The Constitution, a 44-gun frigate that defeated two British warships in the War of 1812, was nicknamed “Old Ironsides”.
It was memorialized as “Old Ironsides” in the 1830 poem of that name by Oliver Wendell Holmes, written to protest the proposed scrapping of the ship.
The ship was saved and, in rebuilt form, is still on view at the Boston Navy Yard.
The women’s rights group, the National Organization for Women, was founded in 1966 by Betty Friedan. Friedan was author of the 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique.
The last smoking sign in Times Square, which had advertised Winston cigarettes for five years, stopped blowing rings September 13, 1977. Like its predecessors for much of the twentieth century, it blew about 1,000 rings a day; a steam-producing box, located behind the head of the man in the sign, created the rings. The Winston…
The most destructive air attack of World War II was not the atomic bombing of Hiroshima but the firebombing of Tokyo by 279 Superfortress bombers on March 9-10, 1945. Over 1,650 tons of incendiary bombs were dropped on the city, raising a massive firestorm and killing from 80,000 to 120,000 people. The bombing represented a…
Yes. Originated by the Constitution, the Court has been regulated in size by Congress. The number of justices varied, from six to ten, until 1869, when Congress voted to set the membership at nine.
The “Mexican cession” was the territory Mexico called the “Far North,” including what are today California, Nevada, Utah, most of New Mexico and Arizona, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado. In return Mexico received $15 million, was set free of $3 million in American claims, and got rid of American forces occupying its capital. The…
No one knows exactly how old is the song “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” is. It seems to have begun as “The Levee Song” among African-American workers building levees on the Mississippi River in Louisiana in the 1830s-40s. It was later adapted to railroad building and associated with Irish work gangs in the West….