In 1897, Bayer employee Felix Hoffmann found a way to create a stable form of the drug that was easier and more pleasant to take. (Some evidence shows that Hoffmann’s work was really done by a Jewish chemist, Arthur Eichengrun, whose contributions were covered up during the Nazi era.) After obtaining the patent rights, Bayer began distributing aspirin in powder form to physicians to give to their patients one gram at a time. The brand name came from “a” for acetyl, “spir” from the spirea plant (a source of salicin) and the suffix “in,” commonly used for medications. It quickly became the number-one drug worldwide.

Aspirin was made available in tablet form and without a prescription in 1915. Two years later, when Bayer’s patent expired during the First World War, the company lost the trademark rights to aspirin in various countries. After the United States entered the war against Germany in April 1917, the Alien Property Custodian, a government agency that administers foreign property, seized Bayer’s U.S. assets. Two years later, the Bayer company name and trademarks for the United States and Canada were auctioned off and purchased by Sterling Products Company, later Sterling Winthrop, for $5.3 million.

Bayer became part of IG Farben, the conglomerate of German chemical industries that formed the financial heart of the Nazi regime. After World War II, the Allies split apart IG Farben, and Bayer again emerged as an individual company. Its purchase of Miles Laboratories in 1978 gave it a product line including Alka-Seltzer and Flintstones and One-A-Day Vitamins. In 1994, Bayer bought Sterling Winthrop’s over-the-counter business, gaining back rights to the Bayer name and logo and allowing the company once again to profit from American sales of its most famous product.

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Cronkite had reported from the European front in World War II and anchored CBS' coverage of the 1952 and 1956 elections, as well as the 1960 Olympics. He took over as the network's premier news anchor in April of 1962, just in time to cover the most dramatic events of the 1960s. The Cuban Missile Crisis came six months into his tenure, and a year later Cronkite would break the news that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. The footage of Cronkite removing his glasses and composing himself as he read the official AP report of Kennedy's death, which he did 38 minutes after the president was pronounced dead in Dallas, is one of the most enduring images of one of the most traumatic days in American history.

Cronkite would cover the other assassinations that rocked the country over the coming years, including those of Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and John Lennon. He also reported on some of the most uplifting moments of the era, most famously the Moon Landing in 1969.

In 1968, at the invitation of the U.S. military, Cronkite traveled to Vietnam. In a televised special on the war, he said, "it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate." "Uncle Walter" was already a household name and one of the most respected men in the country, and his pronouncement that the war was un-winnable is said to have contributed to President Lyndon Johnson's decision not to run for re-election in 1968. Moments like these led to the perception that Cronkite was more straightforward with the American people than their own elected leaders, an attitude reflected in a 1972 poll that named him the most trusted person in the country. The next few years saw the unfolding of the Watergate Scandal, which further degraded public confidence in Washington and which Cronkite followed closely.

Cronkite relinquished the anchor's chair at the age of 65 because CBS mandated that its employees retire at that age. He remained in public life for many years, writing a syndicated column and regularly hosting the Kennedy Center Honors. His replacement, Dan Rather, would hold the job even longer than Cronkite, anchoring the Evening News until 2005. Nonetheless, due both to his near-universally recognized credibility and to the century-defining events he reported to the nation, Cronkite remains a singular figure, quite possibly the most respected television news journalist in American history. He died in 2009.

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The Dutch Resistance was one of the fiercest of all the underground movements in Nazi-occupied Europe. “The Dutch never accepted the German contention that… the war was over,” wrote the Dutch foreign minister in a postwar account of life under Nazi occupation. “[T]heir acts of resistance and sabotage grew more audacious as time passed.”

Those acts of resistance and sabotage included harboring Allied soldiers and pilots who either parachuted or crash-landed within Dutch territory, harboring Dutch Jews, and killing German troops. The Resistance was composed of representatives from all segments of Dutch society, ranging from the most conservative to communists.

Rauter was head of the SS in Holland and answered directly to Heinrich Himmler, the SS commander. In 1941, during a strike that broke out in Amsterdam among Dutch workers to protest the round-up of almost 400 Dutch Jews, Rauter ordered the SS and German troops to open fire on the strikers, killing 11. The Jews, whom the strikers were trying to protect, were deported to Buchenwald. All were dead by the fall.

Rauter was riding in an SS truck, filled with food destined for the Luftwaffe (the German air force) based near Apeldoorn on March 6, 1945, when some young members of the Dutch Resistance ambushed the truck. The closing days of the war had left much of occupied Holland close to famine conditions, and the guerrillas were determined to co-opt the food. They did not know Rauter was in the truck when it was attacked; Rauter was shot during the heist attempt but lived. In retaliation, the SS proceeded to round up and execute 263 Dutchmen, some of whom were Resistance fighters who were already being held in prison.

Rauter was tried for war crimes by the Dutch court Den Haag. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. He appealed the sentence at Nuremberg in 1949, but the sentence was upheld and he was executed that year.

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Thirteen days earlier, on February 23, Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna ordered a siege of the Alamo Mission (near present-day San Antonio), which had been occupied by rebel Texas forces since December. An army of over 1,000 Mexican soldiers began descending on the makeshift fort and setting up artillery.

Over the next two weeks, the two armies traded gunfire, but there were few casualties. Despite being clearly outnumbered, Alamo co-commanders James Bowie and William Travis insisted on remaining in place. The volunteer soldiers defending the Alamo included doctors and farmers, as well as Tennessee frontiersman and Congressman Davy Crockett, who fought in the Tennessee militia.

The final attack came before dawn on March 6. Mexican troops breached the north wall and flooded into the compound, awakening many of the Texans inside. The fighting lasted 90 minutes, some of it hand-to-hand combat. Bowie and Travis were killed, as was Crockett, although reports differ as to exactly how and when. Several Texans reportedly surrendered, but Santa Anna ordered all prisoners be executed. Only a handful survived, mostly women and children. Historians estimate several hundred Mexicans died.

After the battle, the Mexican army marched east. Meanwhile, Sam Houston, commander of the Texas forces, had been building and developing his army in Harris County. “Remember the Alamo!” became their rallying cry as an urgent reminder to avenge their earlier defeat. On April 21, Texas and Mexico fought again at the Battle of San Jacinto. Texas was victorious this time, and won independence from Mexico, bringing the Texas Revolution to an end.

The defense of the Alamo remains a symbol of resistance and revolution. The battle has been immortalized in several TV series and films, including 1960’s The Alamo, starring John Wayne as Davy Crockett.

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The Sandy Hook lighthouse first shone its beam on June 11, 1764, after the Provincial Congress of New York orchestrated two lotteries to raise money for its construction. Discussion about the construction of a lighthouse for Sandy Hook had begun nearly a century before, initiated by Colonial Governor Edmund Andros. Forty-three New York merchants proposed the lotteries to the Provincial Council, after losing 20,000 pounds sterling from shipwrecks in early 1761.

Major Malcolm’s task was to prevent the lighthouse from helping the British to reach New York City. The Congress wanted Malcolm to remove the lens and lamps so that the lighthouse could no longer warn ships of the rocky shore; he succeeded. Colonel George Taylor reported six days later that Malcolm had given him eight copper lamps, two tackle falls and blocks, and three casks, and a part of a cast of oil from the dismantling of the beacon.

Malcom’s efforts, however, failed to keep the British from invading New York; they were soon able to put the lighthouse back into service by installing lamps and reflectors. The Patriots attempted to knock the light out again on June 1, by placing cannon on boats and attempting to blow away the British paraphernalia. They managed some damage before being chased away.

The new states of New Jersey and New York bickered over ownership of the lighthouse, until the federal government assumed control of all U.S. lighthouses in 1787. As of 1996, the Sandy Hook lighthouse, the oldest original lighthouse in the United States, passed into the jurisdiction of the National Park Service.

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The Herald of Free Enterprise ferry was an 8,000-ton ship owned by Townsend Car Ferries, Ltd. It usually carried passengers and vehicles from Dover, England, to Calais, France, and back. However, in March 1987, the ferry was transferred into service on the company’s Zeebrugge, Belgium, to Dover route. It made one of its first trips on the new route on a Friday morning with 543 people, 84 cars and 36 trucks on board as it headed across the English Channel to Dover.

The Herald was designed to allow vehicles to drive on and off the ship quickly and easily. Still, in order to save even more time, it was the unofficial policy of the ship’s crew to leave port with the bow doors open and to close them as the ship was already moving, a practice that allowed a small, but normally inconsequential, amount of water into the ferry. The March 6 trip left port with the doors open and the person assigned to close them asleep in a bunk. (It was later revealed that this, too, was not unusual.) The crew members who were supposed to take over this assignment were unable to close the doors as the Herald pushed out to sea.

As crew members frantically pounded the doors with hammers, water flooded into the cargo hold. The vehicles in the hold were tossed back and forth in the water, and a sudden shift in weight caused the ship to tip to the port side. Within minutes, the Herald capsized. Many passengers were thrown into the sea and quickly drowned in the cold 30-foot-deep water. Life preservers kept some afloat until rescuers were able to reach them.

Still other passengers remained trapped inside the Herald, some for more than a day, until rescuers could reach them. Ultimately, more than 400 people survived the disaster, including the ship’s captain and first officer, though both were suspended for their lax safety procedures. The disaster also resulted in the establishment of new and more extensive safety regulations for ferries crossing the English Channel.

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That philosophy would make Rand one of the most deeply divisive figures of the 20th century.

Rand, who was born and educated in Russia, moved to the U.S. at the age of 21, hoping to become a screenwriter. She lived in Chicago and then Los Angeles, working in the movie industry, before settling in New York City.

In her most influential and best-selling novels—The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957)—Rand crafted protagonists who embodied her philosophical ideals. In an appendix to Atlas Shrugged, Rand made the connection explicit: “My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

In addition to novels, she also wrote plays, screenplays and nonfiction, including her essay collections The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966). Rand served as editor of The Objectivist from 1962 to 1971, a periodical platform for her intellectual musings.

Rand drew both cultish admiration and stinging rebukes for her philosophy, which touted selfishness as a virtue and altruism as a vice. Her passionate defense of laissez-faire capitalism endeared her to many political conservatives, libertarians and CEOs. (Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, was a big fan.) But critics decried her elevation of reason at the expense of human emotion—and her focus on extreme individualism with no concern for the greater good—as misguided and toxic.

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Helen Thomas moved to Washington, D.C. in 1942, as a recent college graduate hoping to make a career in media. By 1970, she was a White House correspondent for UPI. She established herself as a serious journalist in the Nixon era, and was the only print journalist to travel with Nixon on his historic trip to China.

Thomas achieved numerous firsts for women in journalism, including being the first woman to serve as White House Bureau Chief, and the first woman to gain membership to the (previously all male) Gridiron club in Washington, DC. She eventually became the club's president, as well as the president of the White House Correspondents' Association. Her career at UPI spanned 57 years, until she resigned from her position after the agency changed ownership in 2000. Even then, she remained in the White House briefing room, in her customary front row seat, as a columnist for Hearst newspapers. She was forced to retire in 2010 in the wake of controversial comments she made on the topic of Israel and Palestine.

Thomas was a famous face in American media for decades. Early in her career, she was often the only female face reporting on the presidency. As UPI's bureau chief, she always asked the first question at presidential press conferences, and always closed them with her signature phrase, "Thank you, Mr. President." Her style was blunt, fearless and at times combative. She was outspoken and opinionated, especially on American foreign policy in the Middle East. She earned the respect of American presidents from Kennedy to Obama, although they sometimes bemoaned her aggressive questioning. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell once remarked, "Isn't there a war somewhere we could send her to?" As one of her colleagues in the White House press corps observed, "She has great respect for the office of the presidency. But she is not intimidated by the person who temporarily inhabits the office."

Helen Thomas died in 2013 at the age of 92.

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David Greenglass was a machinist at Los Alamos, where America developed the atomic bomb. Julius Rosenberg, his brother-in-law, was a member of the American Communist Party and was fired from his government job during the Red Scare. According to Greenglass, Rosenberg asked him to pass highly confidential instructions on making atomic weapons to the Soviet Union. These materials were transferred to the Russians by Harry Gold, an acquaintance of Greenglass. The Soviets exploded their first atomic bomb (and effectively started the Cold War) in September 1949 based on information, including that from Greenglass, they had obtained from spies.

The only direct evidence of the Rosenberg’s involvement was the confession of Greenglass. The left-wing community believed that the Rosenbergs were prosecuted because of their membership in the Communist Party. Their case became the cause célèbre of leftists throughout the nation.

The trial lasted nearly a month, finally ending on April 4 with convictions for all the defendants. The Rosenbergs were sentenced to death row on April 6. Sobell received a thirty-year sentence. Greenglass got fifteen years for his cooperation. Reportedly, the Rosenbergs were offered a deal in which their death sentences would be commuted in return for an admission of their guilt. They refused and were executed.

In 2008, the only surviving defendant, Morton Sobell, admitted that he was a Soviet spy and implicated Julius Rosenberg in industrial and military espionage.

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Born in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, in 1887, O’Keeffe grew up in Virginia and first studied painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. Initially, she embraced a highly abstracted, urban style of art. She later moved to New York where she thrived within the growing community of abstract expressionists. Beginning in 1912, though, she began spending time in Texas and she became the head of the art department at the West Texas State Normal College in 1916. O’Keeffe’s time in Texas sparked her enduring fascination with the stark and powerful western landscape. She began to paint more representational images that drew on the natural forms of the canyons and plains that surrounded her. O’Keeffe’s paintings of cow skulls and calla lilies gained particular attention and won her an enthusiastic audience.

Her marriage to the New York art dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz brought O’Keeffe back to the northeast. For a decade, she divided her time between New York City and the couple’s home in Lake George, New York. In 1919, O’Keeffe made a brief visit to the small New Mexican village of Taos, and she returned for a longer stay in 1929. Attracted to the clear desert light and snow-capped mountains, she began returning to New Mexico every summer to paint. O’Keeffe found a vibrant and supportive community among the artists that had been flocking to Taos and Santa Fe since the 1890s.

After Stieglitz died in 1949, O’Keeffe permanently relocated to Abiquiu, New Mexico. There she continued to produce her hauntingly simple images of the southwestern land she loved. By the time she died in 1986, O’Keeffe was considered one of the preeminent artists of the American West and had inspired legions of imitators.

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In the year 2000, the new company had created something of a music-fan’s utopia—a world in which nearly every song ever recorded was instantly available on your home computer—for free. Even to some at the time, it sounded too good to be true, and in the end, it was. The fantasy world that Napster created came crashing down in 2001 in the face of multiple copyright-violation lawsuits.

Oh, but people enjoyed it while it lasted. At the peak of Napster’s popularity in late 2000 and early 2001, some 60 million users around the world were freely exchanging digital mp3 files with the help of the program developed by Northeastern University college student Shawn Fanning in the summer of 1999. Radiohead? Robert Johnson? The Runaways? Metallica? Nearly all of their music was right at your fingertips, and free for the taking. Which, of course, was a problem for the bands, like Metallica, which after discovering their song “I Disappear” circulating through Napster prior to its official release, filed suit against the company, alleging “vicarious copyright infringement” under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996. Hip-hop artist Dr. Dre soon did the same, but the case that eventually brought Napster down was the $20 billion infringement case filed by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

That case—A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc—wended its way through the courts over the course of 2000 and early 2001 before being decided in favor of the RIAA on February 12, 2001. The decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected Napster’s claims of fair use, as well as its call for the court to institute a payment system that would have compensated the record labels while allowing Napster to stay in business.

Then, on March 5, 2001, District Court Judge Marilyn Patel issued a preliminary injunction ordering Napster to remove, within 72 hours, any songs named by the plaintiffs in a list of their copyrighted material on the Napster network. The following day, March 6, 2001, Napster, Inc. began the process of complying with Judge Patel’s order. Though the company would attempt to stay afloat, it shut down its service just three months later, having begun the process of dismantling itself on this day in 2001.

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Elected as Rhine-Palatinate state premier in 1969, Kohl served the post until 1976, when he became federal chairman of the CDU and led the opposition to Chancellor Schmidt’s government. In 1982, with Germany suffering under persistent economic difficulties, he organized a successful no-confidence vote in the West German Parliament against Schmidt and was subsequently named interim chancellor. In March 1983, the West German people confirmed him as chancellor, and in 1987 German economic recovery led to his reelection.

In the fall of 1989, the communist government of East Germany collapsed, and Kohl led the efforts to reunify the two Germanys. In March 1990, in the first all-German elections in six decades, Kohl was elected the first chancellor of a reunified Germany. During his third term as chancellor, Kohl oversaw the formidable task of absorbing East Germany’s crippled economy into the West and was an advocate of the movement for a united Europe. In 1994, Kohl was elected to a fourth term, but increasing unemployment in Germany and his cuts to the country’s welfare system led to his defeat by Gerhard Schroder and the Social Democrats in 1998. Kohl died in 2017, at the age of 87.

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Malenkov was one of the few old-time Bolsheviks who had survived Stalin’s bloody purges of the 1930s. A quiet figure who seemed to prefer working in the background, Malenkov was not taken seriously by many of his peers in the Soviet government, but under Stalin’s watchful eye he proceeded up the Communist Party hierarchy throughout the 1930s and 1940s. By the late-1940s it was widely assumed that he would succeed Stalin.

When Stalin died in March 1953, Malenkov took the position of premier and first secretary of the Communist Party. It appeared that he might have a reformist streak, as he called for cuts in military spending and eased up on political repression in the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc nations. These actions might have proved his undoing. In just two weeks, his main political opponent in the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, had organized a coalition of political and military leaders against Malenkov and took over as first secretary.

In February 1955, this same group voted Malenkov out as premier and a Khrushchev puppet, Nikolai Bulganin, took over. Malenkov seethed at this action and in 1957 joined in a plot to overthrow Khrushchev. When the attempt failed, he was dismissed from his government positions and expelled from the Communist Party. Instead of imprisonment, Malenkov faced the disgrace of being sent to Kazakhstan to serve as the manager of a hydroelectric operation. He died in 1988.

Malenkov was a transition figure from the iron-fisted dictatorship of Joseph Stalin to the more moderate regime instituted by Nikita Khrushchev. In an ironic turn of affairs, Khrushchev eventually supported many of the reforms first put forward by Malenkov.

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For two years beginning in 1490, he lived in the Medici palace, where he was a student of the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni and studied the Medici art collection, which included ancient Roman statuary.

With the expulsion of the Medici family from Florence in 1494, Michelangelo traveled to Bologna and Rome, where he was commissioned to do several works. His most important early work was the Pieta (1498), a sculpture based on a traditional type of devotional image that showed the body of Christ in the lap of the Virgin Mary. Demonstrating masterful technical skill, he extracted the two perfectly balanced figures of the Pieta from a single block of marble.

With the success of the Pieta, the artist was commissioned to sculpt a monumental statue of the biblical character David for the Florence cathedral. The 17-foot statue, produced in the classical style, demonstrates the artist’s exhaustive knowledge of human anatomy and form. In the work, David is shown watching the approach of his foe Goliath, with every muscle tensed and a pose suggesting impending movement. Upon the completion of David in 1504, Michelangelo’s reputation was firmly established.

That year, he agreed to paint a mural for the Florence city hall to rest alongside one being painted by Leonardo da Vinci, another leading Renaissance artist and an influence on Michelangelo. These murals, which depicted military scenes, have not survived. In 1505, he began work on a planned group of 12 marble apostles for the Florence cathedral but abandoned the project when he was commissioned to design and sculpt a massive tomb for Pope Julius II in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. There were to have been 40 sculptures made for the tomb, but the pope soon ran out of funds for the project, and Michelangelo left Rome.

In 1508, he was called back to Rome to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the chief consecrated space in the Vatican. Michelangelo’s epic ceiling frescoes, which took several years to complete, are among his most memorable works. Central in a complex system of decoration featuring numerous figures are nine panels devoted to biblical world history. The most famous of these is The Creation of Adam, a painting in which the arms of God and Adam are outstretched toward each other.

In 1512, Michelangelo completed the Sistine Chapel ceiling and returned to his work on Pope Julius II’s tomb. He eventually completed a total of just three statues for the tomb, which was eventually placed in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. The most notable of the three is Moses (1513-15), a majestic statue made from a block of marble regarded as unmalleable by other sculptors. In Moses, as in David, Michelangelo infused the stone with a powerful sense of tension and movement.

Having revolutionized European sculpture and painting, Michelangelo turned to architecture in the latter half of his life. His first major architectural achievement was the Medici chapel in the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, built to house the tombs of the two young Medici family heirs who had recently died. The chapel, which he worked on until 1534, featured many innovative architectural forms based on classical models. The Laurentian Library, which he built as an annex to the same church, is notable for its stair-hall, known as the ricetto, which is regarded as the first instance of mannerism as an architectural style. Mannerism, a successor to the Renaissance artistic movement, subverted harmonious classical forms in favor of expressiveness.

In 1534, Michelangelo left Florence for the last time and traveled to Rome, where he would work and live for the rest of his life. That year saw his painting of the The Last Judgment on a wall above the altar in the Sistine Chapel for Pope Paul III. The massive painting depicts Christ’s damnation of sinners and blessing of the virtuous, and is regarded as a masterpiece of early mannerism. During the last three decades of his life, Michelangelo lent his talents to the design of numerous monuments and buildings for Rome, which the pope and city leaders were determined to restore to the grandeur of its ancient past. The Capitoline Square and the dome of St. Peter’s, designed by Michelangelo but not completed in his lifetime, remain two of Rome’s most famous visual landmarks.

Michelangelo worked until his death in 1564 at the age of 88. In addition to his major artistic works, he produced numerous other sculptures, frescoes, architectural designs, and drawings, many of which are unfinished and some of which are lost. He was also an accomplished poet, and some 300 of his poems are preserved. In his lifetime, he was celebrated as Europe’s greatest living artist, and today he is held up as one of the greatest artists of all time, as exalted in the visual arts as William Shakespeare is in literature or Ludwig van Beethoven is in music.

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Monroe, who was born into the Virginia slave-holding planter class, favored strong states’ rights, but stood back and let Congress argue over the issue of slavery in the new territories. Monroe then closely scrutinized any proposed legislation for its constitutionality. He realized that slavery conflicted with the values written into the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence but, like his fellow Virginians Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, feared abolition would split apart the nation they had fought so hard to establish.

Passage of the Missouri Compromise contributed to the Era of Good Feelings over which Monroe presided and facilitated his election to a second term. In his second inaugural address, Monroe optimistically pointed out that although the nation had struggled in its infancy, no serious conflict has arisen that was not solved peacefully between the federal and state governments. By steadily pursuing this course, he predicted, there is every reason to believe that our system will soon attain the highest degree of perfection of which human institutions are capable.

In the end, the Missouri Compromise failed to permanently ease the underlying tensions caused by the slavery issue. The conflict that flared up during the bill’s drafting presaged how the nation would eventually divide along territorial, economic and ideological lines 40 years later during the Civil War.

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In 1834, Dred Scott, an enslaved man, had been taken to Illinois, a free state, and then Wisconsin territory, where the Missouri Compromise of 1820 prohibited slavery. Scott lived in Wisconsin with his master, Dr. John Emerson, for several years before returning to Missouri, a slave state. In 1846, after Emerson died, Scott sued his master’s widow for his freedom on the grounds that he had lived as a resident of a free state and territory. He won his suit in a lower court, but the Missouri supreme court reversed the decision.

Scott appealed the decision, and as his new master, J.F.A. Sanford, was a resident of New York, a federal court decided to hear the case on the basis of the diversity of state citizenship represented. After a federal district court decided against Scott, the case came on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which was divided along slavery and antislavery lines; although the Southern justices had a majority.

During the trial, the antislavery justices used the case to defend the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise, which had been repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. The Southern majority responded by ruling on March 6, 1857, that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional and that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. Three of the Southern justices also held that African Americans who were enslaved or whose ancestors were enslaved were not entitled to the rights of a federal citizen and therefore had no standing in court.

These rulings all confirmed that, in the view of the nation’s highest court, under no condition did Dred Scott have the legal right to request his freedom. The Supreme Court’s verdict further inflamed the irrepressible differences in America over the issue of slavery, which in 1861 erupted with the outbreak of the American Civil War.

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With its trademark blue-and-white uniforms (originally inspired by those of an English team), Madrid began to make a name for itself in Spain almost right away. From 1905 to 1908, with future coach Arthur Johnson on the roster, the team won four cup titles in a row. In 1932, Real Madrid won the first of (as of 2024) 36 championships in La Liga, the top Spanish soccer league, including an impressive five consecutive titles from 1986 to 1990.

Real Madrid’s legendary status internationally was solidified under the leadership of Santiago Bernabeu Yeste, who played for the team from 1912 to 1927 and served as club president from 1943 to 1978. In 1953, Bernabeu began to stock his roster with the best players he could find from around the world, instead of just the best in Spain, beginning with Madrid’s most famous soccer icon, Argentine star Alfredo Di Stefano. The resulting team won the European Cup, Europe’s football championship, an unprecedented five times in a row, from 1956 through 1960. Bernabeu then switched course in the 1960s and built a team entirely of Spanish players. In 1966, Real Madrid won its sixth European cup with a team of Spanish “hippies” who rivaled the Beatles in popularity on the European continent.

In 2000, soccer’s international governing body, FIFA, selected Real Madrid the best football team of the 20th century. Two years later, the club celebrated its 100-year anniversary.

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