How big is Manhattan Island?
Manhattan is 13.4 miles long, 2.3 miles across at its widest point, and 22.5 square miles in area.
The feminist writer Margaret Fuller was 30 when Ralph Waldo Emerson asked her to edit his Transcendentalist periodical in 1840. During her life she also worked as the foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune and wrote the influential collection of essays, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), which served as an inspiration for the…
The man who had been expelled from Harvard, William Randolph Hearst, bought or started 42 newspapers. Only a handful remained by the time of his death in 1951.
No, the Smithsonian Institution wasn’t named after an American. Founded in 1846, it was named for British chemist James Smithson (1765-1829), who bequeathed his fortune to build the U.S. institution. It is now the world’s largest museum complex, containing 14 museums and the National Zoo.
The Boy Scouts of America was incorporated in 1910 in Washington, D.C., by painter and illustrator Daniel Carter Beard. Known as “Uncle Dan,” Beard based the organization on the British group founded in 1908 by Sir Robert Baden-Powell. Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Scouts organization in Savannah, Georgia, in 1912.
The first attempted assassination of a president took place in January 1835, when a house painter named Richard Lawrence aimed two pistols at Andrew Jackson. Both guns misfired. The first assassination of a president was John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865.
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.