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There was one more dire mission to complete; she had to return to Maryland and try once again to rescue her sister Rachel and her two children, Angerine and Ben. With the exception of these three people, Harriet had pulled her entire immediate family that remained in Maryland away from slavery’s hold.
It was more than 2,000 years before the #MeToo movement, but a scene similar to the ones we’ve witnessed so often lately was already playing out. A prominent politician was on trial for corruption and bribery, charges bolstered by dirt his enemies had dug up from his past: the violent sexual assault of a young girl.
In the summer of 1965, the Olivetti P101 made it to the New York World’s Fair but only just. It was hidden away in a small room behind the main stand. If anyone found it, it was supposed to be an accident. But a few people did. Soon more and more began to squeeze their way in.
When Portugal fell under Spanish rule, the Inquisition targeted individuals with Jewish lineage. As religious violence worsened, many Jews fled Portugal and resettled in England, bringing with them culinary treasures founded in Sephardic cuisine—including fish. Peshkado frito was one of them.
In the Western imagination, sugar is pleasure, temptation, and vice — and in modern history, it is original sin. How a taste for sweetness, developed for survival, became a stand-in for everything good — and evil — about our culture.
In the water park business, Jeff Hendry was considered a genius of sorts. He often said that his goal in life was to make customers of his family’s legendary water parks happy—“to put a smile on their faces, to give them a thrill or two.” It was a beautiful vision. Until it went horribly wrong.
As a Polish Jew born in 1925, who survived the Warsaw ghetto, lost my family in the Holocaust, served in a special operations unit of the Polish underground, the Home Army, and fought in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, I know what it means to be at the sharp end of European history – and I fear that the battle to draw the right lessons from that time is in danger of being lost.
The Unification Treaty signed in August 1990 re-Germanied the Germanies, and that West Germany (now known as “Germany”) inherited East Germany’s territories. But there may have been a tiny oversight. Turns out, there could still be a sliver of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik remaining in the Caribbean, just west of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs.
The president of Washington and Lee University, Will Dudley, understood the depth of his problem the moment he turned on the television and saw hoards of white men in collared shirts and khakis carrying tiki torches as they marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee.
If there’s traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there’s a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green. Fail to do so, and you’re committing a crime: jaywalking. It’s the result of an aggressive, forgotten 1920s campaign led by auto groups and manufacturers.
On July 4, 1988, FIFA awarded the 1994 World Cup to the United States. At the time, there was no top-flight professional league in the U.S., and it had been 38 years since the country had participated in a World Cup. As a condition for awarding the tournament, FIFA required the United States to create a new professional league.
Nearly every American above a certain age remembers precisely where they were on September 11, 2001. But for a tiny handful of people, those memories touch American presidential history. Where was the president in the eight hours after the Sept. 11 attacks? The strange, harrowing journey of Air Force One, as told by the people who were on board.
Dirty Dancing’s setting, Kellerman’s, is based on the numerous all-inclusive vacation spots aimed at Jewish travelers that dotted the upstate New York landscape throughout much of the 20th century—a constellation of resorts commonly known as the Borscht Belt.
With his implacable pursuit of the presidential trio, the corruption-busting prosecutor José Domingo Pérez has established an international template for how to prosecute former heads of state on graft charges.
In May 1969, a controversial election for student body president at Dudley High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, turned into an open revolt against police repression and racial segregation.
In 1985, an armed standoff between Philadelphia police and members of a radical black liberation group, resulted in the deaths of eleven people. No police officers or city officials were ever charged for their role in what’s known as the MOVE bombing.
How an African-American psychiatrist helped design a groundbreaking television show as a radical therapeutic tool for helping minority preschoolers.
White is also the color that the Brazilian national soccer team was wearing in the infamous “Maracanazo” match, a decisive showdown against Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup. Nearly 70 years later Brazil is ready to tempt fate.
A century ago, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, as much of the world was still recovering from the devastation of World War I. Rebuilding was just beginning, refugees were returning home, orphans were being cared for, and a global influenza outbreak was being battled.
Three decades ago, Olof Palme was assassinated on Stockholm’s busiest street. The killer has never been found. Could the discovery of new evidence finally close the case?
In September 1986, the city of Cleveland attempted to set a special record: the simultaneous launch of 1.5 million balloons. But fate intervened, and the result was both crazier and more tragic than anyone could have imagined.
In 2001, a smugglers’ yacht washed up in the Azores and disgorged its contents. The island of São Miguel was quickly flooded with high-grade cocaine – and nearly 20 years on, it is still feeling the effects.
During a routine round of conservation on Johannes Vermeer’s 17th-century Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, art detectives realized that a section of the canvas had been painted over after the Dutch artist’s death in 1675, concealing a cupid figure.
A documentary about two ‘conventional’ couples that swapped partners and lived in a group marriage in the early 70s, hoping to pioneer an alternative to divorce and pave the way for how people would live in the future.
The “Poet of Radical Photography”, Miron Zownir, captures the provocative energy and aggressive hedonism of New York City in the 80s.
The Glen Grey Act was the first piece of legislation to enshrine in law the residential separation of the races. It was also the basis for the notorious Natives Land Act of 1913, which in its final form allocated a mere thirteen percent of all arable land to the black majority.
