The 32,000-ton liner the Lusitania sunk by a German submarine on May 6, 1915, was British.
Of the 1,200 passengers who lost their lives, 128 were Americans, a fact that aroused strong anti-German feeling in the U.S.
The Union had a population of about 20,700,000 during the Civil War. The 11 states of the Confederacy had a population of 9,100,000 including nearly 4,000,000 slaves.
The first Academy Awards ceremony was held in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel on May 16, 1929. All awards were presented by Douglas Fairbanks, then president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. There were no surprises because the winners’ names had already been made public in February. Since April…
A white amateur photographer named George Holliday happened to be on hand to videotape the scene of Rodney King’s beating by Los Angeles police on March 3, 1991, while testing his new camcorder. The images of black motorist King being kicked and clubbed by white officers shocked the country. A year later, news of the…
James Buchanan (1857-1861) was the only U.S. president that was a lifelong bachelor. He had been engaged in 1819 to Ann Caroline Coleman, but she died of an overdose of laudanum before the two were married.
The chairman of the America First Committee formed in 1940 to oppose U.S. intervention in World War II was Robert E. Wood, head of Sears, Roebuck. America First’s most famous spokesman, however, was aviator Charles A. Lindbergh. Some committee members expressed sympathy for Nazi ideology; Lindbergh had visited Nazi Germany and accepted a medal from…
Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, six days after Nagasaki was bombed on August 9 and nine days after Hiroshima was bombed on August 6.