On December 20, 1957, while spending the Christmas holidays at Graceland, his newly purchased Tennessee mansion, rock-and-roll star Elvis Presley receives his draft notice for the United States Army. With a suggestive style–one writer called him “Elvis the Pelvis”–a hit movie, ...read more
For an inanimate object weighing just a tiny fraction of an ounce, the postage stamp can sometimes stir up a whole lot of trouble. Throughout U.S. history, stamps have often caused controversy, usually for reasons the post office never anticipated. Here are 11 of the most famous ...read more
Millennials, it turns out, aren’t all shook up about Elvis. (Most of them wouldn’t even get the reference.) According to a news story that drew on the results of a poll of 2,034 Britons by YouGov, an Internet-based market research firm, 29 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds had never ...read more
Jesus Christ When British pop artist Sir Peter Blake and his then-wife Jann Haworth developed the idea for a photomontage of famous people to grace the cover of “Sgt. Pepper,” Paul McCartney, George Harrison and John Lennon gave them a list of possible figures to include. ...read more
1. Elvis had a twin. On January 8, 1935, Elvis Aron (later spelled Aaron) Presley was born at his parents’ two-room house in East Tupelo, Mississippi, about 35 minutes after his identical twin brother, Jesse Garon, who was stillborn. The next day, Jesse was buried in an unmarked ...read more
1. “Migrant Mother,” 1936, California In 1936, photographer Dorothea Lange shot this image of a destitute woman, 32-year-old Florence Owens, with an infant and two other of her seven children at a pea-pickers camp in Nipomo, California. Lange took the photo, which came to be ...read more
1. Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee (April 9, 1865) The only thing civil about the terrible war between the Union and the Confederacy was its climax. On Palm Sunday 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant strode into the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s farmhouse in Appomattox Court House, ...read more
1. Butch Cassidy According to the traditional narrative, the American train and bank robber Butch Cassidy, leader of the Old West gang known as the Wild Bunch, died in a hail of bullets in Bolivia in 1908. But rumors that the notorious bandit (who is seated on the far right in ...read more
Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” (1956) is one of the biggest and most instantly recognizable pop songs in history. It’s a song so closely associated with the King of Rock and Roll, in fact, that many may mistakenly assume that it was a Presley original. In fact, the story of the song ...read more
History credits Sam Phillips, the owner and operator of Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee, with the discovery of Elvis Presley, which is perfectly fair, though it fails to account for the roles of four others in making that discovery possible: The business partner who first ...read more
Popular music icon Elvis Presley dies in Memphis, Tennessee. He was 42. The death of the “King of Rock and Roll” brought legions of mourning fans to Graceland, his mansion in Memphis. Doctors said he died of a heart attack, likely brought on by his addiction to prescription ...read more
On December 21, 1970, rock star Elvis Presley is greeted at the White House by President Richard M. Nixon. Presley’s visit was not just a social call: He wanted to meet Nixon in order to offer his services in the government’s war on drugs. Three weeks earlier, Presley, who wanted ...read more
By the end of 1955, Elvis Presley had nearly 18 months of nonstop touring behind him and two dozen singles already under his belt, though his only hits were on the Country and Western charts. He was a hardworking and hard-to-categorize up-and-comer, but the next six months would ...read more
In the spring of 1957, Elvis Presley was completing his second Hollywood movie, Loving You, and his first movie soundtrack album. He had two studio albums and 48 singles already under his belt and two years of nearly nonstop live appearances behind him. If his life had taken a ...read more
In competing versions of the story, what Elvis Presley really wanted for his birthday was a rifle or a bicycle—both fairly typical choices for a boy his age growing up on the outskirts of Tupelo, Mississippi. Instead, Elvis’s highly protective mother, Gladys—”She never let me out ...read more
When Elvis Presley turned 18 on January 8, 1953, he fulfilled his patriotic duty and legal obligation to register his name with the Selective Service System, thereby making himself eligible for the draft. The Korean War was still underway at the time, but as a student in good ...read more
On November 15, 1956, Love Me Tender, featuring the singer Elvis Presley in his big-screen debut, premieres in New York City at the Paramount Theater. Set in Texas following the American Civil War, the film, which co-starred Richard Egan and Debra Paget, featured Elvis as Clint ...read more
