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Money, or the lack thereof, was a persistent problem in colonial America. The colonists were under the control of Great Britain, where the legal tender was both gold and silver, known as a bimetallic system. Yet British coins circulated only rarely in the colonies. The colonists had an unfavorable balance of trade with the mother country, meaning that the value of the goods they imported from England greatly exceeded the value of the goods exported back. Most specie that flowed into the colonies through trade quickly flowed back to England in payment for these goods. Nor did the colonists have access to specie through any domestic gold or silver discoveries. In order to have a functioning economy, the colonists were forced to turn to other commodities for use as money. Spanish coins, from trade with the West Indies and Mexico, circulated freely in the colonies as legal tender. While goods were officially valued in British pounds, in their day-to-day transactions colonists more com...

On what would have been  Elizabeth Taylor 's 85th birthday — the actor, born Feb. 27, 1932, died in 2011 — TIME looks back on one of the most iconic portraits ever captured of her. Philippe Halsman , the prolific 20th-century portrait photographer, was assigned by LIFE Magazine to photograph Taylor for a profile story. Halsman was no stranger to LIFE: he had been a regular contributor since 1941 who captured the world’s leading figures, from  Marilyn Monroe  to Alfred Hitchcock to Winston Churchill, for the publication. In October 1948, Taylor — who was only 16 at the time — arrived in a low-cut dress at Halsman’s New York City portrait studio, which still exists today and is now home to the Halsman Archive. “In my studio Elizabeth was quiet and shy. She struck me as an average teen-ager, except that she was incredibly beautiful,” Halsman reflected in his book  Halsman: Sight and Insight. Halsman had his one-of-a-kind hand-built 4x5 view camera ready to go w...

Getting tattoos can be painful, but did you know they were partly invented to treat pain? In the mid-18th century, Native American women tattooed themselves to alleviate toothaches and arthritis, similar to acupuncture. New York City is considered the birthplace of modern tattoos because it's where the first professional tattoo artist Martin Hildebrandt set up shop in the mid-19th century to tattoo  Civil War  soldiers for identification purposes, and it's where the first electric rotary tattoo machine was invented in 1891, inspired by  Thomas Edison 's electric pen. So it's fitting that the city is currently home to two separate exhibitions on the history of the art.  Tattooed New York ,  from which the fact above is drawn, documents 300 years of tattooing at the  New-York Historical Society . At the same time, with  The Original Gus Wagner: The Maritime Roots of Modern Tattoo , the South Street Seaport Museum dives into the maritime origins of t...

Photographer  Margaret Bourke-White  — LIFE Magazine's first female staff photographer — helped women in her profession reach new heights when she became the first female photographer accredited to cover World War II combat zones. This 1943 self-portrait shows her decked out in a fleece flight suit in front of the Flying Fortress bomber from which she had photographed, from four miles in the air, an attack on Tunis, soaring above the cloud-banked Mediterranean coast to become "the first woman ever to fly with a U.S. combat crew over enemy soil," as  the magazine  declared in its Mar. 1, 1943, issue. Fighter planes swooped in and attacked, and bombs downed 40 German planes in what was considered a "highly successful raid." And this was no cushy gig: It was so cold that LIFE noted that she had to pinch her oxygen mask periodically to "dislodge chunks of frozen breath, which threatened to clog the feed line."

Ever since March  became  Women's History Month in the U.S. in 1987, it has been a time to reflect on and share stories about influential women — of which queens are certainly obvious, colorful examples. If the only queens you can name off the top of your head are  Queen Elizabeth II ,  Queen Victoria  and " Queen Bey " then peruse this round-up of notable women in charge, presented in no particular order, who range from revered rulers to royal pains: Olympias  (on the throne 375–316 B.C.E.) Alexander the Great's mother and queen to Philip II of Macedonia, she was perhaps history's most extreme, and certainly one of the earliest, examples of a helicopter mom. "After Philip was stabbed to death by his jealous male lover — an act that had Olympias’ fingerprints all over it — she arranged for the assassination of Alex’s two siblings from another mother," says Kris Waldherr, author of  Doomed Queens: Royal Women Who Met Bad Ends.  In her spar...

Do you have a question about history? Send us your question at history@time . com and you might find your answer in a future edition of Now You Know. You don't have to be English to know about "teatime" — though you might have to be to know the details of the institution. Afternoon tea goes by a few names, including "low tea" for the low chairs and tables, "little tea" or even "handed tea" for the way the cups are handed around. Confusingly, it evolved around the same time as another, entirely separate occasion during which tea was consumed with food during the afternoon: "high tea" (which was also called "great tea" or "meat tea"). People did drink tea in the afternoon before "teatime" became a ritual, but it wasn't until the Victorian era that it really crystallized as a specific event.