The world’s largest employer of women is Avon Products, Inc., which, as of 1992, employed 1.5 million women throughout the world.
Nearly all the women work as independent sales representatives, often known as Avon ladies.
Founded in 1883 by David H. McConnell as the California Perfume Company, it became Avon Products, Inc. in 1939, a decade after a line of household and personal care products were introduced under the name Avon.
Known as an artist and writer as well as an inventor, Samuel F. B Morse wrote a series of highly popular newspaper articles denouncing the immigration of Catholics to the U.S. These were published under the pen name “Brutus.” Gathered into book form in 1835, they helped create an American tradition of anti-immigration sentiment.
The Constitution, a 44-gun frigate that defeated two British warships in the War of 1812, was nicknamed “Old Ironsides”. It was memorialized as “Old Ironsides” in the 1830 poem of that name by Oliver Wendell Holmes, written to protest the proposed scrapping of the ship. The ship was saved and, in rebuilt form, is still…
Thomas Jefferson said, “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing”, writing from Paris on hearing of Shays’s Rebellion, an uprising of poor farmers against the Massachusetts state government in 1786. Jefferson added, “God forbid that we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.”
An authoritative variorum edition of Emily Dickinson’s complete poems was not published until Thomas H. Johnson did so in 1955, nearly 70 years after Dickinson’s death. Dickinson (1830-86) died with over 1709 poems unpublished; shortly thereafter (in 1890-91), her friends Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel L. Todd began a tradition of publishing her poetry in…
Yes, the man behind the “Sherman Anti-Trust Act” was related to the man behind “Sherman’s March to the Sea”. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890, was sponsored by John Sherman, the younger brother of William Tecumseh Sherman. It was the latter Sherman who, as a Union general, led the destructive march across Georgia in…
The system of mail delivery by horse-and-rider relays lasted only 18 months, from April 1860 to October 1861. It connected Saint Joseph, Missouri, with Sacramento, California, a distance of 1,800 miles. The completion of the transcontinental telegraph system brought the Pony Express to an end.