With the aid of his clandestine patron Thomas Jefferson, Scottish "scandalmonger" James Callender launched a print campaign against President John Adams that would make the election of 1800 one of the ...

The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb, known in the West as Joe-1, on Aug. 29, 1949, at Semipalatinsk Test Site, in Kazakhstan. The Soviets called their first atomic test "First Lightning." ...

Organized crime families owned the majority of the city's gay bars and clubs in an unlikely but mutually beneficial association that lasted throughout the late 1960s. In the early 1960s, while ...

There are over 300 PBS Member Stations across the country, with many telling incredible stories in their own backyard. Take a deep dive into local history and how it connects to the tapestry of our ...

The Geneva Conventions are four separate treaties negotiated and re-negotiated by international committees between 1864 and 1977 to govern human rights during wartime. Henri Dunant, founder of the ...

Born into slavery on Maryland's extern shore in 1818, Frederick Douglass spent several years in Baltimore, where he learned to read. Douglass viewed his newfound literacy as the key to knowledge, and ...

While the reigns of George I and II had been marked by a royal detachment from the administration of American colonies, King George III asserted his claim on the colonies strenuously. The king saw the ...

Bessie Coleman was the first African-American woman, and also the first woman of Native-American descent, to hold a pilot’s license. Coleman grew up in a cruel world of poverty and discrimination. She ...

Sandwiched between the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the Civil War in 1861, the California Gold Rush is considered by many historians to be the most significant event of the first half of the ...