How old was John F. Kennedy when Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” to him?
John F. Kennedy was approaching his 45th birthday when Marilyn Monroe sang the song to him at a Democratic fund-raiser in Madison Square Garden on March 19, 1962.
General Matthew B. Ridgway replaced General Douglas MacArthur as commander of U.N. forces in South Korea during the Korean War. Truman removed MacArthur from command on April 11, 1951, for publicly criticizing Truman’s policy of limiting the war to the Korean peninsula.
There are four stanzas in the song “America the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates (1850-1929), originally published in 1895 and revised in 1904 and 1911. The stanzas begin respectively with these lines: 1. 0 beautiful for spacious skies 2. 0 beautiful for pilgrim feet 3. 0 beautiful for heroes proved 4. 0 beautiful for patriot…
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…
Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto became the first European to reach the Mississippi River during a treasure-hunting expedition in 1539-42. Sailing from Havana, Cuba, De Soto landed at Tampa Bay, Florida, and traveled by a meandering route through what are now Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. After crossing the river and reaching what…
The series of trials in Massachusetts in 1692-93, known as the Salem witch trials, resulted in 27 convictions. Of those, 20 were executed: 19 were hanged, one was crushed to death. In 1693, Massachusetts governor William Phips created a new court, with stricter guidelines for evidence. Through it, remaining prisoners were either acquitted or set…
The third Olympiad, held in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904 was the first Olympics held in the United States.