At the time of Ulysses S. Grant's election to the presidency, white supremacists were conducting a reign of terror throughout the South. In outright defiance of the ...

Robert E. Lee was a central character in America's defining national trauma, the Civil War. These images explore other facets of his life, from the young boy coping with the abandonment of an admired ...

A diverse and potent force in space exploration, women at NASA who served as human computers were ultimately responsible for sending astronauts to the moon. By Nathalia Holt Computers at the Jet ...

Eugenicists like Paul Popenoe relied on dangerously flawed theories of heredity to describe different groups of people. Popenoe shows a couple a pedigree of "Black People of Artistic Ability," 1930.

One of the Capitol Crawl’s youngest participants was eight-year-old Jennifer Keelan, whose mother congratulated her when she reached the top. Photo by Tom Olin. Imagine climbing up 83 steps. Perhaps ...

Three decades before the “War on Terror” and its orientation of “Islamic terrorism” as the principal threat to American security, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was its standing talisman. The color ...

Upton Sinclair, 1900. Library of Congress. By the turn of the 20th century, the unsavory practices of the country’s meat processing industry had already engendered some major scandals. The most ...

Every time a lynching occurred in the U.S. between 1920 and 1936, the NAACP flew this flag from their headquarters on Fifth Avenue in New York. Library of Congress. Can one flag really change public ...

For a long time, “fashion” had nothing to do with it. Even before the Industrial Revolution, laborers from around the globe–farmhands, builders, miners–often wore some kind of homespun denim workwear.

She tracked her targets’ coded messages for more than two years, painstakingly translating gibberish into actionable intelligence. Then, without warning, the messages ceased. When covert transmissions ...

A mob celebrates in front of the burned Love & Charity Hall which housed the black-owned and -edited newspaper, The Daily Record. Courtesy of New Hanover County Public Library. This is the story of ...

In the spring of 1977, the doors of 254 West 54th Street opened to a New York City nightclub that in its glamour and pageantry defined the disco era. Studio 54 was situated in a former opera house and ...