The first “Negro History Week” was organized in the second week of February, 1926, by Carter G. Woodson.
It was meant to include the birthday of Abraham Lincoln and the traditional birthday of Frederick Douglass.
It was expanded in the 1960s to “Black History Month.”
John F. Kennedy was approaching his 45th birthday when Marilyn Monroe sang the song to him at a Democratic fund-raiser in Madison Square Garden on March 19, 1962.
There are 10 federal legal public holidays in the U.S.: New Year’s Day Martin Luther King Day Washington’s Birthday (a.k.a. Presidents’ Day) Memorial Day Independence Day Labor Day Columbus Day Veterans’ Day Thanksgiving Christmas
Richard Henry Dana was a college student at Harvard before he shipped out as a sailor in the voyage recounted in Two Years Before the Mast (1840). Dana (1815-82) suffered eye problems that led him to go out to sea in hopes of improving his health. Working as a common seaman, he traveled around South…
It was not John F. Kennedy’s but Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration that first launched plans for the overthrow of Fidel Castro, the Communist leader of Cuba, by an armed invasion of Cuban exiles. This plan was known as the Bay of Pigs invasion. Kennedy, who came to office in January 1961, allowed the plan to…
After a revolt on July 4, 1846, led by John C. Fremont against Mexico during the Mexican War, California was declared an independent country for a few days. During its brief independence, California flew the flag of a bear. The California grizzly bear is now the state animal.
A black man from Haiti named Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable (1745-1818) founded the city of Chicago. In 1772, Du Sable founded a settlement called Eschikagou on the north bank of the Chicago River. However, he was not officially recognized as the city’s founder until 1968.