Andrew Jackson (served 1829-37), who shot and killed Nashville lawyer Charles Dickinson in 1806, is the only U.S. president known to have killed a man in a duel.
The duel resulted from Dickinson’s impugning of the honor of Jackson’s wife, Rachel Donelson Robards Jackson.
The symbols of the theme of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, “The World of Tomorrow,” were massive: The Trylon, a tapering three-sided shaft, was 750 feet high; the Perisphere was a globe 200 feet in diameter. The two objects were built at a cost of $1.7 million.
James Buchanan (1857-1861) was the only U.S. president that was a lifelong bachelor. He had been engaged in 1819 to Ann Caroline Coleman, but she died of an overdose of laudanum before the two were married.
President Calvin Coolidge, then governor of Massachusetts, called out the state militia to break the strike by Boston police officers in 1919. The praise Coolidge received helped get him elected as Warren G. Harding’s vice-president in 1920. Coolidge served as president from 1923 to 1929.
The subject of the 1840s folk song “On Top of Old Smoky” is one of the peaks in the Blue Ridge Mountains, located near Asheville, North Carolina.
In November 1775, the Continental Congress advised that a regiment have eight companies of 91 officers and men apiece, for a total of 728. The actual size of the regiments varied per state.
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.