The source of the influenza illness remained a mystery to scientists as viruses were too small and obscure for the optical microscopes available in 1918. Credit: Naval Historical Society Of these, an ...

The white folks had all the courts, all the guns, all the hounds, all the railroads, all the telegraph wires, all the newspapers, all the money and nearly all the land – and we had only our ignorance, ...

Scientist Mária Telkes spent her life chasing the sun. Telkes, who was born in Hungary in 1900, first became interested in solar energy while studying at the University of Budapest. After receiving ...

According to one of the Iranian students who seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979, the United States provoked action against its diplomats with one fateful decision. On October 22, ...

Left: A racist postcard, labeled with the epithet “Little Africa,” depicts Greenwood burning during the massacre. Image credits: Tulsa Historical Society & Museum and Mike Simons I have never seen a ...

In the spring of 1977, the doors of 254 West 54th Street opened to a New York City nightclub that in its glamour and pageantry defined the disco era. Studio 54 was situated in a former opera house and ...

Upton Sinclair, 1900. Library of Congress. By the turn of the 20th century, the unsavory practices of the country’s meat processing industry had already engendered some major scandals. The most ...

In September of 1904, William Mulholland, the man in charge of making sure Los Angeles had enough water, took a fateful camping trip. Together with one of the city’s former mayors, Fred Eaton, ...

Decades before his star role in the 1995 Pixar film, Toy Story, Mr. Potato Head was a business trailblazer. As the first toy to be marketed on television, Mr. Potato Head broke new ground with ads ...

During the first half of the 20th century, new fashion trends often permeated culture by starting at the top and trickling down to the masses over time. To some degree this is true of the zoot suit, ...

She made a name for herself by speaking out against fascism abroad and at home. Then the fight got personal. On the morning of August 25, 1934, the American journalist Dorothy Thompson was taking ...

A portrait of the Sadgwar sisters printed on a cabinet card, which could be shared with loved ones or exchanged with visitors. Courtesy National Bahá’í Archives. Not all images of resistance contain ...