When did the passenger pigeon become extinct in the U.S.?
Once common in U.S. skies and hunted widely as cheap food, the last known passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo on September 1, 1914.
The Minnesota Valley Canning Company of Le Sueur, Minnesota, introduced the Jolly Green Giant as the emblem of a line of canned peas in 1926.
William Travis, commander of the Alamo, was not from Texas but from South Carolina. A lawyer and lieutenant-colonel, Travis was one of many Southerners who responded to Texas’s call for volunteers to help in their revolution against Mexico, which began in 1835. Southerners sympathized with the rebels because the province of Texas was a slave-owning…
Sargent Shriver, director of the Peace Corps during John F. Kennedy’s term (1961-63), was Kennedy’s brother-in-law.
A Cherokee named Sequoyah finished the system of writing in Cherokee in Arkansas in 1821. Sequoyah neither spoke nor wrote English, but he had an idea of the power of writing: “I thought that would be like catching a wild animal and taming it.” His alphabet had a character for each of 86 Cherokee syllables….
The Republican mayor of New York City Fiorello La Guardia (1934-45), known as the “Little Flower,” was five feet two inches tall.
The Star-Spangled Banner was played in 1862 at a baseball game in Brooklyn at a field built by sports developer William Commeyer.