On the morning of September 11, 2001, 19 men hijacked four U.S. commercial airplanes that had taken off with full fuel tanks for the West Coast. The hijackers deliberately crashed the planes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and onto a field outside of ...read more

• Sep 10, 2019

Freedom of speech, religion and the press. The right to assemble, bear arms and due process. These are just some of the first 10 amendments that make up the Bill of Rights. But they weren’t included in the original U.S. Constitution, and James Madison, the bill’s chief drafter, ...read more

• Sep 9, 2019

Category 5 is as powerful as a hurricane can get under the Saffir-Simpson scale. These monster storms pack wind speeds of 157 miles per hour or more. Since 1924, there have been 35 documented hurricanes in the North Atlantic that reached this level—and of those, five have hit ...read more

• Sep 6, 2019

Before the Tulsa Race Massacre where the Oklahoma city’s black district of Greenwood was attacked by a white mob, resulting in two days of bloodshed and destruction, the area had been considered one of the most affluent African American communities in the United States for the ...read more

• Sep 13, 2019

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

• Sep 4, 2019

At midnight on July 1, 1997, Hong Kong returned to Chinese control after a century and a half of British colonial rule. The handover was meant to establish a “one country, two systems” relationship between China and Hong Kong that would last until 2047, with Hong Kong existing as ...read more

• Sep 3, 2019

In the frigid waters off King William’s Island, in northern Canada, the wreck of a ship belonging to British explorer Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition to find the Northwest Passage, has been preserved nearly intact for more than 170 years. The HMS Terror, one of two ...read more

• Aug 29, 2019

Knowledge is power, as the saying goes, and the invention of the mechanical movable type printing press helped disseminate knowledge wider and faster than ever before. German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg is credited with inventing the printing press around 1436, although he was ...read more

• Sep 3, 2019

The papers were handed out one by one to the elderly recipients—most frail, some in wheelchairs. To some, it may have looked like a run-of-the-mill governmental ceremony with the usual federal fanfare. But to Norman Mineta, a California congressman and future Secretary of ...read more

• Aug 29, 2019

The U.S. food stamp program was launched at a time when the nation was facing a tragic paradox: As millions of Americans suffered from hunger during the Great Depression, the country’s farmers agonized under a crushing bounty. The economic collapse of the 1930s had sapped food ...read more

• Aug 27, 2019

Today many Americans see Labor Day as time off from work, an opportunity to enjoy a barbecue with friends and family and a final moment of summertime relaxation before the busy fall season begins. But the history behind the Labor Day holiday is far more complex and dramatic than ...read more

• Sep 6, 2019

Inventions through history have often made everyday tasks easier and some, like trains, the cotton gin, printing press, and computers, have been revolutionary. But other inventions have backfired and proven to be detrimental in the long run. Among those who contributed some of ...read more

• Aug 23, 2019