Prologue: Pieces of History

On May 20, 1873, Jacob W. Davis received patent #139,121 for an “improvement in fastening pocket openings.” Davis’s improvement consisted of “the employment of a metal rivet or eyelet at each edge of the pocket opening to prevent the ripping of the seam at those points.” Less than a year later, on January 31, 1874, [...]

Petroglyphs, Napoleon, tobacco pigtails, the EPA. What do these have to do with each other? On May 14, 1804, the Lewis and Clark expedition set out from St. Louis, Missouri, to explore the Northwest from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. France had just seceded Lousiana to the United States. The National Archives holds [...]

The World Expo 2010 in Shanghai, China, opened this month and expects to attract 70 million visitors. If you are not going to China, you can still visit the World Expos of the past, here in the National Archives. Since the 1876 exposition in Philadelphia, the United States has hosted over a dozen expos. The [...]

Forty years ago this week, four people were killed at Kent State University, fueling protests in an already divided nation.  This map was used by the Kent State University Investigative Team to determine what happened on May 4, 1970.

In the history of the United States Navy, no formal mutiny on the high seas has ever occurred, though one was narrowly averted on the storied decks of the USS Somers in 1842. Without a Naval academy to train future Naval officers, the USS Somers set out in 1842 with a crew of seaman in [...]