President John F. Kennedy said the line at his inaugural speech.
Another form of the quote was spoken by the young Kennedy’s headmaster at Choate, a prep school in Wallingford, Connecticut.
The headmaster told his students, “Ask not what your school can do for you; ask what you can do for your school”; and Kennedy adapted the phrase.
James K. Polk, photographed by Matthew Brady in 1849, was the first president photographed while in office. The first president of whom there is any known photograph was John Quincy Adams.
Standard sizes for ready-made clothing were not developed in America until the Civil War, when the Union Army collected body measurements of more than a million conscripts. The statistical data was needed to meet the demand for large numbers of uniforms. From this beginning, fitting systems with numbered sizes were developed during the latter half…
By crossing the Atlantic on May 20-21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh won the $25,000 award offered by a New York hotel owner.
The Republican mayor of New York City Fiorello La Guardia (1934-45), known as the “Little Flower,” was five feet two inches tall.
Mary Katherine Goddard published the first official copies of the Declaration, the first to bear the names of all the signers, in January 1777. At the time, Goddard was the only printer in Baltimore, where the Continental Congress had fled from Philadelphia. She had taken over the print shop and the city’s only newspaper from…
The total American death count in World War I was 116,516, including 53,402 deaths in battle and 63,114 from other causes, mostly disease. An additional 204,002 soldiers received nonlethal wounds.