The undersized Miles Standish was given the nickname “Captain Shrimp” by fellow colonist Thomas Morton.
Standish (c. 1584-1656) was the military leader of the Plymouth Colony, founded in Massachusetts in 1620.
Morton (c. 1590c. 1647), leader of the rival colony of Merrymount, ridiculed the austere habits and strict religious beliefs of his Pilgrim neighbors.
Stephen Collins Foster, who wrote the song “Swanee River” about the South (also called “Old Folks at Home”) in 1852, was born near Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania, in 1826. Daniel D. Emmett, the author of the 1859 song “Dixie” that became a Confederate anthem, was born in Ohio.
Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner collaborated indirectly on the 1944 movie version of Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not. Jules Furthman and William Faulkner wrote the screenplay of the film, now best remembered for bringing together Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. When Hemingway declined to write the screenplay himself, director Howard Hawks reportedly said,…
Though born into slavery, Sojourner Truth was born not in the South but in Ulster County, New York, before slavery was abolished in that state in 1827. After being sold to a master who set her free, she worked as a domestic. She later became a preacher of Christianity, abolitionism, and women’s rights.
Odd-numbered highways move north and south, while those with even numbers move east and west. Highways with one or two digit numbers are through routes, often long ones used for distance driving. Three-digit routes that begin with an even number are usually beltways around a city. Three-digit routes that begin with an odd number are…
Electric lights were first used for a baseball game between Fort Wayne and Indianapolis teams on May 28, 1883, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson originated the phrase “the shot heard round the world” in his poem “Concord Hymn” (1836). The poem memorialized the Battle of Lexington and Concord of 1775, the first battle of the War of Independence.