Dave Roos

Executive orders aren’t mentioned once in the U.S. Constitution, but presidents starting with George Washington have used executive orders and proclamations in order to bypass Congress and quickly exercise the independent power of their office. Franklin D. Roosevelt is the ...read more

When the Supreme Court of the United States agrees to hear a case, the only part of the process that’s open to the public are the oral arguments. The rest of the deliberations happen behind closed doors between the nine justices and their teams of law clerks. So how exactly do ...read more

When the Allies celebrated Victory in Europe (VE) Day on May 8, 1945, the British military commander Bernard Law Montgomery cautioned his troops, “We have won the German war. Let us now win the peace.” Months before Germany’s unconditional surrender in World War II, the “Big ...read more

By the mid-1930s, the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany threatened to engulf Europe into another world war. The United States, meanwhile, had taken an isolationist turn, with Americans refusing to send more young men to die on foreign battlefields. More than 100,000 ...read more

The Korean War (1950-1953) was the first armed conflict of the Cold War era, and historians agree that communist North Korea would not have invaded South Korea in 1950 without the approval of Joseph Stalin, the ruthless and autocratic leader of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953. ...read more

In July of 1936, a failed military coup plunged Spain into civil war. The conflict pitted the leftist Republican government against fascist-backed Nationalists led by General Francisco Franco. With Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini already in power in Germany and Italy, ...read more

On October 20, 1846, an exceptionally early and heavy snowstorm dumped foot after foot of cement-like snow on the Sierra Nevada mountains, trapping 81 members of the ill-fated Donner Party, more than half of them children. Their five-month ordeal is one of the most infamous in ...read more

The airplane had existed for little more than a decade by the outbreak of World War I, but both sides of the conflict quickly recognized the advantages of creating flying war machines and worked relentlessly throughout the war to develop faster, bigger and deadlier fighters and ...read more

On July 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon addressed the nation in a live televised broadcast to make an unexpected announcement: he had accepted an invitation from Beijing to become the first U.S. president to visit the People’s Republic of China, a Communist nation of 750 ...read more

The United States has officially declared war 11 times during five separate military conflicts. According to the Constitution (Article I, Section 8), Congress has the exclusive power to declare war. The last time America declared war was during World War II. The Korean War, the ...read more

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Washington, D.C. remained the capital of the fractured United States and also the military headquarters of the Union Army. Richmond, the newly minted capital of the Confederacy, was less than 100 miles away in neighboring Virginia. Likening ...read more

Long before Santa Claus, caroling and light-strewn Christmas trees, people in medieval Europe celebrated the Christmas season with 12 full days of feasting and revelry culminating with Twelfth Night and the raucous crowning of a “King of Misrule.” Christmas in the Middle Ages ...read more

When John Marshall was appointed chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1801, the nation’s highest court occupied a lowly position. There was no Supreme Court Building in the newly completed capital, Washington, D.C., so the six justices heard cases in a borrowed room in the ...read more

For 30 years, Northern Ireland was scarred by a period of deadly sectarian violence known as “the Troubles.” This explosive era was fraught with car bombings, riots and revenge killings that ran from the late 1960s through the late 1990s. The Troubles were seeded by centuries of ...read more

On April 10, 1963, just seven months before he shot and killed President John F. Kennedy, the inscrutable assassin Lee Harvey Oswald crouched behind a fence in an upscale Dallas neighborhood and aimed his rifle at the window of an ultra-conservative firebrand named Edwin Walker, ...read more

When Christopher Columbus reached the Americas, he hoped the land would be rich with gold, silver and precious spices, but perhaps the New World’s greatest treasure was its bounty of native food crops cultivated for millennia by Indigenous Americans. As much as three-fifths of ...read more

On November 16, 1968, Major Colin Luther Powell was serving his second tour of duty in Vietnam, this time as the assistant Chief of Staff to the commander of the U.S. Army’s Americal Division (also called the 23rd Infantry Division). It was mostly a desk job, but that day Powell ...read more

In a way, the American Revolution was also a civil war. By 1774, American colonists were divided into two camps: patriots and loyalists. Hotheaded patriots like the Sons of Liberty wanted to rid themselves of British rule at all costs. While the loyalists, either through stubborn ...read more

The Silk Road wasn’t a single route, but rather a vibrant trade network that crisscrossed central Eurasia for centuries, bringing far-flung cultures into contact. Traveling by camel and horseback, merchants, nomads, missionaries, warriors and diplomats not only exchanged exotic ...read more

On April 29, 1975, as communist North Vietnamese troops closed in on the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, the United States ordered the immediate evacuation of U.S. personnel and several thousand South Vietnamese military and diplomatic officials. TV news cameras broadcasted ...read more

Paul Revere is best-known for his “midnight ride” celebrated in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1860 poem. But Revere’s role in the American Revolution extends far beyond that famous 1775 mission to warn the towns of Lexington and Concord that British troops were on the move from ...read more

European archeologists have uncovered hoards of Bronze Age weaponry dating from more than 4,000 years ago. Some of the larger and more elaborate weapons—like the 28-inch dagger known as the Oxborough Dirk—may have been ceremonial or prestige pieces, but others show clear markings ...read more

Without Robert Morris, the American Revolution may have been crushed under a mountain of debt and disarray. The self-made millionaire from Philadelphia never set out to be a politician, but was pressed into service by the Continental Congress when it needed a brash and savvy ...read more

More than 3,200 years ago, the Mediterranean and Near East were home to a flourishing and interconnected Bronze Age civilization fueled by lucrative trade in valuable metals and finished goods. The great kingdoms and empires of the day—including the Egyptians, Babylonians, ...read more

The most recent ice age peaked between 24,000 and 21,000 years ago, when vast ice sheets covered North America and northern Europe, and mountain ranges like Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro and South America's Andes were encased in glaciers. At that point our Homo sapien ancestors had ...read more

For 75 years, active-duty members of the British military have served as stewards at Wimbledon, the annual tennis “Championships” held at the storied All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club. Since 1946, uniformed men and women from the Army, Air Force and Navy have volunteered at ...read more

There have been two epic battles at the place known as Tannenberg. The first, in 1410, saw the defeat of a German religious order called the Teutonic Knights at the hands of Slavs and Lithuanians. Five hundred years later, Germany got its revenge in one of the earliest battles ...read more

There are two layers to every water polo match: the graceful athleticism above the water, and the rough play and cheap shots hidden beneath the surface. The 1956 Melbourne Olympics were a lot like a game of water polo. On the surface, they were billed as the “friendly games,” but ...read more

The Soviet hockey team, led by an iron curtain of a goaltender named Vladislav Tretiak, was the clear favorite to bring home the gold at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. The Soviets had won all four of the previous Olympics and had beaten the USA in all 12 ...read more

There are roughly 180 known impact craters worldwide and fully a third of them—including some of the biggest—are located in North America. These massive blast zones were formed by meteors, asteroids and comets that slammed into the earth’s surface with a force many times greater ...read more

In the spring of 1749, the billions-strong swarm of cicadas known today as Brood X emerged from the ground in rural Maryland, much to the fascination (and horror) of a 17-year-old Black tobacco farmer named Benjamin Banneker, who believed they were a plague of locusts. “The ...read more

Few animals command as much respect and instill as much healthy fear as bears. While fatal bear attacks are rare—there have only been around 180 deaths from bear attacks in North America since the late 1700s—they never fail to shock with their brutality. The following list is ...read more

At the dawn of the 20th century, the world’s military powers worried that future wars would be decided by chemistry as much as artillery, so they signed a pact at the Hague Convention of 1899 to ban the use of poison-laden projectiles "the sole object of which is the diffusion of ...read more

The Western Front of World War I is infamous for trench warfare, long and grueling battles fought from dug-in positions separated by no man’s land. But a lesser-known type of battle also raged underground as both Allied and German forces dug extensive networks of secret tunnels ...read more

Who succeeds the president in the event of death or incapacity? There’s a list of nearly 20 officials—starting with the vice president and the speaker of the House—whose top leadership roles place them squarely in line for the job. Then there’s the wild card: a “designated ...read more

At the turn of the 20th century, the United States was in the grip of a full-blown smallpox epidemic. During the five-year outbreak from 1899 to 1904, government health officials confirmed 164,283 cases of smallpox, but the real numbers may have been five times as high. To slow ...read more

In 1809, when President Thomas Jefferson reviewed New York’s ambitious plans for a more than 360-mile canal connecting the Hudson River (and therefore New York Harbor) to the Great Lakes, he dismissed it as “little short of madness” and refused to authorize federal funding. Less ...read more

To modern ears, the word “Celtic” evokes traditional art, literature and music from Ireland and Scotland. But the ancient Celts were a widespread group of people with origins in central Europe. See what historians have learned about this rich and complex collection of tribes.  1. ...read more

The Aztec Empire was a shifting and fragile alliance of three principal city-states. The largest and most powerful among the three was Tenochtitlán, the island city built by the Mexica people, also known as the Aztecs. The Aztec Triple Alliance exerted tremendous power over a ...read more

Since 1800, 14 sitting presidents have faced censure by either the Senate or the House of Representatives, but only a handful of those official rebukes were ever adopted by Congress, and the one that arguably stung the most was later “expunged” from the record. A censure is a ...read more

Early in the predawn hours of December 4, 1969, a Peoples Gas truck pulled up in front of an apartment building at 2337 W. Monroe St. in the West Side of Chicago. Fourteen plainclothes Chicago Police officers quietly filed out of the undercover truck, armed with pistols, a ...read more

It’s a grim calculation, counting those Americans who have died in service to their country, as targets of terrorist attacks, amid natural disasters or as victims of pandemic disease. Here are major events from history that have inflicted a devastating toll on American lives. 1. ...read more

In the mid-19th-century, the two most powerful political parties in the United States were the Democrats and the Whigs. In two presidential elections, 1840 and 1848, Americans voted a Whig into the White House. And some of the most prominent political voices of the contentious ...read more

In 1901 a deadly smallpox epidemic tore through the Northeast, prompting the Boston and Cambridge boards of health to order the vaccination of all residents. But some refused to get the shot, claiming the vaccine order violated their personal liberties under the Constitution. ...read more

Americans borrowed the term “lame duck” from the British, who first applied the insult to bankrupt businessmen in the 18th century and then to 19th-century politicians whose time in office was quickly running out. Before the 20th Amendment was ratified in 1933, lame-duck ...read more

An unthinkable more than 50 million people worldwide died from the 1918-1919 flu pandemic commonly known as the “Spanish Flu.” It was the deadliest global pandemic since the Black Death, and rare among flu viruses for striking down the young and healthy, often within days of ...read more

The Egyptian military became one of the ancient world’s greatest fighting forces during the New Kingdom period (1550 B.C. - 1070 B.C.), but it did so using borrowed weapons technology. For much of its early history, Egypt relied on simple stone maces, wooden-tipped spears, axes ...read more

Sailing for more than two months across 3,000 miles of open ocean, the 102 passengers of the Mayflower—including three pregnant women and more than a dozen children—were squeezed below decks in crowded, cold and damp conditions, suffering crippling bouts of seasickness, and ...read more