As the United States grew into the world’s leading industrial power during the late 19th century, those atop the economic ladder in America’s Gilded Age accumulated spectacular fortunes. By 1890, the country’s 4,000 millionaires held 20 percent of the country’s wealth, and with ...read more

If a Mount Rushmore for America’s most unpopular presidents is ever created, John Tyler would be a leading candidate to have his likeness carved into stone. “Popularity, I have always thought, may aptly be compared to a coquette—the more you woo her, the more apt is she to elude ...read more

Eulogized by Henry Lee as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen,” George Washington stood preeminent among the pantheon of American Founding Fathers. At his home Mount Vernon, on the battlefield and in the presidency, Washington crossed paths ...read more

Although “peace on earth” may never have seemed more elusive than during the Civil War, America’s bloodiest years actually produced our popular image of Santa Claus. Clement Clarke Moore had injected Santa into the American psyche with his 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” ...read more

On an early December morning in 1941, waves of Japanese bombers roared through American airspace. While air sirens wailed and guns blazed, American nationals took cover as a surprise attack in the Pacific sank U.S. battleships and crippled the largest aggregation of American ...read more

In the early 1800s, the sovereign Cherokee nation covered a vast region that included northwest Georgia and adjacent land in Tennessee, North Carolina and Alabama. Under the terms of an 1819 treaty, the United States guaranteed that Cherokee land would be off-limits to white ...read more

The U.S. government has long made protecting whistleblowers a priority. In fact, just seven months after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress passed what Allison Stanger, author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump, ...read more

The U.S. food stamp program was launched at a time when the nation was facing a tragic paradox: As millions of Americans suffered from hunger during the Great Depression, the country’s farmers agonized under a crushing bounty. The economic collapse of the 1930s had sapped food ...read more

With his quintessential rags-to-riches story, Andrew Carnegie embodied the American Dream. After poverty drove his family out of Scotland in 1848, Carnegie arrived in the United States as a penniless 12-year-old boy. With little formal education, he worked in a Pittsburgh cotton ...read more

Fourteen tons of fireworks illuminated the New York night on May 24, 1883, to celebrate the completion of one of the greatest engineering feats of the Gilded Age—the Brooklyn Bridge. Billed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” the longest suspension bridge ever built at the time ...read more

Little did Ida May Fuller know she would find a piece of history inside her mailbox when she opened it on a February day in 1940. When the 65-year-old retiree and lifelong Republican lifted the lid of the mailbox outside the front door of her Ludlow, Vermont, house, she found a ...read more

Before the break of dawn on April 15, 1961, a squadron of eight B-26 bombers piloted by Cuban exiles roared down a Nicaraguan airstrip on a secret mission. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and President John F. Kennedy hoped the Bay of Pigs Invasion would result in the ...read more

Before Che Guevara became a Marxist guerilla commander, before he became a revolutionary icon emblazoned on T-shirts, before he was even known as “Che,” there was a buddy, a bike and an epic road trip that would change the course of his life and world history. In December 1951, ...read more

On the morning of August 23, 1973, an escaped convict crossed the streets of Sweden’s capital city and entered a bustling bank, the Sveriges Kreditbanken, on Stockholm’s upscale Norrmalmstorg square. From underneath the folded jacket he carried in his arms, Jan-Erik Olsson pulled ...read more

Chicago shivered through a particularly bleak November in 1930. As the U.S. economy plummeted into the Great Depression, thousands of the Windy City’s jobless huddled three times a day in a long line snaking away from a newly opened soup kitchen. With cold hands stuffed into ...read more

In the spring of 1866, a band of Irish-Americans who fought on both sides of the Civil War united to undertake one of the most fantastical missions in military history: invade the British province of Canada, seize the territory and ransom it back to the British for Ireland's ...read more

Early in the 5th century, an Irish ship beat against the waves along the western coast of Great Britain. On the far edge of the crumbling Roman Empire, a band of Irish marauders crept into a secluded cove and raided the village of Bannavem Taburniae. Among the plunder captured ...read more

Every March 17, the United States becomes an emerald country for a day. Americans wear green clothes and quaff green beer. Green milkshakes, bagels and grits appear on menus. In a leprechaun-worthy shenanigan, Chicago even dyes its river green. Revelers from coast to coast ...read more

In the Gospel of John, Pontius Pilate poses a question to Jesus of Nazareth: “What is truth?” It’s a question that could also be asked about Pilate’s own history. From the perspective of the New Testament of the Christian Bible, the Roman governor of Judea was a wavering judge ...read more

When confronted by the crisis of the Great Depression, the American president knew that doing nothing was not an option. “That would have been utter ruin,” he recalled. “Instead we met the situation with proposals to private business and to the Congress of the most gigantic ...read more

While billions of people believe Jesus of Nazareth was one of the most important figures in world history, many others reject the idea that he even existed at all. A 2015 survey conducted by the Church of England, for instance, found that 22 percent of adults in England did not ...read more

During the throes of the Industrial Revolution, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad still ran on horsepower—literally. Steeds hauled the B&O’s railcars when the railroad launched in May 1830. But the company’s investors knew that only machines, not muscle, would be able to power trains ...read more

It was just another day on the job for the surveyor walking back and forth atop a New York City skyscraper as he analyzed his measurements. Down below, however, October 24, 1929, was no ordinary day. With the New York Stock Exchange in free fall, the jittery crowd that had ...read more

Nearly two decades after leaving the White House, Herbert Hoover knew precisely where to place the blame for the economic calamity that befell his presidency—and it wasn’t with him. “The primary cause of the Great Depression was the war of 1914-1918,” the former president wrote ...read more

Near the westernmost point of the border between the United States and Canada, the Peace Arch straddles the world’s longest undefended international boundary. The inscription atop the monument honors the friendship between two “children of a common mother,” but this was not ...read more

Snow weighed down the fronds of palm trees of Fort Myers, Florida, while an icy crust formed on the Mississippi River in New Orleans. Nearly three feet of snow buried the nation’s capital, and ice encased steamboats on Lake Michigan. There’s cold—and then there was the Great ...read more

January 17, 1920, marked a dark day for American brewers. At the stroke of midnight, America became a dry country under Prohibition, with over a thousand producers swiftly banned from selling their chief commodity: alcohol. Prohibition forced brewing companies to adapt or ...read more

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. ...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

On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley Jr. wounded President Ronald Reagan and three others in an assassination attempt he hoped would earn the affection of the Oscar-winning actress he was stalking, Jodie Foster. The effects are still felt today. Secret Service tightened security, ...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 four third-party candidates—Robert La Follette in 1924, Strom Thurmond in 1948, 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