Pulitzer left $2M to Columbia to establish the Pulitzer Prize

Joseph Pulitzer created modern journalism

Long before there was cable news, there were newspapers, and Joseph Pulitzer was their king. A Hungarian immigrant, Pulitzer began his career as a reporter himself before buying a newspaper that he could shape with his editorial vision. Pulitzer's papers were bold, provocative, and visually striking, setting a new standard for newspapers nationwide as they moved into the 20th century.

The Pulitzer Prize has had its fair share of controversies

From fabricated articles to fiction that inspired FBI surveillance, these are five of the most controversial moments in Pulitzer Prize history. Among them: the Pulitzer Board’s decision not to give novelist Sinclair Lewis the 1921 award for fiction. This snub led the author of “Main Street” to become the first Pulitzer recipient to reject the prize in 1926.

Pulitzer's newspapers were intended for the masses

His newspapers, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the New York World, transformed journalism by marketing to a mass audience rather than just the elite.

The full list of every Pulitzer Prize winner

Since its inception in 1917, over 2,000 Pulitzers have been awarded to writers published in the US, from poetry and fiction to investigative reporting and history books. You can explore the winners by decade and year here, or click the view to see winners by category, including those no longer used.

Andrew Carnegie donated $56M to build 2,509 public libraries worldwide

Carnegie, who left school at 12 and credited borrowed books for his self-education, began funding libraries in 1881. Of the 2,509 libraries built, 1,681 were in the United States. He required each community to maintain the library as a condition of his gift.

Mark Twain once challenged a rival newspaper editor to a duel

While writing for a newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada, Twain published a story about a local fundraiser, accusing the paper’s rival of rescinding their donation. The problem was that the story was untrue: It was a hoax that he had concocted while drunk. The affair led to a protracted, public back-and-forth, with Twain challenging the editor of the rival paper to a duel; likewise, two other men challenged Twain to a duel. Twain ultimately left town, but wrote about the episode later on in an essay titled “How I Escaped Being Killed in a Duel.”

Alfred Nobel invented dynamite and later used his fortune to fund peace prizes

Nobel stabilized dangerous nitroglycerin to create dynamite, revolutionizing construction and mining in the 19th century. Despite his success with explosives, he was deeply disturbed by their destructive potential and redirected his legacy toward rewarding human progress.

Why endowments took off at the turn of the century

After the Civil War, economic growth boosted philanthropy, much of it ending up in universities and colleges. Charles Eliot, the longtime president of Harvard, realized a university’s success was determined by how much money it could hold in the endowment. His approach to endowments radically changed their role in the modern university.

The Smithsonian was first funded by a man who never visited the US

The Smithsonian Institution was established through a gift in the will of James Smithson, a British scientist who never visited America but left his fortune to establish an institution dedicated to the "increase and diffusion of knowledge."

After finding success as a novelist, Dickens started his own newspaper

Dickens made enough from "Sketches by Boz," "The Pickwick Papers," and "Oliver Twist," that he was able to work full time as a novelist. Still, he was still interested in journalism and decided to publish his own newspaper, the Daily News, in 1846. After 17 issues, he felt he no longer had time to focus on his novels and handed the operation off to a friend.

The Times Square New Year's celebration originated as a party for The New York Times

The paper moved to the area, originally called Longacre Square, in 1904 and lobbied the city to rename it after the publication. The paper’s publisher, Alfred Ochs, threw a massive all-day party on New Year’s Eve to celebrate the opening of the paper’s headquarters, establishing the location as a destination for the holiday.

The original article revealing Machu Picchu to the world

After first coming upon the ruins of Machu Picchu in 1911, Hiram Bingham’s subsequent expeditions were funded by Yale University, the Peruvian government, and $10,000 from a then-young National Geographic Society—in fact, it was the first archaeological grant that NatGeo ever issued. The magazine devoted its entire April 1913 issue, all 192 pages, to Bingham and his findings. You can read that issue in its entirety here.

Whitman led a Lincoln lecture late in life

Whitman toured several cities with “The Death of Lincoln,” a lecture series about the slain president that sought to establish him as a crucial figured in American history. The talks attracted famous figures, including Mark Twain and General William Tecumseh Sherman.

A letter about a hurricane helped launch Hamilton's life in America

After a hurricane severely damaged the Caribbean island of St. Croix, Alexander Hamilton wrote a vivid letter that was later published and impressed local business leaders, who took up a collection to send the teenager to North America for schooling.

How a pencil-making company helped fund Thoreau's books

Thoreau's father ran a pencil-making business, designing a model that dominated the American market and paid for his son's Harvard education. Later, Henry David Thoreau would use the business to fund the publication of his two books, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and "Walden."

The Tony Awards were founded by Brock Pemberton

A Kansas boy who went on to become a groundbreaking Broadway producer, Brock Pemberton is also the founder of the Tony Awards. He went from a prodigious Midwestern newspaper reporter to a New York drama critic and quickly caught the attention of a local producer, who offered Pemberton a job and kick-started his decades-long Broadway career, which included cofounding the influential American Theatre Wing.

In 1914, the Financial Times asked readers to redraw Europe for cash prizes

Two months in World War I, the newspaper invited readers to sketch postwar borders and submit peace terms for cash prizes. The contest captured public attempts to predict a new world order and foreshadowed modern crowdsourced forecasting. It's a wild look at how uncertain Europe's future was at the time.

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.

The Louisiana Purchase nearly doubled America’s size in 1803

Acquired from France for $15M, the Louisiana Purchase added 828,000 square miles to the United States—stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rockies. US ambassadors in France signed the papers to buy the tract from the embattled Napoleon Bonaparte for a mere $15M before Jefferson learned the terms, due to the advantageous nature of the deal.

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

Famed American investor Jesse Livermore made millions when the stock market crashed in 1929

Livermore made his first major short against rail company Union Pacific in 1906, coincidentally before an earthquake in San Francisco, which ultimately tanked share prices. During a financial panic the next year, JP Morgan reportedly asked Livermore to increase his long-term investments to restore hope and restabilize the market—which Livermore did. However, Livermore began betting against the market in 1929, sensing that stocks were too hot, and was one of the few people to benefit from the 1929 stock crash.

'The Vulture and the Little Girl' (1993) has a controversial story behind it

The tragic Pulitzer Prize-winning image taken by South African photojournalist Kevin Carter depicts a little girl suffering from starvation during a famine in Sudan in 1993. Carter faced criticism from the public for taking her picture instead of helping her. A few months later, Carter took his own life.

That time two journalists raced around the world in 80 days

In 1889, Journalist Nellie Bly, née Elizabeth Jane Cochran, set sail on a journey around the world to compete with Phileas Fogg, the protagonist of the 1872 fiction novel "Around the World in Eighty Days." This short video explains how competing...

French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin revived the ancient Olympic Games

When Baron Pierre de Coubertin was just 11, Germans began excavations at the site of the original ancient Olympics. It was a formative moment that fueled his dream of reviving the Olympic Games to cultivate educational discipline, national spirit, and international peace. This deep dive explores the lengthy process Coubertin went through and the challenges he overcame to bring the first modern Olympics to Athens in 1894.

Hughes once taught creative writing to junior high and high school students

In 1949, Hughes accepted an eight-week contract at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools to teach creative work, along with seminars on jazz and the “negro theme” in American poetry. He enjoyed his time at the school, but never returned to the classroom, noting that the early mornings and teaching load left little time for his writing.

Horace Mann was America’s champion of free, standardized public schooling

Horace Mann (1796–1859), Massachusetts Secretary of Education from 1837–1848, led the 19th-century Common School Movement. He established state boards, founded normal schools for teacher training, and urged universal, nonsectarian, tax-funded education. His reforms became national models.

August A. Busch, Sr. was gifted a six-horse Clydesdale hitch to celebrate Prohibition’s end

This helped reveal the marketing power of a horse-drawn beer wagon, so it invested in a second six-horse Clydesdale hitch. The Clydesdales soon went to New York, where they drew a crowd of thousands en route to the Empire State Building. Anheuser-Busch even gifted a case of Budweiser to New York Governor Alfred E. Smith in thanks for his help in the fight against Prohibition.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

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

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

Before writing 'Walden,' transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau nearly burned down his hometown with a campfire that grew out of control.

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.

Explore fun facts from the USPS, including unique post office buildings, a stamp that traveled past Pluto, and more.

In 1915, workers recovered a submarine-like vessel from the Chicago River, prompting fears of German espionage

The rivalry between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson centered on federalism—the question of how much power the federal government should hold relative to the states.

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

The original copy of the Declaration of Independence is not a pristine document, and even features a smudged anonymous handprint in the bottom left corner.

Roughly 43 million US borrowers owe roughly $1.7T in student debt, the second-largest source of consumer debt behind mortgages.

Poison ivy was sent to Europe in the 1600s as an exotic, ornamental oddity, where it was purposefully grown in the English royal gardens at Kew, the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, and a few other locations.

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

Against his wishes, Albert Einstein's brain was removed before his cremation, and the pathologist responsible stored it for decades in mason jars within a beer cooler.

The Brothers Grimm were lawyers before they were storytellers, and became interested in fairy tales as they began investigating how rules and customs had been passed down through cultures.

The US first hosted the World Cup in 1994, a tournament that lives in soccer infamy for its poor planning and the murder of Colombian player Andres Escobar, who'd accidentally scored on his own net.

Explore a list of the 100 best novels of all time, compiled by some of the world's best living writers, including Salman Rushdie, Stephen King, and Jennifer Egan.

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

Double world record holder Hunter Ewen helped conquer his fear of balloons, called globophobia, by training to win Guinness World Record titles for balloon inflation.

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

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

The most expensive ad of all time was for Chanel No. 5 perfume and cost roughly $33M to produce in 2004—about $57M in today's dollars.

Bone marrow (soft tissue found inside certain bones) generates roughly 500 billion new blood cells each day