He produced programs, like “Inside Bedford-Stuyvesant” and “Like It Is,” that exposed a wide audience to the black experience.

In the wake of a horrific mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a young white man with an apparent history of racism is accused of killing nine black people during Bible study at a church, many are calling for the removal of the Confederate flag on statehouse grounds in South Carolina's capital. But the politics are tricky for Republicans in this conservative state. Last year, six in 10 South Carolinians said the flag should stay.

During the Jim Crow era, traveling in the United States for African-Americans was difficult and often dangerous. Motels and restaurants didn’t have to serve you if they didn’t want to. “Sundown towns”—places where it was unsafe to be black at night—dotted the nation’s geography. If you were driving around the country, the only way to know if you were safe was by word-of-mouth.

Founded in 1790, the Patent Office aimed to put innovation and entrepreneurship within reach of every citizen. Now, 225 years later, protesters say an out-of-touch system is doing more the opposite.

On August 6, 1945, Eugene Cotton, a Lieutenant in the US Army Air Corps, wrote to his fiancée from his posting in California. Cotton was one of hundreds of thousands who, having left service in the European theater of the war, were slated to take part in a massive invasion of the Japanese islands in late 1945 and early 1946. He was 23 years old, a recent college graduate with a degree in physics, and had undergone training at both MIT and Berkeley before joining the Army...

Drought conditions in the Western part of the United States have allowed an old Nevada town once submerged deep beneath Lake Mead to emerge from its watery grave. Founded in 1865, St. Thomas was initially settled by Mormons drawn by Muddy Creek, a tributary that flows into the Colorado River, located 22 miles away. When the Mormons left in 1871, outlaws — including horse thieves and cattle rustlers— moved in. The town was eventually settled by people attracted by the region’s prime farming land.

There's a map making the rounds on Facebook right now, which is being shared as if it's a map of pre-contact North America. You can find it here. But it doesn't show pre-contact North America at all — it's trying to show what the boundaries of the First Nations & Inuit would look like in 2015 if contact had never happened. And it's not even an accurate representation of that alternative history: the borders it uses are borders that were formed, in part, as a result of European contact.

Oliver Hazard Perry was born August 23, 1785 and also died on August 23, 1819 from Yellow Fever. He was 34 years old.

   An Infographic Overview on The History of Freight Shipping.

Samuel N. Hanmer, chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Springfield Museums, said securing the Fairfield St. property is "just the beginning" as possible next steps are explored.

It’s little more than a day off for shopping now, but when Labor Day was first observed, it wasn’t all fun and back-to-school sales.

America's railroads -- and with them, its economy -- nearly ground to a halt in 1894 because one of the wealthiest men in American history decided to grow his own fortune on the backs of hungry workers.

Time is a hard concept for most of us. A human lifetime is a long period of time. A Century is an eternity. Yet there are two people alive who have lived in three centuries. When thinking of time, realize that the US Constitution, who's ratification was ancient history when I was in school, has only been around TWO whole human lifetimes. All of US history from the Revolution till now can be contained in the life and experiences of three people.

Francis Scott Key pens a poem which is later set to music and in 1931 becomes America’s national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The poem, originally titled “The Defence of Fort McHenry,” was written after Key witnessed the Maryland fort being bombarded by the British during the War of 1812.

President Abraham Lincoln issues a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which sets a date for the freedom of more than 3 million black slaves in the United States and recasts the Civil War as a fight against slavery.

Amid much public excitement, American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark return to St. Louis, Missouri, from the first recorded overland journey from the Mississippi River to the Pacific coast and back. The Lewis and Clark Expedition had set off more than two years before to explore the territory of the Louisiana Purchase.

President Lyndon B. Johnson receives a special commission’s report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which had occurred on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev caps his trip to the United States with two days of meetings with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The two men came to general agreement on a number of issues, but a U-2 spy plane incident in May 1960 crushed any hopes for further improvement of U.S.-Soviet relations during the Eisenhower years.

In 1870, the Lighthouse Board petitioned Congress for $40,000 to construct a lighthouse and fog signal on Racine Point, located three-and-a-half miles north of Racine and eighteen miles south of Milwaukee.