The Chevrolet Corvair, made by General Motors, was exposed by Ralph Nader in Unsafe at Any Speed. Nader’s crusading book, published in 1965, led to passage of the Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966.
The Boy Scouts of America was incorporated in 1910 in Washington, D.C., by painter and illustrator Daniel Carter Beard. Known as “Uncle Dan,” Beard based the organization on the British group founded in 1908 by Sir Robert Baden-Powell. Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Scouts organization in Savannah, Georgia, in 1912.
Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland, was the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. Born in 1737, he was 95 years old when he died in 1832.
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.
In alphabetical order, the executive departments are: Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs.
The Revolutionary War patriot Paul Revere (1735-1818) was only 50 percent British. Revere’s father was French silversmith Apollos Rivoire, a Huguenot (Protestant) refugee from persecution by the Catholic authorities in France. Revere’s mother, Deborah Hitchbourn, was of English descent.