As we put 2020 into the past, we’re taking a look back on the most popular posts published this year. Thank you to the National Archives staff who helped us share our love of history.
10. The fourth installment of a series about unratified constitutional amendments, Unratified Amendments: Regulating Child Labor, explored an amendment proposed during the Progressive Era to regulate working children.
9. As part of our series commemorating the anniversary of the Woman Suffrage Amendment, ninth place goes to 19th Amendment at 100: Mary Church Terrell.
8. February’s Facial Hair Friday: the First President Not Clean-shaven was all about the first President with facial hair: John Quincy Adams.
7. In seventh place is Amending the Electoral College: The 12th Amendment, which looked at the origins of the Electoral College and how it has been changed.
6. Little Boy: The First Atomic Bomb from Michael J. Hancock, marked the 75th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb.
5. Unratified Amendments—the kick-off to the series about amendments that Congress proposed but were not ratified by a sufficient number of states—delved deeper into what was supposed to be the original first amendment.
4. In celebration of the movie musical version of Hamilton, My Name is Alex Hamilton highlights two Hamilton-related documents from our holdings.
3. In the third spot is Lori Norris’s post on the World War II–era actress who invented Wi-Fi: Hedy Lamarr.
2. Coming in at number two is Michael J. Hancock’s look at the The 1824 Presidential Election and the “Corrupt Bargain.”
1. Not surprising after the year we’ve had, the most-viewed post published in 2020 was an update to an earlier post from Megan Huang, “Wear a Mask and Save Your Life: The 1918 Flu Pandemic.”
Want to know what the most viewed posts in 2020 were? All these posts were published before this year but still get a ton of views:
Thanks for all of these articles. Best wishes for 2021.