De Tocqueville based his work, Democracy in America, on a ten-month visit to study the American prison system for the French government, from May 1831 to February 1832. A study of American social and political institutions, Democracy in America was published in two parts in 1835 and 1840.
Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were seventh cousins, once removed.
The moniker the “Cossacks of the Plains” was given to the Comanche, a Shoshonean-speaking people who lived in western Texas, western Oklahoma, and parts of Kansas and New Mexico. Masters of horsemanship and warfare, the Comanche clashed regularly with U.S. settlers until being forced onto reservations in the 1860s and 1870s.
James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) sued John Ruskin for libel after Ruskin vilified the painter’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1877), accusing Whistler of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler had lived in Europe since 1855 and had become a fixture of London art circles….
The bank robber Jesse James was shot in the back of the head by his reward-seeking cousin, Robert Ford, on April 3, 1882. James was 34 at the time of his death.
In the nineteenth century, the district known as Harlem in northern Manhattan was a fashionable white residential district, a favorite site for summer homes. Apartment buildings rose in the boom of the 1880s. After the panic of 1893, however, many buildings became vacant, and property owners began renting to blacks. By World War I, much…