If you ask people to name the victorious Allied Powers in World War II, Mexico isn’t usually a name that comes to mind. But after declaring war against the Axis in mid-1942, Mexico did contribute to the Allied victory in important ways. Despite long standing tensions with the ...read more

A long-lost letter written by Galileo Galilei reveals an effort by the 17th-century astronomer to soften his public stance against the Catholic Church’s doctrine that the sun orbits the Earth. The letter, uncovered at the Royal Society in London, appears to solve a ...read more

In 1987, President Ronald Reagan got the chance to appoint the third Supreme Court justice of his presidency. But while the first two justices had sailed through the confirmation process, the third appointment turn out to be much, much more difficult. The outcome would have ...read more

For many people, nothing tastes better than a glass of cold beer, whether enjoyed at the end of a long day of work or while relaxing on a summer afternoon. But brewing beer—not baking bread—could be the reason our ancestors began cultivating grains in the first place. Inside a ...read more

No cultural symbol of the 1920s is more recognizable than the flapper. A young woman with a short “bob” hairstyle, cigarette dangling from her painted lips, dancing to a live jazz band. Flappers romped through the Roaring Twenties, enjoying the new freedoms ushered in by the end ...read more

On March 8, 1965, two battalions of U.S. Marines landed on beaches of Da Nang, marking the first official engagement of American troops in the Vietnam War. Over the next several years, as the United States escalated its ill-fated involvement in that conflict, hundreds of ...read more

“Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.”-Senator John McCain, Faith of Our FathersAfter a devastating ordeal as a POW in Vietnam, John McCain launched a ...read more

A non-profit organization that went into debt buying the world’s largest private collection of Abraham Lincoln-related artifacts 11 years ago has turned to crowdfunding in efforts to pay off the remaining $9 million it still owes.If it fails, some of the collection’s most ...read more

By the end of 1919, more than 70 years after the first national woman’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, Congress finally passed a federal women’s suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But the fate of the 19th Amendment all came down to Tennessee.In the summer of 1920, ...read more

They may be only 10 percent of the population, but it’s become apparent that left-handers have the edge in at least one prominent area—politics. No fewer than six out of 13 U.S. presidents since World War II have been lefties, helping to fuel speculation that left-handed people ...read more

In early August 2008, after Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili sent troops into the rebellious province of South Ossetia, Russia came to its defense, beginning a five-day-long conflict that ended with Russian troops within striking distance of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. ...read more

Archaeologists in the Houston suburb of Sugar Land are exhuming and testing the remains of 95 people believed to be African-American convicts forced to work the sugarcane fields during the Jim Crow era.The grave sites were uncovered in April during the construction of a new ...read more

Article 5 is the cornerstone of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)  and states that an attack on one member of NATO is an attack on all of its members. But despite its importance, NATO has only invoked Article 5 once in its history—in response to the terrorist attacks ...read more

As the summer of 1914 approached, the balance of power in Europe looked shaky at best. It would take only a single crisis—the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie Chotek by a young Bosnian Serb nationalist in ...read more

The charred remains of a 14,500-year-old pita-like flatbread, made from grinding together cereals and tubers, were discovered in a stone fireplace in the Black Desert in Jordan, according to a study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of ...read more

When Germany signed the armistice ending hostilities in the First World War on November 11, 1918, its leaders believed they were accepting a “peace without victory,” as outlined by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson in his famous Fourteen Points. But from the moment the leaders of the ...read more

The founding fathers set a high standard of ideals for the new nation to live up to back in 1776. But from the very beginning, debate about the best way to do that has been an inherent part of the American experiment. Since its founding, the United States has had both high and ...read more

When the first skirmishes of the Revolutionary War broke out in Massachusetts in April 1775, few people in the American colonies wanted to separate from Great Britain entirely. But as the war continued, and Britain called out massive armed forces to enforce its will, more and ...read more

Almost as soon as World War II ended, the question of what to do with a defeated, destroyed Germany threatened to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. At Potsdam in 1945, the Big Three (the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union) agreed to ...read more

Newly discovered film footage from 1935 offers a rare glimpse of President Franklin D. Roosevelt walking, in a show of extreme effort that he went to great lengths to hide from the public eye. Fred Hill of New York was attending the annual Easter Egg Roll at the White House with ...read more

A set of silverware made to commemorate Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s 50th birthday in 1939 has been sold at auction in Dorset, England for £12,500 (or $16,583 in U.S. dollars). The rare set of cutlery—which included two knives, three spoons and three forks, each engraved with the ...read more

When you picture Tyrannosaurus rex, the most fearsome of all the dinosaurs, you probably imagine it with jaws gaping, a giant tongue protruding from its terrifying mouth. But according to a new study published in PLOS ONE, that isn’t how T. rex looked at all. In fact, many ...read more

We humans may pride ourselves on having some unique traits among animals, such as the ability to teach our traditions, habits and ways of living to our children and preserve them over generations. But it turns out we aren’t the only ones in the animal kingdom with this ability. A ...read more

Archaeologists working at the site of a large roadworks project in Cambridgeshire, England recently stumbled on a grisly find—the bodies of two men whose legs had been chopped off at the knee, buried in a gravel pit being used as a garbage dump.  The remains are believed to date ...read more

In 1844, reeling from the murder of their founder and prophet, Joseph Smith, and facing continued mob violence in their settlement in Illinois, thousands of Latter Day Saints (better known as Mormons) threw their support behind a new leader, Brigham Young. Two years later, Young ...read more

Originally adopted after the Civil War to protect the rights of freed slaves, the 14th Amendment has exponentially expanded the protection of civil rights for all Americans over the past 150 years. It’s been cited in more litigation than any other amendment to the U.S. ...read more

The January 1968 capture of the U.S.S. Pueblo during a spy mission in international waters cost the life of one American sailor and began a grueling 11-month imprisonment for the other 82 Americans aboard. While the Pueblo crew was remembered for their bravery and defiance, ...read more

Experts think they have figured out how the ancient Polynesian inhabitants of Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, put those enormous red stone hats on top of the island’s famous giant statues. Anthropologists photographed the cylindrical hats, known as pukao, and used the photos to make ...read more

In what seems to be rare physical evidence of crucifixion, the method used to kill Jesus Christ according to the Bible, scientists say wounds found on the heel of a man buried some 2,000 years ago in northern Italy suggest he was nailed to a wooden cross before he died. In 2007, ...read more

Moments after Valerie Solanas entered Andy Warhol’s sixth-floor office at 33 Union Square West on June 3, 1968, carrying two guns and a massive, paranoid grudge, their lives would be changed forever. She thought he was was going to steal her manuscript, he ignored her calls. It ...read more

About 5,000 to 7,000 years ago the number of men having children fell dramatically—possibly by as much as 95 percent—throughout Asia, Africa and Europe, genetic research shows. Now, scientists think they might know why. A new study argues that conflict between warring patrilineal ...read more

After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the United States entered a fierce competition with their Communist rivals for dominance in space. The ensuing space race was filled with many notable successes – including American astronauts walking and playing golf on the Moon – ...read more

Even after an asteroid more than five miles wide crashed into Earth at some 40,000 mph and blasted a giant crater into Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago, signs of underwater life surfaced at the impact site within a few years, according to new research published in ...read more

During his adolescence in upstate New York, Timothy McVeigh developed an enthusiasm for guns and a suspicion of governmental authority. He drew inspiration from the 1978 novel The Turner Diaries, written by the white nationalist William Luther Pierce, which depicts a right-wing ...read more

In April 1993, some 75 members of the millennial sect known as the Branch Davidians – including their messianic leader, David Koresh – perished in the blaze that destroyed their compound near Waco, Texas, after a 51-day siege by federal agents. The Branch Davidians fell from ...read more

On May 17, 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren issued the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, ruling that racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The upshot: Students of color in America would no ...read more

As a last-ditch search effort for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 wraps up in the Indian Ocean, one of history’s greatest aviation mysteries endures. But in an unexpected twist, historians in Australia say the massive search effort for the missing Boeing 777 has uncovered the fate ...read more

After Nikola Tesla was found dead in January 1943 in his hotel room in New York City, representatives of the U.S. government’s Office of Alien Property seized many documents relating to the brilliant and prolific 86-year-old inventor’s work.It was the height of World War II, and ...read more

On June 12, 1987, President Ronald Reagan stood just 100 yards away from the concrete barrier dividing East and West Berlin and uttered some of the most unforgettable words of his presidency: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”By the time Reagan traveled to Berlin, Germany, to ...read more

The public has waited nearly 26 years for the last classified documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to be released. But it looks like we’ll have to keep waiting, due to a decision by the Trump administration to withhold some material in the archive ...read more

In 1993, when President Bill Clinton signed the policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” into law, it represented a compromise between those who wanted to end the longstanding ban on homosexuals serving in the U.S. military and those who felt having openly gay troops would hurt ...read more

As the first secretary of the U.S. Treasury, Alexander Hamilton built the foundations of the national banking system and wielded more power in the earliest years of American democracy than any other man beside George Washington. Yet unlike Washington, and unlike his longtime ...read more

Since 1950, individual income taxes have been the primary source of revenue for the U.S. federal government. Together with payroll taxes (used to fund social programs like Social Security and Medicare), income taxes amount to roughly 80 percent of all federal revenue, and are the ...read more

An estimated 100,000 people gathered at the dock in Belfast, Ireland on March 31, 1911, to watch the launch of the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) Titanic. Considered to be an “unsinkable” sink, Titanic was the largest and most luxurious cruise liner of its day, measuring more than 882 ...read more

The Nazis’ efforts to protect one of their biggest battleships from Allied attacks during World War II left a lasting mark on the Norwegian landscape.Commissioned in 1941, the German battleship Tirpitz spent much of the war stationed in various fjords along the coast of Norway, ...read more

When Japanese bombers appeared in the skies over Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, the U.S. military was completely unprepared for the devastating surprise attack, which dramatically altered the course of World War II, especially in the Pacific theater. But there ...read more

Late on the night of July 18, 1969, a black Oldsmobile driven by U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy plunged off the Dike Bridge on the tiny island of Chappaquiddick, off Martha’s Vineyard, landing upside down in the tidal Poucha Pond. The 37-year-old Kennedy survived the crash, but the ...read more

Long celebrated as master shipbuilders and seafarers, the Vikings ruled the waters of the North Atlantic from 900 to 1200 A.D., regularly sailing their longboats for hundreds of miles over open water to their colonies in Iceland and Greenland. On clear days, they used a ...read more