Panamanians gather in the streets after the riots in 1964. (Michael Rougier/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Few Americans know that January 9 is a national holiday in Panama, and even fewer know why. Today is Martyrs’ Day—commemorating an outbreak of violence between Panama and the United States…
. . . Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. That mantra, a Supreme Court justice once estimated, is familiar to two billion people around the world, mostly from its regular recitation in television crime dramas. Of all the rights guaranteed under our Constitution, no…
The atomic power plant at Shippingport, Pennsylvania. (U.S. Department of Energy)
When residents of western Pennsylvania awoke on December 18, 1957, 50 years ago today, they became the first Americans to make their breakfast toast with energy generated by nuclear fission. During the night, the…
George Eastman’s 50-room mansion, where he lived with his mother. (George Eastman House)
The day is fast approaching when a camera that records pictures on film seems as strange to young people as a wind-up Victrola. Someone who has grown up snapping images on a cell phone can hardly relate to…
In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic North by Northwest, Cary Grant escapes from New York by train and meets Eva Marie Saint in an elegant dining car as the Hudson River rolls by in the background. The train was the 20th Century Limited, and when the film was made it was still the “Greatest Train in…
Louis B. Mayer in 1924, when he joined Metro-Goldwyn and added his own name to that of the company. (Bettmann/Corbis)
November 28, 1907, was a big day in the history of dreams. On that day, exactly 100 years ago, a half-educated scrap-metal dealer opened a 600-seat movie theater in a converted…
Before nylon—and before Lycra, Kevlar, and Teflon—DuPont meant gunpowder. For a hundred years after arriving in America, the du Pont family devoted itself exclusively to the manufacture of explosives. During the 1800s, powder making was a ubiquitous and at times highly lucrative industry across…
The first car drives through the Holland Tunnel, underneath the Hudson River, on opening day in 1927 (Bettmann/Corbis)
One Saturday in the autumn of 1927, 20,000 pedestrians walked through the brand-new Holland Tunnel shouting and singing and listening to their voices echo off the glistening white…
More than a million Americans sailed to Europe in 1917 and 1918 to fight in the Great War. Only three of them, all well over 100 years old, are alive today. And of all who fought, just one emerged as the exemplary doughboy—Alvin York. On this date in 1918, York performed a feat of bravery and…
In September 1850 P. T. Barnum brought Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” across the Atlantic to tour America. He risked everything, even mortgaging his home, to guarantee the famous soprano her extraordinary fee of $150,000. Determined to turn a profit, he generated a blizzard of publicity.…
