Sacajawea was the woman who helped Lewis and Clark find their way on their western expedition beginning in 1804.
A Shoshoni, she was captured in childhood by the Hidatsa Sioux and sold to the French Canadian Toussaint Charbonneau, who took her as a wife.
Charbonneau, a guide and interpreter on the voyage, brought along Sacajawea and their infant child.
Precursor of the modern machine gun, the rapid-firing weapon the Gatling gun saw limited action during the Civil War, specifically in the Petersburg Campaign in 1864. The hand-crank-operated gun, capable of firing hundreds of rounds a minute, was patented by Richard J. Gatling in 1862.
In 1916, the rebel leader Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, and killed 18 people. Villa opposed U.S. influence in Mexico and was seeking to overthrow the Mexican government. In response, President Woodrow Wilson sent General John Pershing and 6,000 troops into northern Mexico on a mission to find Villa. Pershing’s expedition clashed with Mexican…
The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, founded in 1925 by A. Philip Randolph and other labor leaders, was the first African-American union. The Pullman Company, at first opposed to the Brotherhood, awarded the union its first contract in 1937. Later the Brotherhood became best known for its civil rights activism.
The first Jews in the 13 Colonies settled in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam (New York) in 1654. Descendants of Jews forced to leave Spain and Portugal during persecutions in the late 15th century, they had settled in the Dutch colony of Recife in Brazil. When that colony was conquered by the Portuguese, the…
The American-born dancer and choreographer Isadora Duncan (1878-1927), long an advocate of radical politics, went to Moscow in 1921 at the invitation of Anatoly Lunacharsky, Soviet commissar of enlightenment. In Moscow, she founded a school and married poet Sergei Essenin.
Running from the Hudson River to Lake Erie in what is now New York State, the warpath was a trail about a foot wide and six inches deep. The Iroquois traveled single file down this forest path when invading enemy territory.