American History
Newton Knight Led an Interracial Revolt Against the Confederacy in Mississippi
In 1863, Newton Knight deserted the Confederate Army and organized an interracial guerrilla militia in Mississippi's piney woods — defying…
Real Monuments Men Raced to Save 5 Million Nazi-Stolen Artworks
In a booby-trapped Austrian salt mine, a small Allied unit of curators and art historians made a desperate bid to…
Best Korean War Books to Read Before You Forget It Was Fought
The Korean War killed 36,000 Americans and millions of others, yet vanished from collective memory. These essential history books —…
Great Depression Dust Bowl: When Black Sunday Made Two Catastrophes One
From the stock market crash of 1929 to Black Sunday's eight-thousand-foot dust wall in 1935, the Great Depression fused economic…
Roanoke Colony’s 117 Settlers Didn’t Vanish — Archaeology Shows Where They Went
The Roanoke Colony didn't disappear without a trace — the colonists carved their destination before they left. New archaeological evidence…
Ken Burns’ Vietnam War Doc Unearthed Footage Buried for 50 Years
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's 18-hour PBS Vietnam War documentary spent a decade recovering military film, classified footage, and Vietnamese…
American Revolution Trivia: 8 Verified Facts Stranger Than Fiction
From Benedict Arnold's legless monument at Saratoga to Continental Congress pamphlets poaching Hessian mercenaries in German, the real American Revolution…
Cockade History: The Ribbon Badge That Toppled the Bastille
A cockade — a simple knot of ribbons pinned to a hat — helped start revolutions on three continents, stitched…
Britain Voted on Europe in 1975 — and the Result Shaped Brexit
Forty-one years before Brexit, Britain held its first referendum on European membership — and almost nobody in 2016 remembered it.…
How Tlaxcalan Warriors — Not Cortés’s 600 Men — Brought Down the Aztec Empire
The fall of the Aztec Empire is usually credited to Spanish steel and smallpox, but the decisive factor was a…