African Americans turned to the courts to help protect their constitutional rights. But the courts challenged earlier civil rights legislation and handed down a series of decisions that permitted ...

Nineteenth-century Plains Indian drawings have often been called “ledger” drawings because they were made with pencil, ink, and watercolor on pages of old ledger or account books. When young Plains ...

In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, the first machine that could record sound and play it back. On the first audio recording Edison recited, “Mary had a little lamb. Its fleece was white ...

These small metal badges, most often made of copper, were produced in Charleston, South Carolina between 1800 and the Civil War. They were worn by slaves working in the city; slaves living and working ...

This commercial bread-slicing machine was designed and manufactured in 1928 by Otto Frederick Rohwedder (1880-1960). It was used to slice loaves of fresh bakery bread at Korn's Bakery, in Rohwedder's ...

“I meekly followed [the nurse] through the long ward, unable to return the gaze of the occupants of the twenty-six beds, … and with a sinking heart watched her raise the head of a poor fellow in the ...

The indications or uses for this product as provided by the manufacturer are: Aids in relieving distress and discomforts of colds by its fourfold action -- as an analgesic, as an antipyretic, as an ...

This Kermit the Frog puppet was created by Jim Henson in 1955 for Sam and Friends. It is the first Kermit puppet, and it is made from Jim Henson’s mother’s old spring coat and a pair of Jim’s blue ...

This steel cabinet, which Phyllis Diller calls her Gag File, has fortyeight file drawers containing more than 50,000 3-by-5-inch index cards, each bearing a typewritten joke or gag that Diller used in ...

Jack Kilby’s demonstration of the first working integrated circuit (IC) in 1958 revolutionized the field of microelectronics. Instead of using discrete transistors, resistors, and capacitors to form a ...