September 11, 2001, started off as a clear, beautiful late summer day on the East Coast of the United States. New Yorkers were preparing to vote in a mayoral primary, businessmen and women and tourists in New York and Washington, D.C., were going about their regular lives, children had just started back recently in school [...]

Steve Jobs showing off the new MacBook Air, an ultraportable laptop, during his keynote speech at the 2008 Macworld Conference & Expo. Credit: Tony Avelar—AFP/Getty Images. Steve Jobs has been synonymous with Apple since he cofounded the garage start-up with Stephen Wozniak more than three decades ago. And today, eight years after he was first diagnosed [...]

Credit: Wally McNamee/Corbis The Comeback Kid (or Slick Willie, depending on partisan affiliation) hasn’t been a kid for quite some time, and today the former president of the United States Bill Clinton officially becomes a senior citizen as he turns 65. Clinton’s rise from meager circumstances in Hope, Arkansas (his father died in an auto [...]

As we near the peak of Atlantic hurricane season and continue to be haunted by the ghosts of Hurricane Katrina—with the conviction of five officers recently for opening fire on New Orleans’s Danziger Bridge in the aftermath of that devastating storm—this week we remember Hurricane Camille, one of the strongest hurricanes of the 20th century. [...]

In the nearly five years since the Britannica Blog was founded, we have published more than 4,000 posts, and as the dog days of summer are upon us we’ve decided to do something we’ve never done before—take a vacation. So, until August 15, this will be our last post, as we’ve decided to go fishin’, [...]

Harry Truman once said that if you want a friend in Washington, you should get a dog. So, President Barack Obama has at least one friend, Bo, and after the debt ceiling “compromise” this week, he’s not likely to get too many more in the near future. Pushed to the brink by Tea Party Republicans [...]