Decades before his star role in the 1995 Pixar film, Toy Story, Mr. Potato Head was a business trailblazer. As the first toy to be marketed on television, Mr. Potato Head broke new ground with ads ...

On May 8, 1970, “the Hard Hat Riot” erupted in lower Manhattan. At midday, construction workers, including those building the World Trade Center, violently clashed with students demonstrating against ...

In the fall of 1959, Nikita Khrushchev became the first Soviet premier to visit the United States. Khrushchev said he was “curious to have a look at America” and had been trying to get an invitation ...

More than forty years after its conclusion, the Vietnam War is a persistent wound on the American psyche. It is a war that divided families and communities, and sparked massive protests on college ...

Grants in Egypt. Library of Congress. When Ulysses S. Grant left the White House in 1877, he certainly needed a vacation. His reputation had been severely damaged by corruption in his administration ...

After the success of the preliminary Boston trials for the Pill in 1954 and 1955, John Rock and Gregory Pincus were confident they had honed in on an oral contraceptive. But without large-scale human ...

Ever prescient, John Adams rightly predicted that Benjamin Franklin would forever occupy an elevated position in the American imagination. He was, after all, the man who risked life and limb to fly a ...

Earl Little, a Baptist minister born in Reynolds, Georgia, and his second wife, Louise, born in Grenada, British West Indies, were long-standing members of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement ...

Over the course of 13 days in October 1962, Kennedy avoided war with the Soviet Union through a willingness to proceed with caution -- and a gamble that Premier Nikita Khrushchev was just as horrified ...

Fannie Lou Hamer was born in 1917, the 20th child of Lou Ella and James Lee Townsend, sharecroppers east of the Mississippi Delta. She first joined her family in the cotton fields at the age of six.

The twin towers of the World Trade Center, among the best known buildings in the world, represent only one step in the century-long evolution of skyscrapers in New York City. Here are some pioneering ...

For over six decades, Ansel Adams turned his camera on the American wilderness, becoming one of the most recognized photographers in the world. Browse some of Adams's most beloved images in this photo ...