Who said, “I have not yet begun to fight”?
Scottish-born American privateer John Paul Jones said, “I have not yet begun to fight” in 1779, during the Revolutionary War.
Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was the “Gerry” behind gerrymandering. In 1812, when Gerry was the Republican governor of Massachusetts, legislators from his party redrew district lines to favor their representatives. Their rivals, the Federalists, blamed Gerry for the redistricting (though he was actually opposed to it). A Federalist cartoonist portrayed…
The subject of the 1840s folk song “On Top of Old Smoky” is one of the peaks in the Blue Ridge Mountains, located near Asheville, North Carolina.
William C. Durant found the General Motors Corporation in 1908, in Flint, Michigan.
Bar manager Catherine Genovese was stabbed to death in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York, in the early morning hours of March 13, 1964. Her neighbors looked on from their windows but ignored her calls for help. The case became a paradigm for urban lawlessness and apathy.
Eighty men, aboard 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers, took part in Doolittle’s 1942 raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942. Launched from the carrier USS Hornet, the planes bombed five Japanese cities: Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka. The raid rattled the Japanese and boosted American morale at a time when Japan seemed invincible.
The World War II anthem “Praise the Lord, and Pass the Ammunition” was written by Frank Loesser. He was the Broadway composer whose musicals include Guys and Dolls (1950) and The Most Happy Fella (1956).