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 →
The first list of names drawn up for the mountain did not contain a single president. It held a Lakota war chief, two explorers, a Shoshone teenager, a court-martialed officer, and a man who... 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 Prize was first awarded in 1917. In the 109 years since, the Board has handed out somewhere north of 2,500 prizes across journalism, letters, drama, and music. In that same span, there... Read More →
On December 12, 1948, Dick and Mac McDonald reopened a small drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, California, with the entire menu reduced to nine items. They had spent the previous three months tearing the... 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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