The producers of Twenty-One saw Charles Van Doren's handsomeness and polite demeanor as a way to boost their ratings. Getty ImagesCharles Van Doren on the game show Twenty-One. “I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception.” That’s what Charles Van Doren told the U.S Congress in 1959. It was only two years prior that Van Doren was on the cover of magazines and beloved by the American public for his astounding intelligence displayed on the TV game show Twenty-One.

The "Migrant Mother" photo is iconic — but if the subject had her way, she wouldn't be the face of the Great Depression.Dorothea Lange/Library of Congress In 1936, a very tired 32-year-old mother of seven named Florence Owens sat down with a few of her children in a temporary shelter near the migrants’ camp in Nipomo, California, next to her broken-down car. The woman’s boyfriend, Jim, was away for several hours with the older two children to get the car’s radiator fixed.

Every day between 1925 and 1935, Hachikō the dog waited at Tokyo's Shibuya train station in hopes that his dead master would return.Hachikō the dog was more than a pet. As the canine companion to a university professor, Hachikō patiently waited his owner’s return from work at their local train station each evening. But when the professor died suddenly one day at work, Hachikō was left waiting at the station — for nearly a decade.

For centuries, Vikings traveled from throughout Scandinavia to join the elite Varangian Guard that protected the Eastern Roman Emperor and the city of Constantinople.National Library of SpainA 12th-century illustration of the Varangian Guard defending Constantinople. Vikings are perhaps best known for plundering Western Europe and being the first Europeans to set foot in North America. But they also played a crucial role in the Byzantine Empire, where a select group of warriors called the Varangian Guard protected the emperor in Constantinople for hundreds of years.

What happened on this day in history: Adolf Hitler dies by suicide in Berlin, Anton Lavey establishes the Church of Satan, and other noteworthy events on April 30th.1803: The Louisiana Purchase Is Completed The Louisiana Purchase Treaty is signed between the United States and France. Robert Livingston and James Monroe agreed to pay France $15 million (more than $300 million today) for 828,000 square miles of land that lay west of the Mississippi River.