For 107 years, beginning in 1864, the mile-square Union Stock Yards stood at Halsted Street and Exchange Avenue.
The Swift, Armour, and Wilson companies had plants there. The yards closed on July 31, 1971, and were demolished.
Only the Union Stock Yards’ gate was preserved; it was named a Chicago landmark on February 24, 1972.
Harpers Ferry is in what is now West Virginia (then part of Virginia). John Brown led a party of 22 in seizing the U.S. arsenal there in October 1859. Brown, an abolitionist born in Torrington, Connecticut, planned to arm the local slaves and start a full-scale rebellion, but his plan was foiled by state and…
Lincoln’s “eye for an eye” order was an order issued in 1863 during the Civil War that the Union would shoot a Confederate prisoner for every black Union prisoner shot. It would also condemn a Confederate prisoner to hard labor for life for every black prisoner sold into slavery. The order was meant to deter…
As a colonel in the Libyan army, Qaddafi deposed King Idris I in a military coup in September 1969. In the following years, he expropriated Libya’s Jewish and Italian communities and nationalized foreign-owned petroleum assets.
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 last smoking sign in Times Square, which had advertised Winston cigarettes for five years, stopped blowing rings September 13, 1977. Like its predecessors for much of the twentieth century, it blew about 1,000 rings a day; a steam-producing box, located behind the head of the man in the sign, created the rings. The Winston…
In the U.S., British general Charles Cornwallis’s main claim to fame was his surrender to the Americans and French at Yorktown, Virginia, on October 19, 1781, a turning point that effectively ended the war. But Cornwallis’s career of enforcing British imperial rule was far from over. He went on to become Governor General of India…