Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry first brought an armed squadron to Tokyo Bay in 1853, when he delivered a letter from President Millard Fillmore to the emperor of Japan.
In 1854, on a second expedition, Perry succeeded in persuading the Japanese to open their previously isolated society to U.S. trade.
The College Board first administered the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) in June 1926. More than 8,000 applicants took the test, most of them applicants to elite colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. The test, intended to help predict subsequent academic performance, was modeled on intelligence tests administered by the U.S. Army in World War…
Yes, Bob Dylan did indeed meet Woody Guthrie, albeit when Guthrie was in his last years. Born Robert Zimmerman in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, young folksinger Bob Dylan hitchhiked to New York in 1960 to visit his musical idol Woody Guthrie, who was hospitalized with Huntington’s chorea. The composer and collector of hundreds of folk…
The poem that later became the “Star-Spangled Banner” was written by Francis Scott Key in 1814. It was written to commemorate the battle for Fort McHenry, Maryland, during the War of 1812, was called “Defence of Fort M’Henry.”
The sharpshooter Annie Oakley who appeared in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the late 19th century was born Phoebe Mozee. Her life was popularized on Broadway in the 1946 Irving Berlin musical Annie Get Your Gun, starring Ethel Merman.
William Howard Taft, at a top weight of 352 pounds was the heaviest U.S. president.
The date of the first human migration to the Americas is still in dispute. It may be as early as 35,000 years ago or, according to some archeologists, no more than 12,000 years ago. Whichever date turns out to be correct, it is believed that the first Americans migrated from northeastern Siberia across the Bering…