“I had learned a great deal about my tribal customs from my father and my mother, and the more I learned the more I wanted to put it down on canvas. That’s pretty much how it started.” — Allan Houser Allan Houser was born Allan Capron Haozous. His family name…

PARIS, 1871 — In the aftermath of the Prussian invasion of France, and the collapse of the Second Empire, two rival governments arise. One of them is the Paris Commune. Its headquarters: the city streets, the blazing foundry of radical democracy. …

Francisco Zúñiga’s father was a sculptor, the creator of hundreds of religious sculptures. Like many of his siblings, Zúñiga took classes in drawing, and around the age of sixteen, he began training as a sculptor in his father’s workshop. Zúñiga grew up in San José, Costa Rica. As he got…

On December 12, 1952, disaster struck Chalk River Laboratories in Canada. A problem with the experimental NRX reactor caused a partial meltdown. The reactor had been seriously damaged by a hydrogen explosion, and thousands upon thousands of gallons of radioactive water were flooding into the reactor building’s basement. A major…

In 1965, my father, Frederick Hart, worked at the Gayety Theater in Washington, D.C., a famous burlesque theater. As a struggling artist, at the age of twenty-two, he performed fire tricks on stage. And then, while performing a fire-eating trick, my father burned his mouth severely. …

Slave rebellions had taken place before. This time, the rebels became revolutionaries. At the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, the enslaved people of Haiti rose up and fought for their freedom. Together, they demanded full equality for all people, regardless of race. They defeated the forces of the world’s mightiest…

When the first major outbreak of polio occurred in the United States, parents were terrified. It was 1916, and no one understood how the disease worked, only that children were the most frequently affected. The New York Times reported on the plight of one parent, and his attempt to seek…

March 2, 1961. At noon, almost two hundred African-American students gather for a rally at Zion Baptist Church in Columbia, South Carolina. About half of them are female, about half male. For the most part, they are students from the two main African-American colleges in Columbia: Allen University and Benedict…

Why do gargoyles look the way they do? Why are they depicted as fierce creatures, with bat wings and fangs? The answer may lie in the legend of the Gargouille. A French legend, which sprang up around the town of Rouen in the seventh century AD, describes a fearsome battle…