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As  Women's History Month  approaches — March has been designated as such in the U.S.  since 1987  — you can bring a piece of that  history  home, with an iconic photograph from the LIFE collection, now on sale for a limited time in the  TIME Shop . In addition to the already available collection of LIFE classics, six photographs of history-making women are newly available for purchase. And, taking a look at these six images, it's clear just how many aspects of world events have been changed by women like these: Thomas D. McAvoy's image of singer Marian Anderson in 1939 captures a concert considered a curtain-raiser for the civil rights movement, and Yale Joel's 1965 photograph of LIFE contributor Gloria Steinem catches the writer right on the cusp of becoming a feminist icon. Allan Grant's picture of Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn at the 1956 Oscars showcases the best in show business on their industry's biggest night, while Alfred Eisenstaedt's ...

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.

w is not a great time for warm feelings about Russia in Washington. After a campaign season full of  intrigue , the fallout from questions of foreign involvement in the most recent presidential election  continues to grow . And most recently, the revelation on Wednesday that Attorney General Jeff Sessions  spoke  with Russia's ambassador to the United States twice during the 2016 campaign season, only to say during his confirmation hearings that he had not communicated with Russian officials, has  spurred calls for Sessions to resign . This wave of tension has sparked  numerous   comparisons  to the Cold War period, which is unsurprising. Though the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies in World War II and helped each other to victory, that cooperation was followed by decades during which the opposition between the two systems they represented dominated global politics. But, though the Cold War may be the most obvious example of a time when...

As of Friday, it has been 94 years since the date on the  very first issue of TIME . A lot has changed, for the magazine and the world alike. The issue was short and entirely black-and-white, the  League of Nations  hadn’t yet been replaced by the United Nations, the latest art news was  about  the future of cubism and a working  helicopter  had just been invented. In other ways, however, the more things change, the more they stay the same. In 1923, politicians in Washington  fretted  over the border with Mexico, educators  worried  about the behavior of teenage boys, questions of journalistic objectivity provoked  controversy  — and TIME magazine reported on all of it. TIME subscribers can always access that issue and the rest of TIME's archives — complete with the original layouts, art and advertisements — in the TIME Vault, but on Friday and this weekend, to celebrate the magazine's anniversary, that issue can be...

This piece is part of an ongoing series on the unsung women of history.  Read more here. In 1856, an attractive young widow presented herself at the offices of Allan Pinkerton. At the time, he was well on his way to fame as the founder of America’s first detective agency. Little did he realize that his visitor wasn’t just another pretty face; she was Kate Warne and she was soon to become the world’s first woman P.I. Though Pinkerton gushed about Warne’s good looks and graceful vivacity, what really impressed him was her sense of purpose. She was looking for a job, she told him, and he should hire her. “She could go and worm out secrets in many places which it was impossible for male detectives to gain access,”  Pinkerton wrote years later . “She had evidently given the matter much study.” Pinkerton agreed, and a legend was born. Little is known of Warne’s life before she became a private eye, only that she was about 23 when she came to Pinkerton’s office and that she ...

Milestone moments do not a year make. Often, it’s the smaller news stories that add up, gradually, to big history. With that in mind, in 2017 TIME History will revisit the entire year of 1967, week by week, as it was reported in the pages of TIME, to see how it all comes together.  Catch up on last week’s installment here. Week 10: March 10, 1967 When magazine magnate  Henry Luce  died at 68 on Feb. 28, 1967 — almost exactly 44 years after the date on the cover of  the first issue of TIME  — his final memo to the magazine's editors was still in transit. Luce, who had founded TIME with his Yale classmate Briton Hadden in the years after World War I, had already begun to delegate his duties at the company. (In 1960, he ceded corporate control of Time Inc. and in 1964 he stepped down as Editor in Chief of TIME.) Nevertheless, he remained closely tied to the daily operations of the publications he had launched. Such a set-up made sense, as TIME and its sist...

This post is in partnership with the  Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin . A version of the article below was originally published on the  Ransom Center’s Cultural Compass blog. In August 2016, I joined the Ransom Center as a graduate student assistant from The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information to digitize the Gabriel García Márquez papers. The project’s title, “Sharing ‘Gabo’ with the World,” reflects the intentions of the Council on Library and Information Resources’ grant: to make accessible digitized content from García Márquez’s voluminous collection of manuscripts, notebooks, scrapbooks, and photographs. My first weeks entailed digitizing pages of García Márquez’s manuscripts. Several months later my supervisor, Jullianne Ballou, asked me to select about 100 photographs for digitization from among the thousands that arrived with the collection. It wasn’t until I was facing a collection of 24 boxes containing dozens of fold...

This post is in partnership with the  History News Network , the website that puts the news into historical perspective. The article below was originally published at  HNN. In the 1850s, Ernestine Rose (1810-1892) was one of the most famous women in America — far better known than her co-workers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. An outstanding orator in an era when women seldom spoke publicly, Rose had “as great a power to chain an audience as any of our best male speakers,” a New York newspaper declared. She had an international reputation: “Her eloquence is irresistible. It shakes, it awes, it thrills, it melts — it fills you with horror, it drowns you with tears,” wrote a British sympathizer. “They who sat with her in bygone days on the platform will remember her matchless powers as a speaker,” Anthony reminisced in the 1880s, “and how safe we felt when she had the floor….” Her amazing life deserves to be restored to U.S. history.

When photography was  invented  in the mid-19th century,  France  became the nation that could boast providing the landscape captured in the  first known photograph  — but it didn't take too long for the medium to make its way around the world. Though photography would capture changing history, or  cause history to change , in many places, the timing of its arrival in China proved particularly interesting from a historical perspective. Travelers from the West brought the technology to Asia in the 1840s,  according  to the Getty Research Institute's in-depth study of the history of photography in China, and it quickly became popular. At that time, China was ruled by the Qing (or Manchu) Dynasty, the imperial dynasty that had governed the vast nation since the 17th century. Photography's arrival in China in the 19th century occurred just at the right moment to capture a way of life that would largely disappear when the  Qing Dynasty ...

On International Women's Day this year, the organizers behind the  Women's March on Washington  are aiming for another national demonstration of solidarity — this time in the form of " a day without a woman ." Organizers have called on women to take the day off from paid and unpaid work on March 8, avoid shopping and wear red to show support. Those who participate will follow the precedent set by generations of women who previously spent a day — or weeks — on strike for various causes. Here are some of the issues that have previously led women in the U.S. to strike — and what they accomplished by doing so: Uprising of the 20,000 in 1909 In what became known as the " Uprising of the 20,000," New York City garment workers led a weeks-long strike beginning in November of 1909, calling for better working conditions and higher wages. The strike, led mostly by young women, came out of a meeting of workers from different garment companies.  Male union lead...

Though the dedication of March to the topic of women's history is now observed in the U.S., it  grew out of  a week that grew out a day: International Women's Day, which is observed on March 8. On or around that day, for more than a century, women around the world have marched for what they believe in. In 1909, at the  original  such march, it was for better working conditions. This year, the day will be an occasion for the movement associated with January's post-Inauguration Women's March  protests  to  continue  to make its voice heard. But during the first decades of the 20th century, there was one particular cause that drew  many  American women to take to the streets: the right to vote. Images of  suffrage marches  from the decade before the  19th Amendment  enfranchised women, from the Library of Congress' collection of early news photographs, capture that important moment in time. For this year's Interna...

The  history of women  in American politics is just as long as that of the nation as a whole. Even in the days before the Constitution guaranteed women the  right to vote , many tried hard to make a difference as best they could — and succeeded, not only by breaking glass ceilings and proving that women could handle the job but also by introducing important legislation, standing up for their fellow citizens' rights and much more. Whether they held office at the local and federal level, whether they were appointed to the most high-profile jobs in politics or to a role many would never hear about, and even if they merely ran and lost, each made her mark. Some of them wielded their influence in the nation's  earliest days  and others have only recently been elected to office. And, of course, that history is still being written by many women who have yet to make it to the history books. It would be impossible to sum up the complete role that women have play...

In a world in which some people are willing to shell out up to  $1,300  for tickets to see  Hamilton  on Broadway, it is perhaps unsurprising that interest in the  real  Alexander Hamilton is also high. Or at least that's the hope of Seth Kaller, a historical document dealer who is currently offering a collection of original letters, documents and imprints penned by Alexander Hamilton, which Kaller says is valued at $2.7 million. The collection is now  online  and on display Thursday through Sunday at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair. One document that may particularly interest fans of the Tony Award-winning show is Hamilton's Aug. 8, 1780, letter to his future wife Eliza — one of the few love letters between the two that survive from this period. Sparks flew between Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler during the most heated period in U.S. history. As the daughter of Revolutionary War General Philip Schuyler and heir to two of the wealthies...

When the new movie  Kong: Skull Island   arrives in theaters on Friday, more than eight decades will have passed since  King Kong  introduced the world to a creature TIME  described  in 1933 as a "gigantic whatnot resembling an ape, 50 feet tall, equipped with large teeth and a thunderous snarl." (His fur, the story noted, was made of 30 bearskins.) The whole concept of the film could have produced something entirely ridiculous, the magazine observed back then as well as in future stories about the franchise, but somehow it worked — thanks to some Hollywood alchemy that filmmakers are hoping to recapture once again.

This post is in partnership with the  History News Network , the website that puts the news into historical perspective. The article below was originally published at  HNN. In April 2016, Wyatt Houston Day was expecting a visit from a collector who had made an appointment so that the Swann Galleries’ expert on printed and Manuscript African Americana could take a look at the cartes-de-viste album he owned. The collector had picked this album up at a sidewalk sale at the Puck Building in New York over 30 years before. Some goods left in storage were being sold off, and he bought the collection of photos as a lark. Day was used to disappointment, but when he began to thumb through the album, he recalled: “I almost fell out of my chair!” This souvenir album contained 44 19th-century daguerreotypes—men and women, blacks and whites, including a familiar image of the intrepid Underground Railroad conductor, Harriet Tubman. Indeed, this image adorned the cover of not just my o...

This post is in partnership with the  History News Network , the website that puts the news into historical perspective. The article below was originally published at  HNN. The role of death and how it might have affected American history and politics is demonstrated in so many situations in American history. In 1848, President James K. Polk had triumphed in gaining new territory from Great Britain by treaty, and by war with Mexico. While the political battle raged over what was to be done with the Mexican Cession territories and the expansion of slavery, Polk chose not to run for reelection, the only time in American history that a President, willingly, chose not to seek a second term. It was a wise decision on Polk’s part, as he fell ill shortly after retirement, and died only 105 days after the end of his term in June 1849, the shortest retirement of any President in American history. So he avoided dying in office by retiring in time. In 1860, Democratic Senator St...

Winter Storm  Stella  may have many people scratching their heads: after a warm  February , it's  hitting  the East Coast one week before the official start of spring. But there’s precedent for a major  snowstorm  in the middle of March, although it may not happen frequently. It was 61 years ago, nearly to the day, on March 18, 1956, that another hit the East Coast, blanketing the northeast corridor with snow. During that storm, LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt captured these images of New Yorkers coping with the onslaught of winter weather. Though the images did not run in the magazine, the storm did make news — with the tale of one New Yorker who had more trouble than most with the snow. Al Asnis of LIFE's photo lab happened to be waiting for the train on an El platform when he saw a man "writhing on the sidewalk below," the magazine  reported .

The  news on Monday  that Poland will request the extradition of 98-year-old Michael Karkoc, who is believed by authorities to have been a commander of a Nazi-led unit that was responsible for war crimes during World War II, is the latest development to arise from  years of questioning  about the Minnesota man's past. It is also a fresh reminder that the hunt to find and prosecute the perpetrators of the war crimes of that era, the period that  gave the world  the word  genocide,  is ongoing — including within the United States. When Karkoc's case came to light in 2013, Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center  told  New York  magazine  that there could be "hundreds" of Nazi war criminals currently living, undetected, in the United States. (Karkoc's family, meanwhile, insists that he is not one of them.) Per a 2008 report from the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), a bureau TIME once  described  as...

In the introduction to a headline-making episode Tuesday of her MSNBC show in which she  revealed the contents of one of Donald Trump's old tax returns , Rachel Maddow had cause to remind audiences of a particular  presidential one-liner  from  American history : the moment in November of 1973 when President Richard Nixon told the American people, "I am not a crook."