History

Andrew Jackson, president from 1829 to 1837 was nicknamed “Old Hickory”. He received the nickname during the War of 1812 because of his tough physical and personal character. Andrew Jackson was called the ‘farmer from Tennessee” because he made his home there and had helped frame its state constitution. However, his birthplace was not in…

In her popular manual for housewives, The American Woman’s Home, published with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1869, Beecher encouraged a systematic and orderly approach to the noble duties of housework. She suggested this schedule: Monday—prepare for the week Tuesday—wash Wednesday—iron Thursday—iron, mend, fold and put away clothes Friday—sweep and clean the house Saturday—arrange…

Clarence Darrow did not graduate from law school. Darrow (1857-1938), famed for his defense in the Scopes trial of 1925, briefly attended the University of Michigan law school but did not get a degree. He studied on his own and got most of his legal education in a law office in Youngstown, Ohio.

Less than eight months had gone by when the three network television movies on the “Long Island Lolita” shooting aired. The teenaged Fisher shot Buttafuoco, wife of her alleged lover Joey, on May 19, 1992, in Massapequa, Long Island. The NBC, CBS, and ABC TV-movies aired in the week from December 28, 1992, to January…

In 1894, a U.S. congressional resolution made Labor Day a legal holiday in the U.S. Promoted by the Knights of Labor since 1887, the holiday had already been celebrated in several states.

Woodrow Wilson was the first president to hold a press conference, in 1913.

Four presidents have been assassinated. Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James A. Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F. Kennedy in 1963.

James Chaney, 21, Andrew Goodman, 21, and Michael Schwerner, 25, were the names of the three civil rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. Goodman and Schwemer were white students from New York who had come to Mississippi to help in the “Freedom Summer” voter registration project. Chaney was a black Mississippian….

Editor and writer H. L. Mencken (1880-1956), who lived his entire life in Baltimore and wrote for the Baltimore Sun for 40 years, was the “Sage of Baltimore”. His works include Prejudices (1919-27) and The American Language (1919).

No one knows exactly how old is the song “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” is. It seems to have begun as “The Levee Song” among African-American workers building levees on the Mississippi River in Louisiana in the 1830s-40s. It was later adapted to railroad building and associated with Irish work gangs in the West….

The battle cry “fifty-four forty or fight” mean was the slogan of U.S. expansionists who wanted to fix the boundary of the Oregon country (the Pacific Northwest) at latitude 54° 40′ N., in the middle of what is now British Columbia in Canada. The belligerent slogan was associated with the presidential campaign of James K….

Notre Dame holds the honor of the most winners of the Heisman Trophy, with seven Heisman Trophy winners: 1943—Angelo Bertelli, quarterback 1947—John Lujack, quarterback 1949—Leon Hart, end 1953—John Lattner, halfback 1956—Paul Hornung, quarterback 1964—John Huarte, quarterback 1987—Tim Brown, wide receiver

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the average American male is 5 feet 9.1 inches tall. The average American female is 5 feet 3.7 inches tall.

The “Hair Buyer of Detroit” was Henry Hamilton, the Detroit settlement’s British governor during the American Revolution. To fight the spread of U.S. settlements, he armed massive numbers of Native Americans with knives and ordered them to scalp frontier dwellers.

The federal income tax in the U.S. has been permanent since 1913, with the passage of the 16th Amendment. As established in that year, the bottom rate was 1 percent on taxable net income over $3,000 for an individual, $4,000 for a married couple. The top rate, for those making more than $500,000, was 7…

Only one ancient Norse settlement has been discovered in North America. The remains of a colony at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland were discovered by Norwegian archeologists in the 1960s. Settled in the 11th century, it may have been a staging area for explorations to the south.

The origins of the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church lay in a controversy over segregation rules at St. George’s Methodist Church in Philadelphia in 1787. The white elders ordered black members of the congregation to sit in a separate gallery. Several African-Americans, including Richard Allen, an ex-slave and lay preacher, refused, founding their own Methodist…

The first three American states admitted to the union after the original 13 were: Vermont-1791, created from parts of New York and New Hampshire Kentucky-1792, created from Virginia Tennessee-1796, created from North Carolina

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.

The speed limit in New York City is thirty miles per hour on the streets, 50 miles per hour on the highways, except where otherwise noted.

The New York Times adopt the slogan, “All the news that’s fit to print” in 1896, when it was purchased by Chattanooga Times newspaper publisher Adolph Ochs. Known until 1857 as The New York Daily Times, it was founded in 1851 as a Whig newspaper. Under its first editor, Henry Jarvis Raymond, the Times was…

Only one treaty ending foreign wars ever been signed in the U.S. In 1905, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was the site of the treaty that ended the Russo-Japanese War. President Theodore Roosevelt facilitated the negotiations between Japan and Russia.

In 1824, the candidates the last time the presidential election went to the House of Representatives were Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, William H. Crawford, and Henry Clay. Jackson won a plurality of both the electoral and popular votes, but not a majority in the Electoral College. In accord with the Constitution, the election was…

Three cities were destroyed when the volcano erupted. They were Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae, all southeast of modern Naples. When were the ruins of Pompeii discovered? Destroyed in A.D. 79, the city was not discovered until the late 1500s. Formal excavation did not begin until 1748.

Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton (c. 1676-1741), born in Scotland, was John Peter Zenger’s attorney during Zenger’s trial for seditious libel. He successfully defended the German-born editor’s right to print true accusations against the colonial governor of New York. The famous trial in 1735 was a landmark for freedom of the press.

Lincoln said, “I believe this government can not endure permanently half slave and half free” in a speech delivered on June 16, 1858, in Springfield, Illinois, accepting the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. In the same speech, Lincoln paraphrased the New Testament, saying, “A house divided against itself can not stand.”

Oliver Hazard Perry said, “We have met the enemy, and they are ours” at the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813, during the War of 1812.

Twenty-two of 41 presidents served in the armed forces. They were: George Washington James Monroe Andrew Jackson William Henry Harrison Zachary Taylor James Buchanan Abraham Lincoln Andrew Johnson Ulysses S. Grant Rutherford B. Hayes James A. Garfield Benjamin Harrison William McKinley Theodore Roosevelt Harry Truman Dwight D. Eisenhower John F. Kennedy Richard M. Nixon Gerald…

The song “Meet Me in St. Louis” by Andrew B. Sterling and Kerry Mills refers to the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri. The tune provides the leitmotif for the 1944 musical film Meet Me in St. Louis, starring Judy Garland, about a St. Louis family faced with a move to New York…

Super Bowl XII was played in the Superdome in New Orleans on January 15, 1978. Dallas beat Denver 27 to 10. The largest arena in human history, the Superdome covers 13 acres and reaches a height of 27 stories.

Abraham Lincoln was 25 when he was elected to the Illinois state legislature as an assemblyman in 1834.

The 1803 purchase from France of 828,000 square miles of land, stretching from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, now known as Louisiana, cost $15 million. This put the price of each acre of land at about 3 cents. The purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 cost $7.2 million. This made the selling…

The TV special “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” appeared first, in December 1964. “Charlie Brown” followed in 1965. Since then, both have appeared annually at Christmas time on CBS.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, was created in 1933 to protect against bank failure by insuring deposits in eligible banks. It is entitled to borrow up to $3 billion from the U.S. Treasury. The FDIC has not yet had to use that privilege.

The first petroleum well was dug by American railway conductor Edwin L. Drake on August 28, 1859, at Titusville in western Pennsylvania. Kerosene for lamps was the first product to be refined from oil; gasoline did not become important until the development of the internal combustion engine in the 1880s and ’90s.

Will Rogers said, “We don’t know what we want, but we are ready to bite somebody to get it”?.

The first theatrical performance in America north of Mexico took place in 1598 in a Spanish settlement near present-day El Paso, Texas. The play was a comedy about a military expedition.

The following are on denominations of U.S. paper currency: One dollar—George Washington Two dollars—Thomas Jefferson Five dollars—Abraham Lincoln Ten dollars—Alexander Hamilton Twenty dollars—Andrew Jackson Fifty dollars—Ulysses S. Grant One hundred dollars—Benjamin Franklin

Founded in 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a nonpartisan organization devoted to protecting constitutional rights, has nearly 300,000 members. George Bush used the term “card-carrying member of the ACLU” to darken the name of his opponent Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential campaign.

The Continental Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin to the position of first postmaster general of the United States in 1775. In 1789, Samuel Osgood was named the first postmaster general under the new Constitution.

The remark “the necessity, real or imaginary, which has been supposed to exist, of appealing to the feelings and passions of our countrymen, rather than to their reasons and their judgments”? was made by Henry Clay, leader of the Whig party, after its candidate William Henry Harrison won the 1840 presidential election with a campaign…

Invented by Samuel F. B. Morse and completed in 1844, the telegraph line ran from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland. The first message, telegraphed on May 24, 1844, was, “What hath God wrought!”

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 Minnesota Valley Canning Company of Le Sueur, Minnesota, introduced the Jolly Green Giant as the emblem of a line of canned peas in 1926.

The oldest legal code, the Code of Hammurabi was developed circa 1950 B.C. during the reign of Babylonian leader Hammurabi. It is now known for its emphasis on the law of retaliation (an eye for an eye).

The Wisconsin Idea was a plan for reform created by Wisconsin Governor Robert M. La Follette in the early 1900s. This first statewide progressive reform plan was designed to erode the corruption of political bosses and big business, particularly the railroad trust.

A Columbia Records (CBS) team led by Dr. Peter Goldmark invented the long-playing 33 1/3 r.p.m. record in 1948 as a successor to the 78 r.p.m. record. To compete with CBS, RCA came up with the handy 45 r.p.m. record in 1949.

The first U.S. warship to make a trip around the world was the sloop-of-war Vincennes in 1829-31, during the administration of President Andrew Jackson. Jackson used the show of force to protect American commerce in the Pacific.

On Friday, September 23, 1949, President Truman announced: “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.”

The city of Cleveland (pop. 573,822) was named for its founder Moses Cleaveland in 1836. The city was once known as the “Forest City” because of its abundance of trees.

The cover of the final issue of Life magazine, December 29, 1972, features “The Year in Pictures 1972” in block letters. Life had been in publication for 36 years, beginning November 23, 1936.

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 average American generates about three pounds of garbage per day, according to the Garbage Project.

The Great Plains Indians didn’t start riding horses until after 1540, when Spanish explorer Francisco de Coronado, traveling through Kansas, let most of his 260 horses escape. There were no horses in America until the Spanish brought them. The Great Plains Indians tamed the descendants of these horses and made them an integral part of…

Ten hours before the surprise attack on December 7, 1941, Americans intercepted a 14-part Japanese message. They deciphered it at 4:37 A.M., Washington time, just hours before the attack, but the message remained in the code room; not until three hours later was it delivered to President Roosevelt. By 11:00 A.M., the U.S. chief of…

Jacqueline Susann (1918-74) said, “I don’t think any novelist should be concerned with literature”. She was the immensely successful author of such fiction bestsellers as Valley of the Dolls (1966), The Love Machine (1969), and Once Is Not Enough (1973).

At least 1,547 people were killed when the boiler of the side-wheeler Sultana exploded on April 27, 1865, on the Mississippi River near Memphis, Tennessee, making it the worst marine disaster in U.S. history. Many of those killed in the blaze were Union soldiers who had recently been freed from Confederate prison camps. The most…

World War II general Douglas MacArthur was ranked first of 93 in the class of 1903 at West Point. How highly ranked was Civil War officer George Armstrong Custer? He was 35th of 35 in the class of 1861.

Officially known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, the G.I. Bill gave a variety of benefits to World War II veterans. The benefits included medical care in veterans’ hospitals, low interest mortgages, grants for higher education, unemployment compensation, and vocational rehabilitation.

It was late 19th-century cold cereal developer C. W. Post, whose creations included Grape-Nuts who said, “All I have I owe to advertising”.

The athlete’s father was part Sac and Fox; his mother was part Potawatomi. Born at a Sac and Fox village in Oklahoma, Thorpe (1888-1953) won the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics and went on to play professional football and baseball. Although Thorpe was stripped of his gold medals for playing professional baseball before…

Visa began in 1965 as the Bank of America’s BankAmericard, backed by a group of banks able to exchange funds nationally. It received its current name, Visa, in 1977, to promote its international image and acknowledge the cooperation of banks in other countries. MasterCard began in 1966 as the Interbank card issued by another consortium…

The founder of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) Samuel Gompers was, like his father, a cigar maker. The English immigrant reshaped the Cigar Makers International Union before founding the AFL in 1886.

The letters D or P on American coins are mint marks, indicating the city in which the coin is pressed. The letter D indicates that the coin was made in Denver; P denotes Philadelphia. Pennies no longer carry mint marks.

The division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation that maintains the world’s largest fingerprint files was founded in 1924. The FBI itself was founded in 1908.

The first commercially successful plastic was celluloid, developed by American John Wesley Hyatt in 1869. It was made from a material that had first been produced by British chemist Alexander Parkes in 1855. Hyatt originally intended the synthetic organic substance as a cheap alternative to ivory for the manufacture of billiard balls, but other commercial…

President Jimmy Carter taught Sunday school at First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C while in office.

There were three pioneering suburban housing developments bearing the Levittown name: the one in Hempstead, New York, in the late 1940s; one near Philadelphia in the 1950s; and one in New Jersey in the 1960s.

Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973) was elected as Montana’s sole delegate to the House of Representatives in 1916. After serving her term, she was not reelected until 1940. A pacifist, she holds the distinction of being the only member of Congress to have voted against American participation in both World Wars.

Unofficial studies of field reports indicate that about 4,500 men died in battle and over 6,000 were wounded in the American Revolution. Illness also took a large but indeterminate number. At Valley Forge, for example, illness claimed over 3,000 lives.

The 600-foot futuristic steel structure in Seattle, known as the Space Needle, was erected for the Century 21 exposition in 1962.

Only one black woman, itinerant preacher and abolitionist Sojourner Truth, attended the first National Woman’s Rights Convention. The convention was held in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1850.

The southern parts of present-day Arizona and New Mexico, were purchased from Mexico for $10 million in 1853. The deal was negotiated for the U.S. by railroad president James Gadsden.

Franklin Roosevelt first used it in his acceptance speech for the presidential nomination at the 1932 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier was the French nobleman better known to history as the Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834). In 1777, at the age of 19, Lafayette came to America to volunteer in the Revolutionary War. Idealistic and adventurous, he was appointed a major-general and helped to secure military assistance from France.

John Tyler was the first president to have a veto overridden by Congress in 1845.

In 1932, the Woolworth chain of “five & dime” stores began to offer 20-cent merchandise in addition to five- and ten-cent items.

Andrew Jackson was the first presidential candidate of the Democratic Party in 1828. He won. John C. Fremont was the first presidential candidate of the modern Republican Party in 1856. He lost to Democrat James Buchanan. The first victorious Republican presidential candidate was Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

The world’s largest employer of women is Avon Products, Inc., which, as of 1992, employed 1.5 million women throughout the world. Nearly all the women work as independent sales representatives, often known as Avon ladies. Founded in 1883 by David H. McConnell as the California Perfume Company, it became Avon Products, Inc. in 1939, a…

Composer Aaron Copland knew very little about the historical subject of his ballet Billy the Kid (1938). Copland admitted that his knowledge of the career of Western outlaw William H. Bonney (1859-81) was “rather vague” and that he “would never have touched it” if he had had to present it realistically. Instead, he treated Billy…

Hank Aaron entered the major leagues as right fielder with the Milwaukee Braves in 1954. He moved to Atlanta with the team in 1966. On April 8,1974, he broke Babe Ruth’s record for career home runs.

Al Capone’s business cards said he was a second-hand furniture dealer in Chicago.

The composer Cole Porter wrote nearly 800 songs and two dozen musicals, including Kiss Me, Kate (1948) and Can-Can (1953).

Sacajawea was the woman who helped Lewis and Clark find their way on their western expedition beginning in 1804. A Shoshoni, she was captured in childhood by the Hidatsa Sioux and sold to the French Canadian Toussaint Charbonneau, who took her as a wife. Charbonneau, a guide and interpreter on the voyage, brought along Sacajawea…

The Republican mayor of New York City Fiorello La Guardia (1934-45), known as the “Little Flower,” was five feet two inches tall.

No U.S. ships were fired on in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. The U.S. Navy reported that month that the USS Maddox and the USS Turner had been fired upon by three North Vietnamese patrol boats. Later investigations showed no evidence of any such attacks.

The sign “NINA” in front of 19th-century factories in the U.S. meant “No Irish Need Apply.” It expressed native-born American prejudice against the two million Irish immigrants who arrived in the U.S. between 1830 and 1860.

According to folklore, John Henry was an ex-slave who worked as a steel driver. Helping to blast the Big Bend Tunnel through the Allegheny Mountains for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in West Virginia in the 1870s. His job was to hammer steel into rock to make holes for explosive charges. In the folk song…

Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner collaborated indirectly on the 1944 movie version of Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not. Jules Furthman and William Faulkner wrote the screenplay of the film, now best remembered for bringing together Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. When Hemingway declined to write the screenplay himself, director Howard Hawks reportedly said,…

In 1975, physicians at New York City hospitals engaged in a work slowdown to request shorter hours, in the first U.S. strike by doctors.