The term “organized crime” didn’t really exist in the United States before Prohibition. Criminal gangs had run amok in American cities since the late 19th-century, but they were mostly bands of street thugs running small-time extortion and loansharking rackets in predominantly ...read more

In the spring and summer of 1929, the U.S. economy was riding high on the decade-long winning spree called the Roaring Twenties, but the Fed was raising interest rates to slow a booming market and an increasingly vocal minority of economists and bankers were beginning to wonder ...read more

Long before there was a Grinch who stole Christmas, there was Krampus, the devilish half-man, half-goat that helps out jolly St. Nicholas by stuffing naughty Austrian children in sacks and dragging them to hell. Yes, the true history of Christmas is as colorful ...read more

John F. Kennedy’s heroics during World War II earned him a Navy and Marine Corps Medal and a Purple Heart—he is the only U.S. president to have earned either of those honors. Kennedy’s political supporters made a big deal of JFK’s military honors, but when asked exactly how he ...read more

Every year, more than 100 million Americans hit the stores the Friday after Thanksgiving in the hopes of scoring a great deal on a 4KTV or the latest toy craze. Although Black Friday has practically become a holiday of its own, it hasn’t always been this way. For ...read more

Thanksgiving may be America’s most beloved national holiday, but its history is all over the place. Even the details of the famous feast between the Plymouth Colony settlers and the Wampanoag Indians in November of 1621 are sketchy. The best account we have is a ...read more

When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521, they described witnessing a grisly ceremony. Aztec priests, using razor-sharp obsidian blades, sliced open the chests of sacrificial victims and offered their ...read more

It was 2004, the day after Christmas, and thousands of European and American tourists had flocked to the beaches of Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia to escape the winter chill in a tropical paradise. At 7:59 AM, a 9.1-magnitude earthquake—one of the largest ...read more

Apple released three new iPhones at its launch event on September 12, each one bigger than the last. With a 6.5-inch (diagonal) screen, the iPhone XS Max is the company’s largest smartphone ever. It features a screen size that’s nearly twice as big as the original 2007 model. ...read more

1952 was the year America caught flying-saucer fever. So when a rash of strange sightings was reported in the skies over Washington D.C. that summer, the press and the public demanded answers. Were these unexplained radar blips, crafts that in some cases outran jets, part of a ...read more

In late August of 1968, Americans freshly traumatized by the assassinations of both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, faced reports about new violence—this time at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. As the evening news broadcast images of billy ...read more

By the time pharaohs like King Tut ruled Egypt, mummification was a codified practice that had started in the Old Kingdom period around 2500 B.C.—or so historians thought. Now, analysis shows that ancient Egyptians began passing down a standard embalming recipe more than 1,500 ...read more

July 18, 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s birth. One of the 20th century’s most important civil-rights change-makers, he devoted his life—including 27 years in prison—to bringing an end to the cruelly segregationist policies of South Africa’s apartheid system. ...read more

To the untrained eye, the palm-sized quartz stones appear unremarkable. But archeologists believe that 96 roughly sharpened rocks dug from a cliffside deposit in China represent the oldest known evidence of ancient human tools outside of Africa. How and when our human ancestors ...read more

There were two sides to Theodore Roosevelt. One was the trust-busting progressive who reined in industrialist excess, won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese war, and set aside millions of acres of public land for wildlife conservation. The other ...read more

Mother Nature can be merciless. From the churning hurricanes of the Gulf Coast, to the trailer-tossing storms of Tornado Alley, to the ground-pounding quakes of California, the United States is no stranger to deadly natural disasters. Here are five of the worst natural disasters ...read more

Ask almost any daredevil, stunt performer or extreme-sports athlete since the 1970s who provided their greatest inspiration and the name Evel Knievel inevitably leaps to mind. In his career as a motorcycle-jumping daredevil, Knievel dreamed big, performed fearlessly—and had the ...read more

William Jackson Smart was a twice-married, twice-widowed Civil War veteran and father of 14 children, one of whom dedicated her life to the creation of Father’s Day in honor of her devoted and selfless dad. The story goes that William’s daughter, Sonora Smart Dodd, was attending ...read more