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47 illustrations
In 1898, Marie Curie and her husband Pierre worked in a converted shed at the École de Physique et de Chimie in Paris, processing tons...
On August 1, 1834, church bells rang across the British Caribbean as the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 took effect. In Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, and...
In 1863, Emperor Napoleon III summoned Louis Pasteur to address a crisis threatening the French economy: wine was souring in its barrels, and no one...
In 1811, twelve-year-old Mary Anning knelt along the Blue Lias cliffs of Lyme Regis, Dorset, carefully chiseling limestone away from an enormous skeleton. Her brother...
In 1863, Emperor Napoleon III asked Louis Pasteur to investigate why French wines were spoiling during transport — a crisis costing the nation millions of...
On the evening of October 28, 1787, William Wilberforce sat at his oak desk in his home at Old Palace Yard, Westminster, and scratched a...
On March 9, 1841, the marble halls of the United States Supreme Court fell silent as Justice Joseph Story delivered a verdict that would echo...
On May 12, 1789, William Wilberforce rose in the British House of Commons and delivered a lengthy speech calling for the end of the slave...
On the evening of March 24, 1882, Robert Koch stood before the Berlin Physiological Society and changed the course of medicine forever. Tuberculosis had ravaged...
In November 1660, authorities arrested John Bunyan, a tinker-turned-preacher from Elstow, Bedfordshire, for conducting worship services without a license from the Church of England. The...
On October 31, 1512, Pope Julius II unveiled the completed ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City — over twelve thousand square feet of...
In the autumn of 1772, eighteen of Boston's most prominent men — including Governor Thomas Hutchinson and John Hancock — gathered to examine a young...
In 1761, a seven-year-old girl arrived in Boston Harbor aboard a slave ship called the Phillis. She was given the ship's name as her own,...
In August 1881, Robert Koch began the loneliest work of his career. Tuberculosis was devouring Europe — one in every seven deaths across the continent...
For four years, from 1508 to 1512, Michelangelo Buonarroti stood on scaffolding sixty-eight feet above the floor of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, painting...
On October 3, 1904, Mary McLeod Bethune opened the door of a small rented cottage on Oak Street in Daytona Beach, Florida, and welcomed five...
In December 1898, Marie and Pierre Curie announced to the French Academy of Sciences that they had discovered a new element — radium. But the...
Sengbe Pieh was born free. A rice farmer from Mende country in Sierra Leone, he was seized by slave traders in early 1839, shipped across...
In the parlor of a modest New York City apartment in 1875, Fanny Crosby sat at a small writing desk, her sightless eyes turned toward...
Between 1850 and 1860, Harriet Tubman made thirteen rescue missions from St. Catharines, Ontario, back into the slave-holding territory of Maryland's Eastern Shore. She had...
In 1660, a tinker-turned-preacher named John Bunyan stood before magistrates in Bedfordshire, England, charged with holding unlicensed religious services. The sentence was simple: stop preaching,...
On January 23, 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell walked across the stage at Geneva Medical College in upstate New York and received her Doctor of Medicine degree...
In 1660, a traveling tinker and lay preacher named John Bunyan was arrested near the village of Lower Samsell in Bedfordshire, England, for conducting a...