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It was said that Maxwell Bodenheim was "more disliked, derided, denounced, beaten up, and kicked down more flights of stairs than any poet of whom I have heard or read." And that was said by a friend. 

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Gherman Titov was the second Soviet cosmonaut to go into space, but the first one to visit America. Things didn't quite go as planned.

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Victoria Woodhull, the first female candidate for president of the United States, sat out the election in a jail cell. She achieved several firsts for women in America, yet her impact on the women's movement was so controversial, and in the end so negligible, that she's a minor figure in feminist history, but a fascinating one. 

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On a sunny afternoon in 1939, the physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner visited Albert Einstein at his beach cottage on Long Island. They wanted him to write to President Franklin Roosevelt about the need to develop the atom bomb before the Nazis could.

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The 1939 New York World's Fair, projecting a future of peace and prosperity, opened in a world that was tilting into war. By the time it closed in 1940 the Fair, like the world, was in shambles.