History

An illustration from The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain, published in 1897. Between the 1860s and 1920, when Prohibition went into effect, American bartending came into its own. Internet Archive Book Images/Flickr hide caption

3-D renderings of four skeletons found buried near the altar of an early church in the Jamestown settlement in Virginia. Smithsonian X 3D hide caption

Costume designer Walter Plunkett made an intricate watercolor design for Scarlett O'Hara's famous curtain dress in Gone with the Wind. Courtesy of AMPAS hide caption

The USS Indianapolis (CA-35), pictured off the Mare Island Navy Yard, Calif., in July 1945. U.S. Navy/National Archives via Wikimedia Commons hide caption

The Harwell Dekatron Computer in Bletchley Park is one of the massive machines used by Matt Parker in his Imitation Archive music. Courtesy of the National Museum of Computing hide caption

Willis Conover, an expert on jazz, broadcasts "Music USA" from his Voice of America studio in Washington in March 1959. AP hide caption

Author and activist Bill McKibben paddles toward Follensby Pond in New York's Adirondack Mountains, along the route followed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the summer of 1858. Julia Ferguson/NCPR hide caption

The architecture of downtown Charleston, S.C., is modeled after its sister colony, Bridgetown, Barbados. Many of Charleston's first settlers were white voyagers and black slaves from the island. Kenya Downs for NPR hide caption