Francine Hughes stood outside her Michigan home, watching it burn. Inside was her abusive husband, Mickey. Earlier that night, he had beaten and raped her for the last time. She stood watching the fire, then turned and entered the car where three of her children cowered in fear. ...read more

In the treacherous waters of the Atlantic and the bomber-laden Mediterranean of World War II, the USS Wasp, a 741-foot-long aircraft carrier, came out unscathed. But it wasn’t so lucky in the Pacific. After earning two battle stars and ferrying soldiers and aircraft in the ...read more

It was 1749, and John Winslow was about to go to sea. Any voyage was a risky, time-consuming endeavor in those days, so before he left he sat down to write an important letter. His correspondent wasn’t a loved one or even a friend: It was Edward Holyoke, president of Harvard ...read more

When Barbie dolls were first introduced in 1959, little girls snatched them up in droves. For the first time, midcentury kids could play with a doll that looked like a woman, not a little girl—a doll with a sassy ponytail, heavy eyeliner, a healthy dose of side-eye, and a ...read more

Draped in lush trees and surrounded by stately buildings, Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo might look like a place to check out monuments or stop for a relaxing rest. But each Thursday, one of Argentina’s most famous public squares fills with women wearing white scarves and holding ...read more

In 1930, the United States needed a miracle. Months before, the stock market had crashed, and the economy had begun to tank with it. As the Great Depression pummeled millions of American workers, Frances Perkins, New York’s Commissioner of Labor, warned that New York faced a ...read more

Did Pope Pius XII do enough to protect Jews during the Holocaust? That question has raged since World War II. But since historians have no access to Roman Catholic files related to his reign, it has gone unanswered. Until now. Pope Francis announced on March 4, 2019 that the ...read more

As the stage coach drove up to Camp Supply, its passengers must have felt relieved. They’d been caught in a storm, and the coach’s horses had lost their path in the Kansas snow. Finally, the coach arrived at Camp Supply, a military outpost in Indian Territory in what is now ...read more

If you peeked into a suburban living room in the 1950s, you might see a group of women in funny hats playing party games, tossing lightweight plastic bowls back and forth and chatting about their lives as they passed around an order form for Tupperware. Well stocked with punch ...read more

Shot haven’t been fired in the Korean War for nearly 70 years—but that doesn’t mean it’s over. Officially, the Korean War never technically ended. Although the Korean Armistice Agreement brought an end to the hostilities that killed 2.5 million people on July 27, 1953, that ...read more

William Fitzjohn and his driver raced up Route 40 through Maryland, hoping to find a hot meal before the African diplomat’s meeting at the White House. It was April 1961, and segregation was the status quo in large swaths of the United States. Fitzjohn, the charge d’affaires for ...read more

They drank. They swam. They smiled. But they didn’t hear the click of the cameras–or acknowledge that their secret romance could constitute a national scandal. They were Princess Margaret and Roddy Llewellyn, and they were about to grace the cover of a British tabloid with images ...read more

The trumpeter held the silver instrument to his lips. This was no ordinary trumpet: It had been retrieved 17 years earlier in the tomb of King Tutankhamun, a 14th-century B.C. pharaoh whose lavish sarcophagus and funeral remains had stoked a worldwide fascination with all things ...read more

After it was all over, Virginia Reed wrote a long letter to her cousin. A member of the infamous Donner Party, the 13-year-old had recently suffered through one of the most grueling—and gruesome—overland crossings of all time. Though Virginia said her family had not eaten human ...read more

By the time he made it to a Union encampment in Baton Rouge in March 1863, Peter had been through hell. Bloodhounds had chased him. He had been pursued for miles, had run barefoot through creeks and across fields. He had survived, if barely. When he reached the soldiers, Peter’s ...read more

London’s St. Martin-in-the-Fields church was home to the graves of plenty of English noblemen, but it had never seen a pair of graves quite like this. They belonged to Kamehameha II and his queen, Kamamalu, and they were just temporary resting places. It was July 1824, and soon, ...read more

The news was terrifying to colonists in Massachusetts: Smallpox had made it to Boston and was spreading rapidly. The first victims, passengers on a ship from the Caribbean, were shut up in a house identified only by a red flag that read “God have mercy on this house.” Meanwhile, ...read more

Begging. Blacking boots. Dodging angry, drunken adults. Living on the street. The 35 children who gathered at New York’s Children’s Aid Society in 1880 all had stories of deprivation and abuse to tell. Now, their ragged clothes had been stripped from them and replaced with sturdy ...read more

Emmett Till. Medgar Evers. Harry and Harriette Moore. The Civil Rights Movement had lost more than its fair share of heroes by 1968. But when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down on the balcony of a Memphis hotel on April 4 of that year, it seemed like the death knell for ...read more

Louis Berizzi was in his pajamas when FBI agents burst into his Manhattan apartment and arrested him. As his daughter, Lucetta, and the rest of the family watched, wiping the sleep from their eyes, he hurried into clothing and was taken away. Soon after, FBI agents questioned ...read more

In 1924, a group of ten children and hundreds of spectators gathered for a mass baptism. This was no mere religious rite. As the children and their parents moved toward the clergyman, they were enveloped by 50 men in white robes. They were the children of the Ku Klux Klan, and ...read more

A Danish ambulance driver huddled over a Copenhagen phone book, circling Jewish names. As soon as he’d heard the news—that all of Denmark’s Jews would be deported by the Nazis the next day—he knew he had to warn them. The man was just one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ...read more

The avalanche raced down a steep hill in Aberfan, Wales, sucking everything in its path into the chaos: landscape, buildings, an entire schoolhouse. When David Evans, the owner of a local pub, heard about it from a neighbor, he ran into the street. “Everything was so quiet, so ...read more

Marcel Marceau was known worldwide as a master of silence. The world-famous mime delighted audiences for decades as “Bip,” a tragicomic figure who encountered the world without words. But during World War II, his skills as a mime came in handy for another reason: He used them to ...read more

It could have been a disaster: runs on banks, uncashed checks, confusion at the counter. But by all accounts, the European Union’s switchover from a rainbow of different currencies to a single currency, the euro, was so orderly it was downright dull. “The boring thing about the ...read more

Parents gave their children advice and checked them over one last time. Then, came the goodbyes—sincere, but not too sad. “There was laughter and crying and one last hug,” recalled social worker Norbert Wollheim. The Jewish children, clutching their possessions, then walked ...read more

It was a double celebration: Christmas, and the Moores’ 25th anniversary. Harry T. and Harriette Moore celebrated the way they had 25 years before, cutting the cake together like newlyweds. They had no idea that the tender moment would be among their last. As they settled in to ...read more

As the Civil War’s first Christmas neared, a pair of young lovers, Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, a Confederate soldier and his eventual bride, wrote to one another with increasing melancholy. They were separated by hundreds of miles, and their communication was often ...read more

In 1567, a tempestuous, unhappy queen picked up her pen and wrote a passionate sonnet to her lover. “My love for him is not an empty show,” she wrote, “But purest tenderness and constancy.” Or did she? The sonnet was one of 12. And those documents were part of a larger hoard ...read more

When Carry Nation stepped foot into the Kiowa, Kansas bar, nobody saw what was coming. The formidable woman, dressed in black, was on a mission from God. But as soon as she entered the saloon, all hell broke loose. “I ran behind the bar, smashed the mirror and all the bottles ...read more

It was 1945, and Berlin lay in ruins. The bombed-out houses and destroyed streets left a deep impression on a 28-year-old reporter who had come to Germany on assignment with a Hearst newspaper. He had been tasked with covering the Potsdam Conference, in which the “Big Three”—the ...read more

Should men and women have equal rights under the law in the United States? It’s a simple question with a seemingly simple solution—a Constitutional amendment that guarantees that equal rights shall not be abridged on the basis of sex. But as the thorny history of the Equal ...read more

Turkeys these days are mostly seen as vessels for stuffing on your Thanksgiving table. But in 300 B.C., the birds were viewed by the Maya as vessels of the gods and honored accordingly. In fact, the birds were originally domesticated to play a part in religious rites. Prized ...read more

“There’s no way we can survive.”  It was November 18, 1978, and cult leader Jim Jones needed to convince over 900 of his followers that they needed to die. As he pressured members of the Peoples Temple to drink cyanide-laced punch, they screamed, wept and argued. Slowly, they ...read more

When Brigham Young and his band of Mormon settlers marched into Utah in 1847, they saw a vast expanse of land they envisioned as a sanctuary. Salt Lake City would soon become the bustling center of life in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But that life would rest ...read more

Brick-throwing mobs. Mass arrests. Torched synagogues. Broken glass. Between November 9 and 10, 1938, the pogrom now known as Kristallnacht resulted in the destruction of over 7,500 Jewish businesses, 1,000 synagogues, and any sense of security Jewish people in Germany and its ...read more

“Our synagogue is burning!” Rabbi Manfred Swarsensky dropped the phone and ran to his place of worship. It was 2 a.m., but the sky was already bright. As he approached the Synagogue Prinzregentenstrasse in Berlin, pushing his hat down so he wouldn’t be ...read more

A striking portrait hung on the wall of the campaign headquarters for George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential run. It wasn’t a slick painting of the vice-president, who hoped to become the next Republican in the White House. Rather, it was a mug shot, a grainy photo of a black man ...read more

It’s one of the United States’ best-known rights: automatic citizenship to all born within its borders. But birthright citizenship hasn’t always been the rule of the land in the U.S., and the legal concept has faced plenty of challenges over the century. Here’s the story of ...read more

Shot in front of their children. Attacked with acid. Murdered while walking away. Germany’s Weimar Republic was a dangerous place for politicians and government officials—and for hundreds of them, it was deadly. Between 1918 and the mid 1920s, Germany was rocked by murder after ...read more

When Nicholas Romanov was crowned tsar of Russia in 1894, he seemed bewildered. “What is going to happen to me…to all Russia?” he asked an advisor when he assumed the throne. “I am not prepared to be Tsar. I never even wanted to become one.” Twenty-four years later, he seemed ...read more

When World War II broke out in Norway, Joachim Ronneberg was a surveyor. A few years later, he was a hero, the leader of an almost suicidal mission to bring down the lynchpin of Nazi Germany’s nuclear program. Reuters reports that Ronneberg died on October 21, 2018. He was 99 ...read more

Tsar Nicholas and his family waited patiently in the basement. For much of 1918, the Romanov family had been the captives of the Bolsheviks who overthrew Nicholas II in the bloody Russian Revolution, and they were used to moving from place to place. They had no idea they had ...read more

What would happen if the United States were about to be hit by nuclear weapons? Hopefully, the government would provide some warning through the federal alert system. But that system hasn’t always been in place—and it hasn’t always worked. For over 40 minutes on February 20, ...read more

You may have read it on the internet or heard it from a friend: Before Fred McFeely Rogers became a beloved TV legend, he was a sniper in the Vietnam War. Then he took to the airwaves, adopting his signature sweater to cover his full-sleeve tattoos, using his platform to abuse ...read more

If you headed to Coney Island at the turn of the century, you might wade in the water, eat some ice cream, or try out a rollercoaster at the newly opened amusement park, Luna Park. But your boardwalk promenade might also include a visit to the equivalent of a fully functional ...read more

When Duke Ellington and his band toured the segregated South in the early 1930s, they encountered racism wherever they went. A gorgeous black performer also traveled with the band—Frederika “Fredi” Washington. Lithe and light-skinned, she was pale enough to “pass” as white in the ...read more

John Mack Carter’s office was comfortable, as befitted the editor-in-chief of one of the nation’s most important women’s magazines. But on March 18, 1970, there was nothing comfortable about it. Suddenly, his office and the rest of the New York headquarters of the Ladies’ Home ...read more