It was not Christopher Columbus or Leif Erikson who was the first known European to spot America. It was a Norseman named Biarni Heriulfson who first spotted North America around 985 A.D. Blown off course while sailing from Iceland to Greenland, he probably saw what is now Newfoundland, Canada.
The Panama Canal, which required ten years from start to finish, took two years longer to build than the Erie Canal. Excavation on the 51-mile long Panama Canal began in 1904; the first ship entered the waterway in 1914. The Erie Canal, linking Buffalo and Albany, New York, took from 1817 to 1825 to complete.
African-American Sergeant William H. Carney won Congressional Medal of Honor for his courage in the charge of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers on Fort Wagner in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, in July 1863. The charge was unsuccessful, but the regiment’s bravery is commemorated by a monument at the Boston House of Commons. The black…
D Day is a standard military term referring to the day set for the beginning of an attack. The D stands for “Day” (Day-Day). Similarly, the time for an attack is H-Hour (Hour-Hour). The most famous D Day, the Allied invasion of Normandy, took place on June 6, 1944.
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.
Founded in 1947, the CIA was born about the same time as the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. An offshoot of World War Il’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the agency was established to gather foreign intelligence, carry out counterintelligence, and perform covert operations.