This 1817 exchange of notes between U.S. Secretary of State Richard Rush and British Minister Charles Bagot, also known as the Rush-Bagot convention, provided for disarmament of the U.S-Canada frontier.
It laid the basis for keeping the boundary undefended to this day.
The head of the Unification Church married 2,075 couples in a mass wedding at Madison Square Garden in New York City on July 1, 1982.
The eighth president, Martin Van Buren (1836-1844), was born on December 5, 1782, after the United States declared its independence.
Louis Armstrong’s first recordings were with the Creole Jazz Band of Joseph “King” Oliver in Chicago in 1923. Armstrong played second clarinet to Oliver.
The most destructive air attack of World War II was not the atomic bombing of Hiroshima but the firebombing of Tokyo by 279 Superfortress bombers on March 9-10, 1945. Over 1,650 tons of incendiary bombs were dropped on the city, raising a massive firestorm and killing from 80,000 to 120,000 people. The bombing represented a…
The young Republican congressmen from southern and western states known as the “War Hawks”, including Henry Clay of Kentucky and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, demanded war against Great Britain in 1810-11. They got their wish in the War of 1812. Dubbed “War Hawks” by their opponents, they wanted to stop Great Britain from…
The first petroleum well was dug by American railway conductor Edwin L. Drake on August 28, 1859, at Titusville in western Pennsylvania. Kerosene for lamps was the first product to be refined from oil; gasoline did not become important until the development of the internal combustion engine in the 1880s and ’90s.