Rockwell's 'Murder in Mississippi (Southern Justice)' was a response to real events

Rockwell based many of his paintings on staged photographs

Rockwell’s work was often noted for its realism. His paintings' near-photographic precision was no accident. Early in his career, he painted from live models. Later, he’d conceived a scene, staged it, photographed it, and then used the photos as the foundation for his paintings.

Rockwell left the Saturday Evening Post and began creating more politically charged work

Rockwell left the magazine in 1963 and joined Look magazine, where he began depicting a more complex America than he had at the Post. His work at Look dealt with racial segregation and violence, and often made unambiguous statements about real events.

Southern race riots in 1866 galvanized support for more radical Reconstruction

In 1866, white mobs in Memphis and New Orleans killed dozens of Black residents and burned Black neighborhoods. The massacres horrified Northerners, convincing Congress that stronger federal action was needed to protect freedpeople's rights and enforce Reconstruction.

The 'Problem We All Live With' was based on Ruby Bridges

The 1964 painting was based on Ruby Bridges, the first Black student to integrate an all-white school in Louisiana. Rockwell used Anita Gunn, the granddaughter of one of his friends, as the model, offering to pay for her violin lessons for her assistance.

Uncovering corruption in rural Mississippi

In 1997, Curtis Flowers was convicted of murdering four furniture store employees. The Black Mississippi native was tried in the 1996 crime six times over 21 years, during which he maintained his innocence and continued to appeal his case. This is the first episode in a 2018 investigative podcast series that heavily contributed to Flowers' conviction being overturned and all charges dropped.

Searching for a hate crime's unknown victim

In 2004, two federal agents heard a rumor: two white men, one under investigation for an unrelated crime, had gotten away with killing a Black man 15 years earlier as a requirement to join a white supremacist group. One of the men confessed to the crime, though he didn't know who was killed. This series dives into the search for the slain man and the justice he deserved.

The oft-cited roots of the true crime genre

The 1966 book "In Cold Blood" by American author Truman Capote is often considered the beginning of true crime as it's known today. The story details the real-life murders of a family of four in Holcomb, Kansas, using techniques that, at the time, were relegated to fictional tales. Before it was a book, the narrative was published by The New Yorker in 1965 as a four-part series. 

Claude McKay's poem 'If We Must Die' criticized racial violence

The poem, a Shakespearean sonnet, is a critique of the violence that Black Americans faced at home in America. It was written in the summer of 1919, also known as "Red Summer," when several white supremacist attacks and race riots broke out across the country.

Conspiracy theories persist around Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination

Despite multiple investigations—including FBI inquiries and a 1979 House committee report—questions and conspiracy theories have continued to surround the 1968 assassination of Dr. King long after his assassin’s conviction.

Norman Rockwell's 'Freedom of Speech' has become an internet meme

The famous painting, which portrays a man in work clothes speaking up in a crowd of men in suits, has become a companion image for internet users posting unpopular or controversial opinions. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Aaron Douglas' art defined the visual aesthetic of the Harlem Renaissance

Douglas learned about Harlem's cultural scene while teaching high school in Kansas City and was eventually recruited to New York by Charles S. Johnson, the editor of the National Urban League's periodical. Soon, Douglas was illustrating periodicals and books affiliated with the movement. In 1934, the Works Progress Administration commissioned him to paint the "Aspects of Negro Life" murals. One of those murals, "Song of the Towers," pictured below, portrays Black life during the Harlem Renaissance.

Ray Charles' 'Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music' albums blurred genre lines

Released in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, Charles’ records showed that country music, by then largely segregated, was an American music, no matter one’s background.

Watch a news clip from the evening of 'the Saturday Night Massacre'

On Oct. 20, 1973, President Nixon ordered the firing of Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox—prompting the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy AG William Ruckelshaus. This NBC News Special Report shows the immediate aftermath of the decision.

Dylan opened for Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington

The apex of Dylan’s era as a “protest singer” was his appearance, alongside collaborator and sometimes-lover Joan Baez, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was the same demonstration where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Dylan performed four songs, including a scathing version of “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” a ballad about Medgar Evers, an activist who was murdered at his home in Mississippi by a white supremacist.

King once shelved his own book

“Rage” was one of King’s earliest novels and the first to be published under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. After several school shootings mirrored the book’s plot, in which a troubled student murders several of his teachers, King asked his publisher to discontinue the title, fearing it might have inspired the assailants.

The Kent State massacre sparked a nationwide student strike

In 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on Kent State University students—peacefully protesting the Vietnam War—and killed four. The tragedy led to more widespread nationwide protests, shutting down more than 200 colleges and universities. The event led to a Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of a slain and grieving student.

O’Connor’s stories feature Southern outcasts thrust into bizarre situations

The Deep South is presented as a shadowy place, filled with scheming figures posing as upstanding citizens, like the conniving door-to-door Bible salesman of “Good Country People,” and smug intellectuals receiving their comeuppances, like the condescending college graduate of “Everything That Rises Must Converge.”

One Martin Wong painting contains a secret homage to graffiti culture

After the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired painter Martin Wong's "Houston Street," they discovered there was another work on the back of the canvas that featured contributions from some of the luminaries of the 1980s New York graffiti scene.

Jean Stafford’s ‘A Mother in History’ followed the mother of JFK’s assassin

Marguerite Oswald, the mother of Lee Harvey Oswald, leaned into the public eye after her son’s crime. Stafford’s decision to interview her was the subject of controversy, but offered an interesting character study of a maligned woman openly inclined to make money off the attention she was receiving.

'Bonnie and Clyde,' the 1967 film starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, was the first major American movie to feature graphic violence.

Director Arthur Penn used the then-new Squibb technology, which triggered realistic and bloody bullet wounds, to portray graphic violence, at the time a taboo in American cinema.

Novelist Richard Wright joined the existentialists in Paris

The author of “Black Boy” and “Native Son” left the United States in 1946 to escape his home country’s racial inequality. In Paris, he explored existentialist ideas and spent time with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. “The Outsider,” a novel he wrote while living in France, embraced many of the philosophy’s central themes.

The tragic Pulitzer Prize-winning image 'The Vulture and the Little Girl' (1993) generated controversy, raised concerns about ethics in photography, and eventually led to the photographer's death.

Steinbeck's novel 'The Grapes of Wrath' was inspired by a series of newspaper reports he wrote about migrant farm workers.

Taliesin’s first fire also involved the tragic murder of seven people

In 1914, while Frank Lloyd Wright was out working in Chicago, one of his servants at Taliesin brutally murdered his mistress, Martha “Mamah” Borthwick Cheney, her two children, and three other people in the home. The massacre left a deep impression on Wright, who spent much of his career restoring the home.

'What each of us must come to realize is that our intent always comes through.'

- First African American Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993)

Poet Robert Lowell was once convinced communists were invading an artist colony

In 1949, the Pulitzer winner accused Elizabeth Ames, director of the Yaddo artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, of colluding with Agnes Smedley, a journalist who'd been staying on the property for years and who was working on a project sympathetic to communist causes.

See 33 images that became central to huge scandals, including a young Charles and Camilla, Michael Jackson's baby on a hotel balcony, and Hugh Grant's mugshot.

The 19th-century painters of the Hudson River School were among the first American romantics, with portraits that displayed the natural beauty of the young country.

The story of Dollree Mapp, whose legal challenge over her 1957 conviction for possessing "obscene material" led to a major strengthening of the Fourth Amendment

The Ramones' 'Pet Sematary,' the theme song for the Stephen King novel of the same name, was written while the band was admiring the writer's collection of horror memorabilia.

After her fellow cult members tried to kill her with an LSD-infused hamburger, one member of the Manson Family, the murderous cult led by Charles Manson, decided to testify against the group's leader.

American short story writer Flannery O'Connor raised 40 peacocks, which became potent symbols for her fiction's elegant violence

Art theft is the third-largest source of criminal revenues worldwide, thanks in part to the subjective nature of valuing a work of art.

Abraham Lincoln was almost assassinated weeks before his inauguration as he traveled from Illinois to DC through Baltimore in 1861; it took two independent claims for Lincoln to be convinced the threat was real

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

A small portion of The Winstons' 'Amen, Brother,' an obscure '60s gospel record, is the basis for thousands of hip-hop tracks, making it one of the most sampled records ever that's informally known as 'the Amen break.'

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

Salvador Dalí believed he was his own dead brother, who had died nine months before he was born

70 years ago today, city officials in Santa Cruz, California, banned rock 'n' roll to protect its youth from corruption after witnessing a 'provocative' concert the night before.

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

Mark Twain spent decades feuding with the US Postal Service, convinced its costs and regulations were bureaucratic overreach.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

View the ten deadliest tornadoes in US history.

The Great Salt Lake's distinct dual coloration results from high-salinity organisms that only live in the northern portion and produce a purple protein.

Poison ivy's characteristic rash is caused by an allergic response to an oily compound in the plant called urushiol.

Gerrymandering works through two techniques: cracking opposing voters across districts to dilute their power, and packing them into a few to waste their votes in lopsided majorities.

The American cockroach is actually from Africa, an apparent hitchhiker aboard ships carrying enslaved people, with evidence suggesting the bug may have arrived in the New World as early as the 1600s.