What does Flag Day in the U.S. commemorate?
Instituted in 1897 and celebrated on June 14, Flag Day marks the day in 1777 that the Continental Congress adopted the “Stars and Stripes” as the American flag.
The American-born dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan (1878-1927), long an advocate of radical politics, went to Moscow in 1921 at the invitation of Anatoly Lunacharsky, Soviet commissar of enlightenment. In Moscow, she founded a school and married poet Sergei Essenin.
Kilroy was the hero of graffiti scrawled by countless U.S. servicemen during World War II, proclaiming “Kilroy was here,” but he may never have existed in person. Sergeant Francis J. Kilroy of the U.S. Air Corps and James J. Kilroy, an inspector in a Massachusetts shipyard, have both been suggested as the namesake of the…
Abraham Lincoln was watching Our American Cousin, by Tom Taylor, on the evening of April 14, 1865. It was during this play when John Wilkes Booth entered Lincoln’s private box and fired his one-shot derringer. Lincoln’s bodyguard had stepped away for a drink of water.
Three dozen Navy Seals arrived on the beach at Mogadishu early on December 9, 1992, to begin the famine relief operation. They were outnumbered two to one by more than 75 reporters and camera crew members waiting to cover the story.
Wolfman Jack’s real name was Robert Weston Smith. Born in Brooklyn, the disc jockey began broadcasting as the “Wolfman” in 1960 at border station XERF in Via Cuncio, Mexico, just north of Del Rio, Texas. His raunchy, outlaw pronouncements were heard widely in the U.S. but remained beyond the jurisdiction of the FCC.
James Naismith was teaching at The YMCA Training College, now Springfield College, in Springfield, Massachusetts when he invented basketball. Naismith invented the game for his students in the winter of 1891-92 to provide indoor exercise between the football and baseball seasons.