Just before George Washington died at Mount Vernon on December 14, 1799, doctors only made things worse by draining 40 percent of his blood.

In 1958, the KKK tried to intimidate the Lumbee tribe in Maxton, North Carolina, but they fought back at the Battle of Hayes Pond — and drove the Klan out of town.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama was named after a former Confederate general in 1940. But in 1965, the bridge became the site of a historic civil rights protest.

Spies in the Continental Army wrote of a highly capable operative known only as Agent 355, and though some historians doubt her existence, others think she may have changed the course of the Revolutionary War.

Garrett Augustus Morgan didn't get his due until after his death in 1963 — despite inventing the modern traffic light and an early version of the gas mask.

New Mexico's Lincoln County War only lasted a few short months in 1878, but this deadly clash between ranchers became one of the defining events of the Wild West.

The wife of Charles Lindbergh, Anne Morrow Lindbergh accomplished incredible feats both in the air and on the page that all too often went overshadowed by both her husband’s success and the personal tragedies she endured.

From a monk who mummified himself inside a statue to a tower made of human skulls, discover some of the most chilling artifacts ever unearthed.

Ellen Ochoa became the first Latina to venture into space in 1993 — then became director of NASA mission control in 2012.

When she wasn’t testing her lethal concoctions on hundreds of slaves and children, she was dispatching Nero’s enemies — until she met a brutal end herself.

After winning her freedom in 1856, Biddy Mason invested in large tracts of land in downtown L.A., and she used her growing fortune to assist the city’s poorest people.