John Strausbaugh

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In the 1930s, Laura Ingalls was a stunt and race pilot about as famous as Amelia Earhart. But she became best known for something else -- her championing of Adolf Hitler.

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On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito went on Japanese radio, announcing the end of the war in the Pacific. An 86-year-old retired general, Shiba Goro, decided to commit seppuku, ritual suicide. That in itself isn’t especially noteworthy. Hundreds of Japanese officers at the time were deciding to follow the old samurai way of choosing honorable suicide over living in disgrace and defeat. But General Shiba wasn’t just following the old samurai ways. He actually was an old samurai, born and bred in a samurai household, possibly the last man in Japan about whom that could be said. For him, suicide was a family tradition. 

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In August 1934, Dorothy Thompson was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, on Hitler’s direct order. She was on her way to being one of the most widely read, discussed, and argued about journalists of the era.

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Before dawn on April 26, 1865, a detachment of the 16th New York Volunteer Cavalry found John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln's assassin, holed up in a Virginia tobacco barn. They were under strict orders from the Secretary of War to take Booth alive. But one man who rode with the 16th answered to a higher authority: Sergeant Thomas “Boston” Corbett.

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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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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.

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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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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.