Ten years after mental illness forced him to retire from public life, King George III, the British king who lost the American colonies, dies at the age of 81. In 1760, 20-year-old George succeeded his grandfather, George II, as king of Great Britain and Ireland. Although he hoped to govern more directly than his predecessor […]

Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven,” beginning “Once upon a midnight dreary,” is published on this day in the New York Evening Mirror. Poe’s dark and macabre work reflected his own tumultuous and difficult life. Born in Boston in 1809, Poe was orphaned at age three and went to live with the family of […]

On January 29, 1915, in the Argonne region of France, German lieutenant Erwin Rommel leads his company in the daring capture of four French block-houses, the structures used on the front to house artillery positions. Rommel crept through the French wire first and then called for the rest of his company to follow him. When […]

One of Hollywood’s most enduring marriages begins on January 29, 1958, when Paul Newman weds Joanne Woodward in Las Vegas, Nevada. The two actors first met in the early 1950s while working in New York City on a Broadway production of the romantic drama Picnic. Newman had a supporting role and filled in for the […]

Stanley Kubrick’s black comic masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb opens in theaters to both critical and popular acclaim. The movie’s popularity was evidence of changing attitudes toward atomic weapons and the concept of nuclear deterrence. The movie focused on the actions of a rogue U.S. officer […]

On January 29, 2002, in his first State of the Union address since the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush describes Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” Just over a year into his presidency and several months into a war which would eventually become the longest in American history, Bush identified […]