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.
After experimenting with thousands of materials, Thomas Edison discovered in 1879 that a scorched cotton thread, the equivalent of a carbon wire, was the filament he needed. It was one that would glow for a long period without melting in an electric light bulb. Edison’s discovery ushered in the age of electric lighting.
The line “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” is a fabrication of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, found in his poem “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1858). Alden, Mullins, and Standish were all passengers on the Mayflower but were not known to be involved in a love triangle.
The rebels of “Pontiac’s Rebellion” were an alliance of American Indian tribes of the Great lakes region, including the Chippewa, Potawatomi, Huron, Shawnee, Delaware, and Seneca. In 1763, they made war against the British, who had just taken over the territory from the French. The rebellion was mostly defeated by 1764. However, Pontiac, an Ottawa…
D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in 1916 was the first movie shown in the White House. Woodrow Wilson was president at the time.
Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson died of a battle wound, but it was not inflicted by a Union soldier. One of his own men accidentally shot him in the arm during the Battle of Chancellorsville, Virginia, May 1-3, 1863. Although the battle was a Confederate victory, Jackson’s arm had to be amputated. The general contracted…