At its height, how much cotton did the South produce?
Between 1850 and 1860, when it was generating 3 to 4.8 million bales of cotton per year, the South provided over 75 percent of the cotton in the world.
The Panama Canal, which required ten years from start to finish, took two years longer to build than the Erie Canal. Excavation on the 51-mile long Panama Canal began in 1904; the first ship entered the waterway in 1914. The Erie Canal, linking Buffalo and Albany, New York, took from 1817 to 1825 to complete.
The official name of the Wobblies is The Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW. Founded in Chicago in 1905 and composed mostly of unskilled workers, the union advocated direct action to further the cause of worker control of the means of production. Their aim was to create “one big union” for all workers.
Humorist Dorothy Parker made the quip “How can they tell?” after U.S. President Calvin Coolidge’s death in 1933.
The remark “the necessity, real or imaginary, which has been supposed to exist, of appealing to the feelings and passions of our countrymen, rather than to their reasons and their judgments”? was made by Henry Clay, leader of the Whig party, after its candidate William Henry Harrison won the 1840 presidential election with a campaign…
Shays’s Rebellion (with the apostrophe after Shays) was named for army veteran Daniel Shays, who led an uprising against the Massachusetts state government in 1786. This action was one of a series of protests in 1786-87 by American farmers and workers throughout the young nation against state and local enforcement of tax collection and judgments…
The poorest county in the United States is Shannon County, South Dakota, site of the Pine Ridge Reservation, which is home to the Oglala branch of the Sioux Indians. In 1987, 63.1 percent of all 9,900 residents here lived in poverty, compared to a national poverty rate of 13.5 percent.