For six years, the specter of defeat had dogged Gen. George Washington’s every thought. As advantage after advantage slipped away, the American coffers dried up, and the most promising general betrayed the Revolution, it looked more and more like Washington and his motley army would lose their…
James Meredith, second from right, on June 27, 1966, after rejoining the march.
(Bettmann/Corbis)Hit the dirt! The cry came 51 years ago today, at 4:15 p.m. on June 6, 1966, just before three shotgun blasts exploded from the bushes along Highway 51 near Hernando, Mississippi. Two of the rounds…
No matter how widely he was hailed as a hero fourteen years earlier, Christopher Columbus was all washed up by the time he died in 1506 (511 years ago this May 20).
A sentimental imagining of the explorer's deathbed.
Crowds from across Spain lined the streets of Seville in 1493 to welcome him home…
A hand-colored lithograph of the Battle of Fredericksburg (Library of Congress)
Some of the Rebels in Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, may have heard the voice of Sgt. Benjamin Hearst before they met the withering Union fire at the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge. Hearst, a veteran…
A panel from an early Katzenjammer Kids strip.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, two popular art forms began parallel transformations. Up until that point, photography and cartooning had each been used primarily to depict isolated scenes. But in the last years of the 1800s, static…
Sherman outside Atlanta, shortly before leaving on his march to the sea. (Library of Congress)
“War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it,” Union Gen. William T. Sherman wrote Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood in early September 1864. “You might as well appeal against the thunder storm as against…
A 1777 pamphlet lets citizens know about the Continental Congress’s plans for a national government.
In June 1776, while Thomas Jefferson was writing the Declaration of Independence, a committee of the Continental Congress began work on another document. Thirteen delegates, most of whom had just…
William Faulkner, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1954. (Library of Congress)
William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897; he would die in 1962 just 50 miles away. He had lived in New York, New Orleans, Hollywood, and Virginia, but he always returned—in body and…
The Purple Heart is known among servicemen as the “medal no one tries to earn,” yet hundreds of thousands have been awarded. It is the oldest military decoration still in use in the world, having been established by Gen. George Washington at a moment when he feared losing his army to mutiny or…
We are all born small, but given the right genes and a rich environment, even the tiniest can grow into giants. On November 26, 1976, the Office of the Secretary of State of New Mexico awarded a trademark to a four-man Albuquerque startup headquartered in a two-bedroom apartment. In the 30 years…
