America’s two-party political system makes it difficult for candidates from outside the Republican and Democratic parties to win presidential elections. Since 1920, in fact, only three third-party candidates—Robert La Follette in 1924, Strom Thurmond in 1948 and George Wallace in ...read more

Lasting from 1929 to 1939, the Great Depression was the worst economic downtown in the industrialized world. While no group escaped the economic devastation of the Great Depression, few suffered more than African Americans. Said to be “last hired, first fired,” African Americans ...read more

The border between the United States and Mexico stretches for nearly 2,000 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean and touches the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The Rio Grande runs along 1,254 miles of the border, but west of El Paso, Texas, the ...read more

The biggest night of the year was quickly approaching, and Adolph S. Ochs needed to find new entertainment for his New Year’s Eve party. For the previous three years, the New York Times publisher had set the skies above Manhattan ablaze with a midnight fireworks show launched ...read more

The United States Marine Corps has endured few firefights as savage as the Battle for Outpost Vegas in the waning months of the Korean War. With a roar that sounded like “twenty tornadoes tearing at a countryside,” according to one serviceman, more than 500 mortar and artillery ...read more

After Allied forces defeated Germany in World War II, Europe became a difficult place to be associated with Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich. Thousands of Nazi officers, high-ranking party members and collaborators—including many notorious war criminals—escaped across the Atlantic, ...read more

When the dreaded red phone rang inside the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) operations center on the last day of November in 1955, the mood at the nerve center of America’s nuclear defense grew nervous. At a time when the Cold War raged and Soviet fighter jets routinely ...read more

Even after Junior Johnson tore up dirt tracks across the South and notched five victories on the NASCAR circuit in 1955, stock car racing’s newest star continued to return home to the mountains of North Carolina to work in the family business—moonshining.Johnson’s ancestors had ...read more

As the Louisville Short Line chugged its way through Newport, Kentucky, the passenger train’s engineer peered out into the dark night of October 31, 1879, and saw something truly frightening—a body lying across the railroad tracks. Pulling on the brake with all his might, the ...read more

This is how a group of whiz kids, using a mainframe computer as big as an elevator, messengers stationed at pay phones and a pair of subway tokens, staged a wild race against time under the streets of the Big Apple.Massachusetts Institute of Technology student Peter Samson needed ...read more

In the early 1960s, 13 trailblazing American women participated in a secret program to become America’s first female astronaut. Although the skilled pilots passed the same physiological screening tests given to the Mercury Seven astronauts, NASA abruptly shuttered the ...read more

In the early 1960s, 13 trailblazing American women participated in a secret program to become America’s first female astronaut. Although the skilled pilots passed the same physiological screening tests given to the Mercury Seven astronauts, NASA abruptly shuttered the ...read more

His killer backhand brought him fame on the tennis court, but it was a gruesome murder that earned Vere St. Leger Goold real notoriety—this time in the court of law. A Wimbledon finalist in 1879, the Irish aristocrat made headlines around the world when a rich dowager’s ...read more

Henry David Thoreau is known for living in the woods on the shore of Walden Pond, in self-sufficient isolation. Less known, however, is that a year before building his cabin in Concord, Massachusetts, the famous American author and environmentalist accidentally started a forest ...read more

As the Cold War heated up in the 1950s, the U.S. government devised top-secret plans to ensure its survival if the Soviet Union launched a nuclear attack. These “Continuity of Government” preparations included building dozens of underground bunkers and arranging to move ...read more

“It seems that I have always been ahead of my time,” Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla once mused. While the eccentric inventor pioneered advances in radio, television, motors, robotics and electricity—including the alternating-current technology that’s widely ...read more

America’s national color palette has been set since 1818, when a law was passed requiring the American flag to sport 13 alternating red and white horizontal stripes—one for each of the original colonies—and a white star for each state on a blue field. Every time the United States ...read more

The Case for Alexander Hamilton’s Vision“We live, without question, in Hamilton’s America,” says Stephen F. Knott, professor of national security affairs at the United States Naval War College and co-author of “Washington and Hamilton: The Alliance That Forged America.”“Hamilton ...read more

The 47-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright knelt next to an open grave. The woman inside the plain white pine box carpeted with flowers was Martha “Mamah” Borthwick Cheney, the wife of one of Wright’s clients, and his mistress. Not long after being commissioned by businessman and Oak ...read more

1. Edward Oxford — June 10, 1840Four months after their royal wedding, newlyweds Queen Victoria and Prince Albert departed Buckingham Palace in an open carriage for their regular ride through Hyde Park. Just 100 yards outside the palace gates, Albert noticed “a little ...read more

Seaman Herbert Hammond Renshaw staggered to keep his balance as the Atlantic Ocean vented its fury upon the sub tender USS Ozark. The Salisbury, Maryland, native had enlisted in the U.S. Navy in February 1914—just weeks after his 17th birthday and months before World War I ...read more

1. West Side AirportOur flight of fancy touches down on the west side of Manhattan where one of the city’s most prominent developers, William Zeckendorf, proposed to construct a rooftop airport roughly the size of Central Park above 144 square blocks and the Hudson River. ...read more

1. Liverpool and Manchester RailwayThe opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in September 1830 marked the dawn of steam-powered rail travel. Prior to its construction, most railways were horse-drawn and used to haul freight such as coal over short distances. The 31-mile ...read more

The eight men knew the next step they took would not only change their lives, it could possibly end them as well. “You will take one step forward as your name and service are called and such step will constitute your induction into the Armed Forces indicated,” Lieutenant Steven ...read more

One by one, Mollie Burkhart’s family turned up dead. Her sister Anna had been discovered in a ravine in May 1921 with a bullet wound to the back of her head. Following the shooting of a cousin less than two years later, Mollie’s sister Rita and her husband were killed when an ...read more

Millions of Americans who turned on their televisions on April 22, 1952, expecting to watch their favorite soap operas and game shows instead saw quite a change in programming. Rather than “Search for Tomorrow” or “Strike It Rich,” mushroom clouds flickered across black-and-white ...read more

Dick Cole had always dreamed of soaring into the clouds, but he never dreamed that one day he would fly into the history books alongside his boyhood idol.As a youngster growing up outside Dayton, Ohio—hometown of the Wright Brothers—Cole pasted newspaper articles chronicling the ...read more

The eyes of Abraham Lincoln gazed down from a portrait on the paneled walls inside the executive offices of the Brooklyn Dodgers Baseball Club as Branch Rickey fire-hosed a torrent of racial slurs at Jackie Robinson. The president and general manager of the Dodgers had little ...read more

The Case for U.S. Entry into World War IOn January 22, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson told a joint session of Congress that the United States must remain neutral in World War I to ensure “peace without victory.” Eleven weeks later, he returned to Congress to request a declaration ...read more

1. ShrapnelWhile a lieutenant in the British Royal Artillery, England’s Henry Shrapnel spent years of his time and a portion of his fortune trying to invent an even deadlier weapon of war. The artillery officer’s self-funded experiments in the 1780s resulted in the development of ...read more

1. Riverfront SquareBefore building his Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Walt Disney considered opening his second theme park in a slightly less tropical clime—St. Louis. A native son of Missouri, Disney drew up blueprints for a five-story indoor theme park, dubbed Riverfront Square, ...read more

Minnesota’s Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, separated by less than 10 miles on opposite banks of the Mississippi River, had one heck of a sibling rivalry going in 1890. The two boomtowns were nearly identical in population, which meant the new federal census of 1890 ...read more

1. Saint PeterOne of the original 12 apostles, Peter was personally chosen by Jesus to be the “rock” upon which he would build his church, according to the Gospel of Matthew. The Roman Emperor Nero, who scapegoated Christians for calamities including the Great Fire of Rome in 64 ...read more

The refugees seeking haven in America were poor and disease-ridden. They threatened to take jobs away from Americans and strain welfare budgets. They practiced an alien religion and pledged allegiance to a foreign leader. They were bringing with them crime. They were accused of ...read more

1. Jackson’s parents emigrated from Ireland.Both of Jackson’s parents, Andrew and Elizabeth, were born in Ireland’s Country Antrim (in present-day Northern Ireland), and in 1765 they set sail with their two sons, Hugh and Robert, from the port town of Carrickfergus for America. ...read more

On a muggy July night in 1917, American journalist Arno Dosch-Fleurot joined the protestors parading along Petrograd’s Nevsky Prospekt when gunshots suddenly rang out. Banners pleading for liberty and freedom crashed to the ground as blood stained the Russian capital’s most ...read more

1. He was an immigrant.Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. After attending school in Scotland and London, the 23-year-old immigrated to Canada with his parents in 1870. The following year, Bell moved to the United States to teach at the Boston School for the ...read more

The Case for George WashingtonGeorge Washington was not just “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” as he was eulogized by Henry Lee, but first among America’s chief executives in the minds of many presidential scholars, including Pulitzer ...read more

Laura Ingalls Wilder wasn’t your typical debut novelist when her first book, “Little House in the Big Woods,” was published in 1932. She was 65 years old, decades removed from the childhood memories that provided the foundation for her colorful story of hardship, adventure and ...read more

1. University of Arizona Symphonic Marching Band (Super Bowl I)College marching bands, not big-time musical acts, headlined the first Super Bowl halftime shows. At Super Bowl I in Los Angeles, the University of Arizona Symphonic Marching Band performed “a musical visit to the ...read more

By the winter of 1967, President John F. Kennedy’s goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth” by the end of the decade appeared to be in doubt. A three-month delay in the delivery of a newly designed spacecraft had pushed back the Apollo program’s first ...read more

Big Ben is one of the most iconic—and misidentified—landmarks in the world. The name initially referred not to the distinctive 320-foot-high clock tower on the north side of the British Houses of Parliament, renamed the Elizabeth Tower in honor of Queen Elizabeth II during her ...read more

The Viking Age brought change not only to the regions of Europe plundered and conquered by the Nordic warriors, but to Scandinavia itself. “From the Scandinavian point of view, the big story of the Viking Age is its assimilation into the European mainstream,” says John Haywood, ...read more

Had Martin Luther King Jr. not been killed as he stood on the Lorraine Motel’s second-floor balcony on that spring evening in 1968, it’s almost certain that the Baptist preacher would have remained a powerful voice against injustice. While King would have spoken out against ...read more