The Great Compromise was the agreement reached at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787 to give each state two senators and to apportion seats in the House of Representatives on the basis of population.
The agreement satisfied both the smaller, less populous states, which wanted all states to be represented equally, and the larger states, which wanted representation to reflect population.
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.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, was created in 1933 to protect against bank failure by insuring deposits in eligible banks. It is entitled to borrow up to $3 billion from the U.S. Treasury. The FDIC has not yet had to use that privilege.
The holiday Decoration Day, which was first widely celebrated on May 30, 1868, was originally meant to remind citizens to decorate with wreaths the graves of soldiers killed in the Civil War. The holiday has since been renamed Memorial Day and is observed on the last Monday in May to honor the dead of all…
The origins of the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church lay in a controversy over segregation rules at St. George’s Methodist Church in Philadelphia in 1787. The white elders ordered black members of the congregation to sit in a separate gallery. Several African-Americans, including Richard Allen, an ex-slave and lay preacher, refused, founding their own Methodist…
The comedienne made headlines for her performance at the July 25, 1990, game of the San Diego Padres-Cincinnati Reds. Arnold grabbed her crotch in response to boos at her handling of the anthem.
The first public showing of a motion picture in the U.S. took place on April 23, 1896, at New York’s Koster & Bial Music Hall on 34th Street and Broadway. The 12 short-subject films, projected on Thomas Edison’s Vitascope, accompanied a vaudeville show. Previously, Edison’s films could only be viewed peep-show style on his Kinetoscope…