The Atlantic What America Looked Like: The San Francisco Earthquake By Brian Resnick Images from the most destructive earthquake in American history Wikimedia Commons In less than 60 seconds, San Francisco was ruined. At 5:13 a.m., April 18, 1906, the San Andreas fault line ruptured, radiating seismic waves of destruction that are now believed to have measured 7.7 on earthquake scales. But the destruction didn’t end there — the quake spawned multiple fires that burned for days, cementing the event as one of the most devastating natural disasters in American history. It is estimated that 3,000 people died and there were $500 million (in 1906 dollars) in damage. Chaos and…

Published: April 29, 2011 By: JENNIE COHEN Last week, archaeologists in Kent, England, discovered the body of a girl believed to have been brutally murdered by Roman soldiers during their second invasion of Britain, which began under the emperor Claudius in 46 A.D. They made the tragic find on a site where Roman soldiers may have camped during their campaign, burying unwanted items there before moving on. Read Story at History.com

On this day ,July 2, in 1964, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs into law the historic Civil Rights Act in a nationally televised ceremony at the White House. In the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The 10 years that followed saw great strides for the African-American civil rights movement, as non-violent demonstrations won thousands of supporters to the cause. Memorable landmarks in the struggle included the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955–sparked by the refusal of Alabama resident Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a city bus to a white woman–and Martin Luther King,…

Unless you are very young, or were raised by wolves in the heart of the wilderness, you have heard of the bestselling novel, turned big screen movie, Gone With the Wind. But do you know anything about the book’s author, Margaret Mitchell? Her home town was Atlanta, Georgia, where she grew up in a family of attorneys. She stayed living in her childhood city of Atlanta with her husband in a cramped one bedroom apartment that she called, “the dump”(source:Joanna Arietta, director of historic houses for the Atlanta History Center and Margaret Mitchell House). She not only wrote a bestselling novel, in their small living space, her only published novel, but she also won the Pulitzer Prize in…