Abraham Lincoln called his private secretaries John Hay and John Nicolay “the boys.” In a new book, Joshua Zeitz explores the role the two men had in shaping the image of Lincoln that endures today. Read the excerpt to find out more.
Although the story of Anne Frank has been told in a movie and two plays, a fresh version of her story was recently written and performed on stage in Amsterdam. The new play covers some of Anne’s life before the war and after the discovery of the Secret Annex.
Read about controversial abolitionist John Brown and the violent raid he and his men launched on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, 150 years ago; it set the stage for the Civil War.
Read this article to learn about the settlement of Plymouth and the small but powerful group of English Separatist Church members, including William Bradford, who influenced its founding.
The Hudson River School was a group of distinctly American artists who painted landscapes in the mid-1800s. View the slideshow and consider how their depictions of nature reflected the ideas of the Transcendentalist writers of the same time period.
During the mid-20th century, the Soviet Union (now Russia) held many prisoners in the gulag, a collection of forced-labor camps. Ordinary citizens who questioned the government might be taken away from their families and subjected to the harsh conditions of the gulag for decades. Read about what they left behind.
During the Cold War era, some families built underground fallout shelters in case of a nuclear bomb attack. Homeowners recently discovered one in their back yard, still stocked with food and other disaster survival supplies from the 1960s.
Learn the facts about Paul Revere’s famous midnight ride, and scroll down to see an interactive map of his route.
In 2009, Anne Frank would have been 80 years old. Read about why her life in hiding can be called an inspiring true story of survival under extreme and terrifying circumstances.
Everyone knows that ghosts aren’t real. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of ghost stories to go around. This site lists a few of those stories, describing tales sometimes told about the nation’s most famous ghosts.
