As a young man, King C. Gillette (1855-1932) worked as a traveling salesman. Always interested in inventions, King received a number of patents, none more important than one for a disposable safety ...

Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation’s oldest civil rights organization. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the association led the black civil rights struggle in fighting injustices such as the ...

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 a book published in the year of his death, Scottish mathematician and laird John Napier (1550-1617) described several aids to arithmetic computations. One, since known as Napier’s rods or Napier’s ...

One of Hazelle Rollins favorite characters, this puppet is an early version of Teto the Clown, made in 1928. The marionette's head is made of clay with finely painted features, black yarn hair, and a ...

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints founded the town of Nauvoo, Illinois in 1839 and finished construction of their elaborate temple in 1846. Initially welcomed by the Illinois ...

This vibraphone, used by Lionel Hampton, was made by Musser in Elkhardt, Indiana, around 1980. It is a three-octave, M75 Century model, with gold finished bars, gold lacquered resonators, and covered ...

The John Deere Model D tractor was introduced in 1923 and became the first tractor built, marketed, and named John Deere. It replaced the Waterloo Boy in the company's product line. The two-cylinder ...

Racial segregation was still legal in the United States on February 1, 1960, when four African American college students sat down at this Woolworth counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Politely ...

The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders have been cheering the team on since the Cowboys football team’s inception in 1961 but it wasn’t until 1972 that the iconic uniforms were created. With the distinctive ...

During the 1880s the engineer Herman Hollerith devised a set of machines for compiling data from the United States Census. Hollerith's tabulating system included a punch for entering data about each ...

While leg makeup has been commercially available since the 1920s, it wasn't until rationing was introduced during the World War II that the product became an essential commodity for many American ...