Pamplona, Spain, is known for its annual encierro, or running of the bulls, as famously portrayed in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises. This Tuesday Denver will be the site of a somewhat similar spectacle: 30 longhorn cattle—followed by 100 sheep, driven by trained stock dogs—will…
"In this job I am not worried about my enemies," President Warren G. Harding once famously quipped. "It is my friends that keep me awake at nights." He wasn't joking.
Even though it lasted only from 1921 to 1923, Harding's administration became the most scandal-ridden to date, thanks to several of…
Hank Williams as a rising country music star (Courtesy of PBS)
In the early morning of New Year’s Day, 1953, chauffeur Charles Carr pulled his Cadillac into the lot of a drive-in movie theater in Oak Hill, West Virginia, to check on his passenger, the country-music superstar Hank Williams, who had…
“In this job I am not worried about my enemies,” President Warren G. Harding once famously quipped. “It is my friends that keep me awake at nights.” He wasn’t joking.
Even though it lasted only from 1921 to 1923, Harding’s administration became the most scandal-ridden to date, thanks to several…
At about 10:25 on the morning of November 27, 1978—29 years ago today—William Melia, an engineer at San Francisco’s City Hall, noticed a man pacing nervously outside his first-floor window. He recognized the man as Dan White, until recently a San Francisco city supervisor—the equivalent of a city…
A tent city that would become Anadarko, Oklahoma, shown in 1901, six years before statehood (Bettmann/Corbis)
A century ago today, on November 16, 1907, Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state. Oklahoma City, the state capital, and Tulsa are both holding lavish events today, with parades and…
On Friday, November 1, 1918, the deadliest rapid-transit crash in American history occurred in Brooklyn, New York. An elevated train driven by an unqualified and inexperienced motorman derailed in a tunnel and killed nearly 100 rush-hour commuters. The accident is largely forgotten today, but it…
Twenty-five years ago today, on October 1, 1982, the much-anticipated EPCOT Center opened at Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Florida. It was a massive 260-acre park packed with technology and cultural exhibits that cost more than $1 billion to build. But it was a mere shadow of what Walt Disney had…
Forty-five years ago yesterday, on August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead in the bedroom of her Los Angeles home. Her housekeeper and her psychiatrist broke into the locked bedroom at about 3:30 a.m. and discovered her face-down on her bed, nude, with a hand on a telephone receiver. An…
A book examines the ubiquity of the sixteenth President.
Since Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, the torrent of books about him has never let up. It started with the fascinating but unreliable biography by his former law partner, William H. Herndon; in just the past few years it has…
