Black Tom Island, a major munitions depot in NY Harbor was the scene of a massive explosion in July of 1916 that was originally blamed on lit smudge pots.

Before copyright laws lyricists and musicians freely took popular tunes and used them for their own purposes, as Francis Scott Key did with the popular British drinking song The Anacreontic Song.

You may know that Coca-Cola actually started out with its main selling point being that of its cocaine content, but did you know that the drink still uses coca leaves?

Amid the tension and competition of the space race the Soviet Union attempted to steal America's thunder by landing a probe on the moon at the same time as the Apollo 11 landing.

At the height of the Cold War the US decides to construct a nuclear missile base under the ice sheet of Greenland, without anticipating an unfortunate consequence.

Host Joe Moniaci takes a peek into a long-forgotten bomb shelter in New York's Brooklyn Bridge.

In a long-forgotten passage from civil rights history, Elizabeth Jennings fought for her and other "colored persons'" rights to ride streetcars in New York City after she had been thrown off of one in July 1854.

Unbelievably, a photo of Jewish Latvian immigrant Hessy Levininsons Taft made its way to the cover of a Nazi propaganda magazine.

In 1859 farmer Lyman Cutler discovered a pig gorging itself on his potatoes so he shot it. The sequence of events that would follow would bring the United States and Great Britain to the edge of war.

In 1943 President Roosevelt allowed the formation of a combat unit comprising mostly of interned Japanese-Americans which would later distinguish itself in combat in France and Italy.

During Prohibition bootleggers filtered industrial alcohol in order to remove poisonous additives, only to see the government react by increasing the levels of poison, thus creating an epidemic of alcohol poisoning.

In June of 1865 the CSS Shenandoah, a Confederate ship, continued to pursue and attack Union whalers in the Bering Sea despite the Civil War being officially over.

At the height of the Cold War the US decides to construct a nuclear missile base under the ice sheet of Greenland, without anticipating an unfortunate consequence.

Host Joe Moniaci takes a peek into a long-forgotten bomb shelter in New York's Brooklyn Bridge.

In a long-forgotten passage from civil rights history, Elizabeth Jennings fought for her and other "colored persons'" rights to ride streetcars in New York City after she had been thrown off of one in July 1854.

Arising from his background of having been an underdog, Muammar Gaddafi of Libya takes on and supports a multitude of terrorist causes around the world.

It's claimed that as Sergey Kirov, head of the Communist Party in Leningrad, became more and more popular Stalin had him assassinated and used this as a pretext to purge his political rivals.

As he demonstrated with one particular dissident, Mao uses violence and intimidation to craft a sort of toolkit of terror in order to establish himself as the unchallenged leader of a nascent Communist China.

Mussolini leaves no room for opposition in his bloody quest to create a new Roman empire.

Bin Laden becomes a heroic figure on the battlefield setting him up to become a leader of militant Muslims.

Despite being in high positions within the North Korean hierarchy Kim Jong-il has those who question his suitability to succeed his father murdered.

After recovering from a heart attack that left him unconscious for 9 hours and with possible neurological damage, Haiti's Francois Duvalier became more paranoid, erratic and repressive.

The Articles of Confederation proved to be more trouble than help, with individual states all pushing their interests and agendas, to the point of threatening the country as a whole.

Paul Revere has been billed as America?s first action hero after his famous "Midnight Ride" but as truth would have it, he was part of a network.

Our vision of Paul Revere's midnight ride is all wrong, especially how it concludes.

Such were his powers of organization and logistics, Dwight Eisenhower was always kept away from combat because he made others better and more well-prepared for it.

There are many misconceptions surrounding our understanding of General George Armstrong Custer and his final campaign against the Plains Indians but the actual facts are more compelling than the fiction.

George Washington was preceded by several other Presidents of the United States.