Bellevue, on New York City’s East Side, is the oldest general hospital in North America.
Plans for the hospital date back to 1736, although at that time the building was meant to be only a “Publick Workhouse and House of Correction” near City Hall (located on the site of present-day City Hall Park).
In 1816, a larger space was needed and construction began at Belle Vue Farm, on the hospital’s present site.
It took eleven days for news of Custer’s last stand to be published in the press. The massacre of George Armstrong Custer and his Seventh Cavalry by the Sioux Indians took place on June 25, 1876, on the Little Big Horn River in Montana Territory. The news was first published by the Bozeman Times in…
A chinook was a dance to summon the warm wind to melt the snow. It also refers to the wind itself and to the Chinook people of the Columbia River valley. “Chinook jargon” is a pidgin language based on Indian languages, French, and English, formerly spoken in the Pacific Northwest.
No U.S. ships were fired on in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. The U.S. Navy reported that month that the USS Maddox and the USS Turner had been fired upon by three North Vietnamese patrol boats. Later investigations showed no evidence of any such attacks.
The first major conflict against Indians in New England was the Pequot War against the Pequot Indians of Connecticut in 1637. In the bloodiest encounter of the war, English colonists burned a Pequot village near Long Island Sound, killing hundreds of Indian men, women, and children.
Yale University students appear to have begun the Frisbee in the 1920s, when they threw around metal pie tins from the Frisbie Bakery of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Middlebury College in Vermont has also taken credit for inventing the game. As a commercial venture, however, Frisbee began with a saucer-shaped toy invented by Walter Frederick Morrison in…
“What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar” was uttered by Thomas R. Marshall, vice-president under Woodrow Wilson (1913-21), in response to a senator’s long speech about the country’s needs.