Public interest in Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, began to flourish in the 1940s, when developments in space travel and the dawn of the atomic age caused many Americans to turn their attention to the skies. The town of Roswell, located near the Pecos River in southeastern New Mexico, became a magnet for UFO believers due to the strange events of early July 1947, when ranch foreman W.W. Brazel found a strange, shiny material scattered over some of his land. He turned the material over to the sheriff, who passed it on to authorities at the nearby Air Force base. On July 8, Air Force officials announced they had recovered the wreckage of a “flying disk.” A local newspaper put the story on its front page, launching Roswell into the spotlight of the public’s UFO fascination.

The Air Force soon took back their story, however, saying the debris had been merely a downed weather balloon. Aside from die-hard UFO believers, or “ufologists,” public interest in the so-called “Roswell Incident” faded until the late 1970s, when claims surfaced that the military had invented the weather balloon story as a cover-up. Believers in this theory argued that officials had in fact retrieved several alien bodies from the crashed spacecraft, which were now stored in the mysterious Area 51 installation in Nevada. Seeking to dispel these suspicions, the Air Force issued a 1,000-page report in 1994 stating that the crashed object was actually a high-altitude weather balloon launched from a nearby missile test-site as part of a classified experiment aimed at monitoring the atmosphere in order to detect Soviet nuclear tests.

On July 24, 1997, barely a week before the extravagant 50th anniversary celebration of the incident, the Air Force released yet another report on the controversial subject. Titled “The Roswell Report, Case Closed,” the document stated definitively that there was no Pentagon evidence that any kind of life form was found in the Roswell area in connection with the reported UFO sightings, and that the “bodies” recovered were not aliens but dummies used in parachute tests conducted in the region. Any hopes that this would put an end to the cover-up debate were in vain, as furious ufologists rushed to point out the report’s inconsistencies. With conspiracy theories still alive and well on the Internet, Roswell continues to thrive as a tourist destination for UFO enthusiasts far and wide, hosting the annual UFO Encounter Festival each July and welcoming visitors year-round to its International UFO Museum and Research Center.

The post U.S. Air Force reports on Roswell appeared first on HISTORY.

Six years after its founding, in 1723, the Grand Lodge published The Constitutions of the Free-Masons, a book “whose Enlightenment principles provide the philosophical foundations of modern Freemasonry,” according to the United Grand Lodge of England website.

The Enlightenment, an intellectual and philosophical movement that valued reason over superstition and the rights of individuals over the rule of monarchs, took hold in Europe in the 18th century and became a major force behind both the American and French revolutions. The Freemasons, who trace their roots to the stone masons of the Middle Ages, were one of several secret societies that came to prominence around that time.

In 1734, Benjamin Franklin, an enthusiastic Mason, reprinted the book in the American colonies. According to historian Gordon S. Wood, Franklin “remained a Mason throughout his life. Not only was Masonry dedicated to the promotion of virtue throughout the world, but this Enlightenment fraternity gave Franklin contacts and connections that helped him in his business.”

Franklin wasn’t alone. George Washington, Paul Revere, and an untold number of signers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution are believed to have been Freemasons. Precise numbers are hard to pin down because of the secrecy surrounding the group.

Today in addition to the original Grand Lodge in England, there are Grand Lodges throughput the world, including more than 80 in the United States.

The post 1st Masonic Grand Lodge formed in London appeared first on HISTORY.

After the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 did away with a racist quota system that dated back to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a number of immigrants from China and Hong Kong made their way to New York. Many of the women who arrived in Chinatown after 1965 found work in the garment industry, where pay was bad and conditions were poor. Workers were paid based on how much they produced, rather than by the hour, which led to constant arguing with management and left many making less than minimum wage. The union representing these workers, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, was majority-Asian, but its leadership remained mostly white and did little to communicate with its Chinese-speaking members. Nevertheless, Katie Quan, a garment worker originally from San Francisco, developed her skills as an organizer, forging bonds with her fellow workers and organizing work stoppages to secure them higher wages.

In 1982, the contractors who served as middlemen between manufacturers and workers refused to renew their contract with the garment workers’ union, asking them to give up some of their medical and retirement benefits in addition to three holidays. Quan quickly began organizing her comrades and drawing media attention to the workers’ cause. Although the contractors, who were for the most part also Chinese, tried to play up their ethnic connection and frame the ILGW as indifferent to its Asian members, the workers stuck together. On June 24th, Quan and her fellow organizers called a strike and drew a crowd of over 20,000 workers to their rally. Their subsequent march through the streets was a show of force, and within a few days nearly every contractor had agreed to sign the union contract.

The strike was a major victory for the garment workers and a turning point for their union, which worked much more closely with its Asian American workers from then on. Many of those involved went on to become labor leaders, including Quan, who later served as vice president of the ILGW and formed the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance. Reflecting on the strike, Quan later wrote that it had proven the power of workers to force concessions not only from their managers but also from their unions: “only when the workers stand up and organize themselves will there be justice and lasting change.”

The post Garment workers’ strike begins in New York City’s Chinatown appeared first on HISTORY.

The rapidly moving fire began in a second-floor lounge, a New Orleans fire department official said. Firefighters became blocked by stalled vehicles and crowds of early evening revelers. Witnesses smelled gasoline before the blaze. Fifteen people leaped from the second floor of the club. All survived.

"It was horrible," a former New Orleans fireman told the in 2013. “I don't think anything could have prepared you for something like that," the Vietnam veteran added. "No one deserves to die like that.”

In 1973, the LGBT scene in New Orleans was still largely underground, the Times-Picayune reported in 2013. A week after the fire, churches refused to conduct funerals for the dead. An Episcopal bishop rebuked a reverend who held a prayer service for the victims.

In 2013, the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans apologized for the church’s silence after the fire. Also in 2013, a documentary film was released about the fire.

In 2016, 49 people were murdered at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the deadliest attack at a gay club in American history.

The post UpStairs Lounge arson attack appeared first on HISTORY.

Following World War II, Germany was divided into occupation zones. The United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and, eventually, France, were given specific zones to occupy in which they were to accept the surrender of Nazi forces and restore order. The Soviet Union occupied most of eastern Germany, while the other Allied nations occupied western Germany. The German capital of Berlin was similarly divided into four zones of occupation. Almost immediately, differences between the United States and the Soviet Union surfaced. The Soviets sought huge reparations from Germany in the form of money, industrial equipment, and resources. The Russians also made it clear that they desired a neutral and disarmed Germany.

The United States saw things in quite a different way. American officials believed that the economic recovery of Western Europe was dependent on a strong, reunified Germany. They also felt that only a rearmed Germany could stand as a bulwark against Soviet expansion into Western Europe. In May 1946, the Americans stopped reparations shipments from their zone to the Soviets. In December, the British and Americans combined their zones; the French joined some months later. The Soviets viewed these actions as a threat and issued more demands for a say in the economic future of Germany. On June 22, 1948, negotiations between the Soviets, Americans, and British broke down. On June 24, Soviet forces blocked the roads and railroad lines into West Berlin.

American officials were furious, and some in the administration of President Harry S. Truman argued that the time for diplomacy with the Soviets was over. For a few tense days, the world waited to see whether the United States and Soviet Union would come to blows. In West Berlin, panic began to set in as its population worried about shortages of food, water, and medical aid. The United States response came just two days after the Soviets began their blockade. A massive airlift of supplies into West Berlin was undertaken in what was to become one of the greatest logistical efforts in history. For the Soviets, the escapade quickly became a diplomatic embarrassment. Russia looked like an international bully that was trying to starve men, women, and children into submission. And the successful American airlift merely served to accentuate the technological superiority of the United States over the Soviet Union. On May 12, 1949, the Soviets officially ended the blockade.

The post Soviets blockade West Berlin appeared first on HISTORY.

Subsequently, Congress passed Public Law 88-408, which became known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving the president the power to take whatever actions he deemed necessary, including “the use of armed force.” The resolution passed 82 to 2 in the Senate, where Wayne K. Morse (D-Oregon) and Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska) were the only dissenting votes; the bill passed unanimously in the House of Representatives. President Johnson signed it into law on August 10. It became the legal basis for every presidential action taken by the Johnson administration during its conduct of the war.

Despite the initial support for the resolution, it became increasingly controversial as Johnson used it to increase U.S. commitment to the war in Vietnam. Repealing the resolution was meant as an attempt to limit presidential war powers. The Nixon administration took a neutral stance on the vote, denying that it relied on the Tonkin resolution as the basis for its war-making authority in Southeast Asia. The administration asserted that it primarily drew on the constitutional authority of the president as commander-in-chief to protect the lives of U.S. military forces in justifying its actions and policies in prosecuting the war.

The post Senate votes to repeal Gulf of Tonkin resolution appeared first on HISTORY.

In the early 1670s, 50 years of peace between the Plymouth colony and the local Wampanoag Indians began to deteriorate when the rapidly expanding settlement forced land sales on the tribe. Reacting to increasing Native American tensions, the English met with King Philip, chief of the Wampanoag, and demanded that his forces surrender their arms. The Wampanoag did so, but in 1675 a Christian Native American who had been acting as an informer to the English was murdered, and three Wampanoag were tried and executed for the crime.

King Philip responded by ordering the attack on Swansea on June 24, which set off a series of Wampanoag raids in which several settlements were destroyed and scores of colonists massacred. The colonists retaliated by destroying a number of Indian villages. The destruction of a Narragansett village by the English brought the Narragansett into the conflict on the side of King Philip, and within a few months several other tribes and all the New England colonies were involved. In early 1676, the Narragansett were defeated and their chief killed, while the Wampanoag and their other allies were gradually subdued. King Philip’s wife and son were captured, and on August 12, 1676, after his secret headquarters in Mount Hope, Rhode Island, was discovered, Philip was assassinated by a Native American in the service of the English. The English drew and quartered Philip’s body and publicly displayed his head on a stake in Plymouth.

King Philip’s War ended the Native American presence in the region and inaugurated a period of unimpeded colonial expansion.

The post King Philip’s War begins appeared first on HISTORY.

Responders pulled dozens of survivors from the 40-year-old Champlain Towers South building the day of the collapse. But searches by rescuers in the ensuing days discovered no other survivors.

“The building is literally pancaked,” Surfside mayor Charles Burkett told reporters. Workers eventually cleared over 18 million pounds of concrete and rubble from the site.

The collapse began seven minutes before the residential tower fell, when the ground-floor parking area and a pool deck caved in, the

An investigation by the newspaper uncovered design failures, shoddy construction, structural damage and neglect that led to the deadly chain reaction.

Engineers believed the cause of the collapse was a structural column or concrete slab giving way.

In wake of the collapse, Miami-Dade County inspected more than 500 similar buildings to identify obvious structural concerns.

The post 98 people die in Surfside condo collapse appeared first on HISTORY.

One of Hollywood’s most bankable leading men since the late 1980s, Cruise was on "Today" to promote his forthcoming movie, The War of the Worlds, the director Steven Spielberg’s big-budget movie version of H.G. Wells’ classic science-fiction novel. Cruise was happy to talk about the movie, as well as his upcoming marriage to the actress Katie Holmes, whom he had proposed to atop the Eiffel Tower a short time before, following a whirlwind romance.

When Lauer asked Cruise about his criticism of Shields, however, the exchange got heated, as Cruise’s demeanor became visibly more serious and combative. As a leading member of the Church of Scientology, Cruise is against the use of anti-depressant drugs or psychiatric therapy of any kind. “I really care about Brooke Shields,” Cruise said. “…[But] there’s misinformation, and she doesn’t understand the history of psychiatry…psychiatry is a pseudoscience.”

After chastising Lauer for being “glib” and not knowing enough about the topic, Cruise mentioned his research into the use of the prescription drug Ritalin, which is notably used to treat hyperactive children. When Lauer mentioned that he knew people for whom prescription drugs had worked, Cruise accused him of “advocating” Ritalin, to which Lauer got visibly frustrated and said “I am not…You’re telling me that your experiences with the people I know, which are zero, are more important than my experiences… And I’m telling you, I’ve lived with these people and they’re better.”

The Lauer interview marked the latest in what the Washington Post called at the time “a series of manic moments in public, in which the screen idol appeared to be losing his chiseled, steely reserve.” Another of these moments had occurred earlier that month on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show, where Cruise jumped up and down on a couch professing his love for Holmes. During the "Today" interview, Holmes sat in the wings watching “adoringly” as her fiancé “Chernobyled” (again in the words of the Washington Post). Some blamed Cruise’s run of out-of-control public outbursts on the actor’s split with his longtime publicist, Pat Kingsley, in the spring of 2004 and his decision to entrust his sister, Lee Ann DeVette, with all his publicity. In November 2005, Cruise replaced DeVette with another veteran publicist, Paul Bloch.

The post Tom Cruise raises eyebrows in “Today” show interview appeared first on HISTORY.

In the aftermath of the attack on Gelernter, various federal departments established the UNABOM Task Force, which launched an intensive search for the so-called “Unabomber.” The bombings, along with 14 others since 1978 that killed 3 people and injured 23 others, were eventually linked to Theodore John Kaczynski, a former mathematician from Chicago. Kaczynski won a scholarship to study mathematics at Harvard University at age 16. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, he became a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Although celebrated as a brilliant mathematician, he suffered from persistent social and emotional problems, and in 1969 abruptly ended his promising career. Disillusioned with the world around him, he tried to buy land in the Canadian wilderness but in 1971 settled for a 1.4-acre plot near his brother’s home in Montana.

For the next 25 years, Kaczynski lived as a hermit, occasionally working odd jobs and traveling but mostly living off his land. He developed a philosophy of radical environmentalism and militant opposition to modern technology, and tried to get academic essays on the subjects published. It was the rejection of one of his papers by two Chicago-area universities in 1978 that may have prompted him to manufacture and deliver his first mail bomb.

The package was addressed to the University of Illinois from Northwestern University, but was returned to Northwestern, where a security guard was seriously wounded while opening the suspicious package. In 1979, Kaczynski struck again at Northwestern, injuring a student at the Technological Institute. Later that year, his third bomb exploded on an American Airlines flight, causing injuries from smoke inhalation. In 1980, a bomb mailed to the home of Percy Wood, the president of United Airlines, injured Wood when he tried to open it. As Kaczynski seemed to be targeting universities and airlines, federal investigators began calling their suspect the Unabomber, an acronym of sorts for university, airline and bomber.

From 1981 to 1985, there were seven more bombs, four at universities, one at a professor’s home, one at the Boeing Company in Auburn, Washington and one at a computer store in Sacramento. Six people were injured, and in 1985 the owner of the computer store was killed–the Unabomber’s first murder. In 1987, a woman saw a man wearing aviator glasses and a hooded sweatshirt placing what turned out to be a bomb outside a computer store in Salt Lake City. The sketch of the suspect that emerged became the first representation of the Unabomber, and Kaczynski, fearing capture, halted his terrorist campaign for six years, until the bombings of June 1993. In 1994, another mail bomb killed an advertising executive at his home in New Jersey. In April 1995, a bomb killed the president of a timber-industry lobbying group.

This was to be the Unabomber’s final attack. With the help of Kaczynski’s older brother David, FBI agents gathered evidence against him and on April 3, 1996, arrested him in a remote Montana cabin. On May 4, 1998, Kaczynski was sentenced to four life terms in prison after pleading guilty in order to escape the death penalty. He died in prison on June 10, 2023.

The post Unabomber mail bomb injures Yale professor appeared first on HISTORY.

Those not familiar with oeuvre of the group that Blender magazine named the “Worst Band in History” would do best to imagine, in the most literal way possible, what a rap group made up of actual insane clowns might look and sound like. Not “wacky” clowns or “spooky” clowns, but criminally insane clowns of the homicidal variety.

Formed in Detroit in the early 1990s by the MCs Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, Insane Clown Posse had built a strong enough grassroots following with their first two albums and their bloody, special effects-laden live show to have their contract purchased for $1 million by Disney subsidiary Hollywood Records in 1997. Work began immediately on the group’s next album, The Great Milenko—a reference to one of many fictional characters in the tales of murder and mayhem in which the Posse trafficked.

On June 24, 1997, with 100,000 copies already shipped and 14,000 already sold, The Great Milenko was poised to debut at #63 on the Billboard 200 album chart when corporate officials at Disney decided to cease production and begin an immediate recall of the album.

The rationale offered for the action by Disney officials was reasonable enough: They deemed the lyrical content of The Great Milenko to be inappropriately graphic. But the Insane Clowns and their handlers at Hollywood Records thought there was more to the recall. Just weeks earlier, a boycott of all Disney businesses had been threatened by the Southern Baptist Convention in protest of Disney World's “Gay Days,” and critics of Disney’s move voiced strong suspicion that this pressure is what encouraged Disney to crack down on Insane Clown Posse.

The post Disney pulls Insane Clown Posse album on release day appeared first on HISTORY.

During the opening months of the invasion, Napoleon was forced to contend with a bitter Russian army in perpetual retreat. Refusing to engage Napoleon’s superior army in a full-scale confrontation, the Russians under General Mikhail Kutuzov burned everything behind them as they retreated deeper and deeper into Russia. On September 7, the indecisive Battle of Borodino was fought, in which both sides suffered terrible losses. On September 14, Napoleon arrived in Moscow intending to find supplies but instead found almost the entire population evacuated, and the Russian army retreated again. Early the next morning, fires broke across the city, set by Russian patriots, and the Grande Armée’s winter quarters were destroyed. After waiting a month for a surrender that never came, Napoleon, faced with the onset of the Russian winter, was forced to order his starving army out of Moscow.

During the disastrous retreat, Napoleon’s army suffered continual harassment from a suddenly aggressive and merciless Russian army. Stalked by hunger and the deadly lances of the Cossacks, the decimated army reached the Berezina River late in November, but found their way blocked by the Russians. On November 27, Napoleon forced a way across at Studenka, and when the bulk of his army passed the river two days later, he was forced to burn his makeshift bridges behind him, stranding some 10,000 stragglers on the other side. From there, the retreat became a rout, and on December 8 Napoleon left what remained of his army to return to Paris. Six days later, the Grande Armée finally escaped Russia, having suffered a loss of more than 400,000 men during the disastrous invasion.

The post Napoleon’s Grande Armée invades Russia appeared first on HISTORY.