Happy 300th birthday to the city of Natchez, Mississippi! To celebrate, Mississippi Development Authority executive director Glenn McCullough Jr. noted on Twitter that Natchez had the most millionaires per capita of an U.S. city before the Civil War. That’s a lot of millionaires—where do you think they got all their…
On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton became the first woman nominated as a major party presidential candidate. It was a historical moment in the United States, and despite the controversies around this election, it cannot be underplayed. Unless you’re designing the front cover of a major newspaper on Wednesday.
The mayor of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, began the roll call at the Democratic National Convention earlier today by saying, “Are we ready to make history?” Rawlings-Blake was referring to the official nomination of Hillary Clinton, the first woman to become the presidential candidate of a major party.
In modern America, the ability to move up the economic food chain is a long shot. One method for shaking up entrenched economic classes that has worked in the past: civil war.
Disclosure: From roughly 2000 through 2008, half or more of my household income came from my wife’s direct employment with Bill or Hillary Clinton. Toward the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency, she worked at the White House Domestic Policy Council; after that, she became a legislative aide working on health policy in…
Yesterday, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein revealed how deeply afraid he is of our current scary “moment in history” in which Bernie Sanders’ proposals are being taken seriously. Perhaps Lloyd Blankfein lacks some historical perspective.
On January 28, 1986, America watched on television as the space shuttle Challenger—carrying six astronauts and one schoolteacher—disappeared in a twisting cloud of smoke, nine miles above the launch pad it had just left. To a stunned nation, it appeared that seven lives had instantly been lost.
In December 1950, Woody Guthrie signed his name to the lease of a new apartment in Brooklyn. Even now, over half a century later, that uninspiring document prompts a double-take.
Among the revelations in Dark Money, Jane Mayer’s expansive new book on the Koch brothers and the rise of contemporary American conservatism, is that Fred Koch, the billionaire duo’s father, once helped build an oil refinery in Nazi Germany. The New York Times broke that item last week, but left out a key detail from…
Shapeless. Halfhearted. Diffident. Slipping. Unconvincing in the harsh light of the national stage. Observers may say these things about Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign. But no one can say these things about Marco Rubio’s hair.
As the educated among you well know, St. Augustine, Florida is our nation’s Oldest Continuously Occupied European Settlement. ALERT: do NOT fall for second-rate cities attempting to co-opt St. Augustine’s rightful title of Nation’s Oldest City.
Imagine for a second, if you can: Donald Trump mixing up history and lying about stuff. Yes, the man who claims he saw thousands of Arab-Americans celebrating 9/11 in New Jersey also has an addled memory of Civil War history, according to a report from The New York Times.
Today, Roanoke, Va., mayor David Bowers acknowledged similarities between banning assistance to Syrian refugees based on their country of origin and the use of Japanese internment camps during World War II.
According to a new poll, 72%(!) of Americans “think their country isn’t as great as it once was.” Really? When was America greater?
At the summer Consumer Electronics Show in 1991, Sony announced that it was jumping into the video game hardware market for the first time, partnering with Nintendo to release something called a “PlayStation.” The device never made it to market—for reasons I’ll explain shortly—but someone on reddit may have come…
On the morning of the Father of the Year Awards Luncheon, I ran out of bread enough to even make cinnamon toast for my children, and I ended up serving them some Chocolate Chex and the last apple in the house. Not that I was going there to win Father of the Year. I was merely going to watch.
A two-foot-wide, six-foot-deep sinkhole appeared on the surface of Dublin's Dame Street this week, stopping traffic on the busy thoroughfare. The reason, according to one historian, may have to do with 200-year-old politicians who plunged incredible depths in a quest to get their antique rocks off.
In 1983, a statue of the Buddhist deity Samvara like the one above was stolen from Kathmandu’s Itum Bahal Temple, a structure that dates to the 13th century AD. Thirty years later, a Brooklyn art dealer may have unloaded the plundered artifact for $370,000.
Assume a notable story on a notable day in history—the lunar landing, say—was fabricated. Now assume that 400,000 to 2 million such days were concocted. You begin to get a sense of the scope of New Chronology, the "empirico-statistical" theory that much of human history is a fiction assembled to serve the powerful.
