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

Martha Gadley’s marriage was a nightmare. When her husband drank, he turned increasingly violent. One night, he used an ax to chop a hole in the floor and threatened to push her into the room below. He refused to bring her water when she was sick. When she left the house, he ...read more

In 1926, a self-taught musician named Big Bill Broonzy found his way to Chicago. A sharecropper turned soldier, he had left Mississippi and headed north to escape the pervasive racism of the Jim Crow South along with thousands of others of African-Americans in the Great ...read more

The inner workings of the Supreme Court aren’t usually gripping prime-time viewing. But on the evening of December 12, 2000, the Court dominated headlines as it ended one of the United States’ most contentious elections. And all eyes were on one justice: Sandra Day O’Connor.This ...read more

The Endangered Species Act was created by a somewhat unlikely hero: President Richard M. Nixon. Although Nixon expressed personal disgust with environmentalists in private, he also recognized that Americans’ interest in the environment was not a passing fad.Nixon used his ...read more

When Apollo 11‘s Eagle lunar module landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had to do something hard: Wait. They were scheduled to open the door of their lunar lander and step onto the unknown surface of a completely different world. But for ...read more

If you ask Suzy Snyder about one of the most significant artifacts in the United States Holocaust MemorialMuseum’s collection, she won’t lead you to arailcar used to deport Jews or into the museum’s heap of shoes taken from Jews before they were murdered in death camps. Instead, ...read more

In the early 1990s, you could still find cigarettes in restaurants, vending machines and the mouths of all kinds of consumers. For adults and teenagers alike, one brand overshadowed all the others: Marlboro. The filtered cigarettes in their red-and-white packages had a cult ...read more

If you’ve ever tasted what’s known as “government cheese,” you won’t soon forget it. Its flavor was described as somewhere between Velveeta and American cheese and smacked of humiliation or gratitude for the people who couldn’t afford not to eat it. Its color, an almost neon ...read more

She’s one of the most iconic figures in world history: a queen whose reign has outlasted all other British monarchs and most other world leaders, too. But though she stands for the continuity and tradition of the English monarchy, Elizabeth II’s reign has been anything but ...read more

It was a seemingly simple document—a brief 1944letter with text in German and Hungarian that declared that a Jewish woman from Budapest, was under the protection of the Swiss Legation. But for Maria Magdalena Grausz, it meant freedom. Grausz and over 60,000 other Hungarian Jews ...read more

The Special Olympics, which recognizes the athletic potential of people with intellectual disabilities, is one of the most recognizable and respected charitable organizations in the United States. But without the tragedy sustained by a member of the Kennedy family with an ...read more

These days, strongmen can show off their power in weightlifting competitions and WWE wrestling matches, but in earlier times, men hoisted bulls, iron wheels and seemingly immovable carts to prove their might. Here are some of the most legendary strongmen in history.Milo of Croton ...read more

On the night of March 21, 1981, a cross crackled and burned on the lawn of the Mobile County courthouse—the Ku Klux Klan’s grim protest of the outcome of a local murder trial. It was just the beginning of the terror that would take place that night. The cross burned out, but the ...read more

“I am blind now. I cannot see.” So ended the court appearance of the woman who kicked off the Salem witchcraft trials: Tituba, an enslaved woman who was the first to be accused of witchcraft in Salem. She had just given some of history’s most explosive testimony, a convoluted and ...read more

Thememo was brief—just a few hundred words. The memo was polite. But for President Lyndon Johnson and his NATO allies, it read like a slap in the face. “France is determined to regain on her whole territory the full exercise of her sovereignty,” wrote French President Charles de ...read more

On the surface, it was just another tea party—a well-behaved group of women passing cups of brewed beverages around the genteel table of Jane Hunt, a well-to-do New York woman who had invited four others to dine with her.But this tea party was not for shrinking violets. Hunt’s ...read more

It took 18 days and the efforts of dozens of divers and rescue personnel, but 12 boys and their soccer coach were finallyrescued from the cave complex where they were trapped by floods during Thailand’s monsoon season. Here are five other dramatic rescues that were just as ...read more

When the Marquis de Lafayette visited the United States in 1824 and 1825, there was a can’t-miss destination on his itinerary. Now gnarled with age, the beloved general would receive a hero’s welcome as he crisscrossed the United States he had helped create. It was a farewell ...read more

Children in pens. The overwhelming stink of human waste. Auctions at which human bodies were prodded, compared, and purchased. It was all in a day’s work at the New Orleans, Louisianaslave market, the largest and most lucrative in the pre-Civil War United States. But if it ...read more

“Why be behind when you could be in front?” an unnamed woman, newly promoted to Army private, asked the Army Times’ Meghann Myers in 2017. She was one of the first women to join the U.S. Army’s infantry, undergoing grueling training along with male recruits and preparing for the ...read more

When Caroline Weldon arrived at the Standing Rock Reservation in 1889, she attracted attention. The Sioux people who lived there hadn’t invited her. The white settlers who lived nearby didn’t understand why she wanted to go there. She herself was on the run from life as a social ...read more

When six U.S. Marines raised a flag over Iwo Jima in February 1945, they were laying claim to the slopes of a mountain that was part of a strategically important chain of volcanic islands south of Tokyo. The Ogasawara Islands, also known as the Bonin Islands by Americans, were ...read more

Like countless other women of the Civil War, the wives, sisters and sweethearts of LaGrange, Georgia watched the majority of men in their town march away to military service in 1861. But while other Confederate women on the home front prepared to nurse the wounded and wait out ...read more

In 1899, a German psychiatrist electrified the audience at a conference on hypnosis with a bold claim: He had turned a gay man straight. All it took was 45 hypnosis sessions and a few trips to a brothel, Albert von Schrenck-Notzingbragged. Through hypnosis, he claimed, he had ...read more

Bread lines. Hoovervilles. Dust storms. Bank runs. The Great Depression left an indelible impression on the people who lived through it, and imagery of the poverty and social instability it left in its wake still evokes the crisis today.One of the Depression’s most indelible ...read more

Michael Rosenberg was listening to The Lone Ranger on the radio when his entire world crumbled. The seven-year-old was engrossed in his favorite program in the summer of 1950 when men burst into his New York apartment and took away his father. Soon, his mother was under arrest, ...read more

When groundbreaking astronaut Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983, she received plenty of congratulations. But one of the most meaningful nods to her accomplishment was not from a NASA official or a head of state; it was from an attorney named Linda ...read more

Gay men have always been part of the American military. In an era before gay marriage or open pride, military men fell in love, formed passionate friendships and had same-sex encounters. Due to social and official discrimination, though, most of their stories have gone untold. ...read more

A century ago, Centralia, Pennsylvania was a busy small town filled with shops, residents and a brisk mining business. Coal from local mines fueled its homes and its economy, and its 1,200 residents worked, played and lived as tight-knit neighbors. Today couldn’t be more ...read more

The article was brief, tucked into the back of a paper packed with news of the ravages of the Great Depression. But if you looked carefully in the New York Times on September 27, 1931, the small news item might have stood out: “Hard-Up Missouri Folk Name Shack Colony ...read more

Despite recent confusion, Canada did not burn down the White House during the War of 1812—in fact, it wasn’t even a country in 1812. Though the British attack was conducted in response to an American attack on York, Ontario, Canada as we know it didn’t exist at the time. Canada ...read more

George Wray tied a halter around his wife’s waist and headed to the nearest market. He wasn’t there to buy anything—he was there to sell his wife.Onlookers shouted as he auctioned her off to the highest bidder, William Harwood. After Harwood turned over a single shilling to Wray, ...read more

When conservative radio host Erick Erickson learned what First Lady Melania Trump planned to serve at a recent state dinner in honor of French president Emmanuel Macron, hebashed the menu as “unpronounceable froo-froo garbage” and called for simpler menu items instead. Perhaps ...read more

During the 1950s, the State Department began to scrutinize public servants in its ranks, methodically scanning personnel files and interviewing suspected threats. The goal was to root out “immoral,” “scandalous” and “dangerous” government employees—people whose personal conduct ...read more

Haviva Reik looked out over the fields of Slovakia. For the first time in years she was home—or, rather, above home, flying in an English warplane. It was summer 1944. For years, Slovakia had been a Nazi puppet. And now it was time for Reik, a Jew, to jump into enemy territory at ...read more

When business legend John Jacob Astor died in 1848, he was hailed as a titan of trade and praised as a sharp salesman with a taste for philanthropy. “There are few men whose biography would prove more instructive or more acceptable for the present age than the life of John Jacob ...read more

When disaster strikes, sometimes you lose your head. That was the literal truth for one unfortunate volcano victim who lived in the ancient city of Pompeii, the Associated Pressreports: When he failed to leave the soon-to-be-decimated city as Mt. Vesuvius exploded, a massive ...read more

He was known as the Galveston Giant—a boxer who fought his way toward the first world heavyweight title held by an African-American. But in 1912, Jack Johnson became something else: a wanted man. Accused of violating the Mann Act, which forbade transporting a woman across state ...read more

When salvagers found a 300-year-old ship at the bottom of the Caribbean near the coast of Colombia three years ago, they claimed it was the “holy grail” of shipwrecks—the legendary San Jose galleon, a Spanish ship rumored to contain up to $17 billion in treasure. Now, the ...read more

When Rosa Parks refused to give her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white man in 1955, she was put in handcuffs and arrested. But what happened next? The answer to that question just became more clear thanks to a new discovery: disintegrating court records that detail the legal ...read more

When Jennie Jerome and Lord Randolph Churchill announced their engagement in 1874, his parents were horrified. The couple had only known one another for three days, and Jerome—thetattooed daughter of a philandering financier and a social climber—was an American socialite, not a ...read more

Today, President Trump’s cabinet looks more like a revolving door. Since taking office, he has fired an unprecedented number of cabinet members, including his Secretary of State and other key advisors. But if it were the 1860s, the president’s unilateral firings would have been ...read more

If you were a royal in the late part of the 19th century, there’s a good chance you were related to Queen Victoria—and if Victoria was your grandmother, you were pretty much guaranteed a glamorous royal wedding to a prince or princess of her choosing.“Victoria’s descendants ...read more