The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as "Jim Crow" represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three quarters of a century beginning in ...

Robert E. Lee was a central character in America's defining national trauma, the Civil War. These images explore other facets of his life, from the young boy coping with the abandonment of an admired ...

Eugenicists like Paul Popenoe relied on dangerously flawed theories of heredity to describe different groups of people. Popenoe shows a couple a pedigree of "Black People of Artistic Ability," 1930.

Scientist Mária Telkes spent her life chasing the sun. Telkes, who was born in Hungary in 1900, first became interested in solar energy while studying at the University of Budapest. After receiving ...

One of the Capitol Crawl’s youngest participants was eight-year-old Jennifer Keelan, whose mother congratulated her when she reached the top. Photo by Tom Olin. Imagine climbing up 83 steps. Perhaps ...

Three decades before the “War on Terror” and its orientation of “Islamic terrorism” as the principal threat to American security, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was its standing talisman. The color ...

According to one of the Iranian students who seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979, the United States provoked action against its diplomats with one fateful decision. On October 22, ...

A diverse and potent force in space exploration, women at NASA who served as human computers were ultimately responsible for sending astronauts to the moon. By Nathalia Holt Computers at the Jet ...

Every time a lynching occurred in the U.S. between 1920 and 1936, the NAACP flew this flag from their headquarters on Fifth Avenue in New York. Library of Congress. Can one flag really change public ...

Meteorologist Tetsuya “Ted” Fujita kept a lot of records. He recorded the prevalence of tornados in the United States by month and by state. He recorded the shapes of clouds. He recorded every ...

The white folks had all the courts, all the guns, all the hounds, all the railroads, all the telegraph wires, all the newspapers, all the money and nearly all the land – and we had only our ignorance, ...

For a long time, “fashion” had nothing to do with it. Even before the Industrial Revolution, laborers from around the globe–farmhands, builders, miners–often wore some kind of homespun denim workwear.