Who was the first U.S. president to make a televised speech from the White House?
Harry Truman was the first president to make a televised speech from the White House.
The first public showing of a motion picture in the U.S. took place on April 23, 1896, at New York’s Koster & Bial Music Hall on 34th Street and Broadway. The 12 short-subject films, projected on Thomas Edison’s Vitascope, accompanied a vaudeville show. Previously, Edison’s films could only be viewed peep-show style on his Kinetoscope…
The sign “NINA” in front of 19th-century factories in the U.S. meant “No Irish Need Apply.” It expressed native-born American prejudice against the two million Irish immigrants who arrived in the U.S. between 1830 and 1860.
Aside from the female representations of Justice and Liberty, only three women have been so commemorated: Martha Washington, on the face of the 1886 and 1891 $1 silver certificates and on the reverse of the 1896 silver certificate; Pocahontas, on the back of the 1875 $20 bill; and women’s suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony, on…
Lincoln’s “eye for an eye” order was an order issued in 1863 during the Civil War that the Union would shoot a Confederate prisoner for every black Union prisoner shot. It would also condemn a Confederate prisoner to hard labor for life for every black prisoner sold into slavery. The order was meant to deter…
The first attempted assassination of a president took place in January 1835, when a house painter named Richard Lawrence aimed two pistols at Andrew Jackson. Both guns misfired. The first assassination of a president was John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865.
Born in upstate New York, Matthew Brady (c. 1823-96) worked in New York City as a clerk in the A. T. Stewart department store and as a manufacturer of jewelry cases. He opened his first daguerreotype portrait studio at the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street in 1844. He later became famous for the pictures…