Four American presidents tried to end the conflict in Vietnam. The lessons they learned echo sharply today.

In August 1996, landmark legislation fulfilled the promise to "end welfare as we know it." Congress gave the states money to run their own programs and required them to move many welfare recipients into the workforce. Supporters declared it a new day, the beginning of self-sufficiency for poor families. Others warned the action would push women and children into the streets, perhaps by the millions.

Americans are going broke in record numbers. In 2005 Congress overhauled the bankruptcy system to stem the tide of filings. What's behind the boom in going bust?

Internet poker has taken America by storm. Three-quarters of high school and college kids are gambling on a regular basis. But adolescents are far more vulnerable to getting addicted to gambling than adults. And with Internet companies making millions from online gamblers, there's little incentive or legal controls to restrict youth gambling.

On February 25, 1956, former Kremlin leader Nikita Khrushchev revealed and denounced, for the first time in the history of the Soviet Union, the crimes of his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, dramatically shifting Soviet Russia's course, stirring a human rights movement, and opening the door to the eventual collapse of the USSR.

How a rival concept about the origins of life is defying the cornerstone of biology.

Trace Las Vegas' evolution from a remote railroad town to a mobster metropolis, to its current incarnation as an adult-themed resort town that nearly two million people call home.

Tax law prohibits members of Congress from taking international trips paid for by private foundations, but Republican Richard Pombo may have done just that.

More than 20,000 foreign children are adopted by Americans every year. Most come from poor and troubled parts of the world, and a life in America offers new hope. But it also means separation from their birth culture. Finding Home: Fifty Years of International Adoption explores the pull of adoption across lives and borders.

In the 1970s, women began breaking into male-dominated professions as never before. Women took jobs as police officers, lawyers and steelworkers. Across the country, the first women in male bastions faced a hostile reception. In the iron mines of northern Minnesota, women were harassed, threatened and assaulted. Their fight to keep their jobs broke new legal ground and helped change the workplace forever.