It was not Christopher Columbus or Leif Erikson who was the first known European to spot America.
It was a Norseman named Biarni Heriulfson who first spotted North America around 985 A.D.
Blown off course while sailing from Iceland to Greenland, he probably saw what is now Newfoundland, Canada.
In the late 1800s, New York’s Ladies’ Mile was Manhattan’s high-class shopping district. This equivalent of Fifth Avenue or Fifty-seventh Street ran from Eighth Street to Twenty-third Street, bound on the east by Broadway and on the west by Sixth Avenue. These areas are now parts of the more residential neighborhoods of Greenwich Village and…
The “Trail of Tears” refers to the “removal,” or forced exile, of 17,000 Cherokee from Georgia in 1838-39, under the terms of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. About 4,000 people, one in four Cherokees, died of hunger and disease on their way to Oklahoma.
The middle names of the following U.S. Presidents are: Dwight D. Eisenhower—David Gerald R. Ford—Rudolph James A. Garfield—Abram Ulysses S. Grant—Simpson Warren G. Harding—Gamaliel Rutherford B. Hayes—Birchard James K. Polk—Knox Ronald W. Reagan—Wilson
The road used by migrants moving westward in the mid-19th century, known as the Oregon Trail, ran about 2,000 miles from Independence or Westport, Missouri, to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. It took about six months for wagon trains to cover the distance. The Oregon Trail was in use from the 1840s until the advent of the…
James J. “Gene” Tunney sent Harrison “Jack” Dempsey against the ropes for the heavyweight boxing championship in 1926. Dempsey had held the title since 1919, when he defeated Jess Willard.
The poorest county in the United States is Shannon County, South Dakota, site of the Pine Ridge Reservation, which is home to the Oglala branch of the Sioux Indians. In 1987, 63.1 percent of all 9,900 residents here lived in poverty, compared to a national poverty rate of 13.5 percent.