On July 24, 1923, negotiating parties at the Swiss resort town of Lausanne signed the final treaty of the First World War—the Treaty of Lausanne. After ten months of intense negotiations, the parties ...

More than six decades after the Cuban Revolution, the island remains governed by the political regime that emerged in 1959. Unlike other Cold-War-era regimes that collapsed or liberalized, Cuba’s revo...

Over six weekends in the summer of 1969, nearly 300,000 Black people gathered in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park for the Harlem Cultural Festival, a series of concerts celebrating Black music. A star-studd...

On August 6, 1962, the island of Jamaica became an independent nation, making it the first sovereign English-speaking country in the Caribbean. The tremendous victory of this likkle but tallawah islan...

The Greco-Turkish war erupted on May 15, 1919.

Most Americans think they know the story of the Civil Rights Movement.

Historic Photos, Fresh Stories Photo by Bettman Archive/Getty Images The Irony of Racial Uplift Despite Anita Hill accusing Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment in 1991, the controversy surrounding hi...

On June 16, 1976, thousands of Black students in Soweto rose up in a pivotal event in modern South African history. Soweto was a Black “township,” the South African term for an all-Black (or Indian or...

Dateline: Charlottesville, Virginia, August, 2017. The Confederate battle flag flies high on one side of the police line even as it burns on the other. The flashpoint? Robert Edward Lee, a monument to...

In April 1936, a series of Arab-Jewish clashes led to an Arab general strike that developed into an armed revolt against the British mandate government and the Zionist movement in Palestine. Although ...

On May 8, 1946, shortly before 10 p.m., two teenage Estonian schoolgirls, Aili Jürgenson and Ageeda Paavel, set out to blow up a wooden memorial dedicated to fallen Soviet Red Army soldiers. Using pip...

In English history, few women are more notorious than Anne Boleyn, the second of King Henry VIII’s six wives. Boleyn’s rapid rise into royal affection and political intrigue has been the subject of an...

Have you ever met someone who has skinned their own SpaghettiO?On May 12th, 1965, Donald Goerke invented SpaghettiOs, the round, canned cousins of spaghetti.

Just past noon on Monday May 4, 1970, a squadron of Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire at a loose collection of students gathered across an expanse of leafy lawns and campus parking lots at Kent Stat...

On December 1, World AIDS Day, should we wish the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) a happy birthday? We don’t know the exact day the virus infected its first human host, but scientists have shown th...

Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg catapulted into public view when she began skipping school to sit on a bench in front of the Swedish Parliament, handing out flyers that read, "I am doing this bec...

The war between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary militia Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that erupted on April 15, 2023, has killed more than 800, injured 5,000, and displaced nearly a mil...

Coming to terms with the American Civil War is no easy task. The scale of its destruction alone is still shocking. New historical estimates put the death toll at 750,000 soldiers, or 2.4% of the American population in 1860, which would translate today into a death toll of 7.5 million Americans.

President Harry Truman signed the European Recovery Act into law on April 3, 1948. The Marshall Plan, as it’s more commonly known, was intended to revive the economies of war-torn Western Europe. Exte...

In December 1075, King Henry IV of Germany celebrated the Christmas holidays at Goslar, his favorite castle in Saxony. All seemed to be well: Henry had secured a decisive victory over rebels in the du...

On a snowy afternoon in March 1907, Mary Mallon crouched breathlessly in a storage closet near the Park Avenue mansion where she worked as a cook. Hours earlier, five police officers and a towering fe...

Raise your hand if you watch the annual Oscar awards primarily for the fashion show, not for the movie prizes. If so, you are not alone. Each year the Oscars provide an excuse for an outdoor runway sh...

2026 marks the Semiquincentennial of the United States, the 250th birthday of the nation.(Or does it? The niggling historian might note that 250 years from 1776 marks the Declaration of Independence a...

Over the course of the past year international negotiators have met periodically in Vienna in an attempt to accomplish what was long considered a near-impossible task.

On December 17, 1969, the United States Air Force concluded Project Blue Book, its investigation into Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). Headquartered at Wright Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, ...

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Ukrainian army has proven itself mighty and tenacious to an international community that may have previously thought them quiet and ...

Illustration of the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr (1887).

On August 28th, America will commemorate the anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march was one of the largest political protest gatherings in U.S. History, attracting roug...

In 1918, Grenadian-born Oliver Michael Francis was a medical student at McGill University. Biographical profiles in Old McGill, the university’s yearbook, included country of origin, date of birth, sc...

On its “Milestones in UN History” website, the United Nations features smallpox eradication, explaining that “the world got rid of smallpox thanks to an incredible demonstration of global solidarity, ...

As of 2020, the CDC estimates that just over one in ten Americans has diabetes, a chronic condition that can have serious, life-threatening complications if left untreated.Diabetes is caused when the ...

Barely three years after independence from British colonial rule, Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa, collapsed into a civil war. The Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War, became...

In the 1970s, Venezuela had the highest growth rate and lowest inequality in Latin America. Thanks to an oil bonanza, the government was able to spend more money (in absolute terms) from 1974 to 1979 ...

December 2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the “Acid Tests,” events held by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in partnership with legendary musicians The Grateful Dead. Acid, also known as LSD (lyse...

Historians still squabble over whether there really was a "first" American Thanksgiving. But a handful of documents give us a hint at what might have been served: likely roasted venison and fowl—proba...

On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5-4 decision in the Bush v. Gore case. It put an end to the disputed presidential election held that year.

Fifty years ago, in December 1969, the Provisional IRA was born from the widespread religious violence that had wracked the six counties of Northern Ireland since the preceding August. From modest beg...

The land allotment scheme was in one sense a project of social engineering and in another a way to transfer transfer of hundreds of millions of acres of land from tribal communities to the United Stat...

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Whether or not you are a fan of all things spooky, odds are you have heard some iteration of vampiric legend. From Robert Eggers’ 2024 box office smash-hit Nosferatu to the early 2000s obsession with ...

Though restaurants and their customers use such words as “traditional,” “authentic,” and “pure,” recipes and cuisines are similar to all other historical phenomena: They change over time. This is cert...

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the Armistice went into effect, silencing the guns of the Western Front and ending the First World War. Or so the story goes.

In view of the decades-long close alliance between the Christian Right and the Republican Party, it may not have been a surprise when President Donald J. Trump established a White House Faith Office i...

“We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here...I mean, yes we have Native Americans but candidly there isn't much Native American culture in American culture.” —Rick Santorum, Apr...