On this day in 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Adam Lanza killed 20 first graders and six school employees before turning a gun on himself. Earlier that day, he killed his mother at the home they shared. The Sandy Hook shooting was, at the time, the ...read more
In August 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt issued an order from his summer residence in Oyster Bay, New York, that would soon be the talk of Washington—and the world beyond. Addressing himself to the government printer, Roosevelt decreed that all documents issued by the White ...read more
The Scopes Trial, also known as the Scopes Monkey Trial, was the 1925 prosecution of science teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution in a Tennessee public school, which a recent bill had made illegal. The trial featured two of the best-known orators of the era, William ...read more
For young students heading back to school each fall, few accessories proclaim their pop-culture tastes as conspicuously as a lunch box. Since their midcentury golden age and before, the metal carriers not only served as totes for tuna sandwiches and bruised bananas, but have been ...read more
During your school days, the only monitor you ever encountered was likely in the hall or guarding some kind of pass in your classroom, such as for the restroom. But for several decades in the early 19th century, student monitors reigned supreme over their peers in American ...read more
When Almanzo Wilder took Laura Ingalls to singing school in a tiny South Dakota town in 1884, they sang rounds, practiced scales and learned to harmonize. It turned out they harmonized pretty well in other ways, too. The short stint in singing school was part of the couple’s ...read more
1. John Adams When John Adams graduated from Harvard College in 1755, the 19-year-old Massachusetts native found himself at a crossroads. As a child, he’d considered formal education tiresome and yearned to be like his father, a farmer. Now, however, he was torn between the ...read more
The school, located in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood, currently enrolls approximately 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students across three specialized schools for art, architecture and engineering. Cooper Union consistently has been ranked as one of the best schools in ...read more
On this day in 2012, the man who killed 77 people in a July 22, 2011, bombing and shooting attack in Norway is sentenced to 21 years in prison, the maximum allowed under Norwegian law. Anders Behring Breivik, a 33-year-old right-wing extremist with anti-Muslim views, carried out ...read more
On this day in 2007, 32 people died after being gunned down on the campus of Virginia Tech by Seung Hui Cho, a student at the college who later committed suicide. The Virginia Tech shooting began around 7:15 a.m., when Cho, a 23-year-old senior and English major at ...read more
On this day in 2004, an armed gang of Chechen separatist rebels enters a school in southern Russia and takes more than 1,000 people hostage. The rebels demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from the disputed nearby region of Chechnya. September 1 was the first day of a new ...read more
By an act of the Pennsylvania legislature, Ashmun Institute, the first college founded solely for African-American students, is officially chartered. Established in the rolling farmlands of southern Chester County, Pennsylvania, Ashmun Institute was named after Jehudi Ashmun, the ...read more
In Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called “Monkey Trial” begins with John Thomas Scopes, a young high school science teacher, accused of teaching evolution in violation of a Tennessee state law. The law, which had been passed in March, made it a misdemeanor punishable by fine to “teach ...read more
Brenda Spencer kills two men and wounds nine children as they enter the Grover Cleveland Elementary School in San Diego. Spencer blazed away with rifle shots from her home directly across the street from the school. After 20 minutes of shooting, police surrounded Spencer’s home ...read more
A three-day hostage crisis at a Russian school comes to a violent conclusion after a gun battle erupts between the hostage-takers and Russian security forces. In the end, over 300 people died, many of them children, while hundreds more were injured. On the morning of September 1, ...read more
The bodies of Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada are discovered at the Gatorwood Apartments, near the campus of the University of Florida. Their murders came two days after the discovery that three young female students had been killed and mutilated in two separate locations near ...read more
Charles Roberts enters the West Nickel Mines Amish School in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, where he fatally shoots five female students and wounds five more before turning his gun on himself and committing suicide. Charles Carl Roberts IV, a 32-year-old milk truck driver from a ...read more
Charles Whitman takes a stockpile of guns and ammunition to the observatory platform atop a 300-foot tower at the University of Texas and proceeds to shoot 46 people, killing 14 people and wounding 31. A fifteenth died in 2001 because of his injuries. Whitman, who had killed both ...read more
On this day in 1999, two teenage gunmen kill 13 people in a shooting spree at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, south of Denver. At approximately 11:19 a.m., Dylan Klebold, 18, and Eric Harris, 17, dressed in trench coats, began shooting students outside the school ...read more
Born a slave on a Virginia farm, Washington (1856-1915) rose to become one of the most influential African-American intellectuals of the late 19th century. In 1881, he founded the Tuskegee Institute, a black school in Alabama devoted to training teachers. Washington was also ...read more
George Washington Carver was an agricultural scientist and inventor who developed hundreds of products using peanuts (though not peanut butter, as is often claimed), sweet potatoes and soybeans. Born an African-American slave a year before the practice was outlawed, Carver left ...read more
