Though born into slavery, Sojourner Truth was born not in the South but in Ulster County, New York, before slavery was abolished in that state in 1827.
After being sold to a master who set her free, she worked as a domestic.
She later became a preacher of Christianity, abolitionism, and women’s rights.
Abraham Lincoln was 25 when he was elected to the Illinois state legislature as an assemblyman in 1834.
Swedish soprano Jenny Lind was called the “Swedish Nightingale”. She was brought to the U.S. by showman P. T. Barnum for a concert tour that lasted from 1850 to 1852. Her highly successful appearances helped to fix opera as a popular art in American culture.
Born in Atlanta, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68) traveled north to receive his Ph.D. in theology from Boston University in 1955. He returned to the South to become pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where he met Rosa Parks and was chosen to lead the bus boycott. An advocate of…
The first movie at Radio City Music Hall was The Bitter Tea of General Yen, directed by Frank Capra and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Nils Asther. It opened in January 1934. The final movie was The Promise, directed by Gilbert Cates and starring Kathleen Quinlan and Stephen Collins. The final showing was on April 25,…
The draft office where the Berrigan brothers burned draft files in 1968 was in Catonsville, Maryland. Philip and Daniel Berrigan, both priests, broke into the draft office with seven other Roman Catholic protestors and burned over 600 draft files with napalm. The Berrigans were arrested and convicted, but Daniel jumped bail and went underground for…
The company IBM, now known as International Business Machines was originally founded as the Computing Tabulating Recording Company in 1911.