Patrick J. Kiger

Since colonial times, when fishermen, bakers, refuse collectors and tailors tried to get more money or fairer treatment by refusing to perform their jobs, going on strike has been an important tactic of American labor. Strikes figured prominently in the rise of the organized ...read more

In November 1945, just a few months after atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, U.S. military leaders began planning additional nuclear weapons tests. The first location that they picked to stage a blast was a ...read more

In September 1941, German forces invading the Soviet Union took the city of Kyiv, in what is now the nation of Ukraine, and soon afterward perpetrated one of the most horrific acts of genocide in history. On September 29, they forced much of Kyiv’s Jewish population to go to Babi ...read more

The ancient Greeks, who staged the first formal Olympic Games in 776 B.C., gave the world the idea of organized big-time sports events as entertainment for arenas full of spectators. More than that, they were the first culture in which people idolized their favorite athletic ...read more

In ancient Rome, a city known for its spectacular and violent entertainment, there was one sport that was even more popular than gladiator fights. Chariot racing, staged at the massive Circus Maximus arena located between the Aventine and Palatine hills, gave spectators an ...read more

The Great Depression, a worldwide economic collapse that began in 1929 and lasted roughly a decade, was a disaster that touched the lives of millions of Americans—from investors who saw their fortunes vanish overnight, to factory workers and clerks who found themselves ...read more

During the Gilded Age—the decades between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the turn of the century—the explosive growth of factories, steel mills and railroads driven by the Second Industrial Revolution made a small, elite class of businessmen incredibly rich. By 1890, the ...read more

The Industrial Revolution, which began roughly in the second half of the 1700s and stretched into the early 1800s, was a period of enormous change in Europe and America. The invention of new technologies, from mechanized looms for weaving cloth and the steam-powered locomotive to ...read more

The Middle Ages, which started around the time of the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century A.C. and lasted until the beginning of the Renaissance in the 1300s, is often romanticized as a time of knights in armor, jousting, castles and chivalry. But knowledge gleaned from ...read more

The 13 British colonies that eventually became the United States in some ways were more different than they were alike. They were founded for a diverse range of reasons, from the pursuit of fortunes to the desire to create havens from persecution and model societies, and had ...read more

Americans’ struggle for independence required six years of hard combat, and its outcome was far from clear at the beginning. There were many moments along the way when it appeared that the British, with their well-equipped, well-trained army and navy, had the upper hand against ...read more

Next to the pyramids, the Sphinx and mummies, one of the most intriguing discoveries from ancient Egyptian civilization is a form of writing that appears like stylized pictures of people, animals and objects. Hieroglyphic writing, whose name comes from hieroglyphikos, the Greek ...read more

When the Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the ancient Egyptians' land was "given them by the river," he was referring to the Nile, whose waters were essential to the rise of one of the world’s earliest great civilizations. The Nile, which flows northward for 4,160 miles from ...read more

Even after armed hostilities broke out between the American colonists and British forces in 1775, many prominent colonists seemed reluctant to consider the idea of actually breaking away from Britain, and instead insisted that they were still its loyal subjects, even as they ...read more

World War I saw the crumbling of empires, and among those to collapse was the Russian empire of Czar Nicholas II. When Nicholas declared war against Germany and Austria-Hungary in July 1914, he was absolute ruler of a realm of nearly 150 million people that stretched from Central ...read more

World War I, which lasted from 1914 until 1918, introduced the world to the horrors of trench warfare and lethal new technologies such as poison gas and tanks. The result was some of the most horrific carnage the world had ever seen, with more than 16 million military personnel ...read more

The Second Industrial Revolution, which lasted from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, saw a surge of new technology and inventions that led to dramatic changes in the economy and how people lived and worked in Europe, Great Britain and especially the United States. Steel mills, ...read more

When Southern rebels bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina in April 1861, it was the start of a war between the Union and the secessionist Confederate States of America that would stretch on for four bloody years. The war took a brutal toll. According to statistics compiled by ...read more

While human civilization developed in many places around the world, it first emerged thousands of years ago in the ancient Middle East.  “We see the first cities, the first writing and first technologies originating in Mesopotamia,” says Kelly-Anne Diamond, a visiting assistant ...read more

Halloween may be a secular affair today, dominated by candy, costumes and trick-or-treating, but the holiday is rooted in an annual Celtic pagan festival called Samhain (pronounced "SAH- wane") that was then appropriated by the early Catholic Church some 1,200 years ago. The ...read more

More than 3,800 years after he took power, the ancient Babylonian king Hammurabi is best remembered for the Code of Hammurabi which was inscribed on human-sized stone pillars that he placed in the towns of his realm. But the system of 282 laws was just one of the achievements of ...read more

Even before Jamestown or the Plymouth Colony, the oldest permanent European settlement in what is now the United States was founded in September 1565 by a Spanish soldier named Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in St. Augustine, Florida. Menéndez picked the colony’s name because he ...read more

Thanks in part to the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., in which a small force of Spartan soldiers stayed behind to fight to the death against a vastly larger Persian army, the warriors of Sparta have long been famous for their military prowess and tenacity. Even today, the word ...read more

During the Revolutionary War, when there wasn’t any internet or telephones to provide instantaneous communication over long distances, the connective tissue that held the American colonies together was mail that was transported by horseback riders on the rough-hewn roads between ...read more

When the delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention pondered the question of what age a president should be, the big concern wasn’t about the office-holder being too elderly but too youthful. “George Mason was the principal advocate for age requirements for elective federal ...read more

After Vice President Aaron Burr killed Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804, Hamilton’s widow, Elizabeth Schuyler “Eliza” Hamilton, had to find a way to go on without her beloved husband. One of the ways she found solace—and honored his memory—was to found two ...read more

Western outlaw Billy the Kid met his demise at about 12:30 a.m. on July 14, 1881, when he went to his friend Pete Maxwell’s home in Fort Sumner, New Mexico in search of a slice of beef for a late-night snack.  As the story goes, Billy—just 21 years old, but already a murderer who ...read more

The Silk Road, a network of land and sea trade routes that connected China and the Far East with Europe from 130 B.C. to 1453 A.D., became a vital source for everything from fabric and leather goods to spices and precious stones. It connected communities and allowed them to share ...read more

Every year, millions of Americans have to amass their financial records and fill out forms—or pay professionals to do it for them—in order to file their federal tax returns. It’s an annual ritual that traditionally takes place in the spring, though in 2020, the Internal Revenue ...read more

Thomas Edison applied for his first patent in 1868, when he was just 21 years old. The famous inventor’s first brainchild was for a device that recorded legislative votes. That was just the start of a career in which he would obtain 1,093 U.S. patents, in addition to another 500 ...read more

On the evening of March 5, 1770, British troops fired into a crowd of angry American colonists in Boston who had taunted and violently harassed them. Five colonists were killed. The event, which became known as the Boston Massacre, helped fuel the outrage against British rule—and ...read more

In an era when wireless communication was still primitive, armies in World War I depended on a range of methods to relay messages between units. Options ranged from the telegraph to telephones to colored flares, mirrors that reflected flashes of sunlight, bugles and trained dogs ...read more

At its peak in the 1500s, the Ottoman Empire was one of the biggest military and economic powers in the world, controlling an expanse that included not just its base in Asia Minor but also much of southeastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. The empire controlled ...read more

Long before the arrival of European explorers, soldiers and settlers in North America, the portion of the continent north of Mexico was inhabited by as many as 18 million native people. And contrary to the popular perception of American Indians living a nomadic existence, many of ...read more

From the tip of South America to the Arctic, Native Americans developed scores of innovations—from kayaks, protective goggles and baby bottles to birth control, genetically modified food crops and analgesic medications—that enabled them to survive and flourish wherever they ...read more

When Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, it represented a major shift in labor policy. For the first time, the federal government set a minimum wage and established the principle that people—or at least those covered by the law—are entitled to at least a certain ...read more

Whiskey—a liquor whose origins in medieval Scotland or Ireland remain murky—once was an uncommon, exotic liquor in the 13 colonies, where rum, gin and brandy were the strong drinks of choice. But during and immediately after the Revolutionary War, that all changed. Whiskey became ...read more

When a commoner named Liu Bang became the first emperor of the Han Dynasty in 206 B.C., it was the start of a period of more than 400 years that was marked by advances in everything from record-keeping to agriculture to health care. “There were major inventions and developments ...read more

There was a time when traveling from the East Coast to the West Coast meant riding for months in a horse-drawn wagon or stagecoach, or sailing southward to Panama and then crossing the Isthmus to board another ship for a journey up the other coast. But that all changed on May 10, ...read more

The American colonists’ breakup with the British Empire in 1776 wasn’t a sudden, impetuous act. Instead, the banding together of the 13 colonies to fight and win a war of independence against the Crown was the culmination of a series of events, which had begun more than a decade ...read more

The Sons of Liberty were a grassroots group of instigators and provocateurs in colonial America who used an extreme form of civil disobedience—threats, and in some cases actual violence—to intimidate loyalists and outrage the British government. The goal of the radicals was to ...read more

The ancient Sumerians, who flourished thousands of years ago between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what today is southern Iraq, built a civilization that in some ways was the ancient equivalent of Silicon Valley. As the late historian Samuel Noah Kramer wrote, “The people ...read more

In January 1919, two months after the fighting in World War I ceased, a conference was convened at Versailles, the former country estate of the French monarchy outside Paris, to work out the terms of a peace treaty to officially end the conflict. Though representatives of nearly ...read more

The Cuban Missile Crisis was among the scariest events of the Cold War. The 13-day showdown brought the world’s two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war. In the Fall of 1962 the United States demanded that the Soviets halt construction of newly-discovered missile bases in ...read more

At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. Six minutes later, the first contingent of New York City firefighters—two ladder and two engine companies—had arrived at the stricken ...read more

The Statue of Liberty, which towers 305 feet, six inches over New York Harbor, is one of the most instantly recognizable symbols of America. It has inspired countless souvenir replicas and been referenced in everything from posters for war bonds to the final scene of the 1968 ...read more

It wasn’t that long ago that Venezuela, which possesses the world’s largest crude oil reserves, was a relatively stable democracy with one of Latin America’s fastest-rising economies. It was a nation so awash in petroleum revenues that the socialist government of the late former ...read more

At the height of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine under Joseph Stalin, starving people roamed the countryside, desperate for something, anything to eat. In the village of Stavyshche, a young peasant boy watched as the wanderers dug into empty gardens with their bare hands. Many were ...read more