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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

Hearst Castle exterior: front of the Casa Grande. Photo by Wim Wiskerke / Alamy Stock Photo From the early 1920s until 1947, William Randolph Hearst lived in a castle on his family's San Simeon estate ...

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, ...

Upton Sinclair, 1900. Library of Congress. By the turn of the 20th century, the unsavory practices of the country’s meat processing industry had already engendered some major scandals. The most ...

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.

In the spring of 1977, the doors of 254 West 54th Street opened to a New York City nightclub that in its glamour and pageantry defined the disco era. Studio 54 was situated in a former opera house and ...

She tracked her targets’ coded messages for more than two years, painstakingly translating gibberish into actionable intelligence. Then, without warning, the messages ceased. When covert transmissions ...

A mob celebrates in front of the burned Love & Charity Hall which housed the black-owned and -edited newspaper, The Daily Record. Courtesy of New Hanover County Public Library. This is the story of ...

The 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment is a chance to recover less well-known histories of women and the vote. If we take away little else, the suffrage centennial can teach us how the Black ...