Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America (1835, 1840) said of Americans, “If I were asked . . . to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women”.
Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973) was elected as Montana’s sole delegate to the House of Representatives in 1916. After serving her term, she was not reelected until 1940. A pacifist, she holds the distinction of being the only member of Congress to have voted against American participation in both World Wars.
Erected in June 1892 on a nine-story building near Broadway and Twenty-third Street, the first electric sign in New York measured 60 by 68 feet and read: Buy Homes On Long Island Swept By Ocean Breezes Manhattan Beach Oriental Hotel Manhattan Hotel Gilmore’s Band Brock’s Fireworks
What Peter Minuit gave the Manhattoe tribe was a package of trinkets and cloth valued at 60 guilders, roughly equivalent to $24.
There have been Two Liberty Bells. The first was cast in England in 1752 for the Pennsylvania State House, which later became Independence Hall. The second was cast in Philadelphia and inscribed, “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” (Leviticus 25:10). The bell cracked on July 8, 1835, as it tolled…
Upton Sinclair said, “I aimed for the heart and by accident I hit the stomach instead”. He was discussing the national response to his 1906 novel The Jungle about the Chicago meatpacking industry. The book was meant to galvanize workers to socialism but instead led to the passage of the first nationwide food and drug…
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…