There were three pioneering suburban housing developments bearing the Levittown name: the one in Hempstead, New York, in the late 1940s; one near Philadelphia in the 1950s; and one in New Jersey in the 1960s.
Seven members serve on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, founded in 1913. All are appointed to 14-year terms by the president. The Federal Reserve System, which includes all national banks and many state banks, helps to maintain the country’s economic health through such means as fixing reserve deposit requirements and establishing…
President Richard Nixon was charged with three counts of impeachment. On July 30, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee charged the U.S. president with three counts related to the Watergate case: obstructing justice; abuse of power; and defying the House Judiciary Committee subpoenas.
After escaping from slavery in 1838, the abolitionist and black leader Frederick Douglass (c. 1817-95) took the name “Douglass” from a character in Sir Walter Scott’s narrative poem The Lady of the Lake (1810).
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…
Formally conceived to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago also served to establish Chicago as a cosmopolitan international urban center. To plan the Exposition, several of the nation’s top urban planners were recruited, including Daniel Burnham and Frederick law Olmsted. Founder of Poetry magazine Harriet…