Lincoln’s “eye for an eye” order was an order issued in 1863 during the Civil War that the Union would shoot a Confederate prisoner for every black Union prisoner shot.
It would also condemn a Confederate prisoner to hard labor for life for every black prisoner sold into slavery.
The order was meant to deter Confederates from murdering or enslaving captured black soldiers.
The Soviet port Yalta in the Crimea (now part of Ukraine) was the site of the February 1945 meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin.
About 15 million Model Ts were sold when the iconic car was being produced.
The subject of the 1840s folk song “On Top of Old Smoky” is one of the peaks in the Blue Ridge Mountains, located near Asheville, North Carolina.
Theodore Roosevelt, who invited Booker T. Washington, was the first president to invite an African-American man to the White House.
Previous handguns before the Colt revolver could fire only once before they had to be reloaded. Samuel Colt’s invention, patented in 1835, had a six-chambered cylinder that rotated with each shot, automatically readying another bullet for firing. The Colt revolver became standard equipment on America’s western frontier.
Composer Aaron Copland knew very little about the historical subject of his ballet Billy the Kid (1938). Copland admitted that his knowledge of the career of Western outlaw William H. Bonney (1859-81) was “rather vague” and that he “would never have touched it” if he had had to present it realistically. Instead, he treated Billy…