When did the Trojan War occur?
According to scholars, the Trojan War took place during the thirteenth century B.C.
The Iliad, Homer’s epic account of the war, is thought to have been written in the ninth century B.C.
The acute pneumonia called Legionnaires’ disease is caused by a bacterium of the genus Legionella. The disease made headlines (and got its name) when it killed 29 people at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia, July 21-24, 1976. The causative agent was found a year later.
The first women’s college in the U.S. was the Troy Female Seminary, in Troy, New York, founded by Emma Willard (1787-1870) in 1821. The first coeducational college was Oberlin College, which first accepted female students in 1833.
Columbus did not realize he had discovered a new continent that would be named America, but Amerigo Vespucci, who explored the New World between 1497 and 1504, did. German mapmaker Martin Waldseemuller first applied the name to the new continent on a map published in 1507.
Wall Street got its name from the wall built around Lower Manhattan in colonial times to protect cattle from Indian raids.
In the year 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, which was the height of slavery, the slave population in the U.S. was 3,953,760.
Humorist Dorothy Parker made the quip “How can they tell?” after U.S. President Calvin Coolidge’s death in 1933.