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.

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

Susanna on the way to Casa Susanna, Catskills, New York, Art Gallery of Ontario © AGO In the 1960s, a group of cross-dressing men and transgender women spent ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...