Richard Henry Dana was a college student at Harvard before he shipped out as a sailor in the voyage recounted in Two Years Before the Mast (1840). Dana (1815-82) suffered eye problems that led him to go out to sea in hopes of improving his health. Working as a common seaman, he traveled around South…
In Ronald Reagan’s first job after college, the future president (served 198189) broadcasted play-by-play accounts of major league baseball games from Station WHO in Des Moines, Iowa.
The warning “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal” appeared in the 1968 report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which was headed by Illinois governor Otto Kerner. President Johnson appointed Kerner to investigate the causes of over 100 ghetto riots that took place in the…
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 required nine of the thirteen states ratified the Constitution between January and June 1788. But it was not until after Washington was inaugurated in 1789 that all of the states ratified it. The last stragglers were North Carolina in November 1789 and Rhode Island in May 1790.
The Star-Spangled Banner was played in 1862 at a baseball game in Brooklyn at a field built by sports developer William Commeyer.