Named for trader Jesse Chisholm, this nineteenth-century cattle route started south of San Antonio, Texas, passed through Oklahoma, and ended at Abilene, Kansas.
In 1871, the trail’s busiest year-700,000 cattle were driven along the route by 5,000 cowboys.
During the Revolutionary War years, 90 percent of Americans were farmers. By World War II, the number had shrunk to 15 percent. Today fewer than 3 percent of the population are farmers.
The name “America” first appeared in print in 1507 in Cosmographiae Introductio by German mapmaker Martin Waldseemuller. Waldseemiiller named it in honor of explorer Amerigo Vespucci, whom he believed was the true discoverer of America. Vespucci’s claims to have been the first to reach the American mainland (in 1497) and the first to realize that…
The name A&P is an abbreviation for the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. One of the nation’s top grocery chains, it was founded in New York in 1859 by George Huntington Harford and George P. Gilman as the Great American Tea Company. It was renamed in 1869 to take advantage of national interest in…
The draft in the U.S. ended on January 27, 1973, after years of anti-draft protests. The end of the draft coincided with a ceasefire that stopped direct involvement of U.S. ground forces in hostilities in Vietnam.
Dick Beals, himself only four-and-a-half feet tall, did the voice of the singing animated Alka-Seltzer puppet in over 200 TV commercials from 1954 to 1964. Speedy, who had an Alka-Seltzer tablet for a hat and another for his torso, was designed by Robert Watkins for Wade Advertising of Chicago.
The Great Compromise was the agreement reached at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787 to give each state two senators and to apportion seats in the House of Representatives on the basis of population. The agreement satisfied both the smaller, less populous states, which wanted all states to be represented equally, and the larger states,…