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The International Brotherhood of Teamsters formed in 1903 when the American Federation of Labor merged two rival groups of wagon drivers, who controlled the final mile between rail depots and businesses. First president Cornelius Shea fell after the failed 1905 Chicago strike, when 25,000 Teamsters backed locked-out tailors at Montgomery Ward and the press reported Shea living in a brothel and throwing parties on union funds. Daniel J. Tobin led from 1907 to 1952, curbing wildcat strikes and pushing locals into joint councils and master agreements. Membership rose from 82,000 in 1932 to 530,000 in 1941, driven partly by organizers Tobin disliked, including the Trotskyists behind the 1934 Minneapolis strike, who built the Central Conference of Teamsters, and Dave Beck's Western Conference.

Beck took the presidency in 1952, and Jimmy Hoffa brought organized crime onto the national stage, working with mobster Johnny Dio in 1956 to charter paper locals with no members to win convention votes. The McClellan Committee, with Robert F. Kennedy as chief counsel, found Beck had taken a $300,000 interest-free loan from union funds; Beck took the Fifth 117 times, the AFL-CIO expelled the union in 1957, and the hearings led to the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959. Hoffa's 1964 National Master Freight Agreement gave the union enormous power, while the Central States Pension Fund financed Las Vegas casinos. Hoffa was convicted of witness tampering, imprisoned in 1967, pardoned by Nixon and vanished in 1975. Trucking deregulation in 1979 cost 30 percent of freight Teamsters their jobs.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his 1944 Fala speech at the Teamsters convention.
• Pension fund money helped build Caesars Palace, the Stardust and the Dunes.
• A 1989 RICO consent decree brought direct elections, and reformer Ron Carey won in 1991 with backing from Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
• A $36 billion federal grant in 2022 rescued the Central States Pension Fund for about 350,000 workers and retirees.
• In 2024 Sean O'Brien spoke at the Republican National Convention, and the union endorsed no presidential candidate for the first time since 1996.

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When the Plaza Hotel opened on October 1, 1907, about 90 percent of its occupants lived there full time. It replaced an earlier Plaza built between 1883 and 1890 and plagued by financial troubles and shoddy work. In 1902 a syndicate led by builder Harry S. Black and financier Bernhard Beinecke paid $3 million in cash for the site at Fifth Avenue and Central Park South, then the largest all-cash deal in Manhattan real estate. Architect Henry Janeway Hardenbergh designed an 18-story French Renaissance chateau that took 27 months and $12.5 million to build, with a sub-basement plant making 15 tons of ice a day, a coal plant and a switchboard of Tennessee marble. Short-term guests paid $2.50 a night and shared the cost of 500 bathrooms and a round-the-clock staff with the wealthy residents, who had a private entrance on 58th Street.

The 1929 crash broke the founders. Black died by suicide in 1930, Beinecke died two years later, and by 1932 half the residential suites were empty; the Grill Room became storage and the Rose Room an automobile showroom. Wealthy widows with inherited trust money stayed on and kept the hotel solvent, and that world of long-term residents later inspired Kay Thompson's Eloise books. Conrad Hilton bought the Plaza in 1943, and in 1988 Donald Trump bought it for $407 million in a leveraged buyout. After a prepackaged bankruptcy he surrendered 49 percent to lenders, and in 1995 he sold it at a loss to a group including Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Elad Properties bought it in 2005 and cut it to 282 hotel rooms and 181 private condominiums.

• Diamond Jim Brady and Mark Twain were early regulars, and the hotel opened during the Panic of 1907.
• Frank Lloyd Wright kept a second-floor suite for five years in the 1950s while designing the Guggenheim Museum.
• F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived and wrote there, and the Beatles stayed during their first US trip in 1964.
• Ivana Trump led a gilded renovation, and the basement Trader Vic's restaurant was shut down.
• Only about a third of today's condo owners live there, with the rest using their units as pied-à-terres.

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The Panzer IV began in 1934 under the cover name Begleitwagen, or escort vehicle, because the Treaty of Versailles banned German tanks. In Heinz Guderian's plan it was a support tank, firing a short low-velocity 75mm gun at infantry, anti-tank guns and bunkers while the Panzer III fought enemy armor. Krupp rejected a proposed torsion bar suspension in favor of leaf springs on eight road wheels per side, and because the driveshaft ran down the middle of the crew compartment, the turret sat about two and a half inches left of center and the engine six inches right. When the T-34 and KV-1 appeared in 1941, the Panzer III's turret ring proved too small for a long 75mm gun, and the Panzer IV's larger ring made it the main German combat tank, with the Ausf. F2 and Ausf. G leading the 1942 summer offensive.

Upgrades piled on: 80mm front armor, Zimmerit paste against magnetic mines and Schürzen skirts, pushing the Ausf. H from about 18 to 25 tons on the original leaf springs. The tank pitched forward, swayed on straight roads and broke transmissions. The final Ausf. J lost its powered turret traverse to make room for more fuel, swapped steel skirts for wire mesh, cut return rollers from four to three and dropped Zimmerit. More than 8,500 were built, about 30 percent of German tank strength. After the war, Syria bought refurbished Panzer IVs from France and Czechoslovakia, mounted Soviet DShK machine guns on them and used them on the Golan Heights in the 1960s, and in 2023 Russian forces found a wrecked Panzer IV near Kreminna.

• It was the only German tank in continuous production throughout World War II.
• Hand-cranking the Ausf. J turret 120 degrees on flat ground took nearly 30 seconds.
• Schürzen skirts were built to detonate bazooka and PIAT warheads early but tore off in the Normandy bocage.
• Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Finland operated Panzer IVs during the war.
• Syrian Panzer IVs faced Israeli Super Shermans and Centurions in the 1967 Six-Day War and were still under fire in 1973.

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The Panzer III was built by Daimler-Benz to the doctrine Heinz Guderian pushed in 1934: a dedicated tank killer working alongside Krupp's Panzer IV, which carried a short 7.5cm gun for bunkers and infantry. Its biggest edge was a three-man turret that left the commander free to watch the battlefield from a cupola ringed with vision blocks, while the French SOMUA S35 had a one-man turret and early T-34s a cramped two-man turret. In the early stages of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, German tanks achieved a six-to-one kill ratio against older Soviet T-26 and BT tanks. Designers had also built the turret ring larger than the original 3.7cm gun required, anticipating a 50mm weapon.

Against the T-34 and KV-1, the 3.7cm gun failed, and the oversized ring allowed the 5cm KwK 38 and then the longer KwK 39 on the Ausf. J. But the chassis, torsion bars and transmission topped out around 23 tons as armor grew from 15 to 50 millimeters and Schürzen skirts were added on the Ausf. M. The Panzer IV's larger ring took the long 75mm anti-tank gun, and the final Panzer III, the Ausf. N, received the Panzer IV's old short 7.5cm gun. By 1943 the turreted tank was out of production and the chassis lived on as the StuG III assault gun, the most produced German armored fighting vehicle of the war, with about 18,000 vehicles built on the Panzer III chassis.

• Japan bought two Panzer IIIs, one with a 50mm and one with a 75mm gun, to reverse engineer, and they were obsolete on arrival.
• The early 3.7cm gun was chosen to share ammunition with the infantry's 3.7cm anti-tank gun.
• Waterproofed Tauchpanzer IIIs with snorkel hoses were built for Operation Sea Lion and later crossed rivers underwater during the invasion of the Soviet Union.
• Removing the turret let the StuG III carry a bigger gun and thicker front armor while staying under the weight limit.
• At Factory No. 37 in Sverdlovsk, the Soviets rebuilt more than 200 captured Panzer III chassis as the SU-76I with 76.2mm guns.

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The Leopard 2 rose from the collapse of the MBT-70, a joint US and West German tank that died by 1969 over costs, imperial versus metric measurements and design disputes such as seating the driver in the rotating turret. West Germany salvaged its technology for new prototypes named Keiler and Eber, and project officer Paul-Werner Krapke oversaw testing of 17 turrets: ten with 105mm guns and seven with a new Rheinmetall 120mm smoothbore firing fin-stabilized penetrators. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War showed the power of portable anti-tank missiles, the pointed Spitzmaus turret gave way to a blockier design with spaced multi-layer composite armor, and the weight limit rose from about 47 to 55 tons.

Under a mid-1970s memorandum with the United States, the stripped Leopard 2AV was tested against the American prototypes that became the M1 Abrams. It matched or beat them on mobility, and the US turbine burned about 50 percent more fuel than the German diesel, yet the US chose its own tank, citing armor coverage. Each side disputed the trials, but the Abrams later adopted the German 120mm gun. In service, Canadian and Danish Leopards survived large IEDs in Afghanistan, Turkish 2A4s were destroyed in Syria in 2016 during Operation Euphrates Shield, and a European coalition sent Leopards to Ukraine, where they have scored successes and suffered confirmed losses. Germany has since ordered the 2A8 with the Trophy active protection system.

• Ukrainian reports say Russian troops hear older tanks two to three kilometers away but often miss the Leopard 2 until about 200 meters.
• German conscripts drove the Leopard in the US trials while professional crews manned the American prototype, and gun stabilization was tested on flat tracks.
• A 1,500-horsepower MTU V12 twin-turbo diesel drives the tank, and a snorkel lets it cross rivers four meters deep.
• From the 2A5 onward, wedge-shaped add-on modules on the turret defeat tandem shaped charges without creating a shot trap.
• Ammunition sits behind bulkheads under blow-off roof panels, and a Dräger overpressure system keeps contaminated air out.

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The KV heavy tank replaced the five-turret T-35, a land battleship whose thin armor the Spanish Civil War showed could not survive modern anti-tank guns. Designer Joseph Kotin turned away from the twin-turret SMK concept, built a single-turret design and put the saved weight into thick frontal armor, naming the result for defense commissar Kliment Voroshilov. Tested in the 1939 Winter War against Finland, it outperformed its competitors, and the KV-2 variant carried a 152mm howitzer to destroy concrete bunkers at close range. When Germany invaded in June 1941, German intelligence had missed the tank entirely, and 37mm and 50mm anti-tank rounds bounced off its sloped armor; German infantry called it the Russischer Koloss.

At Raseiniai in June 1941 a single KV held up the 6th Panzer Division for a day, knocking out 50mm guns and an 88mm flak gun before a second 88 fired from behind. In August 1941 near Krasnogvardeysk, Lieutenant Zinoviy Kolobanov's five dug-in KV-1s destroyed 43 German tanks in half an hour, and his own tank took 135 hits without a penetration. The 45-ton KV was too heavy for many bridges, had poor visibility and a gearbox based on a Holt tractor design that drivers reportedly beat into gear with hammers. Better German guns and the Hs 129 made it vulnerable by 1942; appliqué armor raised it to 52 tons, the lighter KV-1S traded armor for speed, the KV-85 arrived in small numbers, and Voroshilov's fall cleared the way for the IS series.

• At Raseiniai, German engineers placed satchel charges on the KV overnight, and infantry finally had to drop grenades through holes punched by an 88.
• Kolobanov hit the lead and trailing German tanks first, trapping the column on a swampy road where narrow tracks bogged down.
• Factories were being evacuated east to the Urals in 1941, so the Soviets kept building the flawed KV rather than pause production.
• The KV-1S got a planetary transmission and could exceed 43 kilometers per hour.
• The KV-8 hid a flamethrower in its turret behind a fake wide tube around a small 45mm gun, while the KV-1K bolted rocket launchers to the hull.

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The Irvine Company's 120,000-acre holdings trace to the drought of 1864, which killed the cattle of ranchero Jose Antonio Sepulveda and forced the sale of Rancho San Joaquin. Gold Rush merchant James Irvine I bought it with Benjamin and Thomas Flint and Llewellyn Bixby, then added the hilly Rancho Lomas de Santiago from William Wolfskill in 1866 for sheep grazing, creating a 185-square-mile ranch. Irvine refused to subdivide while neighbors sold lots. When Collis Huntington's Southern Pacific crews began laying track across the ranch, Irvine's men rode out with shotguns, and Irvine later granted the route to the Santa Fe on his own terms. After his death in 1886, trustees tried to auction the ranch; James Irvine II, at 25, had the sale declared illegal and incorporated the Irvine Company in 1894.

In 1961 the company sold 990 acres to the University of California for one dollar, and architect William Pereira planned a city around the new UC Irvine campus; the city of Irvine incorporated in 1971. The Tax Reform Act of 1969 capped foundation ownership of a business at 20 percent, forcing the James Irvine Foundation to sell its 54 percent stake. A. Alfred Taubman's consortium bought the company in 1977, and minority investor Donald Bren bought out partners for more than $500 million in 1983 and became sole owner in 1996. The company expanded to the MetLife Building in New York and 71 South Wacker in Chicago, but laid off 1,700 hotel and resort staff in 2020 and in September 2024 sold San Diego's Symphony Towers for $45.7 million after buying it for $134 million in 2003.

• More than 50,000 Boy Scouts camped at the 1953 national jamboree on the site of today's Fashion Island, and Jamboree Road was built for it.
• The one-dollar university sale brought faculty, students and state-funded water, power and roads to the surrounding company land.
• Of about 93,000 core acres in Orange County, roughly 44,000 were kept for development and over half preserved as open space.
• In 2014 the company returned 2,500 acres already approved for housing to preservation.
• The sources cite Bren's net worth at about $15.3 billion as of 2021 and more than $220 million in gifts to local schools and universities.

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The IS-2, named for Joseph Stalin, grew out of the failing KV-1 program. By early 1943 the KV-1 was slow, prone to transmission failure and armed no better than the T-34, and Soviet command considered ending heavy tank production and closing Joseph Kotin's design bureau. The capture of a German Tiger I in January 1943 reversed that. Stopgaps followed: the lighter KV-1S, then the KV-85, which needed welded fillets to widen the hull for a turret carrying the 85mm D-5T gun, with only 130 built before the IS-1 (Object 237). For the IS-2, planners chose the 122mm D-25, adapted from the A-19 artillery piece, over the 100mm D-10 even though the 100mm penetrated German armor better, because 122mm production capacity and ammunition stocks already existed and its 25-kilogram high-explosive shell could wreck a tank without piercing it.

The big gun used separate-loading ammunition, so early tanks fired one to one and a half rounds a minute until a semi-automatic drop breech raised that to three or four. Only 28 rounds fit inside, typically 20 high-explosive and 8 armor-piercing. The hull relied on cast armor, cheaper and easier to angle but uneven in thickness, and Soviet steel substituted manganese for scarce nickel and grew brittle. German industry ran short of manganese by summer 1944, leaving Panther weld seams that could crack from a ricochet at 2,500 meters. On August 11, 1944 at Oględów, IS-2s waiting 800 meters from roads that Tiger IIs of the 16th Panzer Division could not leave in sandy ground destroyed three, and three more were found abandoned and sent to Kubinka.

• The 122mm high-explosive round carried a 3.8-kilogram TNT charge at 800 meters per second and caused lethal spalling inside enemy hulls.
• Late-1944 hulls replaced the stepped front and opening driver's visor with a single 120mm cast nose angled at 60 degrees.
• One Guards senior lieutenant's IS-2 logged 955 kilometers and 205 engine hours by August 1944 against a 150-hour warranty.
• A German report from October 1944 found a Tiger I had to close to 100 to 300 meters to pierce the IS-2's front, while the IS-2 could pierce the Tiger from 500 to 1,500 meters.
• After the war the IS-2 went to China, Cuba and North Korea, was modernized as the IS-2M in the 1950s, and moved to reserve storage by the late 1960s.

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John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company of Ohio held about 4 percent of US refining in the early 1870s. Rockefeller saw refining, not drilling, as the bottleneck of a boom-and-bust Pennsylvania oil trade, and used his shipping volume to win secret railroad rebates. He showed rival Cleveland refiners his account books and offered them Standard Oil stock or ruin; by early 1872 he controlled about 25 percent of the national market, and by 1879 more than 90 percent. Through the 1880s Standard integrated backward into oil lands, pipelines and even timber for its own barrels, and forward into tank cars, distribution and retail, while using predatory pricing and threats against independent distributors.

In November 1906 the Justice Department sued Standard Oil of New Jersey, the holding company over the empire, under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The case moved under the Expediting Act through the Circuit Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, where a 15-month trial ended in a 1909 decree of dissolution. In 1911 the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Edward D. White upheld the breakup but read the law to ban only unreasonable restraints of trade, the rule of reason. Justice John Marshall Harlan agreed with the result and dissented from that reasoning as judicial legislation. The decree split the company into 43 independent firms, pieces of which became ExxonMobil, Chevron and part of BP.

• Rival refiners were offered a fair price in Standard Oil stock or a fight against Rockefeller's lower freight costs.
• Standard cut kerosene prices below cost in one town, funded by monopoly profits elsewhere, then raised them after rivals failed.
• The Court named three monopoly harms: higher prices, reduced output and lower quality without fear of losing customers.
• The rule of reason drew on an 1899 circuit court opinion written by William Howard Taft.
• Harlan noted the Sherman Act banned every contract in restraint of trade and recalled 1890 fears of a new kind of slavery to corporate capital.

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The M48 Patton began in 1950 as the T48 project, launched in a panic as the Korean War broke out and US planners feared Soviet heavy tanks like the IS-3 massing in Europe. With the M26 Pershing and M46 judged inadequate, the Army chose to test and mass-produce the tank at the same time. The design moved to a four-man crew, put the driver in the center of the hull and dropped the bow machine gunner to free space for ammunition. General Bruce C. Clarke's wish list asked for a fast, armored, swimming, low-maintenance vehicle and added that it should also be invisible. Early gasoline M48 and M48A1 models managed 0.33 miles per gallon and a range of roughly 70 to 75 miles, so crews strapped four 55-gallon fuel drums to the rear deck.

The M48 never fought the European war it was built for. From 1965 the diesel M48A3 served in Vietnam, clearing mines and supporting infantry along Highway 19. After US forces withdrew, the ARVN 20th Tank Regiment was ambushed on April 23, 1972 by infantry firing wire-guided 9M14 Malyutka (Sagger) missiles, and by early May it had lost every M48. Pakistan used M48s against India in 1965 and 1971, Iran lost 150 at the Battle of Abadan, and Israel rebuilt them as the Magach with 105mm guns and explosive reactive armor. Pakistani M48s supported US troops in Mogadishu in 1993, Turkey still fields more than 750, and Thailand sent M48s to its border with Cambodia in 2025.

• 120 hulls cast with incorrect ballistic protection were designated M48C and restricted to training at Fort Knox.
• The M1 commander's cupola was so cramped that the .50 caliber gun jammed and standard ammunition boxes would not fit.
• A stereoscopic rangefinder fed a mechanical ballistic computer whose shaped metal cams solved the trajectory of the 90mm shell.
• Explosive reactive armor on the Magach detonates outward and throws a steel plate across a shaped charge's metal jet.
• The episode credits the tank's long life to spare volume in its hull, which later held diesel engines, 105mm guns and reactive armor.