Dynamic Directory - November 8, 2026

Samuel A. Mudd was a young doctor with several children when he met John Wilkes Booth in the fall of 1864.

Joanne Pearce-Martin is principal keyboardist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.

On January 6, 1838, Samuel Morse successfully tests an electrical telegraph. So why did it take years longer to send the first message?

Before he became a pope, Giuseppe Sarto had a great deal of experience living among his parishoners. As Pope Pius X, he strongly opposed the outbreak of WWI.

Learn the story behind one of the most-famous photos of the U-boat War: The attack of U-569.

Major Henry Reed Rathbone and his fiancé, Clara Harris, attended a play with Abraham and Mary Lincoln on the night the President was shot. Booth lunged at Rathbone with a knife, injuring but not killing him. Learn how the assassination claimed more victims, years later, when Rathbone himself lost his mind.

Professor Wiles has won the Abel Prize for solving Fermat's Last Theorem. How long did it take to solve it? How did he do it?

As Alan Turing and his Bletchly Park colleagues worked feverishly to break the Enigma code, they caught a break when the Royal Navy captured U-110 on May 9, 1941. Onboard was a working Enigma machine and secret codes for the following month. Initially towing the disabled U-boat to Iceland, the crew with the secret treasure was redirected to Scotland.

Before the Pearl Harbor bombing, Japanese-Americans lived and worked on Terminal Island. After the bombing, their homes were destroyed and their way of life was gone forever.

Ansel Adams, one of America's greatest photographers, started his professional life as a pianist. What made him decide to switch profressions?

Oliver Wendell Holmes is known for some of his free-speech decisions which he wrote while serving as a Supreme Court Justice.

On August 16, 1896 prospectors find gold in Alaska. The Trump fortune got its start as a result.

December-January of 2019 marks the 75th anniversary of the Ardennes Offensive, also known as the Battle of the Bulge. Hitler meant the major German offensive to turn the tide of war against the Allies. Instead, despite Germany's initial gains, the opposite happened.

Elizabeth Shoumatoff (1888-1980) was painting President Roosevelt's portrait at his Little White House, in Warm Springs, on the 12th of April, 1945. The President said he had a headache; soon after he was dead.

On the night before Halloween, 1938, Orson Welles and his colleagues at Mercury Theatre on the Air played a prank on the American people.

On witnessing the first test of the atomic bomb, which he had helped to develop during his work with the Manhattan Project, Dr.