There's much more to Saint Patrick than shamrocks, green hills, and snakes. His real tale is a pirate story because Patrick first came to Ireland when he was captured by Irish pirates just before his 16th birthday. Learn the real story behind Saint Patrick in our...
Frederick Douglass, the famed orator and abolitionist, saw his life change in one afternoon in 1833. Learn about his incredible battle with an overseer--a struggle that changed a slave into a man, he said. Click on the link below, and you can watch our second "History...
My favorite canine writer, Snoopy of Peanuts fame, received a boatload of rejection slips in his pursuit of a publisher over the years, and some of them are gems. "Dear contributor, thank you for submitting your story to our magazine," one publisher wrote to Snoopy....
On a misty night in October of 1863, the aptly named David, a small Confederate torpedo boat, set out to slay the much larger Union vessel, the New Ironsides. The David was the first important steam-powered torpedo boat developed by the Confederacy--a forty-eight and...
Venetia Burney was having breakfast on March 14, 1930, when her grandfather read aloud a newspaper story that said a new planet had just been discovered. This planet had been found at the farthest reaches of our solar system, in cold, dark space. Venetia, who was just...
The young man rode his horse along the road that weaved through the lush countryside of Assisi, Italy, when he heard a sound that struck terror in anyone who heard it. It was the ringing of a clapper, a type of bell--a signal that the man approaching on the road was a...
Superman started out as a villain. When two students from Glenview High School in Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, wrote a short story in the early 1930s about Superman, their new character was a villain who wanted to conquer the world. But within a year,...
An elderly man shoves two packages out of a fourth floor window, and then he crawls out and sits on the ledge, staring down at the ground below. Then slowly, carefully, he turns himself around, lowers himself from the ledge, and lets go, plunging down four stories,...
Sky Andrecheck's field of dreams is more like a field of data. His specialty is known as "sabermetrics"--the study of baseball using data popularized by the best-selling book, Moneyball, and the movie by the same name starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. In Moneyball,...
Happy Henry Day! This week marks the 166th anniversary of Henry Brown's amazing escape from slavery. On March 23, 1849, Henry Brown was sealed inside a wooden box, 3 feet by 2 feet by 2-1/2 feet in size. Then he was shipped from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia--a...