Prohibition went into effect on January 17, 1920, officially banning the “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors” for beverage purposes in America. No law, however, could suddenly transform the United States into a country of teetotalers.  Prohibition only ...read more

A small crowd gathered around Martin Luther King, Jr. in the shoe section of a Harlem department store on September 20, 1958. They had come to meet the 29-year-old preacher who sat in a roped-off section of Blumstein’s Department Store autographing copies of Stride Toward ...read more

Long before the United States began accusing other countries of stealing ideas, the U.S. government encouraged intellectual piracy to catch up with England’s technological advances. According to historian Doron Ben-Atar, in his book, Trade Secrets, “the United States emerged as ...read more

On a late January night in 1812, a mob hell-bent on violence stormed through the door of George Ball’s textile workshop on the outskirts of Nottingham, England. With handkerchiefs tied around their faces, the men slammed their targets with sledgehammers and fled, leaving behind ...read more

On the infamous morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese fighter pilots made final arrangements for their deaths. The aviators penned farewell letters and slipped them into envelopes along with locks of hair and clipped fingernails that their loved ones could use for their funerals. ...read more

On a sunny winter day some three centuries ago, British warships fired their cannons in celebration as Lieutenant Robert Maynard sailed up the James River upon his return to Virginia. Any questions as to the success of his covert mission to subdue one of history’s most notorious ...read more

Shortly after 5 a.m. on November 11, 1918, German, British and French officials gathered inside a railroad dining car in a dark forest north of Paris and signed an armistice to end World War I. Rejecting German calls to immediately halt hostilities, Allied commander Ferdinand ...read more

A minute before noon on a November morning in 1918, a telegraph inside the United Press office on the third floor of the New York World headquarters chattered a message of salvation to a war-weary country. After reading the cable from France, pressmen grabbed the largest type ...read more

It was a violent end to a violent life. Less than 12 hours after his transfer to a federal prison in West Virginia, notorious Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger was found beaten to death in his cell on October 30, 2018. Authorities believe Bulger’s attackers included a Mafia ...read more

While World War I redrew political borders and introduced modern weaponry such as poison gas, machine guns and tanks, it also spurred the development of practical innovations. From Pilates to Kleenex to drones, these World War I innovations now permeate everyday ...read more

Sometime before the end of 1861, the men of a small New York hamlet gathered inside the village schoolhouse and voted 85 to 40 to sever ties with the United States. Seven Southern states had already seceded from the Union, but few could have imagined that this community 250 miles ...read more

While war engulfed the globe in the early autumn of 1918, Roy Grist watched as the bodies of fellow soldiers piled up inside a makeshift morgue. As the U.S. Army doctor wandered through the double rows of dead doughboys, he struggled to comprehend how young men, so full of life ...read more

The blue benches outside London’s Queen’s Hospital were reserved for men with shattered faces and smashed dreams. The colorful paint job warned the locals that they might want to avert their eyes, shielding them from coming face-to-face with the awful reality of the war and ...read more

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 ...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.” ...read more

The night was especially dark as U.S. Coast Guard seaman John Cullen patrolled the sand dunes of Amagansett, New York, shortly after midnight on June 13, 1942. Regulations in effect after the United States entered World War II six months earlier had already imposed blackouts on ...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

Jesus Christ When British pop artist Sir Peter Blake and his then-wife Jann Haworth developed the idea for a photomontage of famous people to grace the cover of “Sgt. Pepper,” Paul McCartney, George Harrison and John Lennon gave them a list of possible figures to include. ...read more

1. Edward Oxford — June 10, 1840 Four 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

Wong Kim Ark was nearly home. As the steamship Coptic slipped through the Golden Gate on an August day in 1895, the young cook could see the buildings huddled on the steep hills of San Francisco, the city where he was born and spent most of his life. Returning to the United ...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 Airport Our 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 Railway The 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 ...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 I On 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 ...read more

1. Shrapnel While 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 ...read more

1. Riverfront Square Before 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