History Staff

Seventy-five years ago, the Allied powers in World War II decided to take the fight against Adolf Hitler directly to France. Planned for more than two years, the D-Day offensive was a full-scale invasion designed to push the Nazis back into Germany. No amphibious mission of its ...read more

Communism as an ideology arose in the wake of the first Industrial Revolution when overworked, underpaid workers felt exploited and sought better representation in government. The Communist Manifesto, as laid out by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, called for a classless society ...read more

January 1969 Richard Nixon is inaugurated as the 37 President of the United States. February 1971 Richard Nixon orders the installation of a secret taping system that records all conversations in the Oval Office, his Executive Office Building office, and his Camp David office and ...read more

Sure, Rex Tillerson’s 13-and-a-half-month tenure as Secretary of State was kind of short. But he’s not the first top White House official to be kicked out early, especially in Donald Trump’s administration, which lost National Security Advisor Michael Flynn within the first ...read more

As 2017 slips into the history books, take a look back at the year in culture—with the best new releases that drew from the past. Whatever medium your personal passion might be, these movies, books, TV shows and podcasts proved that what’s old can be new again. Film Directors ...read more

It might seem like an obvious piece of any numerical system, but the zero is a surprisingly recent development in human history. In fact, this ubiquitous symbol for “nothing” didn’t even find its way to Europe until as late as the 12th century. Zero’s origins most likely date ...read more

The sport we in the United States know and love as football is more properly called gridiron football, for the vertical yard lines that mark the field. Closely related to two ancient English sports—rugby and soccer (or association football)—gridiron football originated at ...read more

Although it’s one of the world’s most famous monuments, the prehistoric stone circle known as Stonehenge remains shrouded in mystery. Built on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, Stonehenge was constructed in several stages between 3000 and 1500 B.C., spanning the Neolithic ...read more

You may have heard that a young man named Abner Doubleday invented the game known as baseball in Cooperstown, New York, during the summer of 1839. Doubleday then went on to become a Civil War hero, while baseball became America’s beloved national pastime.  Not only is that story ...read more

For several centuries, people have debated whether human beings can spontaneously combust, or burst into flames without being ignited by an external source. Though the first known accounts of spontaneous human combustion (SHC) date all the way back to 1641, the phenomenon gained ...read more

Soon after rescuers reached surviving members of the Donner Party on the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada in February 1847, the public was bombarded with grisly details about how the snowbound pioneers had resorted to cannibalism when their food supply ran out. Thanks to ...read more

If you’re wondering where the dollar sign ($) came from, you’re in good company. No one really knows for sure, and several theories have emerged over the years. The most widely accepted explanation, according to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, goes back to the Spanish peso, ...read more

In July of 64 A.D., a great fire ravaged Rome for six days, destroying 70 percent of the city and leaving half its population homeless. According to a well-known expression, Rome’s emperor at the time, the decadent and unpopular Nero, “fiddled while Rome burned.” The expression ...read more

In early 1923, British archaeologist Howard Carter and his financier friend George Herbert, Lord Carnarvon, ceremoniously opened the long-obscured burial chamber of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamen in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Two months later, Carnarvon was dead, killed by blood ...read more