Tags: USA

On May 9, 1754, Benjamin Franklin published the political cartoon “Join, or Die” in the Pennsylvania Gazette, a Philadelphia-based newspaper that he owned. One of the oldest known political cartoons, this image was originally designed to rally the American colonies to behind the British cause in the French and Indian War (1754-1763). The pro-Britain cartoon is usually attributed to Benjamin Franklin himself, and yet, just twenty two years after…

The 155th anniversary of the holiday commemorates the end of slavery in the United States: From its Galveston, Texas origin in 1865, the observance of June 19th as the African American Emancipation Day has spread across the United States and beyond. Today Juneteenth commemorates African American freedom and emphasizes education and achievement. It is a day, a week, and in some areas a month marked with celebrations, guest speakers, picnics…

On behalf of cosmologists everywhere, as well as all who share a love for knowledge and intellectual elegance, we salute the life of the great physicist and theorist Stephen Hawking: With mathematician Roger Penrose, Hawking used Einstein’s theory of relativity to trace the origins of time and space to a single point of zero size and infinite density. Their work gave mathematical expression to the Big Bang theory, proposed by Belgian priest…