In 1953, the CIA intervened in Iran because a man tried to nationalize the country’s oil industry. The United States and Great Britain couldn’t have Iran nationalizing its oil industry and felt the need to intervene, reinstalling the Shah of Iran who instituted a brutal secret police task force to crush his dissidents and critics.

According to Northeastern Illinois University, Mohammad Mossadegh was the man who tried to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. He was elected as the prime minister of Iran during legitimate parliamentary elections, and he served in office for two years. …

I’ve been reading through chapter 2 of To Kill a Mockingbird with my student, where we caught a fact I didn’t catch on my first read of the book in high school. A teacher of the main character is from Winston County, Alabama, a county reputed to have seceded from Alabama during the Civil War.

Personally, I never heard of any Southern county seceding from the Confederacy. Growing up, I thought of seceding as synonymous with the South. When we went through the portion of the book discussing Winston, it was hard to tell my kids how not being part…

In 1939, United States intelligence operatives informed the government that German scientists — at the request of Adolf Hitler — had begun developing nuclear weapons. With the typical American zeal for doing stuff first, American scientists were soon put to work for the same project.

A couple of years later, and right after Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japanese forces, the United States declared that it was entering WWII. With a heavy hand finally in the game of war, efforts to establish the country as a leader in nuclear weapon technology ramped up. …

″I beat all my women, except one, and nothing ever happened to any of them,″ Carlos Monzón once said.

In late 1988, Argentina was going through a significant upheaval. The economy was in shambles during a record period of inflation. The military was in the middle of a rebellion against the democratic government.

But one of the most newsworthy events that rocked the country was boxing idol Carlos Monzón being charged with homicide. His estranged lover and mother of his 6-year-old son, Alicia Muniz, died from a fall from a second-story fall in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Randall Hackley at…

When my father immigrated to America from China he was making a poverty-level wage as a researcher. It was barely enough to support a three-person family, and when my family had their second child in 1997 (me), they couldn’t afford to raise me. I had to be sent home for two years to live with my grandparents and extended family.

But my family stayed for one simple reason — despite how little they were making in America, it was light years ahead of his salary in China.

That mindset would be the same reason why so many Chinese immigrants worked…

In 2009, I was in the 7th grade, and I had a music teacher first period who was a little…Republican. We were interrupted by a morning announcement to congratulate President Barack Obama on winning the Nobel Peace Prize. There was applause heard around the main office, and most of us nodded in agreement.

My music teacher, however, snapped. He went on a rant over how we were not at peace, how Obama was only in office for nine months, how we were still at war in Afghanistan. …

“I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.” ~ Harry Truman on Becoming President in 1945

Harry Truman was known around the halls of the Senate as being a persistent man. By 1940, he had held his Senate seat for five years, but he remained scarcely known in the town full of brash and ambitious men. When World War II broke-out in Europe, Truman saw its arrival as the perfect opportunity to change that.

In 1940, a year into the war, Congress authorized $10 billion in defense contracts in a short six months…

I have heard about Kudzu all my life. Growing up in rural North Carolina, everyone was taught to hate the stuff. We were told that it would eventually eat up all the forests and starve them of light until there was nothing left.

And, it made sense. I lived right next to the Pisgah National Forest and from what I could see, the stuff was taking over. The stands of trees became what looked like dark green billowing hills, only these were in the air. The properties near the forests were encroached on by the slender tendrils that seemed to…