Archaeologists at Roanoke Island, North Carolina have just found 400-year-old artifacts believed to be from the mysterious Lost Colony, the first English settlement in North America.
Betsy Ross didn’t design the American flag. Neither did George Washington, Ben Franklin, or anyone else you’ve ever heard of (unless you’ve heard of Francis Hopkinson). Nor was the flag’s design handed…
On the evening of July 13, 1977, two lightning strikes just north of New York City led to a massive blackout that plunged the city into darkness.
The lights went out, elevators stalled, and subways ground to a halt. Looting and arson broke out, over a thousand fires were reported, and more than 1,600 stores were damaged or ransacked. The Mets-Cubs game at Shea Stadium ended in the bottom of the sixth inning. The light-filled city became a black pit.
Elsewhere in New York’s summer of 1977, a sweltering heat wave, financial downturn, rising poverty and inequality levels, paranoia about the Son of Sam murders, and the shining lights of Studio 54 took hold of the city.
Likewise, as fires burned down much of the Bronx, hip hop began to rise from the ashes. In fact, the looting of music stores during the blackout enabled people who couldn’t afford turntables and mixers to gather the equipment they needed to become DJs.
Check out some compelling photos from that uneasy summer in New York City:
How a civilian engineer became a World War II spy — twice — and stopped the Nazis that had infiltrated America’s borders.
William Sebold never planned on becoming a spy, but fate had different plans.
Before federal food safety regulations really existed in the U.S., one man made it his duty to prove that food additives were harmful to human health — and he did so in a rather unconventional way.
At the turn of the 20th century, Harvey Wiley, Chief Chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, started inviting people into the basement of his office building for extraordinarily well-prepared meals. The meals were free and prepared by a top chef, often with locally-sourced ingredients. The catch? All the dishes were laced with poison.