with an earthquake. It resulted in 465,000 evacuations, $360 billion in economic losses and increased ...read more
How the Ali-Frazier 'Fight of the Century' Became a Proxy Battle for a Divided Nation
When Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali faced each other in the ring on March 8, 1971, the world stopped to watch. Dubbed “the Fight of the Century,” the clash sold out Madison Square Garden in New York City, grossed $45 million in tickets at closed-circuit venues in the United States ...read more
7 Important Civil War Battles
When Southern rebels bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina in April 1861, it was the start of a war between the Union and the secessionist Confederate States of America that would stretch on for four bloody years. The war took a brutal toll. According to statistics compiled by ...read more
Why Suffragists Helped Send Women Doctors to WWI's Front Lines
The unlikely band of American women who crossed the Atlantic into war-torn France in February 1918 included six doctors, 13 nurses, a dentist, a plumber, an electrician, a carpenter and a mechanic. They were the first wave of women determined to build hospitals to treat the ...read more
The Female World War II Codebreaker Who Busted Nazi Spy Rings
In March 1942, an American codebreaker named Elizebeth Smith Friedman made a horrifying discovery: Nazi spies in Latin America had located a large Allied supply ship named the Queen Mary along the coast of Brazil, and German U-boats were planning to sink it. So intent was Adolf ...read more
Valhalla: How Viking Belief in a Glorious Afterlife Empowered Warriors
Old Norse literature about Vikings is filled with famous last stands, audacious last words, death songs and defiance. When men died in battle, it was believed that the war-god Odin gathered chosen slain warriors at his home in Asgard—the dwelling place of the gods in Norse ...read more
The Last Confederate General to Surrender Was Native American
How did a high-standing Indian who signed away his ancestral lands in the Deep South become a general for the Confederacy during the Civil War? And why did he fight so fiercely against other Native people during the conflict? Stand Watie lived during a convulsive time for his ...read more
How Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ Confronted an Ugly Era of Lynchings
The haunting lyrics of “Strange Fruit” paint a picture of a rural American South where political and psychological terror reigns over African American communities. “Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze,” blues legend Billie Holiday sang in her powerful 1939 recording of ...read more
Why the 19th Amendment Did Not Guarantee All Women the Right to Vote
With the certification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution on August 26, 1920, women secured the right to vote after a decades-long fight. "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on ...read more
Women in WWII Took on These Dangerous Military Jobs
Women served on both sides of World War II, in official military roles that came closer to combat than ever before. The Soviet Union, in particular, mobilized its women: Upward of 800,000 would enlist in the Red Army during the war, with more than half of these serving in ...read more