Lauren Coontz is a staff writer for Coffee or Die Magazine. Beaches are preferred, but Lauren calls the Rocky Mountains of Utah home. You can usually find her in an art museum, at an archaeology site, or checking out local nightlife like drag shows and cocktail bars (gin is key). A student of history, Lauren is an Army veteran who worked all over the world and loves to travel to see the old stuff the history books only give a sentence to. She likes medium roast coffee and sometimes, like a sinner, adds sweet cream to it.
As thousands of Beatles fans sang impromptu choruses of “Give Peace a Chance” at political protests across the United States, the Nixon administration fumed at the effect singer John Lennon had on the younger generation. The 1972 election would be ...
Santa’s sleigh won’t be the only thing soaring through the sky this Christmas. NASA plans to launch the James Webb Space Telescope Christmas morning from French Guiana in northeast South America. Astronomers and astrophysicists hope the ...
The National Archives and Records Administration on Wednesday, Dec. 15, released 1,491 previously classified documents regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The move followed a memorandum issued by President Joe Biden. Since ...
After calls for justice and vocal support from Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., New York Supreme Court Justice Ellen Biben exonerated Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam on Nov. 18, 2021, for the 1965 murder of civil rights icon Malcolm X — 55 ...
A Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-funded research project at NASA's Johnson Space Center may have accidentally discovered how to build a warp drive engine. The scientists published their findings in July. Harold "Sonny" White, a NASA ...
Just before 8 a.m. Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, while getting dressed for church, Grace Lally, head nurse of the USS Solace hospital ship, stopped in her tracks as she heard machine-gun fire and the roar of engines. The sounds were coming from Japanese ...
Many movies about the 1950s paint a picture of an idyllic time and overlook the decade’s dark underbelly — including, among other blights such as the Korean War, how perilously close the United States came to an apocalyptic nuclear exchange with the ...
Russia launched a test missile Nov. 15, targeting one of its own satellites. The impact created a debris cloud that forced astronauts inside the International Space Station to take shelter. The test prompted an international outcry, condemning the ...
A recent proposal penned by Navy and Marine Corps personnel for the U.S. Naval Institute breaks down how the Navy could quickly (and cheaply) make its carrier-based fighters into highly capable submarine hunters. If adopted, this approach could ...
At Uniontown High School in rural Kansas, history teacher Norm Conard gave his 1999 class a yearlong assignment on a lesser-known historical figure. Through extensive research and a small story published in U.S. News and World Report in March 1994, ...
The US Coast Guard recently discovered the wreck of the US revenue cutter Bear, a storied vessel that sank in 1963. On Oct. 15, representatives from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the US Coast Guard announced the ...
A Category 5 monstrosity, Hurricane Maria careened into Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, 2017. The deadly storm devastated the island's infrastructure and thwarted access to food and water. In Maria's aftermath, roads were blocked by debris, flooding, and ...
America's man in Havana had one hell of a life. After he left his affluent family in Ohio to join the circus, he enlisted in the Merchant Marines, then joined the Army and the mob before ultimately ending up in Cuba, where he helped put Fidel Castro ...
During World War II, Louis Austin O'Jibway — son of a Michigan Chippewa man — successfully turned a malnourished, ragtag Chinese military force into a lethal fighting machine. Later, he became a career agent in the CIA during the Cold War, completing ...
At the height of the Cold War, the FBI's suspicions that American women's liberation movements could be a front for communist infiltration efforts spurred an unprecedented domestic surveillance operation that later drew sharp criticism from ...
Robert Salas's UFO story begins as the best ones always do: on night shift, working in a top-secret facility monitoring nuclear warheads. Then a young Air Force first lieutenant, Salas was on duty deep underground on March 14, 1967, at Montana's ...
When geological activity dramatically lifted the seafloor near Iwo Jima, Japan, this month, enormous shipwrecks emerged like ghosts from their watery graves. Japan experiences approximately 5,000 earthquakes every year. The island country sits on ...
Today, floor-to-ceiling windows fill a former CIA safe house on San Francisco's Telegraph Hill with natural light, and the spacious bedrooms give no indication of the lurid operation that once took place within its walls. The sprawling, ...
The arc of Colin Powell’s storied career spanned conflicts from Vietnam to Desert Storm and ultimately led to Washington for his tenure as secretary of state during the George W. Bush administration. During his ascent, Powell reached a number of ...
Local rumor has it that the Emma Silver Mine in Utah's Little Cottonwood Canyon almost started a war with England in the 1870s. Located near the Alta Ski Area (of 2002 Winter Olympics fame), the Emma Mine consists of a large tunnel bored into the ...
The US government once tried to control the weather. Although scientists have widely debated the feasibility of cloud seeding, the US government has, over the decades, explored its potential combat utility. If successful, these endeavors offered the ...
Soon after the start of the post-9/11 Global War on Terror, US bombers began launching from a remote location in the Indian Ocean to destroy Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan. These sorties originated from Navy Support Facility Diego Garcia, a ...
Enraged and unpredictable, President Richard Nixon drunkenly milled about the Oval Office, ranting at anyone within earshot. The Watergate impeachment proceedings had infuriated and humiliated Nixon a month earlier. During his final days in office, ...
In the end, some hippies resorted to using bombs to make sure everyone understood their message of peace and love. Beginning in 1969 as a Vietnam War protest group, the Weather Underground Organization stood out for its brazen acts of domestic ...
New York City hosts many strange things. Perhaps one of the more remarkable discoveries was the shipwreck of a Revolutionary War-era vessel excavated from under the foundations of the World Trade Center at ground zero. Ten years after 9/11, while ...
OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE, Neb. — In a World War II bomber hangar that once housed the Enola Gay and Bockscar B-29 bombers, which dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan, forensic anthropologist Traci Van Deest, Ph.D., and her team of ...
When he boarded United Airlines Flight 91 out of Newark, New Jersey, FBI Special Agent Bobby Chacon was only thinking about dive gear. It was the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and the Michigan State Police had requested assistance from Chacon’s New York ...
In 2010, the Department of Defense purchased 9,500 first-edition copies of Anthony Shaffer’s book, Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan — and the Path to Victory. The Pentagon paid $47,500 and then told the ...
Spread out across six miles, the Iraqi Republican Guard's elite 2nd Al Medina Armored Division lumbered across the Iraq desert Feb. 15, 1991. Two US Air Force A-10 Warthogs passed overhead, providing attractive targets for the 10,000 Iraqi soldiers ...
Marine Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover Jr., who mostly went by Taylor to his friends and "Bubba" to his sisters, was only an elementary school student at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “When 9/11 happened, he was only 11 years ...
