At 9:37 a.m. on September 11, 2001, a 62-year-old Pentagon employee and retired Air Force communications specialist was sitting in traffic west of the Pentagon when a roaring jet engine passed so low overhead that it clipped the radio antenna of the car behind him. The airplane, ...read more

For more than two centuries, the Achaemenid Empire of Persia ruled the Mediterranean world. One of history’s first true super powers, the Persian Empire stretched from the borders of India down through Egypt and up to the northern borders of Greece. But Persia’s rule as a ...read more

Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, and the invention of the mechanical movable type printing press helped disseminate knowledge wider and faster than ever before. German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436, although he was ...read more

Middle-schoolers who trudge home each day with a 50-pound backpack and hours of homework would have had an easier time in 1901. That’s when the anti-homework movement was at its peak and the state of California actually banned all homework for grades below high school. From the ...read more

The “outsider” candidate running against “Washington insiders” has become a familiar figure on both ends of the political spectrum. But back in the 1820s, there was no such thing as an anti-establishment, populist candidate—until Andrew Jackson invented it. At the time, the 50th ...read more

Many Americans get the Pilgrims and the Puritans mixed up. Common thinking is: They were both groups of English religious reformers. They both landed in modern-day Massachusetts. And they were both stuffy sourpusses who wore black hats, squared collars and buckled shoes, right? ...read more

Most Americans can tell you that the first unofficial “declaration of independence” happened in Boston, when a band of tax-hating renegades dumped King George’s beloved tea into the harbor, a spirited act of defiance that united the colonies in revolution. But as with most ...read more

Five times in history, presidential candidates have won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College. This has led some to question why Americans use this system to elect their presidents in the first place. Among the many thorny questions debated by the delegates to the 1787 ...read more

On July 20, 1969, just eight years after President John F. Kennedy threw down the Cold War gauntlet and announced the ambitious goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the American flag in ...read more

From August 15-18, 1969, something remarkable happened on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Upstate New York. While we remember the anti-war chants, the hippie fashion, the mud and the nudity, music was Woodstock's core. Here are the biggest musical moments from the festival billed as ...read more

The moment is etched in the collective memory of an entire generation—the blurry black-and-white image of Neil Armstrong descending the stairs of the Apollo 11 lunar module on July 20, 1969 to become the first human being to step foot on the moon. “That’s one small step for [a] ...read more

It was the largest amphibious invasion in the history of warfare. On June 6, 1944, more than 150,000 brave young soldiers from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada stormed the beaches of Normandy, France in a bold strategy to push the Nazis out of Western Europe and ...read more

Memorial Day was born out of necessity. After the American Civil War, a battered United States was faced with the task of burying and honoring the 600,000 to 800,000 Union and Confederate soldiers who had died in the single bloodiest military conflict in American history. The ...read more

The mouth-watering smokiness of a rack of pork ribs. The juicy gluttony of a medium-rare bacon cheeseburger. The simple pleasure of a salami sandwich on rye. One thing is clear—humans love meat. But why do we eat so much more meat than our primate cousins and why are we wired to ...read more

There can be confusion over the origins of Cinco de Mayo. Some think it’s a holiday celebrating Mexican independence from Spain (that’s actually September 16), or the 1910 Mexican Revolution (November 20), or that it was dreamed up to sell more beer and guacamole. Cinco de Mayo ...read more

The Woodstock Festival, held in August 1969, was a watershed moment in the 1960s counterculture movement. Expecting 50,000 attendees for a three-day music concert, the event instead drew an estimated 500,000. The festival, billed as “Three Days of Peace and Music,” looms as large ...read more

As early as 1942, Adolf Hitler knew that a large-scale Allied invasion of France could turn the tide of the war in Europe. But thanks in large part to a brilliant Allied deception campaign and Hitler’s fanatical grip on Nazi military decisions, the D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944 ...read more

Without the brilliant planning and heroic sacrifices of the D-Day invasion, the Allies may have never defeated the Nazi forces in Europe. On June 6, 1944, more than 156,000 American, British and Canadian troops stormed 50 miles of Normandy's fiercely defended ...read more

Record numbers of 19-century immigrants arrived in American port cities from the UK and Western Europe following the War of 1812—but that’s only if they managed to survive the journey. Many of the new arrivals were desperately poor, paid very little for their passage and were ...read more

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

Albert Einstein, the German-born Nobel prize-winning physicist, became an outspoken civil rights advocate after immigrating to the United States in the 1930s to escape the Nazis. But newly published travel diaries from the 1920s, when Einstein and his wife Elsa embarked on a ...read more

Scottish archaeologists are crediting a 10th-century Viking raid with preserving a “treasure trove” of new information about a mysterious lost culture. The Picts were a confederation of tribes that ruled Northern Scotland for most of the first millennium A.D., famously repelling ...read more

During World War II, Nazi officials were constantly hunting down resistance fighters and the allied spies who aided them. But there was one foreign operative the Third Reich held special contempt for—a woman responsible for more jailbreaks, sabotage missions and leaks of Nazi ...read more