George Washington kept hounds with names like Sweetlips, Tipsy, Drunkard, and Vulcan, bred them with the patient obsession of a man building something permanent, and is credited by the American Kennel Club with helping... Read More →
In January 1924, a state historian named Doane Robinson stood before the Black and Yellow Trail Association, a highway-booster group, and proposed carving giant figures into the Black Hills. He was thinking of tourists... Read More →
The street names on a Monopoly board are not invented. Every one of them was lifted from Atlantic City, New Jersey, a real resort town on a real barrier island, and for ninety years... Read More →
The Pulitzer Prizes began in 1917 with four awards – two in journalism, one in history, one in biography – and now run to twenty-three categories handed out every spring. The pressure to take... Read More →
When Dick and Mac McDonald reopened their little barbecue drive-in, the entire operation had been rebuilt around a single sandwich. They had spent the previous three months tearing the place apart – firing twenty... Read More →
Forty-eight times between 1777 and 1910, an American state moved its capital. The count is unsettling because most people assume capitals were settled fixtures, chosen at statehood and inherited from the territorial period, but... Read More →
World War II killed somewhere between 70 and 85 million people - roughly 3 percent of the entire human population alive in 1940. That number is so large it becomes abstract until you consider... Read More →
On August 2, 1776, fifty-six men gathered in Philadelphia and signed what amounted to a death warrant - their own. By putting their names on the Declaration of Independence, they were committing treason against... Read More →
The office of the American presidency was invented on the fly. In 1787, the founders sat in Philadelphia arguing about whether the executive should be a single person or a committee of three. They... Read More →
Twelve men who sat in the Oval Office first gave orders on a battlefield. Some commanded armies that changed the course of history. Others held the rank in name only, their “generalship” a political... Read More →
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