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, ...

On February 15, 1907, the New York Central Railroad Company initiated electrified rail service from Grand Central to the Westchester suburb of White Plains. The New York papers reported commuters' ...

Mississippi was a hostile place for African Americans in the first part of the 20th century. The rule of law was applied differently for blacks and whites. Jim Crow, the legalized segregation and ...

Norman Borlaug with Mexican field technicians who contributed to early seed production of improved wheat varieties, in the field near Ciudad Obregón, Sonora, northern Mexico, c. 1952. International ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Eugenicists like Paul Popenoe relied on dangerously flawed theories of heredity to describe different groups of people. Popenoe shows a couple a pedigree of "Black People of Artistic Ability," 1930.

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 ...

For a long time, “fashion” had nothing to do with it. Even before the Industrial Revolution, laborers from around the globe–farmhands, builders, miners–often wore some kind of homespun denim workwear.

Every time a lynching occurred in the U.S. between 1920 and 1936, the NAACP flew this flag from their headquarters on Fifth Avenue in New York. Library of Congress. Can one flag really change public ...