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 ...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. ...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 ...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 ...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