The Shawnee political and military leader Tecumseh (1768-1813) fought against the U.S. as a British brigadier-general in the War of 1812. Born in what is now western Ohio, he had resisted U.S. encroachment on Native American lands but was defeated at the Battle of Tippecanoe in 1811. When the War of 1812 broke out, Tecumseh…
William Travis, commander of the Alamo, was not from Texas but from South Carolina. A lawyer and lieutenant-colonel, Travis was one of many Southerners who responded to Texas’s call for volunteers to help in their revolution against Mexico, which began in 1835. Southerners sympathized with the rebels because the province of Texas was a slave-owning…
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.
During World War I (1917-18), Franklin Roosevelt was the assistant secretary of the Navy.
National Airlines began the first domestic jet airliner passenger service in the U.S. on December 10, 1958, between New York and Miami.
The feminist writer Margaret Fuller was 30 when Ralph Waldo Emerson asked her to edit his Transcendentalist periodical in 1840. During her life she also worked as the foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune and wrote the influential collection of essays, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), which served as an inspiration for the…