What politician was known as “The Little Giant”?

The 1921 site houses the Cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta, a depiction of the Civil War battle for control of the Georgia railroad on July 22, 1864. The 1885-86 artwork blends an enormous circular painting with a three-dimensional model of the action. The painting is 358 feet in circumference and 42 feet tall. It…

In 1846, the 29-year-old Henry David Thoreau was charged with nonpayment of a poll tax. Thoreau refused to pay because the tax was to be spent on the Mexican War, which he opposed. Thoreau’s friends paid the tax for him, after he spent the night of July 23, 1846, in jail. He described the experience…

Emma Lazarus (1849-87), a New York Jewish poet, wrote the poem “The New Colossus” with its words, “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It was written in honor of the planned Statue of Liberty in 1883, but the poem was not part of the statue when it was…

The Miss Subways program, run by the New York Subway Advertising Company, started in May 1941 and ended in December 1976. Every month a Miss Subways, a woman over 17, not an actress or a model, was chosen. She was featured on signs and was given a $50 sterling silver charm with dangling subway tokens….

Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Veblen used the term to excoriate Americans who spent lavishly in trying to impress others with their wealth.

The name “America” first appeared in print in 1507 in Cosmographiae Introductio by German mapmaker Martin Waldseemuller. Waldseemiiller named it in honor of explorer Amerigo Vespucci, whom he believed was the true discoverer of America. Vespucci’s claims to have been the first to reach the American mainland (in 1497) and the first to realize that…