After Kenyon Ballew was paralyzed, the NRA shifted the gun-control debate — On a late spring night in 1971, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were aiming for efficiency. They had obtained search warrants for two addresses in an apartment complex, at 1014 Quebec Terrace, in Silver Springs, Maryland, and planned to inspect them one after the other…

On its most active day, the Old Man of the Lake traveled four miles — About 7,700 years ago, Mount Mazama in southern Oregon erupted, expelling over 11 cubic miles of magma into the air and across the surrounding terrain. It left behind a vast depression in the earth’s surface, a caldera which eventually filled up to become what is now called Crater Lake. It…

Dozens were killed, and a dam nearly gave way — Purley Bennett was camping with her family in West Yellowstone when she heard a great rumbling on the night of August 17, 1959. “I saw my husband yelling,” Bennett recalled. “He told me to grab a tree. I saw him grab a tree, but I never saw him again. I…

Switching from left- to right-hand-side driving was a national ordeal — The image has become the darling of internet listicles with titles like “Weird Pics From History.” It shows a mess of cars strewn across a city road — a large crowd gawking at the apparent clumsiness and chaos — on the day Sweden made the switch from driving on the…

Sneaking onto Britain’s most prized ship was never so easy — On a balmy winter day in February, 1910, six young Englishmen studied Swahili on a train. They weren’t cramming for an exam or a trip abroad, but a prank. As part of their sophisticated hoax, two were dressed as agents from the British Foreign Office, while four disguised themselves in…

Political unrest in the Middle East turned into political unrest in the Northeast — It turns out when Americans can’t fill their cars with gas, they get violent. In Levittown, Pennsylvania, discontent with the fuel shortage of 1979 reached its zenith in June. A mob of angry truck drivers rioted—blocking intersections, vandalizing property, setting fire to automobiles, and fighting with police — in clashes…

Mabel Loomis Todd had a talent for both science and writing — Why travel hundreds of miles for something that lasts no longer than a few minutes? In a 1982 Atlantic essay, Annie Dillard makes a persuasive case for going the distance to witness a total eclipse. “There was no sound,” writes Dillard of the moment she was enveloped by the dark…

Twice, Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in the wrong place at the wrong time — August 6, 1945, was meant to be Tsutomu Yamaguchi’s last day of work in Hiroshima, after having labored three months to design a 5,000-ton oil tanker for his employer, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Before getting on a bus to the shipyard offices, Yamaguchi realized he had forgotten his inkan, a personal…