September 11, 2001 was supposed to be a typical day for Lieutenant Heather Penney of the District of Columbia Air National Guard. As Penney recalled in a 2016 interview with HISTORY, that morning she was attending a briefing at Andrews Air Force Base, planning the month’s ...read more

Leading up to the November midterms in 1894, the Democrats were in trouble. Democratic President Grover Cleveland, elected just two years prior, was facing a catastrophic recession, a railroad strike and an army of jobless workers demonstrating in Washington, D.C. for relief. ...read more

Steven Spielberg’s 1998 film Saving Private Ryan may include some of the most horrific fighting scenes ever produced on film. But that isn’t its only element of realism. The film draws on the story of an actual soldier named Fritz Niland and a U.S. War Department directive ...read more

The Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944 is considered one of the most consequential developments of World War II and instrumental in defeating the Axis powers. 156,000 troops landed on the beach as part of Operation Overlord, but before they would carry out the liberation ...read more

With cash crops of tobacco, cotton and sugar cane, America’s southern states became the economic engine of the burgeoning nation. Their fuel of choice? Human slavery. If the Confederacy had been a separate nation, it would have ranked as the fourth richest in the world at the ...read more