The assassination of President John F. Kennedy devastated the nation. But the day before the shooting was just a normal day. It was particularly calm and uneventful for the gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald.
Once a party drug, ketamine has found its way into modern medicine.
Four years before Amelia Earhart ever got into a plane, Ruth Law was already making a name for herself in the skies.
Sexual harassment has been existed in showbiz as long as there have been bright lights.
Back in the 1830s, Jim Crow wasn't yet a symbol of inequality. He was a fictional character in minstrel shows who, to entertain his audiences, performed in blackface.
After receiving complaints about carriages driving too fast, Washington D.C. policeman William H. West arrested a presidential speed demon.
For decades, the boundary between Mexico and the United States was little more than an imaginary line in the sand.
If you work in an office without offices, with just about everyone working in a large spare space full of stylish desks, straight lines and papers stored in a credenza, then you have met Florence Knoll Bassett.
A full year after the King James Bible was printed in 1631, people discovered an error.
After the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, John Surratt traveled across three continents, wore disguises and used fake names for nearly two years to escape authorities.
Pinball was once so vilified that it was banned in cities across the United States.
When Eugene Cernan walked on the moon, he didn’t know he’d be the last astronaut to make the journey.
In the early days of the House, some congresspeople thought hats had no place atop the heads of representatives debating the great issues of the day. Hats, they argued, weren’t dignified.
When Alexander Hamilton argued in favor of lifetime tenures for Supreme Court justices, he probably didn’t foresee them living past their prime.
Lego started as a company that made wooden toys, and grew into an empire of plastic building blocks.
John Calhoun’s rodent experiments revolutionized the way we think about social behavior and the impact of growing populations.
Presidents throughout history have visited battlefields to better grasp conditions, reverse public doubt and signal that the country took war efforts seriously.
White House maid Elizabeth Jaffray not only cleaned up after presidents, she had an amazing insight into their appetites.
Fritz Kuhn was the leader of the pro-Nazi group known as the German American Bund. He was a hero to his audience, and a scourge on the world to most others.
After being fired from his job for being gay, Frank Kameny took his battle for equality to the nation’s highest court.
A professor at The University of Virginia was fatally shot by a student in 1840.
The story of how the anonymous soldier came to rest inside the famous tomb is almost as unknown as his identity.
Along with staggering death tolls, the "Great War" generated memorable literature, geopolitical upheaval, hope, disillusion, the Russian Revolution and the seeds of World War II.
The first mass police shooting on a U.S. college campus happened two years before the Ohio National Guard opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University.
Mark Twain first laid eyes on a “newfangled typing machine,” as he called it, sometime in the early 1870s.
When Gerald Ford took over the presidency after Richard Nixon’s resignation, he soon made a controversial choice: he pardoned Nixon.
Some believed that a lottery was more democratic than a vote.
In 1950, Mary Ann Van Hoof gathered an estimated 100,000 people to see the Virgin Mary on a farm in Necedah, Wisconsin.
From the mid-1800s to well into the 20th century, the Capitol’s Demon Cat was the top dog of Washington ghost stories.
In 1956, New York City’s bomb squad used criminal profiling to catch a terrorist known as “The Mad Bomber.”
