West Virginia was part of Virginia when that state seceded from the
Union in 1861.
The delegates of 40 western counties formed their own government and seceded from Virginia to join the Union side.
These counties entered the Union as the state of West Virginia in 1863.
Operation Torch was the Allied invasion of French North Africa beginning on November 8, 1942. Assault troops, almost all American, captured Morocco and Algiers with mostly British naval support.
The first attempted assassination of a president took place in January 1835, when a house painter named Richard Lawrence aimed two pistols at Andrew Jackson. Both guns misfired. The first assassination of a president was John Wilkes Booth’s assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865.
Part of the maple-sugar manufacturing process, “sugaring-off” refers to boiling down the sap of the maple tree until the sap hardens into candy or crystallizes into sugar. Maple-sugaring was a popular social activity in America during the 19th century, accompanied by feasting and dancing.
Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of Robert Kennedy, was a Jordanian-born American. He shot Kennedy, then a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, on June 5, 1968.
An attempt to revive the Roman Empire of the West, the Holy Roman Empire was founded by Charlemagne in A.D. 800. Surviving for more than a thousand years, this entity was not formally abolished until 1806, when it dissolved under pressure from Napoleon.
Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry first brought an armed squadron to Tokyo Bay in 1853, when he delivered a letter from President Millard Fillmore to the emperor of Japan. In 1854, on a second expedition, Perry succeeded in persuading the Japanese to open their previously isolated society to U.S. trade.