U.S. History
How Dangerous Was the Oregon Trail, Really?
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Article
The Oregon Trail has long occupied a special place in the American imagination — a fascination boosted by the popular Oregon Trail computer game, where players regularly suffered from dysentery, snakebites, and broken wagon axles. The real journey west was every bit as grueling — but not always for the reasons popular culture suggests. An estimated 350,000 people traveled the Oregon Trail and similar overland routes between the early 1840s and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. Historians estimate that at least 20,000 of them died along the way, making the route what the ...Read More
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U.S. HistoryArticle1317 Things You Forgot Happened During the Revolutionary War
During the American Revolution, 13 British colonies in North America fought for independence from English rule in what became one of the most defining conflicts in history. Certain moments from…
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U.S. HistoryFact41Navy bean soup has been on the Senate menu every day since 1903.
Though no one’s sure who to thank for the tradition — some say Senator Fred Dubois of Idaho, while others credit Minnesota’s Knute Nelson — one item has been on…
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U.S. HistoryFact54In 1941, the U.S. Postal Service moved $9 billion in gold to Fort Knox.
No visitors are allowed at the Fort Knox Bullion Depository, and for good reason: About half of the U.S. Treasury’s gold reserves are stored there, making it one of the…
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U.S. HistoryArticle527 Priceless Facts About the U.S. Mint
With the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 and the Bill of Rights in 1791, citizens of the fledgling United States of America could count on documentation that guaranteed the…
