Monuments

The Pantheon is one of the best-preserved monuments of ancient Rome. The structure, completed around 126-128 A.D. during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, features a rotunda with a massive domed ceiling that was the largest of its kind when it was built. The Pantheon is situated on ...read more

Montezuma Castle is an ancient abode structure located in the Verde Valley in central Arizona. Thanks to its colorful name, the five-story, 20-room building sheltered high in a limestone cliff is sometimes thought to be the former home of the Aztec emperor, Montezuma. Scholars ...read more

In 1872, Yellowstone became the first U.S. national park, and it earned this status the same way new parks still do today: First Congress passed legislation declaring it a national park, and then the president (at the time, Ulysses S. Grant) signed it into law. But by 1906, the ...read more

Few medical doctors have been as lauded—and loathed—as James Marion Sims.  Credited as the “father of modern gynecology,” Sims developed pioneering tools and surgical techniques related to women’s reproductive health. In 1876, he was named president of the American Medical ...read more

After the guns fell silent over the trenches of Europe in 1918 and the doughboys returned from “over there,” Americans in big cities and small towns began the effort to commemorate those who served and died in World War I. Throughout the 1920s, Americans raised money and erected ...read more

1. Plans for the monument began even before Washington was elected president. In 1783, the Continental Congress voted to erect a statue of Washington, commander-in-chief of the American army during the Revolutionary War, in the nation’s yet-to-be constructed permanent capital ...read more