Prologue: Pieces of History

This week’s winner is PaulO, who won us over with his creepy and vaguely dystopian caption “I am product # 751600.” He wins 30% off a numbered product of his choosing at our eStore. And if you think this tube is an escape route from child-shaped robots run amok, you would be partially right! This picture [...]

Escape and evasion files are firsthand accounts of a military personnel’s escape from behind enemy lines. In World War II, thousands of U.S. troops crashed in Nazi territory and had to evade capture or escape from German prisons. The National Archives recently digitized 2,953 firsthand accounts of escape and evasion during the war. Each account [...]

Between negotiating the Compromise of 1850, stymieing southern attempts to turn Cuba into a state, protecting Hawaii from French interests, and working to open up Japan for trade, President Millard Fillmore also appointed Brigham Young as the first governor of the Utah Territory. That was 160 years ago this week. As a gesture of thanks [...]

At 1:28 p.m. on September 28, 1924, two planes landing in Seattle made history. The Chicago and New Orleans had flown 26,345 miles in 66 days to become the first airplanes to circumnavigate the globe. Four planes had started the journey on April 6, but the Seattle and Boston had been forced down over Alaska and [...]

There are few artist in America who so greatly affected the popular landscape as Thomas Nast who was born 170 years ago today. Jolly old St Nick? Not so jolly before the Harper’s Weekly cartoonist plumped him up. The Grand Old Party elephant? Popularized in 1874 by the staunch Republican when talk of a third term [...]