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How the Ancient Greeks Designed the Parthenon to Impress—And Last
Few monuments in the world are more recognizable than the Parthenon. Sitting atop a limestone hill rising some 500 feet above the Ilissos Valley in Athens, this soaring marble temple built in tribute to the goddess Athena brings the glory of ancient Greece into the modern world. ...read more
See Photos of How Astronauts Trained for the Apollo Moon Missions
How do you prepare to send someone to a place no one has ever gone before? For NASA in the 1960s, the answer was to create simulations that mimicked aspects of what astronauts could expect to encounter. Take gravity, for example. Gravity on the moon is about one-sixth of what it ...read more
The Spy Who Kept the Cold War From Boiling Over
In 1984, U.S. spies monitoring the Soviet press found an alarming piece in a Russian magazine. It wasn’t an expose on officials in the Soviet Union or a worrying account about Cold War attitudes toward the United States. Rather, it was a recipe for coot, a small water bird that’s ...read more
Why Was the Electoral College Created?
Five times in history, presidential candidates have won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College. This has led some to question why Americans use this system to elect their presidents in the first place. Among the many thorny questions debated by the delegates to the 1787 ...read more
Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge Took 14 Years—And Multiple Lives
Fourteen tons of fireworks illuminated the New York night on May 24, 1883, to celebrate the completion of one of the greatest engineering feats of the Gilded Age—the Brooklyn Bridge. Billed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” the longest suspension bridge ever built at the time ...read more
George Washington's Final Years—And Sudden, Agonizing Death
George Washington’s final three years of life were not spent in typically relaxed retirement. Active until his last days at his Mount Vernon estate, Washington focused on making his plantation productive, getting his affairs in order and addressing a dilemma that had nagged at ...read more
The U.S. Deported a Million of Its Own Citizens to Mexico During the Great Depression
In the 1930s, the Los Angeles Welfare Department decided to start deporting hospital patients of Mexican descent. One of the patients was a woman with leprosy who was driven just over the border and left in Mexicali, Mexico. Others had tuberculosis, paralysis, mental illness or ...read more
The Soviet Response to the Moon Landing? Denial There Was a Moon Race at All
You’ve probably heard of conspiracy theories that the moon landing was a hoax (those are false, and easily debunked). But have you heard the one about how the moon race was itself a hoax, because the Soviet Union was never trying to get to the moon in the first place? Or at ...read more
Why Civil Rights Activists Protested the Moon Landing
More than a million people gathered along Florida’s Space Coast to watch the Apollo 11 lift off from Launchpad 39A on the sunny afternoon of July 16, 1969. The event was the culmination of a technological race started by President John F. Kennedy in 1963 with the goal of beating ...read more
When the Golden Gate Bridge Flattened by 7 Feet—and Other Surprising Facts About the San Francisco Icon
The 1.7-mile-long Golden Gate Bridge, an icon of the San Francisco Bay region, connects the city of San Francisco to Marin County, California. At its completion in 1937, the suspension bridge was considered an engineering marvel—the longest main suspension bridge span in the ...read more
How a Trio of Hellish Earthquakes Prompted America’s First Disaster Relief Act
In the early hours of December 16, 1811, the residents of New Madrid, a Mississippi River town once part of the Louisiana Territory, rushed from their homes as the ground rolled beneath their feet. Trees were uprooted and thrown to the ground. Huge chasms opened in the earth, ...read more
When Hollywood Studios Married Off Gay Stars to Keep Their Sexuality a Secret
During the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1920s, actors and actresses shot to fame—but only if they tailored their images to the demands of the big studios. For LGBT actors, that often meant marrying a person of the opposite sex. The early 20th century represented a unique time ...read more
How Segregated Schools Led to Busing—And Backlash
Kids have been riding buses to get to school since the 1920s. But the practice became politically charged when desegregation busing, starting in the 1950s, attempted to integrate schools. The 1954 U.S. Supreme Court landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ...read more
Why the Nazis Were Obsessed With Twins
“Twins! Twins!” Ten-year-old Eva Mozes clung to her mother amidst the chaos of the selection platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Before arriving at the death camp, she had been stuffed into a train car on a seemingly endless journey from Hungary. Now, she and her twin sister Miriam ...read more
Two Viking Boat Graves—With a Warrior Inside—Found in Sweden
Archaeologists digging near the Swedish village of Gamla Uppsala have unearthed two rare boat burials from the Viking Age. Inside one of them, which was found intact, were the remains of a man, a horse and a dog, as well as several weapons and a comb. Though boat burials date ...read more