Elizabeth Yuko

Each year, Jews around the world celebrate an eight-day winter holiday known as Hanukkah (also spelled “Chanukah” and several other ways) on the 25th day of the month of Kislev on the Hebrew calendar, typically falling in November or December on the Gregorian calendar. Hanukkah ...read more

Less than three weeks after the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Americans celebrated their first Christmas of World War II. On the surface, it didn’t look much different than it had in previous years, as the bulk of the men and women who would serve overseas had not yet ...read more

Since its theatrical release in 1973, The Exorcist, based on William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel of the same name, has served as the cultural touchpoint for an otherwise mysterious religious ritual. In reality, it’s only part of the most recent chapter in the long history of the ...read more

While Americans born in or with ancestral ties to Arab countries have made countless significant scientific, medical and engineering contributions, most have never made it into record books. From cryptography, to the artificial heart, to the iPod, here are a few examples of some ...read more

Emerging from the medieval tradition of agricultural and trade fairs, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in London in 1851, was the first international gathering of this kind, and widely considered the first World’s Fair. Over time, World’s Fairs ...read more

Towards the end of each year, as fireplaces are lit and hot cocoa is made, Americans have made it a tradition to revisit their favorite classic holiday books, movies and songs. And though ghost stories may seem out of place in present-day American holiday celebrations, they were ...read more

World’s Fairs conjure up images of the technicolor mid-century vision of the future from New York 1964, the Ferris wheel and Midway (and H.H. Holmes) from Chicago 1893, and the Eiffel Tower, which was constructed for the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris. There’s also the idea that ...read more

The period of rapid technological advancement in the United States known as the Industrial Revolution may have taken place during parts of the 18th and 19th centuries, but its impact resonated for decades and influenced everything from food, clothing, travel and ...read more

Among superstitions, one of the oldest and most enduring is that crossing paths with a black cat will bring on bad luck. The dark-colored felines have also been folded into modern Halloween symbols, giving them the (unearned) reputation of being spooky. But how and where did the ...read more

While belief in an afterlife is a cornerstone of many ancient and modern religions and cultures worldwide, the idea that it’s possible to communicate with the dead never reached the same level of acceptance. But, for a period of about a century, beginning in the 1840s, sending ...read more

Along with hieroglyphics, obelisks and geometric patterns, cats feature prominently in ancient Egyptian art, reflecting the animal’s unique status among the people who dwelled along the Nile River. The animals were initially adopted as useful predators in ancient Egypt and ...read more

Though the Gold Rush triggered the first major wave of Asian immigrants to the United States in the 1840s, their presence in America predates the country itself. For example, in 1763, facing a life of forced labor and imprisonment during the Spanish galleon trade, a group of ...read more