During the Peasants’ Revolt, a large mob of English peasants led by Wat Tyler marches into London and begins burning and looting the city. Several government buildings were destroyed, prisoners were released, and a judge was beheaded along with several dozen other leading citizens. The Peasants’ Revolt had its origins in a severe manifestation of […]

Having hurried ahead of the main body of the expedition, Meriwether Lewis and four men arrive at the Great Falls of the Missouri River, confirming that the explorers are headed in the right direction. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had set out on their expedition to the Pacific the previous year. They spent the winter […]

Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s famously controversial novel Lolita has its New York premiere on June 13, 1962. Even its advertising posters pose the question: “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” Four years earlier, Kubrick, director of the big-budget Roman epic Spartacus (1960), and his partner, producer James B. Harris, […]

The U.S. Supreme Court hands down its decision in Miranda v. Arizona, establishing the principle that all criminal suspects must be advised of their rights before interrogation.

After more than a decade in space, Pioneer 10, the world’s first outer-planetary probe, leaves the outer limits of the known solar system by crossing the orbit of Neptune, the system’s then farthest planet. The next day, it radioed back its first scientific data on interstellar space. On March 2, 1972, the NASA spacecraft was […]

On June 13, 2017 Otto Warmbier, a 22-year-old student who was taken prisoner in North Korea 17 months earlier, returned home to the United States in a comatose state. His return marked a warming of relations between the U.S. and the pariah state known for its extensive human-rights abuses, casting new attention on how North […]