There have been two “Banks of the United States”, both chartered by Congress and both allowed to expire after 20 years. The First Bank of the United States lasted from 1791 to 1811, the second from 1816 to 1836. Each served as the federal government’s fiscal agents and repositories of federal funds. The banks were…
The hero of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, Sergeant Alvin York, launched on September 26, 1918, killed 25 Germans and captured 132, along with 35 machine guns in World War I. The Tennessee sharpshooter, who had petitioned unsuccessfully for exemption as a conscientious objector, was lionized for his exploits and awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and…
One hundred seventy-nine episodes of the TV series “I Love Lucy” were broadcast, from 1951 to 1957, on CBS.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, with 1,560 games, is the NBA lifetime leader in most games played. Born Ferdinand Lewis (Lew) Alcindor in 1947, Abdul-Jabbar began playing for the Milwaukee Bucks in 1969 and the Los Angeles Lakers in 1975.
There are four stanzas in the song “America the Beautiful” by Katharine Lee Bates (1850-1929), originally published in 1895 and revised in 1904 and 1911. The stanzas begin respectively with these lines: 1. 0 beautiful for spacious skies 2. 0 beautiful for pilgrim feet 3. 0 beautiful for heroes proved 4. 0 beautiful for patriot…
In the Kellogg-Briand Pact, signed on August 27, 1928, the US., France, Great Britain, Japan, Italy, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and Poland all agreed to give up war as an instrument of foreign policy. However, the treaty lacked enforcement power, and within 14 years all the parties that signed it were fighting in World War II. The…