The “Trail of Tears” refers to the “removal,” or forced exile, of 17,000 Cherokee from Georgia in 1838-39, under the terms of the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
About 4,000 people, one in four Cherokees, died of hunger and disease on their way to Oklahoma.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, was written by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren (1891-1974). Delivered on May 17, 1954, it was one of the first of several major decisions of the Warren Court, which lasted from 1953 to 1969.
The unofficial group of advisors to President Andrew Jackson, active mainly during his first term (1829-1833), included: Amos Kennedy, newspaper editor from Kentucky Andrew J. Donelson, Jackson’s personal secretary William B. Lewis, an old military comrade Martin Van Buren, secretary of state John H. Eaton, secretary of war Duff Green, newspaper editor; replaced in midterm…
The “Hair Buyer of Detroit” was Henry Hamilton, the Detroit settlement’s British governor during the American Revolution. To fight the spread of U.S. settlements, he armed massive numbers of Native Americans with knives and ordered them to scalp frontier dwellers.
More than 13,000 Union prisoners died at Andersonville, the largest Confederate military prison. Most died of neglect. The prison’s commandant, Captain Henry Wirz, was the only Civil War soldier executed for war crimes.
Margaret Jones of Charlestown, Massachusetts, was the first person executed for witchcraft in America, on June 15, 1648. This was nearly five decades before the Salem witch trials of 1692– 93.
Both Tin Lizzie and The Flivver were nicknames for the Model T, introduced by Henry Ford in 1908.