In 1846, the 29-year-old Henry David Thoreau was charged with nonpayment of a poll tax.
Thoreau refused to pay because the tax was to be spent on the Mexican War, which he opposed.
Thoreau’s friends paid the tax for him, after he spent the night of July 23, 1846, in jail.
He described the experience in his 1849 essay, “Civil Disobedience.”
The first U.S. military advisors were sent to South Vietnam under Dwight D. Eisenhower (served 1953-61).
Benjamin Harrison, Republican, in 1888, was the last president to be elected without winning the largest share of the popular vote. Fewer ballots were cast for him at the polling booth than for Democrat Grover Cleveland. But Harrison carried the day by winning 233 votes in the Electoral College to Cleveland’s 168.
Legend claims that when sentenced to death in 1776 by the British for spying, Nathan Hale proclaimed, “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” But British officer Captain Frederick Mackenzie reports in his diaries that Hale said, “It is the duty of every good officer to obey any…
The New York Times adopt the slogan, “All the news that’s fit to print” in 1896, when it was purchased by Chattanooga Times newspaper publisher Adolph Ochs. Known until 1857 as The New York Daily Times, it was founded in 1851 as a Whig newspaper. Under its first editor, Henry Jarvis Raymond, the Times was…
Jim Crow was a black stage character invented by minstrel star Thomas Rice in the decades before the Civil War. The name came to be applied to the segregationist laws that kept blacks separate from whites beginning in the 1870s. The Supreme Court declared Jim Crow laws unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in…
The average time the 17th- and 18th-century peasants and laborers spent to pay off the debt incurred by their passage to America (about $100) was four years.