The Equal Rights Amendment elude ratification by three states.
Between 1972 and 1982, 35 state legislatures approved the amendment.
Thirty-eight were needed for the amendment to be incorporated into the Constitution.
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…
George K. Kennan, then a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, wrote the pseudonymous article in the magazine Foreign Affairs that first outlined the policy of containing Soviet expansion in 1947.
After serving in the Spanish-American War, New Jersey nurse Clara Maass volunteered in 1901 to take part in yellow fever experiments in Cuba. Dr. Walter Reed designed the experiments to see whether a mild case of the disease would render people immune. Maass allowed herself to be bitten twice by infected mosquitoes. She developed not…
The phrase “rub out” first appeared not among gangsters in the Roaring ’20s but among the rugged fur traders and trappers of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains in the early 19th century. It came into more widespread use in World War I.
The undersized Miles Standish was given the nickname “Captain Shrimp” by fellow colonist Thomas Morton. Standish (c. 1584-1656) was the military leader of the Plymouth Colony, founded in Massachusetts in 1620. Morton (c. 1590c. 1647), leader of the rival colony of Merrymount, ridiculed the austere habits and strict religious beliefs of his Pilgrim neighbors.
The East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., built in 1978, is the work of architect I. M. Pei.