In this video, we dive deep into 100 of the weirdest, wildest, and most surprising facts from U.S. history that never made it into your textbooks. From presidents with wrestling records to exploding battleships that launched wars, and from outlawed Christmas celebrations to the real story behind the Liberty Bell – this is the version of history class you wish you had. Continue reading
World War II pushed the U.S. military to find faster, safer ways to send battlefield messages across the Pacific. On May 4, 1942, the U.S. Marine Corps launched one of its most effective answers by recruiting the first 29 Navajo men to create a code based on the Navajo language. Continue reading
As we celebrate the Fourth of July, few women were more instrumental to America’s founding than Abigail Adams. Although she was not in Philadelphia when the Declaration of Independence was adopted, she played an essential role in shaping the new nation from her home in Braintree, Massachusetts. Continue reading
What secrets are buried inside this 15th-century masterpiece? Discover the hidden musical notes, the impossible anatomy, and the dark mystery of the negative space that shocked art historians.
Ben Franklin played a key role in America’s founding, which included helping to design its paper currency. Kristina Davis
Benjamin Franklin understood something fundamental about money that still shapes modern economies: Money only works when people believe it is real.
In the early 18th century, the British colonies suffered from a chronic shortage of gold and silver coins, forcing local governments to rely on paper bills for trade and everyday commerce. But paper currency created a dangerous new problem: Unlike metallic coins, paper money could be easily copied, altered and faked.
Long before his experiments with electricity or his role in the American founding now 250 years ago, Franklin spent years working with paper, ink and printing. In the process, he developed a practical understanding of materials and manufacturing. Continue reading
On January 9th, 1776, the pamphlet “Common Sense” is published in Philadelphia. The pamphlet immediately becomes a bestseller, selling tens of thousands of copies across America. In “Common Sense,” Thomas Paine, the author and violent foe of aristocracy and monarchy, attacks the King and Parliament and offers Americans an alternative to British rule: true independence.
The Dunlap Broadside on display at the Museum of the American Revolution. Courtesy of the National Archives of the United Kingdom
Jonas Phillips had been living with the Declaration of Independence for a little more than three weeks by late July 1776, when one scorching Philadelphia day he decided he should go ahead and send a copy to his relative Gumpel.
Gumpel Samson, a cousin and business partner who lived in Amsterdam, must have had a lively curiosity in such things as rebellion and independence. Enough so, anyway, that Phillips, a Jewish immigrant patriot and civil rights leader, folded a broadside of the declaration that he likely had torn from the window of a Market Street shop, stuffed it into an envelope, and sent it on the next tall ship out of Philly.
This copy of the declaration then took its own trip — one beginning in those feverish Philly days in 1776 when independence was still new, and spanning nearly two and a half centuries and a continent and an ocean, before finding its way back to Philadelphia. Continue reading
Image by Victoria Maxfield
Benjamin Franklin’s fertile mind constantly spun off inventive and useful ideas. His lightning rod saved buildings and lives. His energy-saving improvement of the wood-burning fireplace kept families warm and forests from being leveled. His lending library extended literacy to those who couldn’t afford books. His map of the Gulf Stream made travel faster and commerce more efficient.
But Franklin’s ingenuity showed most clearly in his invention, or rather recurrent reinvention, of himself. In the course of his life, Franklin devised dozens of authorial personas in print, which allowed him to challenge authority, identify folly and promote human progress with an unsparing vigor he never could have achieved under his own name. Continue reading
The year 1913 quietly transformed the United States forever. In just a few months, America introduced changes that reshaped money, taxes, politics, and the power of the federal government — and most people today have no idea how much of modern life traces back to that single year.
“For money, some men will allow the innocent to hang. They will turn traitor… they will lie, cheat, steal and they will kill. They appear brilliant, charming and generous! But they are deadly! Such are men as Dimitrios.”
Americans, living in what is called the richest nation on earth, seem always to be short of money. Wives are working in unprecedented numbers, husbands hope for overtime hours to earn more, or take part-time jobs evenings and weekends, children look for odd jobs for spending money, the family debt climbs higher, and psychologists say one of the biggest causes of family quarrels and breakups is “arguments over money.” Much of this trouble can be traced to our present “debt-money” system. Continue reading
In November 1910, seven men boarded a private train under assumed names, travelled to a private island off the coast of Georgia, and spent nine days designing the financial system that would govern the United States for the next century. They represented an estimated quarter of the entire world’s wealth. They spoke for the Rockefeller banking interests, the Morgan financial empire, the Rothschild network’s American operations, the Warburg transatlantic banking dynasty, and the United States Treasury. The Federal Reserve was the outcome. But the outcome was never just a central bank. It was a permanent arrangement.
Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States by Howard Chandler Christy
There is a phrase that has become almost liturgical in American political discourse, repeated so often by politicians, journalists, and intellectuals that it has acquired the unearned weight of self-evident truth: America is an idea. On May 4, 2024, I witnessed Justice Neil Gorsuch repeat this claim – that American is a collection of “ideas” – on television while promoting his new children’s book. He is grossly mistaken.
The statement reflects a category error dressed up as profundity, and it’s a consequential one. The United States of America is not an idea. It is a nation constituted upon principles, and the distinction is not merely semantic. It is the difference between a wish and a covenant, between a suggestion and a command, between the provisional and the enduring. Continue reading
Few have had as profound an effect on modern scientific understanding as Sir Isaac Newton.
Many people are familiar with the story of how a falling apple first inspired Newton to investigate the force that would come to be known as gravity, and as he later concluded in his seminal scientific treatise, “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy,” it is this same force that pulls a fruit to ground that keeps the planets in orbit.
While Newton undoubtedly possessed a keen sense of observation and an insatiable curiosity that enabled him to make some of the most influential mathematical and scientific discoveries in recorded history, his prolific notes and writings – especially the vast amount of manuscripts that went unpublished until hundreds of years after his death – reveal a more profound motivation. Continue reading
My knowledge of the Federal Reserve issue goes back to when I was a young boy – BUT – what follows in this video below is a story that I have never heard. It is fascinating, but stay with me – as there will be far more to share with our students on this very subject.
Many years ago on one of my broadcast series – I covered the Federal Reserve act in a manner that few had ever accomplished. I invite you to visit The Mask of Dimitrios ~ the Establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank (December 23, 1913) for an amazing story.
“For money, some men will allow the innocent to hang. They will turn traitor… they will lie, cheat, steal and they will kill. They appear brilliant, charming and generous! But they are deadly! Such are men as Dimitrios.” ~ Editor
I grew up in a little town about 25 miles north of Chicago called Northbrook, Ilinois at a time when everyone treated each other with respect. We didn’t eat a lot of fast food. We drank Kool-aid, ate lunch meat sandwiches, PB&J sandwiches, grilled cheese sandwiches, hot dogs, but mostly home made meal such as meatloaf, fried chicken, roast beef & pork chops, black eye peas, snap peas…
We grew up during a time when we would gather glass bottles to take to the store and use the deposit money to buy penny candy. (We even got a brown paper bag to put the candy in). You sure could get a lot for 25 cents. We went outside to play games, rode bikes, jumped rope and raced against sibling played hide and seek, Red Rover, Red light green light, mother may I, kick the can and yes the games got more daring as we grew…There was no bottled water, no microwave or cable tv, no cell phones, no hair straighteners… Continue reading
Portrait of James Madison, circa 1805–1807, by Gilbert Stuart. James Madison, originally a Federalist, worked hard to ensure that Antifederalists’ complaints about the Constitution would be addressed.
Less than three years after the Treaty of Paris ended America’s War for Independence in 1783, the infant nation still struggled to find its footing. Great Britain’s overreach of power – its writs of assistance, quartering of troops, and lack of jury trials – was still fresh in Americans’ memories, making many wary of concentrating too much authority in a centralized government. Yet it had become clear that the new nation’s Articles of Confederation were too weak to command order among the 13 states. Something had to be done. Continue reading
Most Americans have no idea their state has a constitution. They cannot name a single right it protects. Ask where their rights come from, and they will either plead the fifth or point to the federal Bill of Rights. What they do not know is that colonies first, then states, had declarations of rights before the federal government existed, often more expansive than anything the federal document would guarantee. Continue reading
Americans today have reached unprecedented heights of prosperity, but our economic system rests on a foundation that was built centuries ago under the direction of the nation’s first president, George Washington.
“Not unlike our political form of government, the economic transformation Washington put in place was neither preordained nor inevitable,” historian Charles Ansary writes in his biography, “George Washington: Dealmaker in Chief.”
The prosperity that Americans enjoy today is rather the product of the decisions, protocols, and precedents established during Washington’s presidency, which set a path for future administrations to follow. Continue reading