For the first 19 years of his life, George Washington (born in 1731) celebrated his birthday on February 11.
After the British parliament replaced the Julian calendar with the Gregorian calendar (in 1752), Washington celebrated his birthday 11 days later, on February 22.
First Base. Who Second Base. What Third Base. I Don’t Know Shortstop. I Don’t Give a Darn (I Don’t Care) Catcher. Today Pitcher. Tomorrow Left Field. Why Center Field. Because Right Field. Not mentioned in the routine
The name for the artistic movement Dada was founded in Zurich in 1915 as a revolt against complacent art. It is drawn not from an artist or a technique but from the child’s word for a parent, dada, which in French, curiously, also means “hobbyhorse.” Whatever its origin, the name Dada is intended to be…
As of the early 1980s, the United States held the largest supply, with nearly 27 percent of the world’s uranium reserves. Other countries with large supplies were: Australia, with 18 percent; Sweden, with 16 percent; South Africa, with 15 percent; and Canada, with 9 percent.
A Harvard University student named Lothrop Withington, Jr., swallowed a 4-inch goldfish on a bet on March 3, 1939. The event was publicized in the Boston papers and soon created a new campus fad.
The most famous auto-destructive work of art was probably Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, which blew itself up at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960. The work was meant to satirize modern technological civilization. Constructed of an old piano and other junk, the piece failed to operate as planned and caused…
The term liberal arts arose in the Middle Ages from the Latin artes liberales. It refers to the seven branches of learning: logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy, and grammar. The number seven derives from a quote in Proverbs 9:1: ‘Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn our her seven pillars.”