How much does a B-2 bomber cost?
At about $865 million each, the radar-evading “Stealth” strategic B-2 bomber built by Northrop for the U.S. Air Force is considered the most expensive weapons system in American history.
Sony introduced the Betamax (or Beta) videocassette recorder in 1975. In 1976, JVC (the Victor Company of Japan) introduced the competing VHS system. By the end of the 1980s, VHS had pushed Beta out of the market, and VCRs had spread across the U.S.
Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia Denton Grant are buried in Grant’s Tomb on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
The Supreme Court decided that it was unconstitutional to require recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance not in the 1960s but in 1943, in the midst of World War II. In that year, the Supreme Court struck down a West Virginia law requiring recitation of the pledge.
The hero of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, Sergeant Alvin York, launched on September 26, 1918, killed 25 Germans and captured 132, along with 35 machine guns in World War I. The Tennessee sharpshooter, who had petitioned unsuccessfully for exemption as a conscientious objector, was lionized for his exploits and awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and…
The holiday Decoration Day, which was first widely celebrated on May 30, 1868, was originally meant to remind citizens to decorate with wreaths the graves of soldiers killed in the Civil War. The holiday has since been renamed Memorial Day and is observed on the last Monday in May to honor the dead of all…
The most destructive air attack of World War II was not the atomic bombing of Hiroshima but the firebombing of Tokyo by 279 Superfortress bombers on March 9-10, 1945. Over 1,650 tons of incendiary bombs were dropped on the city, raising a massive firestorm and killing from 80,000 to 120,000 people. The bombing represented a…