One hundred years after the passage of the 19th Amendment, The Vote tells the dramatic culmination story of the hard-fought campaign waged by American women for the right to vote, a transformative ...

A new AMERICAN EXPERIENCE collection of images celebrating summer in America throughout the 20th century, from historical firsts like the original drive-in movie theater to iconic events like the 1977 ...

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 ...

Sonoma State Home for the Feebleminded Hospital, where sterilizations took place. Historical postcard, from the personal collection of Alex Wellerstein. In February 1930, Concepcion Ruiz, a ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

Meteorologist Tetsuya “Ted” Fujita kept a lot of records. He recorded the prevalence of tornados in the United States by month and by state. He recorded the shapes of clouds. He recorded every ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

According to one of the Iranian students who seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979, the United States provoked action against its diplomats with one fateful decision. On October 22, ...