Prologue: Pieces of History

We interrupt our usual hairy programming to bring you this musical interlude. What could be so important that we would skip mustaches, beards, and goatees? Well, today marks the anniversary of the Washington, DC, premiere of This Is the Army, with songs written (and one performed) by Irving Berlin. You would easily recognize Irving Berlin’s [...]

We had a hard time choosing this week between captions that suggested ill-fated monkey-navigated flights or included the phrase “monkey hairdo.” Finally we turned to a man of impeccable taste, Brian Barth, who is the man behind the art direction and graphic design of the recipe book Eating with Uncle Sam: Recipes and Historical Bites from the [...]

Today’s “What’s Cooking Wednesdays” guest post comes from Kimberlee Ried, public programs specialist at the National Archives in Kansas City. Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses, yearning to breath free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed, I lift my lamp beside the golden door. These words, [...]

More than 400 White House staff  came to see Richard Nixon say farewell at 9.32 a.m. in the East Room of the White House. And when Nixon and his family walked to the waiting helicopter, staff and guests crowded across the lawn and porch. There were hundreds of people at the White House that historic morning. But politics [...]

Last week on Facebook, I posted up a image that my colleague found for Shark Week. It wasn’t a biological shark, but a mechanical one. The caption provided some basic information: “A Chinese soldier guards a line of American P-40 fighter planes, painted with the shark-face emblem of the ‘Flying Tigers,’ at a flying field somewhere in [...]