Education

The grandson of Napoleon Bonaparte's younger brother Jérôme, Charles Bonaparte lacked his famous relative's ambition for world domination yet displayed a talent for visionary authority that might have impressed the Little Corporal. In the late 19th century, Charles Bonaparte, then a lawyer from Baltimore, came into the orbit of fast-rising New York politician Theodore Roosevelt through their shared interest in civil service reform. Bonaparte later became President Roosevelt's secretary of the Na...

Records are meant to be broken, but at least one weather-related event is unlikely to be bested anytime soon: the biggest snowstorm in American history, which dumped nearly 5 feet of snow on the Northeastern U.S. The aptly named Great Blizzard of 1888, also known as the Great White Hurricane, occurred in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut between March 11 and 14, and saw as much as 58 inches (4.8 feet) of snowfall. That was in Saratoga Springs, New York, while Ben...

On August 30, 1774, two Virginians arrived by carriage at George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon. It was Patrick Henry and Edmund Pendleton. Henry and Pendleton planned to spend the night at Mount Vernon, and on the morning of August 31, 1774, they would depart with Washington to go to Philadelphia and attend the First Continental Congress. These three Virginians would be joined in Philadelphia by Richard Henry Lee, Peyton Randolph, Benjamin Harrison, and Richard Bland to form the Virginia de...

In the late 19th century, the American press found itself in the grip of a phenomenon known as “yellow journalism” — a sensationalized form of reporting that prioritized eye-catching headlines ahead of the cold, hard facts. These unverified claims sometimes had serious consequences, most notably in the case of the Spanish-American War. On February 15, 1898, the USS Maine battleship exploded and sank in Havana Harbor in Cuba (a country controlled by Spain at the time). Within days, major newsp...