How much television does the average American watch?
Nielsen Media Services reported in 1990-91 that the average American (older than one year) watches 28 hours 13 minutes of television per week, about four hours per day.
A white amateur photographer named George Holliday happened to be on hand to videotape the scene of Rodney King’s beating by Los Angeles police on March 3, 1991, while testing his new camcorder. The images of black motorist King being kicked and clubbed by white officers shocked the country. A year later, news of the…
The man, John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) who set up the Standard Oil Trust also founded the University of Chicago. What university did John D. Rockefeller, Jr., found? The son (1874-1960) of John D. Rockefeller founded Rockefeller University in New York.
Popularized by baseball announcer Red Barber, “sittin’ in the catbird seat” means sitting pretty or being in an enviable position. The Mississippi-born Barber used this 19th-century Southern expression while announcing games for the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s and 1950s, and in the 1950s and 1960s for the New York Yankees. A catbird is the…
The four-stanza song was adopted as the national anthem by the U.S. Congress in 1931. Francis Scott Key wrote the lyrics in 1814, taking the melody from an eighteenth-century drinking song called “To Anacreon in Heaven” by British composer John Stafford Smith. Anacreon was a Greek lyric poet [563-478 B.c.] associated with love and wine.
After escaping from slavery in 1838, the abolitionist and black leader Frederick Douglass (c. 1817-95) took the name “Douglass” from a character in Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem The Lady of the Lake (1810).
A chinook was a dance to summon the warm wind to melt the snow. It also refers to the wind itself and to the Chinook people of the Columbia River valley. “Chinook jargon” is a pidgin language based on Indian languages, French, and English, formerly spoken in the Pacific Northwest.