How old was Abraham Lincoln when he was first elected to public office?
Abraham Lincoln was 25 when he was elected to the Illinois state legislature as an assemblyman in 1834.
The inscription on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery reads: “Here Rests in Honored Glory an American Soldier Known But to God.” Arlington has been a military cemetery since 1864.
In a contest with four candidates in 1860 (Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, John C. Bell, and John C. Breckinridge), Abraham Lincoln received 40 percent of the popular vote and carried 18 states.
Born in Atlanta, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68) traveled north to receive his Ph.D. in theology from Boston University in 1955. He returned to the South to become pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where he met Rosa Parks and was chosen to lead the bus boycott. An advocate of…
The Massachusetts militiamen won the Battle of Lexington and Concord when they forced the British to retreat from Concord back to Boston. This was the first battle of the War of Independence The British were trying to confiscate colonial arms from a depot at Concord. The battle, which took place on the night of April…
At least 1,547 people were killed when the boiler of the side-wheeler Sultana exploded on April 27, 1865, on the Mississippi River near Memphis, Tennessee, making it the worst marine disaster in U.S. history. Many of those killed in the blaze were Union soldiers who had recently been freed from Confederate prison camps. The most…
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, was written by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren (1891-1974). Delivered on May 17, 1954, it was one of the first of several major decisions of the Warren Court, which lasted from 1953 to 1969.