Barbara Maranzani

Secretary of State William Seward wrote it and Abraham Lincoln issued it, but much of the credit for the Thanksgiving Proclamation should probably go to a woman named Sarah Josepha Hale.  A prominent writer and editor, Hale had written the children’s poem “Mary Had a Little ...read more

For most Americans (and those around the world), the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 came as a shock. But for American and international investigators, warning signs of the attack had been brewing for more than a decade. Below, several key seeds that bore fruit on 9/11: ...read more

In March 1836, Mexican forces overran the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, achieving victory over those who had declared Texas’ independence from Mexico just a few weeks earlier. Although nearly everyone at the Alamo was killed or captured, Texas achieved independence when Sam ...read more

On July 16, 1918, imprisoned Czar Nicholas II, his wife, and their five children were awoken in the middle of the night and led down to a basement room. Bolshevik secret police stormed in, an order of execution was read aloud, and a storm of bullets fired toward the family. ...read more

Just six years after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as General Secretary of the Communist Party and introduced reforms, the Soviet Union collapsed and newly formed independent nations arose from the ashes. What went wrong? In 1985, even many of the most conservative hardliners ...read more

The rivalry between Founding Fathers Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton stretched much further than the legendary duel where sitting Vice President Aaron Burr shot and fatally wounded former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. Both were orphans. Both fought in the American ...read more

1. He attended nearly a dozen schools and failed the third grade. Born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on November 20, 1925, Robert Francis Kennedy was the seventh child (and third boy) born to Joseph P. Kennedy and his wife Rose, the daughter of a former Boston mayor. Smaller and ...read more

For almost 11 days in May 1969, American troops waged a deadly battle for control of a 3,000-foot-tall hill in a remote valley in South Vietnam. Famously known as “Hamburger Hill,” the battle launched the first phase of Operation Apache Snow, a coordinated attack by the U.S. Army ...read more

Aragón was a key Western province for the Templars and the birthplace of several of Grand Masters. It was also a live crusading theatre in the so-called Reconquista, in which Christian kings battled against Islamic emirs known as Moors, who occupied southern Spain. From the ...read more

This strategic Holy Land port came under Western control during the First Crusade—but changed hands several times after. In 1291 it was the last Christian-held fortress in the Holy Land when it fell to the Mamluks—one of the most devastating events in Templar, and Western, ...read more

Why are Fridays that fall on a month’s 13th day so fearful? Some attribute the origins to the Code of Hammurabi, one of the world’s oldest legal documents, which may or may not have superstitiously omitted a 13th rule from its list. Others claim that the ancient Sumerians, who ...read more

At 1 p.m. on Saturday, July 28, 1917, a group of between 8,000 and 10,000 African American men, women and children began marching through the streets of midtown Manhattan in what became one of the first civil rights protests in American history—nearly 50 years before the March on ...read more

From the widow who became known as “Lady Bluebeard” and the man who inspired Psycho to the British doctor who killed in the hundreds and the handsome slaughterer whose charm proved lethal, get the facts on some of history’s most infamous serial killers. 1. Harold Shipman: “Dr. ...read more

Researchers believe that if the 9-mile wide asteroid had made impact less than a minute before or after it did, it likely would have crashed into the much deeper Atlantic or Pacific oceans, and not in the Gulf of Mexico, where shallower waters resulted in a massive, dense cloud ...read more

Measuring 18 inches wide and 11 inches tall, the sepia image captures RMS Titanic in its purpose-built berth at the White Star Line’s Southampton dock on April 9, 1912, just a day before it left Southampton on its ill-fated Atlantic crossing. Shortly before midnight on April 14, ...read more

You have to go all the way back to America’s first president to find one almost as wealthy as the 45th. Estimated to have been worth a cool $525 million (in today's dollars), George Washington built his fortune through a mix of inherited and marital wealth, land speculation ...read more

In December 1974, just four months after Nixon’s resignation, New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh revealed the existence of a long-running CIA intelligence program targeting U.S. citizens, a direct violation of its charter. Hersh had, in part, sourced his information on the ...read more

1. Jerry Lewis & Dean Martin: From Boom to Bust When one of the most successful teams in comedy history called it quits in 1956 after a 10-year run, their fans were shocked. Together, Martin and Lewis had made 16 films, starred in a highly-rated television variety program and ...read more

That experience, Takei told HISTORY, gave him a sense of grit and determination, and also inspired his lifelong work as an activist. It also led to the creation of the Broadway musical “Allegiance.”  Describe those first days following the announcement of President Roosevelt's ...read more

1. Louis Brandeis Battles the Bigots Nominated by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, Louis Brandeis had a long history as a legal advocate for social reform, and had successfully argued cases before the Supreme Court, introducing a more analytical and scientific approach to court ...read more

1. John Glenn was a star before joining the Mercury program. Glenn had fallen in love with flying at an early age, building model airplanes while growing up in Ohio. In 1941, Glenn discovered a U.S. Department of Commerce program looking for students to train as pilots. Just six ...read more

The phenomenon began a few months earlier, with the publication of “Roots: The Saga of an American Family.” Released in the fall of 1976—during America’s Bicentennial—it was an overnight commercial and critical success. The book would spend more than four months on The New York ...read more

1. Tolstoy was a self-improvement junkie. Inspired in part by the 13 virtues Benjamin Franklin spelled out in his autobiography, Tolstoy created a seemingly endless list of rules by which he aspired to live. While some seem pretty accessible by today’s standards (in bed by 10 ...read more

The study, published in the journal Science, linked Ötzi with his living relatives by tracing a rare genetic mutation on the Y-chromosome. The mutation, known as G-L91, is passed down along the male line, and scientists at Austria’s Institute for Forensic Medicine have been using ...read more

1. Confederate commander Braxton Bragg had fought near Chickamauga before. Bragg, an 1837 graduate of West Point, was just 21 when he received his first military assignment, attached to the 3rd U.S. Artillery, first in Florida and then in Georgia and Tennessee. In 1838, Bragg ...read more

Researchers estimate that as many as 10 percent of the U.S. population has a fear of the number 13, and each year the even more specific fear of Friday the 13th, known as paraskevidekatriaphobia, results in financial losses in excess of $800 million annually, as people avoid ...read more

Birmingham became the center of the civil rights movement in spring 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr. and his supporters in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference arrived with a plan they called “Project C”—for confrontation. At that point, Black Americans were forced to ...read more

The biblical Solomon, a king of Israel and son of King David, was renowned for his fabled wisdom, power and his personal fortune, often described as one of the largest in the ancient world. But while Solomon’s famed wealth is a story as old as the ages, the popular fascination ...read more

It had its origins in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it’s still in use today. In the decades after World War II, officials in both the U.S. and USSR sought to find ways to improve communication between the increasingly antagonistic former allies. The tipping point was the 13-day ...read more

1. The museum started out as a fortress. The Louvre began life in the late 12th century when Philip II (or Philip Augustus), the first person to be officially known as the King of France and one of medieval Europe’s most successful rulers, began construction on a defensive ...read more

The cemetery is operated by The German War Graves Commission, or Volksbund, which was founded in the wake of World War I and authorized to locate and identify the graves of German dead under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. With nearly 90 percent of Germany’s 1.9 million ...read more

1. Astor tried several different careers before entering the fur business. After working alongside his father in the family’s dairy business for several years, Astor left Germany at the age of 16 to join his brother in London. For five years, he helped his brother manufacture and ...read more

Situated between a series of high, steep mountain ranges in California’s Mojave Desert, Death Valley’s extremely low elevation (282 feet below sea level in some places) and long, narrow configuration keep the region’s temperatures consistently high throughout much of the year. ...read more

1. Tokyo began life as a village known as Edo. The city that would become one of the world’s largest metropolises started out as a small fishing village, first settled around 3,000 B.C. Known as Edo, or “estuary” it was first fortified in the 12th century and became home to Edo ...read more

Thanks to its status as America's business capital, New York City stood deeply divided at the start of the Civil War in April 1861. Its merchants and financial institutions were loath to lose their southern business and the city’s then-mayor, Fernando Wood, had called for the ...read more

Antietam or Sharpsburg? Manassas or Bull Run? For many Americans, what you call a Civil War battle has nearly everything to do with where you or your Civil War-era ancestors grew up. Northern soldiers, far more likely to hail from cities or urbanized areas, are believed to have ...read more

The influential labor leader's sudden disappearance in Detroit unleashed a cross-country goose chase that continues to this day. Here are some of the places FBI agents and others have searched—and what they found (hint: not Jimmy Hoffa).  1. Gardena, California As the search for ...read more

October 1806: Napoleon steals a statue Built between 1788 and 1791 by Prussian Built between 1788 and 1791 by Prussian King Frederick William II as a key entry point to the city of Berlin, Brandenburg Gate was topped off with a statue known as the “Quadriga,” which depicted a ...read more

1. The flag’s original design remained the same from 1777 to 1795. On June 14, 1777, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, passed the Flag Act of 1777, a resolution creating an official flag for a new nation still struggling to gain its independence from ...read more

1. Evers was a World War II veteran who participated in the Normandy invasion. Born in Decatur, Mississippi, on July 2, 1925, Medgar Evers was the third of five children born to farmer and sawmill worker James Evers and his wife Jesse. Evers left high school at the age of 17 to ...read more

1. Secretariat’s fate rested on a coin toss. In the fall of 1969, stable owners Ogden Phipps and Penny Chenery met in the offices of the New York Racing Association for what turned out to be one of the most important coin tosses in sports history. The winner would receive the ...read more

Her admirers called her “Moses” or “General Tubman,” but she was born Araminta Ross. It’s unclear exactly when the woman who would be known as Harriet Tubman was born, with dates ranging from 1815 to 1822. Historians do know that she was one of nine children born to Harriet ...read more

1. Memorial Day and its traditions may have ancient roots. While the first commemorative Memorial Day events weren’t held in the United States until the late 19th century, the practice of honoring those who have fallen in battle dates back thousands of years. The ancient Greeks ...read more

Scientists have long known that it was a strain of Phytophthora infestans (or P. infestans) that caused the widespread devastation of potato crops in Ireland and northern Europe beginning in 1845, leading to the Irish Potato Famine. P. infestans infects the plant through its ...read more

In late 1940, more than a year after the German invasion of Poland, Nazi high command began the forced migration of the country’s 3 million Jews into a series of urban ghettoes. In Warsaw, the country’s capital, more than 400,000 were relocated to a 1.3-sqaure-mile corner of the ...read more

The area that Green-Wood would later call home had already played a crucial role in American history—the August 1776 Battle of Brooklyn. Also known as the Battle of Long Island or Battle of Brooklyn Heights, it was the first major battle of the American Revolution to be fought ...read more

1. It took 20 hours to complete the surrender documents Following the suicide of Adolf Hitler on April 30 and the collapse of the Nazi Party, the end of the war in Europe was clearly in sight. Susan Hibbert, a British secretary stationed at Supreme Headquarters Allied ...read more

1. The Hitler “diaries” that embarrassed a German newspaper. On May 6, 1983, West Germany’s Federal Archives released the results of a forensic investigation into what turned out to be one of the greatest hoaxes of the 20th century–the Hitler diaries. Just weeks earlier, the ...read more