History

The Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi first played the role onstage in the 1927 Broadway production of Dracula. It was adapted by Hamilton Deane and John Balderston from Bram Stoker’s novel. Lugosi became famous by playing Dracula in the 1931 movie version.

When the first minimum wage was instituted in 1938, it was 25 cents per hour.

The real first names of the following musicians are: Duke Ellington—Edward Tommy Dorsey—Francis Glenn Miller—Alton Count Basie—William

Jay Loeb and R. Evans were the composers of the popular World War II song “Rosie the Riveter”. Rosie the Riveter was a nickname for civilian working women during World War II, particularly those who worked in war-related industries.

Forty-two-year-old Leroy “Satchel” Paige became the oldest rookie in pro baseball when he signed with the Cleveland Indians in 1948. He had been a pitcher in the Negro Leagues since 1926.

Originally called a frankfurter (for its origin in Frankfurt, Germany) or a dachshund sausage (for its shape), the hot dog is said to have been first served on a bun in the U.S. in the 1880s. German food vendors Antoine Feuchtwanger in St. Louis, Missouri, and Charles Feltman in Coney Island, Brooklyn, have both been…

More than 13,000 Union prisoners died at Andersonville, the largest Confederate military prison. Most died of neglect. The prison’s commandant, Captain Henry Wirz, was the only Civil War soldier executed for war crimes.

The four 60-foot-high likenesses on Mount Rushmore, sculpted between 1925 and 1941, are meant to represent the following: George Washington, the nation’s founding; Thomas Jefferson, its political philosophy; Abraham Lincoln, its preservation; and Theodore Roosevelt, its expansion and conservation.

The Hundred Years’ War was a conflict between France and England for control of France. It took place over a period of 116 years, from 1337 to 1453, with peaceful intervals of varying length. The French won.

Andrew Jackson said, “After eight years as president, I have only two regrets: that I have not shot Henry Clay or hanged John C. Calhoun”.

The self-improvement program called the Chautauqua Movement was designed “to promote habits of reading and study in nature, art, science, and in secular and sacred literature, in connection with the routine of daily life”. It was first proposed at a Methodist Episcopal camp meeting at Lake Chautauqua, New York, in 1873 by Bishop John H….

Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto became the first European to reach the Mississippi River during a treasure-hunting expedition in 1539-42. Sailing from Havana, Cuba, De Soto landed at Tampa Bay, Florida, and traveled by a meandering route through what are now Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. After crossing the river and reaching what…

By the electoral votes of two states, the 1932 landslide that removed Herbert Hoover was more complete. In 1928, Hoover captured the electoral votes of 40 states; in 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt captured the votes of 42 states. Roosevelt’s landslide was larger in the popular vote as well. The 1928 election saw Hoover winning 6.4…

The chairman of the America First Committee formed in 1940 to oppose U.S. intervention in World War II was Robert E. Wood, head of Sears, Roebuck. America First’s most famous spokesman, however, was aviator Charles A. Lindbergh. Some committee members expressed sympathy for Nazi ideology; Lindbergh had visited Nazi Germany and accepted a medal from…

The first drive-in movie opened on a 40-acre parking lot in Camden, New Jersey, on June 6, 1933. The creation of New Jersey entrepreneurs Richard M. Hollinshead, Jr., and Willis Smith started a nationwide craze. During its peak, in 1958, there were over 4,000 drive-ins across America. As of 1992, there were fewer than 1,000…

In the mid-1970s, the leading career choice for Harvard M.B.A. graduates was manufacturing. Ten years later, it was investment banking.

William Safire wrote the phrase “nattering nabobs of negativism” for Vice-President Spiro Agnew in 1970. Agnew speechwriter Pat Buchanan, came up with “pusillanimous pussyfooters”, also in 1970.

Tassajara, founded in Big Sur, California, in 1967 by Richard Baker and Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, was the first Zen Buddhist monastery in the U.S.

Only one U.S. president was never married, James Buchanan (president 1857-61).

Margaret Brent, who demanded the right to vote in Maryland’s colonial assembly in 1647, was the first known suffragette in American history.

Eighty-five essays were published in New York City newspapers from October 27, 1787, to August 16, 1788. Written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (or The Federalist) supported the proposed Constitution and upheld the need for a strong central government.

The women’s rights group, the National Organization for Women, was founded in 1966 by Betty Friedan. Friedan was author of the 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique.

Yogi Berra was born Lawrence Peter Berra in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1925. He joined the New York Yankees in 1946.

The counter-cultural gathering for 20,000 hippies and flower children was held in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, in January 1967. Timothy Leary and poet Allen Ginsberg were among the speakers.

When Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton restructured the government’s miscellaneous debts into more or less their current form in 1791, the national debt was $75 million, or about $18 per person, given the population at that time. In 191, it was nearly 50,000 times larger. The national debt in 1991 was $3.7 trillion, or…

Formally known as the “United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing,” the Shakers sect got its name from the involuntary trembling of its members during moments of religious ecstasy. Founded in England by Mother Ann Lee, the Shakers came to America in 1774. Lee’s followers practiced celibacy, communal ownership, and sacred dancing. By the…

It was during the Lincoln administration in the middle of the Civil War that the first federal tax on income was levied by Congress, in the Internal Revenue Act of 1862. The rates ranged from 3 to 5 percent. Congress eliminated the tax in 1872.

The most recent amendment to the U.S. Constitution is the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age to 18. The amendment was ratified on July 1, 1971, in response to the demand of young Americans that those old enough to be drafted be old enough to vote.

According to the 1990 census, Americans of Chinese origin (1.6 million) outnumber those of Japanese origin (848,000) by almost two to one.

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…

No number of Supreme Court justices is specified in the U.S. Constitution. The Supreme Court began with six justices, rose to a peak of ten during the Lincoln years, and settled at nine in 1869.

Timothy Leary was fired from Harvard. He and fellow professor Richard Alpert were fired for LSD experiments with students.

After World War I, the British Empire, or Commonwealth, covered over 14 million square miles and dominated 450 million people. It encompassed a quarter of the world’s population and land surface. Among the countries under its dominion were: Antigua, Australia, Canada, Ceylon, India, Iraq, Ireland, and Pakistan.

The eastern branch of the first U.S. transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific, employed mainly Irish workers; the western branch, the Central Pacific, employed mainly Chinese workers. The two work crews met at Promontory, Utah, in May 1869, completing the transcontinental link.

President Calvin Coolidge, then governor of Massachusetts, called out the state militia to break the strike by Boston police officers in 1919. The praise Coolidge received helped get him elected as Warren G. Harding’s vice-president in 1920. Coolidge served as president from 1923 to 1929.

The traditional baseball-only park at Camden Yards opened in Baltimore in April 1992. Influenced by big-league parks of the early 1900s like Ebbets Field, Fenway Park, and Wrigley Field, Oriole Park has an assymetrical playing field and natural grass turf. Its location, Camden Yards, was an important railroad center and in the mid-19th century a…

James Buchanan (1857-1861) was the only U.S. president that was a lifelong bachelor. He had been engaged in 1819 to Ann Caroline Coleman, but she died of an overdose of laudanum before the two were married.

Ronald Reagan served as host and commercial spokesman on the CBS dramatic anthology “General Electric Theater” from 1954 to 1962. The show aired Sundays from 9:00-9:30 P.M. Reagan occasionally starred in the dramas showcased in the series, including “Money and the Minister,” where he acted opposite his wife, Nancy Davis.

The first American college football game took place on November 6, 1869, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Rutgers beat Princeton, six goals to four. The rules used were actually those for soccer. It was not until the 1870s that rugby rules began to prevail in the sport, making the game more like modern football.

West Virginia was part of Virginia when that state seceded from the Union in 1861. The delegates of 40 western counties formed their own government and seceded from Virginia to join the Union side. These counties entered the Union as the state of West Virginia in 1863.

Seventy-five percent of the population of New Yorkers in 1930 consisted of foreigners and their children. Italians and Eastern European Jews were the largest groups.

Arkansas newspaper columnist and long-time Clinton opponent Paul Greenberg was the first to apply the name “Slick Willie” to then-governor of Arkansas and future president Bill Clinton.

George Eastman, a New York bank clerk, developed the first hand-held roll-film camera in 1888. The cost was $25.

During his first term (1861-65), Abraham Lincoln’s vice-president was Hannibal Hamlin of Maine. During his second term (1865), it was Andrew Johnson of North Carolina, who succeeded Lincoln upon his assassination.

A 1908 race riot in Springfield, Massachusetts, reported by liberal New York journalist W.E. Walling inspired him to help found a national organization to speak out on behalf of equality for African-Americans. After a meeting with other concerned citizens in his apartment, including social worker Mary W. Ovington, the National Association for the Advancement of…

Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America (1835, 1840) said of Americans, “If I were asked . . . to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women”.

The Courant, published in Hartford, Connecticut, since 1764, is the oldest U.S. newspaper still being published.

The people of Guam are U.S. citizens but do not vote in national elections. The U.S. acquired Guam from Spain in 1898. Since 1950, the island (the largest of the Marianas Islands, located east of the Philippines) has been self-governing.

Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland, was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. Born in 1737, he was 95 years old when he died in 1832.

No, it was designed by Francis Hopkinson, a naval flag designer, who was never reimbursed for his services by the U.S. government. And there is no record of Betsy Ross’s commission to sew the flag.

The comic book superhero Superman died fighting the villain Doomsday in Superman No. 75, the January 1993 issue that went on sale on November 11, 1992.

Theodore Roosevelt, who invited Booker T. Washington, was the first president to invite an African-American man to the White House.

The gold and silver ore deposit called the Comstock Lode was discovered in 1859 in what is now Virginia City, Nevada.

The first labor union in America was the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers (shoemakers), formed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1794.

There were between 1,490 and 1,635 deaths in the April 19, 1912, disaster when the Titanic sank, 100 of whom were women.

The 1973 women’s health sourcebook Our Bodies, Ourselves stems from a 1969 course created in Boston by a group of women (now known as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective). As their course about women and their bodies evolved, so did the title. Originally titled Women and their Bodies, it became the more inclusive Women…

William Randolph Hearst is alleged to have said, “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war” to artist Frederic Remington, who was covering conditions in Cuba at a time when newspaper publisher Hearst was interested in fomenting war with Spain, then in charge of Cuba. The Spanish-American War of 1898 resulted in part from…

The first World Series between the American and National Leagues was played in 1903. The Boston Red Sox (AL) beat the Pittsburgh Pirates (NL) five games to three in a best-of-nine series.

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 first president born west of the Mississippi was Herbert Hoover. President Hoover was born on August 10, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa.

The major political parties held their national conventions in Los Angeles only once. The Democratic Party nominated John F. Kennedy in Los Angeles in July 1960.

The 4,000-mile trade route called the Silk Road joined the ancient kingdoms of China and Rome. It started in Siam, followed the Great Wall of China to the northwest, bypassed the Takla Makan Desert, crossed the Pamir Mountains, passed through Afghanistan, and ended at the Levant. Goods were then transported across the Mediterranean Sea to…

There are seven states that are part of the Tennessee Valley: Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. The valley of the Tennessee River and its tributaries encompasses 41,000 square miles, with the largest part in Tennessee. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was created in 1933 to control floods, improve navigation, and bring…

In Russian, Bolshevik means “those of the majority.” It was used by a wing of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party led by V. I. Lenin after they had gained a temporary majority on the party’s central committee in 1903. The Bolsheviks believed in a disciplined, centralized party of professional revolutionaries. They called their opponents in…

There are four stanzas in the song “America the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates (1850-1929), originally published in 1895 and revised in 1904 and 1911. The stanzas begin respectively with these lines: 1. 0 beautiful for spacious skies 2. 0 beautiful for pilgrim feet 3. 0 beautiful for heroes proved 4. 0 beautiful for patriot…

The self-governing colony of New Zealand gave women the right to vote on September 19, 1893. Ninety thousand women voted in their first election on November 28, 1893. Switzerland was the last Western country to grant women the vote in 1971.

The 42nd president Bill Clinton (1993— ) was born William Jefferson Blythe 4th on August 19, 1946. His father, a traveling salesman, died in a car accident three months before he was born. He received his new name when his mother married Roger Clinton, a car dealer, in 1950.

Two Philadelphia-based political periodicals, both published in February 1741, share the honor of being the first magazine created in America. One was the American Magazine, or A Monthly View of the Political State of the British Colonies, published by Andrew Bradford. The other was the General Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, For all the British Plantations,…

The U.S. national debt grew about sixfold during World War II. In 1940, the national debt was $43 billion. At the end of World War II, it was $258.7 billion.

The bank robber Jesse James was shot in the back of the head by his reward-seeking cousin, Robert Ford, on April 3, 1882. James was 34 at the time of his death.

“ARVN” stood for “The Army of the Republic of Viet Nam” in the Vietnam War, the army that South Vietnam fielded against North Vietnam.

D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in 1916 was the first movie shown in the White House. Woodrow Wilson was president at the time.

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.

Twenty people on President Richard Nixon’s enemies list were named in the 1971 memo released to the Senate Watergate Committee in 1973. There were 200 additional enemies on a separate list. The memo proposed the use of “federal machinery,” including IRS audits and litigation, to “screw our political enemies.” The top 20 enemies included Ed…

The name “America” first appeared in print in 1507 in Cosmographiae Introductio by German mapmaker Martin Waldseemuller. Waldseemiiller named it in honor of explorer Amerigo Vespucci, whom he believed was the true discoverer of America. Vespucci’s claims to have been the first to reach the American mainland (in 1497) and the first to realize that…

Ralph Waldo Emerson said the line, in the essay “Self-Reliance” (1841). The complete quote is, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

Stephen Collins Foster, who wrote the song “Swanee River” about the South (also called “Old Folks at Home”) in 1852, was born near Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania, in 1826. Daniel D. Emmett, the author of the 1859 song “Dixie” that became a Confederate anthem, was born in Ohio.

No, Abraham Lincoln didn’t write the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope. Judging from the many drafts of the speech that have been discovered, the speech was fashioned through the traditional method of writing and revising. It was presented on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the national cemetery at Gettysburg, four…

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).

As listed in the second century B.C. by Antipater of Sidon, the Seven Wonders of the World were: 1. The Pyramids of Egypt 2. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon 3. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia 4. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus 5. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus 6. The Colossus of Rhodes 7. The…

Kozol said that as of 1984, 25 million Americans were functionally illiterate (reading not at all or at less than fifth grade level) and an additional 35 million were marginally illiterate (reading at less than ninth grade level). The total of 60 million represented more than a third of the adult population.

John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Van Buren, Richard M. Nixon, and George Bush, are several vice presidents that have been elected president. This is besides those who first gained the office when their predecessors died or resigned.

The first tabloid newspaper was the Illustrated Daily News (now the Daily News). Founded in New York City in 1919, it was the nation’s largest-selling paper by 1925. Current weekday circulation is 781,800; Sunday circulation is 983,000.

Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) at six feet, four inches was the tallest U.S. president. James Madison (1809-1817) at five feet, four inches was the shortest U.S. president.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame is at the National Football Museum in Canton, Ohio.

The inventor of the Derringer was Henry Deringer, Jr., (1786-1868), spelled with one “r”. The Philadelphia gunsmith started making pistols in 1825 and came to specialize in the short-barreled, large-caliber pistol that bears his name. The extra “r” was added to “Derringer” by an imitator making similar pistols, and that became the accepted spelling.

The tepee was a conical dwelling made from buffalo hides, supported by poles, and often painted or decorated with beadwork. It was commonly used by Native Americans of the Great Plains. The wigwam was a rounded dwelling made from woven mats or birch bark over a framework of poles. It was widely used in the…

For a family of four, the poverty level in America defined by the Office of Management and Budget in 1990 is $12,675. In 1990, the percentage of all races that live below the poverty level was 13.5. Among whites, 10.7 percent lived below the poverty level; among blacks, 31.9 percent did. For persons of Hispanic…

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “There are no second acts in American lives”.

Hitler married Eva Braun on the eve of their joint suicide, which took place on April 30, 1945. They had met in the early 1930s, when she was a saleswoman in the Munich shop of Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffinan. Braun became Hitler’s lifelong mistress, though she was never allowed to appear in public with him.