After the Civil War, former slaves sought jobs, and planters sought laborers. The absence of cash or an independent credit system led to the creation of sharecropping which was a system agricultural labor in the South. In this article we've collected a few…
In 1949, Victor Hoeflich held a press conference to introduce the "Man from Mars, Radio Hat". Hoeflich knew a picture would tell the story so he had several teenagers modeling the radio hats for the reporters and photographers. Soon pictures and news stori…
When an earthquake ripped through Santa Monica on March 10, 1933, the city was already in bad shape. The quiet community on the Pacific coast had prided itself in being socially elite and culturally refined, but that pride hadn’t stopped the Great Depressi…
The early 1920s were the gilded age for the Ku Klux Klan, as many successful and powerful people were either openly Klansmen or sympathetic to the cause. The organization boasted a membership of 3 million nationwide, including prominent community leaders f…
Once the United States abandoned neutrality and declared war on Germany in April 1917, thousands of German commercial sailors were unlucky enough to be docked at American ports, including the crew of the world’s largest passenger ship, the SS Vaterland, wh…
The recreational cannabis smoking took on a negative connotation in the American cultural imagination when people began to associate it with Mexican immigrants arriving in the US. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, a wave of Mexican immigrants poured in…
In 1919 Chicago was in the throes of an exhausting heat wave. Thousands flocked to the beaches lining Lake Michigan for some relief. Among them: a group of black boys that included 17-year-old Eugene Williams. Eugene, who was on a raft, inadvertently drift…
These pictures show what was acceptable in the 1980s at Spring Break. Mostly from Daytona beach and Fort Lauderdale, these show a party scene that seems alien, the kind of en masse binge-drinking you could have before the intervention of social media. Take…
Born in Wisconsin in 1868, Edward Sheriff Curtis took to photography at an early age. In 1895 he photographed Princess Angeline, the daughter of the Duwamish chief Seattle, for whom the city was named. That encounter sparked Curtis' lifelong fascination with…
Football, or “American football” as the rest of the world calls it, can be traced to early versions of rugby football and association football. Both games have their origin in multiple varieties of football played in Britain in the mid-19th century, in whi…
After the Second World War, America's love affair with the automobile was in full swing. You could drive through about anything – movie theaters, car washes, restaurants, banks and...even churches. That’s a very American way to attend the church. These rar…
When planning the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, NASA had thought about every possible detail including a gloomy scenario: What if the astronaut returning home unleashed upon Earth something dangerous and foreign to science — moon germs? Before Apollo 1…
Keedoozle was the first fully automated grocery store in the United States; a most futuristic shopping experience that the world just wasn’t ready for. The story begins with Clarence Saunders who revolutionized grocery shopping, in a way that defines the m…
On March 27, 1964, at 5:36 PM, a megathrust earthquake occurred in the Prince William Sound region of Alaska. The epicenter was about 10 km east of the mouth of College Fiord, approximately 90 km west of Valdez and 120 km east of Anchorage. Lasting four mi…
In 1986, charity organization United Way of Cleveland thought they had the perfect idea to generate a little publicity and create a beautiful spectacle in the process: an attempt to set a new world record for simultaneously released balloons. With a huge c…
In 1941, LIFE magazine decided to document the lives of one of the biggest single demographics in the U.S.: the 30 million housewives who did most of the washing, made beds, cooked meals and nursed almost all the babies of the nation, with little help, no …
Following World War II, pressures to recognize, challenge, and change inequalities for minorities grew. One of the most notable challenges to the status quo was the 1954 landmark Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas which questi…
By the 1970s teenage pregnancies were recognized as a problem worldwide. The continuing apprehension about teenage pregnancy was based on the profound impact that teenage pregnancy could have on the lives of the girls and their children. Demographic studie…