Lawrence Svobida, a wheat farmer from Kansas, witnessed first-hand the searing drought and relentless winds that crippled the southern Great Plains during the 1930’s. His vivid account is taken from ...

Ansel Adams took his first long trip into the wilderness in 1920, when he was just eighteen. His burro, Mistletoe, carried almost a hundred pounds of gear and food; he himself carried a thirty-pound ...

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, ...

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.

Although President Ronald Reagan did not actually use the phrase "evil empire" in this June 8, 1982 speech, he described the collapse of global communism as inevitable. We're approaching the end of a ...

Three decades before the “War on Terror” and its orientation of “Islamic terrorism” as the principal threat to American security, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was its standing talisman. The color ...

A Tupperware home part, Tupperware, Inc. The business of sales has been a vital part of America's economy since the country's earliest years. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, salesmen accounted ...

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 ...

Sonoma State Home for the Feebleminded Hospital, where sterilizations took place. Historical postcard, from the personal collection of Alex Wellerstein. In February 1930, Concepcion Ruiz, a ...

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 ...

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 ...