On April 2, 1917, Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. He was uncertain about so many things. But Woodrow Wilson wasn’t at all uncertain about ...

The 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment is a chance to recover less well-known histories of women and the vote. If we take away little else, the suffrage centennial can teach us how the Black ...

One of the Capitol Crawl’s youngest participants was eight-year-old Jennifer Keelan, whose mother congratulated her when she reached the top. Photo by Tom Olin. Imagine climbing up 83 steps. Perhaps ...

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 ...

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/cancer-detectives-brief-history-speculum/ 1847 specula. Source image: National Library of Medicine. Many ...

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 ...

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, ...

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/citizen-hearst-william-randolph-hearst-and-mccarthyism/ Caption: Senator Joseph MCcarthy presents to fellow U.S ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...