When vaudeville impresario Martin Beck "discovered" a struggling Harry Houdini in 1899, it was Houdini's ability to escape from handcuffs which caught his attention. Although Houdini was hardly the ...

The term "Boston Brahmins" refers to a class of wealthy, educated, elite members of Boston society in the nineteenth century. Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the term in a novel in 1861, calling Boston's ...

The fatal duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr shocked the nation. But it was the identity of the man killed, not the fact of the duel itself, that produced such dismay. By 1804, dueling had ...

How the Gold Rush, Prohibition, and a 1990s news report helped define American wine consumption. Labeling bottles of wine in Sonoma County, California, in 1942. Russell Lee/Library of Congress For ...

Fannie Lou Hamer was born in 1917, the 20th child of Lou Ella and James Lee Townsend, sharecroppers east of the Mississippi Delta. She first joined her family in the cotton fields at the age of six.

Yellow fever appeared in the U.S. in the late 17th century. The deadly virus continued to strike cities, mostly eastern seaports and Gulf Coast cities, for the next two hundred years, killing hundreds ...

Steel workers gaze on as molten steel is poured from ladle to casts at Homestead Steel Works, December 31, 1914. PD Andrew Carnegie's relentless efforts to drive down costs and undersell the ...

By the dawn of the 19th century, tuberculosis—or consumption—had killed one in seven of all people that had ever lived. Throughout much of the 1800s, consumptive patients sought "the cure" in ...

Many Americans spent the 1920s in a great mood. Investors flocked to a rising stock market. Companies launched brand-new, cutting-edge products, like radios and washing machines. Exuberant Americans ...

In 1989, after two terms in office, Ronald Reagan delivered this farewell speech. This is the 34th time I'll speak to you from the Oval Office and the last. We've been together 8 years now, and soon ...

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 ...

Susanna on the way to Casa Susanna, Catskills, New York, Art Gallery of Ontario © AGO In the 1960s, a group of cross-dressing men and transgender women spent ...