The revealing 1929 study by Robert and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture, examined family life in Muncie, Indiana. It was followed by Middletown in Transition in 1937.
In colonial New England, “hiving out” meant leaving a town when the rules or the neighbors were not to one’s liking and settling somewhere else.
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…
A U-2 was an American high-altitude reconnaissance plane. The plane became infamous when a U-2 flown by Francis Gary Powers was shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960, sparking an international incident.
After escaping from slavery in 1838, the abolitionist and black leader Frederick Douglass (c. 1817-95) took the name “Douglass” from a character in Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem The Lady of the Lake (1810).
John Tyler was the first president to have a veto overridden by Congress in 1845.