For every power tool and piece of equipment in the average tool shed or garage, there’s a super-sized version out there. When challenged to build some of the world’s largest structures and most powerful machines, engineers need tools that are sized up to the task. Here are some ...read more

Throughout its history, the United States has used its military and covert operations to overthrow or prop up foreign governments in the name of preserving U.S. strategic and business interests. U.S. intervention in foreign governments began with attacks on and displacement of ...read more

As the United States grew and expanded into new territories throughout the early to mid-19th century, divisions also deepened. At the heart of those divisions lay the issue of slavery. In 1846, a Pennsylvania representative named David Wilmot proposed legislation intended to bar ...read more

On June 10, 1752, Benjamin Franklin took a kite out during a storm to see if a key attached to the string would draw an electrical charge. Or so the story goes. In fact, historians aren’t quite sure about the date of Franklin’s famous experiment, and some have questioned whether ...read more

For centuries, the city of Timbuktu, located in the center of present-day Mali in Western Africa, thrived as one of the bustling centers of culture and learning during the Golden Age of Islam. The region’s legacy as an intellectual destination begins with the Epic of Sundiata. ...read more

After Jackie Robinson started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, ending a six-decade ban on Black players in Major League Baseball, opportunities slowly began to expand for athletes of color. Robinson’s historic achievement—a formative moment of the postwar ...read more

In Gilded Age New York City during the 1860s and 1870s, nobody wielded more political power than William Magear Tweed. Known by both his fans and fiercest critics as “Boss Tweed,” the former fireman rose through the ranks of New York’s Democratic party to pull the levers of the ...read more

The “Reconstruction amendments” are three key changes to the U.S. Constitution ratified during Reconstruction between 1865 and 1870 that address the way that slavery’s demise reshaped America’s legal system and redefined what it meant to be free and equal following the Civil War. ...read more

When U.S. soldiers fought Germany during World War II, there was one group that was particularly motivated—about 2,000 mostly German and Austrian Jewish refugees who fled the Nazis and then returned to Europe to take on their tormentors as members of American military ...read more

The federal holidays of Memorial Day and Veterans Day are both designed to celebrate members of the U.S. military, but there are a few key differences. Memorial Day, which took shape after the Civil War, is considered a day to honor those who were killed in or as a result of ...read more

Since colonial times, when fishermen, bakers, refuse collectors and tailors tried to get more money or fairer treatment by refusing to perform their jobs, going on strike has been an important tactic of American labor. Strikes figured prominently in the rise of the organized ...read more

In 1974, Chol Soo Lee, a Korean immigrant in his early 20s, was accused and wrongfully convicted of a gangland murder in San Francisco’s Chinatown and sentenced to life in prison. In 1977, after serving several years of his sentence, Lee stabbed a neo-Nazi inmate to death during ...read more