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There have been copies of the Declaration of Independence for as long as there’s been a Declaration of Independence. The handwritten, signed document is currently safe from Nicolas Cage in the National Archives. But the Continental Congress’s printer John Dunlap made about 200 broadside copies of the document on July 4, 1776, of which 26 remain. These were posted in public places for soon-to-be Americans to read and celebrate. One of them will be sold at auction in May 2026 to commemorate the 25...
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Environmental reconstructions reveal that mammoths persisted long after they disappeared from the fossil record.
Scientists have discovered that woolly mammoths coexisted with humans in North America for thousands of years longer than previously believed. (Image credit: Daniel Eskridge via Getty Images)
Woolly mammoths may have survived in North America thousands of years longer than scientists previously thought, according to vials of Alaskan permafrost reveal.
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The Battle of Derna took place during the First Barbary War.
William Eaton and First Lieutenant Presley O'Bannon captured Derna on April 27, 1805, and successfully defended it on May 13.
In 1804, during the fourth year of the First Barbary War, the former American consul to Tunis, William Eaton returned to the Mediterranean. Titled "Naval Agent to the Barbary States," Eaton had received support from the US government for a plan to overthrow the pasha of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli. After me...
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The John Coffee Hays Collection at UT Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History contains a printed oral history by early Texas historian Andrew Jackson Sowell. The oral histories recount the involvement of settler Thomas Galbreath in three frontier skirmishes between the Texas Rangers and Comanche warriors during the 1840s. Sowell’s article serves as an example of the way Texas’s early events were passed orally by participants and thus became part of the inexact and possibly fictional landsca...
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The Sadie Hawkins dance is a familiar tradition to most Americans, best known for the custom of girls asking boys to the dance instead of the other way around. In a world where women run businesses, lead governments, and head nearly half of U.S. households, setting aside one special night for girls to take the lead can feel unnecessary and outdated. Still, the story behind Sadie Hawkins herself offers a fascinating window into Depression-era America and the surprising ways popular culture can sh...
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Destitute and convinced she was dying, Calamity Jane boarded a train in Billings, Montana, without a ticket. When she was about to be kicked off in Sheridan, Wyoming, sympathetic fans paid her way so she could get home to Deadwood.
Dick Nelson was a railroad man who knew many of the characters who made the Wild West famous. He had arrived in Northern Wyoming in 1888 and became a freight brakeman with his headquarters in Sheridan.
As a representative of the railroads, Nelson was assigned to...
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Whether relayed by way of a novel, poem, movie, or word of mouth, stories have served as a means of connecting people through shared experiences and emotions since we first learned to communicate with one another.
Some of the most famous stories have endured for hundreds or thousands of years. William Shakespeare penned his celebrated plays in the 16th and 17th centuries. Beowulf was written several hundred years before that, while the Iliad and Odyssey epics push back even further into the f...
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Whether relayed by way of a novel, poem, movie, or word of mouth, stories have served as a means of connecting people through shared experiences and emotions since we first learned to communicate with one another.
Some of the most famous stories have endured for hundreds or thousands of years. William Shakespeare penned his celebrated plays in the 16th and 17th centuries. Beowulf was written several hundred years before that, while the Iliad and Odyssey epics push back even further into the f...
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Dinosaurs have been extinct for 65 million years. That’s a long time, but not nearly as long as they were alive for: 165 million years. Their reign as the planet’s dominant species absolutely dwarfs our own, which began a few hundred thousand years ago, and accounts for just 0.007% of the Earth’s history — a blink of the cosmic eye. If you compressed the planet’s history into one calendar year, dinosaurs would have appeared on January 1 before going extinct in the third week of September; humans...
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After more than a century of use as a maritime distress signal, “SOS” has become shorthand for just about any emergency. You may have heard that it stands for “save our ship” or “save our souls,” but that’s actually a backronym, or an acronym made up after the fact. The letters in “SOS” didn’t initially stand for anything; they were originally chosen because they form a sequence of Morse code that can be transmitted more quickly than others.
Morse code (named for Samuel Morse) is a way of tra...
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Lighters were invented before modern matches.
Lighters seem, on the surface, to be a little more advanced than your standard pack of matches. But lighters were actually invented before matches as we know them today. Until the early 19th century, “matches” were flammable sticks made to carry fire from one place to another, not make fire on their own. Early self-igniting matches were too dangerous to be practical. The earliest, invented in 1805, involved dipping potassium chlorinate into sulphu...
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In 1843, approximately 1,000 people embarked on the arduous journey west across the young United States in the first major wagon train migration on the Oregon Trail. Spanning more than 2,000 miles from Independence, Missouri, to the promising lands of the Oregon Territory, the trail served as a lifeline for those seeking new beginnings in the American West. Each day, migrants traveled an average of 15 miles, though on a good day, anywhere from 18 to 20 miles could be covered, most of it on foot....
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