A company of French and Caughnawaga Indians killed about 50 of the 300 residents of the English colonial village of Deerfield, Massachusetts.
It was a predawn raid on February 29, 1704, during Queen Anne’s War.
Almost 100 settlers were taken to Canada as prisoners.
The first U.S. warship to make a trip around the world was the sloop-of-war Vincennes in 1829-31, during the administration of President Andrew Jackson. Jackson used the show of force to protect American commerce in the Pacific.
Technically, the first president of the United States was not George Washington, but John Hanson of Maryland. In 1781, Hanson began a one-year term as the first “president of the United States in Congress assembled” under the Articles of Confederation. Seven other men served as president before Washington, technically, the ninth president, took office in…
At least 146 women, mainly young immigrants, died in the sweatshop fire in the Triangle Waist Company that occurred on April 20, 1911. The sprinkler system was inadequate, the 500 female workers stood back-to-back on the crowded work floors, and the fire doors were kept locked to prevent theft. The company owners were later acquitted…
The federal government founded the National Rail Passenger Corporation Amtrak in 1970 to prevent the imminent extinction of passenger railroads in the U.S. Unable to compete with airlines, the commercial railroads had been eliminating most of their passenger service and concentrating on freight. Railroad passenger-miles traveled in a single year had declined from a height…
The first protest was at a segregated lunch counter begun by four black college students at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960. In the next two weeks, sit-ins spread to 15 cities across the South.
A vial containing the air representing Thomas Alva Edison’s last exhalation is a prime draw at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Originally known as the Edison Institute for Technology in honor of Ford’s inventor friend, the museum also includes a slab of concrete with Edison’s footprints in addition to more general Americana like…