The Great Depression of the late 1920s and early 1930s delivered a gut punch to the average American. By 1933, a quarter of Americans were out of work, the national average income had slumped to less than half of what it had been a few years earlier and more than one million ...read more

Throughout history, people have promoted stories of curses for a variety of reasons. To sports fans, curses can help explain their favorite team’s loss. When a cause of death is misunderstood, curses can provide an explanation. For an imperial nation, curses can betray anxiety ...read more

On the second day of the highly contested 1976 Republican National Convention, it was still far from clear which candidate the party delegates intended to choose: sitting president Gerald Ford or his challenger, former actor and California governor Ronald Reagan. Amidst this ...read more

“Witches Must Beware,” declared the Baltimore American on October 31, 1918. The Maryland city’s health commissioner had placed a ban on public Halloween events, instructing the police chief to prevent people from holding “carnivals and other forms of public celebrations.” The ...read more

The justices who sit on the Supreme Court of the United States hold a unique governing power, making their selection extremely fraught. Senators might oppose a nominee because of his or her record, or even because of disagreements senators have with the president who made the ...read more

Puns, rhymes and catchy phrases do remarkably well in United States presidential campaigns, even if they seem a little cheesy. After succeeding Warren G. Harding when he died in office, Calvin Coolidge won the 1926 election using the slogan “Keep Cool with Coolidge.” Dwight D. ...read more

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Lieutenant Colonel Paul “Ted” Anderson noticed that his colleagues at the Pentagon were gathered around a TV. When he walked over, he learned that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower in New York City. “I watched ...read more

U.S. presidential history is filled with “firsts.” First president? George Washington. First president to die in office? William Henry Harrison. First president to serve two non-consecutive terms? That would be Grover Cleveland, who won the 1884 election, lost the 1888 election, ...read more

George Washington didn’t have a nominating convention. As the commander of the colonial forces in the American Revolution, he was an easy candidate to select from among the eligible pool of any white man 35 and older, and he won his first two elections without any real ...read more

On July 27, 1919, a white man hurled rocks at 17-year-old Eugene Williams, a Black boy who’d drifted into an unofficially “white” section of a Chicago beach. Williams was floating on a raft and the pelting caused him to slip off and drown. When police refused to make an arrest, ...read more

Picking a vice president can be dicey. Although the presidential candidate is the main focus in an election, there’s a chance that a popular or particularly adept veep can help the ticket, just as a particularly unpopular or offensive candidate can hurt it. The selection is also ...read more

On March 13, 1990, over 1,000 people marched from the White House to the U.S. Capitol to demand that Congress pass the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA. When they got there, about 60 of them cast aside their wheelchairs and other mobility aids and crawled up the Capitol ...read more

Activists who practiced civil disobedience in the 1960s knew their opponents wouldn’t show them civility in return. Congressman John Lewis, a leader of the civil rights movement who co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was arrested 40 times between 1960 and ...read more

Many of the methods Americans used in 1918 to try to prevent the spread of the flu are similar to what people began doing during the COVID-19 pandemic: Close schools. Wear masks. Don’t cough or sneeze in someone’s face. Avoid large events and hold them outside when possible. And ...read more

Woodrow Wilson is best known as the World War I president who earned a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to found the League of Nations. A progressive reformer who fought against monopolies and child labor, he served two terms starting in 1913. But Wilson was also a ...read more

The influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919 was a profoundly traumatic event. It killed some 50 million people and infected up to a third of the world’s population. Unlike most flu strains, this one was particularly deadly for young adults between ages 20 and 40, meaning that many ...read more

Slavery was a dominant feature of the antebellum South, but it was also pervasive in the pre-Civil War North—the New England states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island all have a history of slavery. In the early colonial period, Europeans ...read more

Leading up to the American Revolution, one of the colonists’ chief complaints about the British Empire was that it imposed “taxation without representation”—a slogan that Washington, D.C. has since adopted as its unofficial motto. In 2000, D.C. started printing “Taxation Without ...read more

In June of 1941, Americans read about an extraordinary British mission into Nazi-occupied France. Newspapers, including the Baltimore Sun and New York Post, detailed how the British parachuted into an airfield with tommy guns and hand grenades, overpowered the guards and ...read more

The First and Second Amendments get a lot of attention, but the Third rarely comes up in court. It reads, in full: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” The ...read more

One of the benefits of being a U.S. president is you get to work from home. Ever since John Adams moved into the White House in 1800, every subsequent president has gotten the chance to live in his official workplace in Washington, D.C. Like many other Americans who work from ...read more

“Spanish flu” has been used to describe the flu pandemic of 1918 and 1919 and the name suggests the outbreak started in Spain. But the term is actually a misnomer and points to a key fact: nations involved in World War I didn’t accurately report their flu outbreaks.  Spain ...read more

The influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919 was the most deadly flu outbreak in history, killing up to 50 million people worldwide. In the United States, where it ultimately killed around 675,000 people, local governments rolled out initiatives to try to stop its spread. These varied ...read more

On June 19, 1982, a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin went with friends to a strip club in Detroit to celebrate his upcoming wedding. That night, two white men who apparently thought Chin was Japanese beat him to death. At the killers’ trial, the men each received a $3,000 ...read more

War has always brought chaos, and with it an opportunity for pillage and plunder. This was especially true during World War II, when countless pieces of priceless art, artifacts and other treasure were destroyed and spirited away from both Europe and the Asia Pacific. Nazis, in ...read more

The Shroud of Turin is a 14-foot linen cloth bearing an image of a crucified man that has become a popular Catholic icon. For some, it is the authentic burial shroud of Jesus Christ. For others, it is a religious icon reflecting the story of the Christ, not necessarily the ...read more

The last known survivor of the last U.S. slave ship died in 1940—75 years after the abolition of slavery. Her name was Matilda McCrear. When she first arrived in Alabama in 1860, she was only two years old. By the time she died, Matilda had lived through the Civil War, ...read more

The United States has never delayed a presidential election. But there was one instance in which some wondered if the country should: when the nation was embroiled in the Civil War. The 1864 election was the second U.S. presidential election to take place during wartime (the ...read more

In 1665 and 1666, one city experienced two enormous tragedies: the Great Plague of London and the Great Fire of London. The plague killed roughly 15 to 20 percent of the city’s population, while the fire burned about a quarter of London’s metropolis, making around 100,000 people ...read more

On April 17, 1957, Maurice Hilleman realized a pandemic was on its way to the United States. That day, The New York Times reported on a large influenza outbreak in Hong Kong. One detail in particular caught the doctor’s eye: in the long waiting lines for clinics, the paper said ...read more

The Great Depression was a difficult, life-altering period in the United States when millions of people struggled to find work and get by. Despite the tough times, the average life spans of Americans actually increased. In fact, historical research shows that during the 20th ...read more

One of the best ways to prevent the spread of the flu and other viruses is to wash your hands. Today, this may seem like common sense to many people (even if they don’t all do it properly). Yet it wasn’t until the mid-19th century that some doctors in the United States and Europe ...read more

The first humans emerged in Africa around two million years ago, long before the modern humans known as Homo sapiens appeared on the same continent. There’s a lot anthropologists still don’t know about how different groups of humans interacted and mated with each other over this ...read more

The history of invasive species is usually one of unforeseen consequences. When an animal, fish, insect or plant is taken out of its original ecosystem and introduced to a new one—whether by accident or on purpose—it's less likely to have any natural predators.  Which can lead to ...read more

Despite what the song says, a kiss isn’t always just a kiss. A kiss can be political, whether because it’s the first of its kind or because it’s between two heads of state. A kiss can also become iconic when it’s captured on film, even if the kiss itself was invasive and ...read more

The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian honor in the United States. Originally, Harry S. Truman established the “Medal of Freedom” to honor people who’d demonstrated notable service during World War II. In 1963, John F. Kennedy reintroduced it as the ...read more

The worst influenza pandemic in history was the Spanish flu of 1918-1919. It infected an estimated 500 million people (about one-third of the world’s population) and killed an estimated 50 million—more than the death toll for World War I. Even today, the seasonal ...read more

In November 2002, doctors in the Guangdong province of southeastern China began to see the first cases of what would become known as SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. Over the next several months, 8,096 people in 26 countries contracted the new viral illness, leading to ...read more

H.H. Holmes is notoriously known as one of America's first serial killers who lured victims into his hotel dubbed the “Murder Castle” during the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. According to some claims, he killed up to 200 people inside his macabre hotel that was outfitted with ...read more

George Washington first saw armed conflict in 1754, when he was 22 years old and still had all his teeth. Although he’s most famous for his success as the commanding general of the American Revolution, it was during the French and Indian War that he cut those teeth as a military ...read more

During World War II, countries on both sides of the fight destroyed a number of important cultural sites in Europe and Asia. In 1942, the Nazi Lufwaffe leveled the Royal Opera House in Valletta, Malta. And in 1945, the United States hollowed out the Prefectural Industrial ...read more

Popular culture often shows cavemen as aggressive, club-wielding hunters. But what if most early humans were actually scavengers? The notion, first proposed by scholars in the second half of the 20th century, has since challenged the dated presumption that prehistoric men hunted ...read more

In January 1953, the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency had a thorny situation on its hands. Reports of UFO sightings were mushrooming around the country. Press accounts were fanning public fascination—and concern. So the CIA convened a group of scientists to investigate ...read more

The United Kingdom is made up of four constituent states: England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. But there have long been tensions between England and the other three U.K. states, in part because England has always been the dominant political power among them. England ...read more

Midway through the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, three pipe bombs went off in the Centennial Olympic Park, killing two people and injuring 111. The man behind the bombing was 29-year-old Eric Rudolph, a terrorist who went on to carry out three more bombings over the ...read more

The historical people known as Vikings, who hailed from Scandinavia in Northern Europe, are well-known today for their exploits in the west. But the merchant-warriors also made their way into Eastern Europe, where they helped found a medieval federation in territory now known as ...read more

Before European settlers arrived in North America, there were millions of wild turkeys spread across what are now 39 U.S. states. But by the 1930s, wild turkeys had disappeared from at least 20 states and their total population had dropped to 30,000.  Over the next few decades, a ...read more

When the Mayflower Pilgrims arrived in Plymouth in the early 17th century, they didn’t smell terrific, according to Native American accounts. Unlike the Wampanoag, these Europeans didn’t bathe regularly. A surviving member of the Patuxet nation named Tisquantum (or “Squanto”) ...read more