Roald Amundsen becomes first explorer to reach the South Pole

George Washington, the American revolutionary leader and first president of the United States, dies at his estate in Mount Vernon, Virginia. He was 67 years old. George Washington was born in 1732 to a farm family in Westmoreland County, Virginia. His first direct military experience came as a lieutenant colonel in the Virginia colonial militia […]

A botched burglary attempt further clouds one of the earliest kidnap-for-ransom cases. As he was about to go to bed, wealthy New Yorker Holmes Van Brunt heard burglars breaking into his brother’s house next door. After rounding up three other men to help him surprise the intruders, Van Brunt engaged the thieves in a shotgun […]

On December 14, 1909, four months after tragedy struck at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, race car drivers test out its newly resurfaced—and presumably safer—track. Workers had just finished laying down 3.2 million 10-pound brick pavers over the 2.5-mile oval, which had previously been covered in a messy and dangerous mix of crushed limestone, gravel and […]

In a public exchange of letters with South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, President John F. Kennedy formally announces that the United States will increase aid to South Vietnam, including the expansion of the U.S. troop commitment. Kennedy, concerned with the recent advances made by the communist insurgency movement in South Vietnam wrote, “We shall […]

On December 14, 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Adam Lanza kills 20 first graders and six school employees before turning a gun on himself. Earlier that day, he killed his mother at the home they shared. The Sandy Hook shooting was, at the time, the second-deadliest mass shooting in the United […]