In 1946, World War II veterans in a small Tennessee town armed themselves, laid siege to the county jail, and forced a corrupt local government out of power. It is one of the only times in modern American history that citizens took up arms against their own officials and won. Paul Cantrell's machine, tied to Memphis boss Ed Crump, had run McMinn County since 1936 on a fee system that paid deputies per arrest. Returning GIs got picked up and fined repeatedly. In May 1946 they formed the GI Non-Partisan League and ran their own slate. On election day, Sheriff Pat Mansfield brought in some 200 out-of-county deputies at $50 a day. One shot a Black farmer, Tom Gillespie, in the back for trying to vote. When the polls closed, deputies carried the ballot boxes into the jail and barricaded themselves in. The veterans broke into the National Guard armory, surrounded the jail, and fought a six-hour gun battle before using dynamite. The deputies surrendered around 3:30 a.m. Nobody died. The ballots were counted in public.

Kids skateboarding & hanging out, 1994.

In June 1948, three years after World War II ended, the Soviet Union cut off every road and rail line into West Berlin. More than two million people were trapped behind the blockade, and the goal was to force the Western Allies out. The U.S. & its allies refused, and for the next year they flew in almost everything the city needed. It became known as the Berlin Airlift. One of the pilots was Gail Halvorsen, a farm kid from Utah flying a C-54 cargo plane. One day at the airfield fence he met a group of German kids and gave them the only two sticks of gum he had. I can't imagine being on either side of that fence. He promised to come back and drop them candy, and told them to watch for the plane that wiggled its wings. His crew pooled their candy rations. He tied the bars to tiny parachutes made from handkerchiefs & dropped them on his approach, and the next time he flew over, he could see the kids waving the parachutes at him. They called him Uncle Wiggly Wings. I think this is what winning actually looks like: three years after the war, we were dropping chocolate on the children of the country we'd defeated. He died in 2022, at 101.

Walking around inside of a high school in Fairfax, Virginia in 2002.

By 1945, millions of Americans were serving in Europe, and their mail wasn't getting through all that well. Letters & packages from home had piled up in warehouses for months, and it was dragging down the morale of the troops. The Army's answer was the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only all-Black battalion in the Women's Army Corps & the only all-Black, all-women battalion sent overseas in World War II. More than 800 women volunteered, under Major Charity Edna Adams. They trained at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, crossed the Atlantic on the Ile de France, and went to work in Birmingham, England, digging through mountains of undelivered mail. The battalion ran entirely on its own, with its own medics, cooks & administrators. I think mail sounds like a small thing until you picture being thousands of miles from home for years with nothing arriving. For a lot of those soldiers, a letter was everything. It took a long time for them to get their due: a monument at Fort Leavenworth in 2018, and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2022. Personally, I'd put them in every history textbook in the country.

Russian survivor liberated by the U.S. Army in the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany identifies a former guard from the Nazi SS who was known for brutally beating prisoners & was involved in the crimes of the Holocaust, April, 1945.

Footage of folks eating inside of a Burger King in 1969.

In February of 1943, the U.S. Army transport shipped Dorchester was packed with about 900 soldiers, sailors and civilian workers, sailing in a convoy from Newfoundland to an American base in Greenland. At 12:55 a.m., a German U-boat put a torpedo into her side. The ship went down in 27 minutes, in freezing water, in the dark. Four Army chaplains were aboard. They'd become friends at chaplains' school at Harvard the year before: George Fox, a Methodist minister; Alexander Goode, a rabbi; Clark Poling, a Reformed Church pastor; and John Washington, a Catholic priest. They calmed the men, handed out life jackets from the lockers, and when the jackets ran out, they took off their own and gave them to four young men. Survivors in the water saw them on the tilting deck with their arms linked, praying together. Of roughly 900 aboard, about 230 survived. I've always thought this should be taught in every school in America. Four men from four faiths, arms linked. Truman later dedicated a chapel in their honor, and today the Chapel of the Four Chaplains stands at the old Navy Yard in Philadelphia.

Inside of a movie theater in Dallas in 2004

The US Army once ran camels in the American Southwest. Thirty-three of them landed in Texas in 1856, along with a crew of Middle Eastern & Greek handlers hired to manage them, and the experiment worked — right up until the Civil War killed the funding. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis had convinced Congress that camels would outperform mules in the desert. The USS Supply delivered the animals and the handlers, among them Hadji Ali, whom the soldiers called Hi Jolly. The camels carried more, ate less, and went days without water. The problem was that every horse and mule in the Army panicked at the sight of them, and the teamsters hated them. They were auctioned off in 1864. Hi Jolly bought a few, failed at a freight business, and released them into the desert near Gila Bend. Loose camels fed Southwest ghost stories for forty years. He's buried under a stone pyramid in Quartzsite, Arizona.

Who else remembers this 1998 Pokémon Game Boy commercial?

The US Army sent 223 women to France in WWI as switchboard operators. They took the military oath, wore the uniform, and worked under shellfire — and when they came home the Army called them civilians & denied them veteran status for the next sixty years. General Pershing had found that male soldiers couldn't connect calls fast enough or speak French. Over 7,000 women applied. They shipped out under chief operator Grace Banker in March 1918, handled calls six times faster than the men, and worked through the Meuse-Argonne. More than fifty bills were introduced between 1927 and 1977. Merle Egan Anderson was still pressing the case in her eighties. Carter finally signed it in 1977; 31 survivors got their medals in 1979.

Hanging out inside a record store in 1989

The first American woman to fly a plane solo may have done it by accident. On September 2, 1910, Blanche Stuart Scott's aircraft lifted off the ground during a taxi exercise she wasn't supposed to be flying at all. Scott was born in Rochester in 1885 & had already driven an automobile across the country before she ever saw a plane. She talked Glenn Curtiss into teaching her to fly — he was reluctant, and the training aircraft was a single-seater, so there was no instructor aboard to help. Students were supposed to "cut grass": taxi up and down the field with the throttle blocked to limit power. Whether a gust caught her or the block slipped has been argued ever since. She went on to become the first woman to work as a test pilot. In 1948 she became the first woman to fly in a jet, riding with Chuck Yeager.

Japanese voice actress Ikue Ōtani has been the official voice of Pikachu since the Pokémon anime series began in 1997

The rodeo event now called bulldogging, or steer wrestling, was invented by a Black cowboy who did it by biting the steer's lip. His name was Bill Pickett, and rodeos regularly barred him for his race even as crowds paid to watch him. Pickett was born in Texas in 1870, left school after fifth grade, and worked as a ranch hand. Watching herding dogs control cattle, he taught himself to leap from a galloping horse onto a steer's neck & bite down to drop it. He called it bulldogging. Bill sometimes billed himself as a full-blooded Indian to get into events. He joined the Miller Brothers 101 Ranch Wild West Show in 1905 & headlined for over 25 years, touring England, Mexico and South America, and became the first Black cowboy movie star. A bronco kicked Bill in the head in 1932 and he died after a multi-day coma.

Marshall Fogel purchased this 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle PSA 10 for $121,000 at a 1996 auction, a price many at the time thought was foolish. He still owns the card, which is one of only three PSA 10s in existence. If he sold today on public auction, experts estimate that the card could sell for $50 million or more.

Isaac Burns Murphy was the best jockey of the 19th century and, by most accounts, the highest-paid athlete in America. He was born into slavery in 1861, died at 35, and was buried in a grave that went unmarked for seventy years. He started riding at 14 weighing about 70 pounds. Murphy won the Kentucky Derby in 1884, 1890 and 1891 — the first jockey ever to take it three times, a record no one matched for 45 years. Murphy rode with a famously patient style, holding a horse until the last possible moment. At his peak he earned up to $20,000 a year. He died of heart failure in 1896 and was buried in Lexington's African Cemetery No. 2. His remains were eventually located and reinterred; he now rests at the Kentucky Horse Park.

In 1965, a 19-year-old André René Roussimoff, soon to be known as "Andre the Giant," began training to become a professional wrestler in Paris. By day, he worked as a furniture mover to support himself. By night, he learned his craft in the ring. Even at that young age, André’s extraordinary size and presence made it clear that the wrestling world had never seen anyone quite like him.

Babe Ruth touches home plate after hitting the first home run at Yankee Stadium on the day of its inauguration, April 18, 1923.

In 2004, Glenn Danzig played in Arizona on a bill with hardcore punk band North Side Kings. According to North Side Kings singer Danny Marianino, the show was badly delayed, and after Danzig finished his set, the venue began dismantling the stage, leaving the North Side Kings, who had driven six hours, unable to play. Danny Marianino confronted Danzig backstage. According to Marianino, Danzig slammed him against a wall before he punched Danzig to the floor. The footage spread widely online, becoming one of heavy music's most infamous clips. Danzig later claimed it was a setup to get him sued.