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. ...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

Archaeologists working at one of the oldest historic homes in Boston have uncovered a privy that may have belonged to the family of Paul Revere. And while it may seem unusual to be thrilled over an outhouse, the find may yield some intriguing colonial clues. The discovery was ...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

What is a “filibuster” anyway? A procedural method primarily used by the minority party to delay or block legislation (or in this case, a nomination) the filibuster has a bit of an unsusal history. In its early years, both chambers of Congress limited stalling tactics via a rule ...read more

A fiscal conservative, Dwight Eisenhower had been concerned about the growing size and cost of the Pentagon since becoming president in 1953. Following the July 1953 end of the Korean War—and despite the Cold War heating up—Eisenhower significantly decreased his military budget ...read more

You have to go all the way back to America’s first president to find one almost as wealthy as our current one. Estimated to have been worth a cool $525 million, George Washington built his fortune through a mix of inherited wealth, land speculation (thanks to an advantage he ...read more

Separated by just three years, Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn were nearly inseparable. Both showed signs of prodigious musical talent as children, and they studied composition together, learning from Berlin’s top instructors. Felix is believed to have made his public debut before he ...read more

The 26-foot-tall quartzite relic was buried beneath the streets of a residential Cairo neighborhood of Matariyyah, once the site of the ancient city of Heliopolis. Dedicated to the worship of the sun god Re, it was home to a dazzling temple complex that was destroyed during the ...read more

The photo album, which will be auctioned off next week by C&T Auctions in Kent, England, was first discovered by British war photographer Edward Dean in 1945, when he and journalist Richard Dimbleby entered Hitler’s Berlin bunker a few weeks after its capture. After entering ...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

The third and fourth graders at Papdale School in Kirkwall, Scotland (on the isle of Orkney) had received the two goldfish as a Christmas gift just a few months ago. Alas, as is often the goldfish way, the pair—fondly known as Bubbles and Freddy—were not long for this world. ...read more

The team of international researchers, led by Dominic Papineau and Matthew Dodd from University College London, discovered the specimens (embedded in quartz) in the remote Nuvvuagittuq Supracrustal Belt, or NSB, along the eastern shore of the Hudson Bay, near Quebec, Canada. The ...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,” a filmed version of which will screen in cinemas nationwide on February 19, ...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

How has President Obama’s background and personal experiences, which in many ways are unique and unlike any previous president, helped shape both his world view and approach to foreign policy. As someone who has lived abroad as a child and has family from the developing world, ...read more

TIGHAR, which has spent more than 25 years investigating the ill-fated final voyage of Amelia Earhart, believes Earhart’s plane did not crash in the Pacific Ocean, as many believe, but rather that she and her co-pilot Fred Noonan were able to make a landing on the remote, ...read more

The skeleton was discovered at Montana’s Hell Creek Formation, a site that has produced a number of significant fossil finds in the past, including those of mammals, fish, reptiles and nearly a dozen additional dinosaur specimens. Luke Tufts and Jason Love, two volunteers from ...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

Planet Nine is located in an icy, debris-ridden part of space known as the Kuiper Belt, some 20-100 billion miles away from the sun, which means it would take between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make one solar orbit. By comparison, Neptune, currently recognized as the most distant ...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

Wael Sherbiny, an Egyptian-born scholar trained in Belgium, announced the find at a recent meeting of the International Congress of Egyptologists. Little is known about the manuscript prior to the early 20th century, when a local archaeology institute purchased the scroll, which ...read more

The fossils were found in 2013 by two amateur cavers spelunking through the recesses of the Rising Star cave system, located 30 miles northwest of Johannesburg. The fossil-rich region has been called the “Cradle of Humankind” thanks to the past discovery of extinct hominins. The ...read more

The discovery was made by researchers from the Stonehenge Hidden Landscape Project, an international consortium led by scientists from the Universities of Birmingham and Bradford and Austria’s Ludwig Boltzmann Institute. The five-year project, the largest of its kind ever ...read more

Born Nicholas Wertheimer (or Wertheim) in London in 1909, Winton was the son of German Jewish parents who had arrived in England two years earlier. In an effort to assimilate, his parents would later change the family name to Winton and have Nicholas baptized in the Anglican ...read more

Bill Guarnere’s interest in the military began at a young age, and by the age of 15 he had enrolled in an annual Citizens’ Military Training Camp. He left school six months shy of graduation to work in a Philadelphia-based locomotive factory—a job that exempted him from military ...read more

In a press conference earlier this week, executives from the Seven Star Energy Investment Group revealed additional details for the park, officially known as the Romandisea Seven Star International Cultural Tourism Resort. Expected to cost 1 billion yuan ($165 million), it will ...read more

The 75-acre ancient city, known as Tel Kabri, was founded around 1700 B.C., although the earliest evidence of settlement in the region dates back more than 16,000 years to the Neolithic period. One of the most influential Canaanite cities of the Bronze Age, Tel Kabri was likely ...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

Scott Carpenter wasn’t supposed to be the second American to orbit the Earth. Donald “Deke” Slayton was originally scheduled for the second orbital mission, but was grounded when doctors discovered a heart irregularity. Slayton would be the only one of the Mercury 7 to not fly a ...read more

The news follows a study of the exoplanet, more than three years in the making, which utilized data from both the Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes. In its latest findings, published in this month’s Astrophysical Journal Letters, researchers have produced a low-resolution map ...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 at least 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 13, known as paraskevidekatriaphobia, results in financial losses in excess of $800 million annually, as people avoid ...read more

For more than a year, some members of the scientific community had been arguing that based on Voyager’s speed and predicted trajectory, it likely achieved this remarkable feat last summer. And on several occasions NASA itself has announced that the spacecraft has come ...read more