The Many Ways To Die While Building an Aircraft Carrier
Tip the Empire State Building onto its side and you’ll have a sense of the length of the United States Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the most powerful in the world: the USS John F. Kennedy. Weighing...
30 Aug 202246min
The Divorce Colony: Why Women Fled to South Dakota in the 1880s to End Their Troubled Marriages
No-fault divorce laws began spreading across the globe in the 1970s, in which neither party had to prove wrong-doing. Before this time, somebody had to prove that the other party breached the marital ...
25 Aug 202247min
America's Universal Education System Exists From a Coalition of Progressives, the Know-Nothing Party, and the Ku Klux Klan
In a remarkably short span of time, American children went from laboring on family farms to spending their days in classrooms. The change came from optimistic reformers like Horace Mann, who in the ea...
23 Aug 20221h 12min
How 2 Men Escaped Auschwitz, Exposed the Holocaust to the World, and Saved Hundreds of Thousands of Hungarian Jews
Europe’s Jewish population suffered during every stage of the Holocaust, but by the time the Third Reich occupied Hungary and targeted its Jews for deportation and extermination, the concentration cam...
18 Aug 202238min
Josie Underwood: The Civil War-Era Socialite Who Owned Slaves, Hated Lincoln, and Loved the Union
A well-educated, outspoken member of a politically prominent family in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Josie Underwood (1840–1923) left behind one of the few intimate accounts of the Civil War written by a s...
16 Aug 202224min
The American Revolution Would Have Been Lost Without a Ragtag Fleet of Thousands of Privateers
Privateers were a cross between an enlisted sailor and an outright pirate. But they were crucial in winning the Revolutionary War. As John Lehman, former secretary of the navy under President Ronald R...
11 Aug 20221h 1min
Gen. George Marshall and Henry Stimson Built America’s WW2 War Machine and Created the Postwar Global Order
Five years after World War II ended, Winston Churchill said he was still amazed that the United States, which before WWII had a tiny military and was fully committed to isolationism, “were able not on...
9 Aug 202256min
Bruce Lee Became a Global Celebrity by Embodying 400 Years of Western-Chinese Cultural Trade
An Asian and Asian American icon of unimaginable stature and influence, Bruce Lee revolutionized the martial arts by combining influences drawn from around the world. Uncommonly determined, physically...
4 Aug 202247min
