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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...