A launching ceremony celebrates the moment when a ship enters the water for the first time. The Queen Mary was launched by her namesake, Queen Mary, before a crowd of more than 250,000. The River Clyde in Scotland had to be dredged and widened to accommodate the 81,237-ton ship.

The Cunard Line began construction of the Queen Mary in 1930 when the luxury liner was known simply as “Job No. 534.” The expensive project was stalled for more than two years because of the Great Depression and was restarted in 1934 with a loan from the British government.

The Queen Mary set sail on her maiden voyage on May 27, 1936, from Southampton to New York City. At the time, she was the second-largest passenger ship in the world behind the Normandie, a French luxury liner.

The Queen Mary operated a weekly transatlantic passenger service until World War II, when she was converted for military service. Painted gray for camouflage, the Queen Mary could transport 16,000 troops at speeds exceeding 30 knots (35 miles per hour), earning her the nickname “Grey Ghost.”

After the war, the Queen Mary returned to civilian service, sailing a weekly route between New York and Southampton until 1967, when air travel effectively sank the passenger ship business. In retirement, the Queen Mary found a second life as a tourist destination. The city of Long Beach, California, bought the Queen Mary in 1967 for $3.4 million and turned her into a floating hotel, museum and conference center.

According to legend, at the Queen Mary’s launching ceremony in 1934, English psychic Lady Mabel Fortescue-Harrison predicted, “The Queen Mary will know her greatest fame and popularity when she never sails another mile or carries another fare-paying passenger.”

For 31 years, the Queen Mary transported 2.2 million passengers and 810,000 military personnel. Since docking in Long Beach, the Queen Mary has welcomed more than 50 million visitors.

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The original “Twilight Zone” ran on CBS for five seasons, from 1959 to 1964, totaling 156 episodes. Each episode used supernatural, science-fiction and fantastical stories to explore human nature, social issues and the shared anxieties of the era.

The first episode, “Where Is Everybody?,” follows Mike Ferris (Earl Holliman), who finds himself alone in a small town without any recollection of how he got there or where he was. Although he finds signs of recent human activity—food cooking, a ringing telephone and a lit movie theater—everyone has mysteriously vanished. The explanation turns out to be far from simple.

Serling, who began his television writing career in the 1950s in Cincinnati, wrote the episode and narrated the show as well. Before working in television, Serling served as a U.S. Army paratrooper in the Pacific during World War II. That scarring experience informed much of his writing about war and violence.

Over the next five seasons, "The Twilight Zone" presented self-contained stories that transported viewers to fictional planets and alternate universes. Episodes often explored themes like American nostalgia, innovation, authority and history. Serling was deeply preoccupied with the possibility of humanity destroying itself. Yet while many of the episodes ended in destruction or hard lessons, others took a lighter approach, including “The Mighty Casey” and “Hocus-Pocus and Frisby.”

The series featured an impressive cast of established movie and television stars of the era, including Buster Keaton, Mickey Rooney and Ed Wynn. Their guest appearances often drew on their well-known personas. For example, Keaton’s episode opened with silent-film storytelling techniques. The show also tapped emerging talent, including Robert Duvall, Charles Bronson and Robert Redford, before they became major stars.

"The Twilight Zone" ended in 1964 amid ratings struggles. Still, the show continued to attract new fans in syndication, eventually spawning several revivals and adaptations, including a 1983 film, a TV revival that debuted in 1985, another that ran from 2002 to 2003 and a Jordan Peele-led revival that ran from 2019 to 2020.

“The Twilight Zone’s” influence has extended far beyond the screen, serving as a cultural touchstone. The series also helped popularize “twilight zone” as a term for situations that are bizarre, surreal or uncanny.

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Born Ernest Evans in South Carolina, Checker sang in a South Philadelphia street-corner harmony group and earned the nickname “Chubby.” The high schooler’s uncanny impersonations of singers such as Fats Domino and Elvis Presley impressed television host Dick Clark, whose wife gave Evans his stage name. Clark asked Checker to perform “The Twist”—written by Hank Ballard, originally recorded by his band the Midnighters and released in 1959 as a B-side that peaked at No. 28—on “American Bandstand.” Beamed into living rooms across the country, Checker’s strikingly similar cover quickly became a hit.

“The Twist” was lyrically simple as was the accompanying dance move that got Americans wiggling their hips and swiveling on the balls of their feet. Without complicated steps or partners required, the dance that Checker likened to putting out a cigarette with a toe while drying off with a towel was accessible even to people with two left feet.

Although it spent only one week as a chart-topper in 1960, “The Twist” proved no teenage fad. The dance was embraced by celebrities and adults in nightclubs such as New York City’s Peppermint Lounge and Harlem’s Smalls Paradise, which was owned by NBA legend Wilt Chamberlain and touted as “the best twist spot in town.” The sustained popularity of “The Twist” led to its return atop the Billboard Hot 100 for a two-week reign in January 1962, making it the only non-Christmas song to hit No. 1 in two different chart runs, according to Tom Breihan’s The Number Ones.

Quickly dubbed “Mr. Twist,” Checker starred in Twist-themed B movies, recorded several follow-ups such as his Grammy-winning hit “Let’s Twist Again” (1961) and even endorsed a line of Chubby Checker’s Twisters shoes. The first dance-craze record to top the Billboard Hot 100 also ushered in decades of dance hits from “The Loco-Motion” to “The Hustle” to “Macarena.” The song was added to Library of Congress National Recording Registry in 2013 and was among the first singles inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

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Stonehenge and a 30-acre triangle of adjoining land—listed as Lot 15 at the auction held at the Palace Theatre—had been privately owned by the family of Sir Edmund Antrobus, whose death in 1915 put the estate on the auction block.

Chubb, born only a few miles from Stonehenge, said he had no plans on bidding on the landmark that day; he just did so on a whim. “While I was in the room, I thought a Salisbury man ought to buy it, and that is how it was done,” Chubb told a newspaper. His wife, Mary, was reportedly expecting him to come home with household items and was less than thrilled with the surprise purchase.

Three years later, on October 26, 1918, Chubb deeded Stonehenge to the British people as a gift. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George honored Chubb in 1919 by naming him Sir Cecil Chubb, First Baronet of Stonehenge.

The deed stipulated that the public would have access to Stonehenge for a modest admission fee, that the monument would be preserved as closely as possible and that new construction nearby would be tightly restricted. Stonehenge is now part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site known as Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites.

The British government started a major renovation of Stonehenge in 1919 to straighten stones and reset them in concrete. Maintenance and preservation of the historic tourist attraction continue a century later.

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On August 4, 1892, Andrew and Abby Borden were found dead in the home they shared with Lizzie and her older sister in Fall River, Massachusetts. Andrew’s mutilated body was discovered on a couch in the sitting room, with his head and face struck repeatedly with an ax or hatchet. When the police came, they found Abby’s body upstairs, also brutally murdered.

Lizzie was arrested one week later and charged with her parents’ murders. Although the police couldn’t find the murder weapon or establish a clear motive for the killings, the circumstantial evidence against Lizzie made her the prime suspect. A family friend, Alice Russell, said she saw Lizzie burning a blue dress—the same dress she wore the day of the murders—claiming that it was covered in “old paint.” Additionally, a local drugstore clerk said Lizzie had tried to buy poison a day before the murders.

The double murder trial of Lizzie Borden began on June 5, 1893, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Newspapers nationwide closely covered the dramatic proceedings, including the moment that Lizzie fainted in the courtroom after the district attorney ended his presentation of the case. In the press, Lizzie was alternatively characterized as a vengeful harpy or a spotless Christian woman, and the case enthralled the public.  

Judge Justin Dewey dealt a blow to the prosecution by excluding Lizzie’s conflicting and confused statements to the police in the days after the murder, because she didn’t have an attorney present. The judge also blocked the drugstore clerk’s testimony about Lizzie attempting to buy poison. This left the prosecution with a flimsy case, something that Dewey made clear to the jury.

On June 20, after 90 minutes of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. An Ohio newspaper reported: “Miss Borden’s head went down upon the rail in front of her, and tears came where they had refused to come for many a long day as she heard the sweetest words ever poured into her willing ears—the words ‘not guilty.’” 

Lizzie lived the rest of her life in Fall River in a stately home called Maplecroft, which she purchased with her sister. She died in 1927 and was buried next to her parents.

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