Who was the heaviest U.S. president?
William Howard Taft, at a top weight of 352 pounds was the heaviest U.S. president.
American Nintendo Company employees took the name “Mario” for Super Mario Brothers from the landlord of their building. The Nintendo system first appeared in the U.S. in 1986.
There were several practical reasons why the young Columbia graduate student Margaret Mead decided to do field work on Samoan adolescence. She thought her fluency in French and German would help her in the Polynesian island chain, and there were regular steamship stops there. More important, she wanted to know how much of human behavior…
The 1793 invention, the cotton gin, by Eli Whitney mechanically removed seeds from a cotton bloom without harming its fiber. Previously, seeds had to be removed laboriously by hand. The invention led to an economic boom for the South by increasing the amount of cotton the southern states could provide to textile manufacturers. It also…
The city of Seattle is named for a local Indian chief, whose name was variously spelled Seattle, See-yat, and Sealth.
The slogan “Africa for the Africans at home and abroad” was made famous by Jamaica-born black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), who came to New York in 1916. Garvey built a mass movement calling for an end to oppression of blacks in Africa and the United States. Convicted of mail fraud (a charge he denied),…
The colorful, demagogic Huey Long (1893-1935), nicknamed the “Kingfish,” governed Louisiana from 1928 to 1932, when he resigned to enter the U.S. Senate. Elected in 1930, he deferred his entry into the Senate until 1932. He stayed there until he was killed by an assassin’s bullet in 1935. His wife finished his term.