The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as "Jim Crow" represented a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three quarters of a century beginning in ...

Steel workers gaze on as molten steel is poured from ladle to casts at Homestead Steel Works, December 31, 1914. PD Andrew Carnegie's relentless efforts to drive down costs and undersell 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 ...

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.

Scientist Mária Telkes spent her life chasing the sun. Telkes, who was born in Hungary in 1900, first became interested in solar energy while studying at the University of Budapest. After receiving ...

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 ...

Decades before his star role in the 1995 Pixar film, Toy Story, Mr. Potato Head was a business trailblazer. As the first toy to be marketed on television, Mr. Potato Head broke new ground with ads ...

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 ...

The white folks had all the courts, all the guns, all the hounds, all the railroads, all the telegraph wires, all the newspapers, all the money and nearly all the land – and we had only our ignorance, ...

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 ...

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 ...