President Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor Richard Nixon on September 8, 1974, 30 days after coming to office on August 9.
The unconditional pardon exonerated Nixon of any crimes he might have committed as president.
George K. Kennan, then a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, wrote the pseudonymous article in the magazine Foreign Affairs that first outlined the policy of containing Soviet expansion in 1947.
When Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton restructured the government’s miscellaneous debts into more or less their current form in 1791, the national debt was $75 million, or about $18 per person, given the population at that time. In 191, it was nearly 50,000 times larger. The national debt in 1991 was $3.7 trillion, or…
The poem that later became the “Star-Spangled Banner” was written by Francis Scott Key in 1814. It was written to commemorate the battle for Fort McHenry, Maryland, during the War of 1812, was called “Defence of Fort M’Henry.”
First Bull Run, Virginia Confederacy July 21, 1861 Shiloh, Tennessee Union April 6-7, 1862 Second Bull Run, Virginia Confederacy August 29-30, 1862 Antietam, Maryland Union September 17, 1862 Federicksburg, Virginia Confederacy December 13, 1862 Siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi Union May 22—July 4, 1863 Gettysburg, Pennsylvania Union July 1-3, 1863 The Wilderness, Virginia Union May 5-6,…
Every soldier defending the fort at the Alamo (about 182 in all) died in the fighting on March 6, 1836, or were killed as prisoners soon after. The dead included Travis, knife-inventor James Bowie, and frontiersman and former U.S. Congressman Davy Crockett.
The inoculation campaign that used the Salk polio vaccine during the polio epidemic first started in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1954. Dr. Jonas Salk, the developer of the vaccine, himself was involved in the first program of mass inoculation. The oral polio vaccine, developed in 1956 by Albert Sabin, became more widely used than inoculations.