Molly Pitcher was Mary McCauley Hays, (1754-1832), heroine of the American Revolution. She earned her nickname during the Battle of Monmouth in 1778, when she fetched water for her husband and his gun crew. After her husband suffered a wound, she took over for him, helping the gun crew do its job. After the war,…
The four “Middle Colonies”, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, were all initially colonized by countries other than England. New York and New Jersey were settled by the Dutch, Delaware and Pennsylvania by the Swedes. New Sweden, founded in 1638 with its base at what is now Wilmington, Delaware, was conquered by the Dutch in…
It wasn’t only John D. Rockefeller who founded the Standard Oil Company. What would become the country’s largest oil company was founded in 1867 by four people, Rockefeller, Henry M. Flagler, S. V. Harkness, and Rockefeller’s brother William.
H. L. Mencken said, “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”.
The first president to hold a doctorate was Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924), the 28th president. He received a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1886. His thesis was entitled “Congressional Government, a Study in American Politics.”
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…