A labor organizer who led the Pullman strike of 1894, Eugene Debs ran for president five times, once in 1900 on the Social Democratic ticket and four times as the Socialist candidate (1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920).
Jefferson Davis wearing women’s clothing when he was captured was the unsubstantiated rumor that spread among Union soldiers after the president of the Confederacy was captured near Irwinville, Georgia, on May 10, 1865. Supposedly Davis had donned his wife’s cloak and shawl to disguise himself from the enemy.
Four people are killed in Taxi Driver (1976): the pimp Sport; the “timekeeper” for Iris the prostitute; Iris’s Mafioso customer; and the grocery store robber.
The phrase “to 86” generally means “put an end to”. It is said to have been part of a number code used in diners and soda fountains. In those early days, 86 meant “we’re out of that dish,” “don’t serve that customer,” or “don’t serve another drink to that customer because he’s already had too … Read more
Marilyn Monroe says to Charles Coburn in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), “I always say a kiss on the hand might feel very good, but a diamond tiara lasts forever”.
A closet drama is a play, usually in verse, written for private reading rather than performance. Byron’s Manfred (1817) and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) are examples.
Bellevue, on New York City’s East Side, is the oldest general hospital in North America. Plans for the hospital date back to 1736, although at that time the building was meant to be only a “Publick Workhouse and House of Correction” near City Hall (located on the site of present-day City Hall Park). In 1816, … Read more
George K. Kennan, then a member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, wrote the pseudonymous article in the magazine Foreign Affairs that first outlined the policy of containing Soviet expansion in 1947.
Started in 1936, The Negro Motorist Green Book was a travel guide designed to “give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments, and to make his trips more enjoyable.”
The main model of the spaceship Discovery used in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was 54 feet long. It was filmed moving along a track 150 feet in length. A smaller, 15-foot model was used for some shots.
No, Bonfire of the Vanities wasn’t the biggest box-office flop of 1990. It lost only $15 million. Havana was the worst, it lost $35 million.
No, Andrew Jackson holds that honor of being the first president born in a log cabin. He was born on March 15, 1767, in a log cabin in Waxhaw, South Carolina. Andrew Jackson was also the first president born in South Carolina and the first born west of the Allegheny Mountains.
Falconetti (Marie Falconetti, 1901-46), a French stage actress, starred in The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) by Carl Dreyer. This was Falconetti’s only film.
Contrary to dormitory fears, it does not inhibit sexual desire. Instead, saltpeter, or potassium nitrate (KNO3), is a diuretic. Another form of saltpeter is Chile saltpeter, or impure sodium nitrate (NaNO3). Lime, or Norwegian saltpeter, is calcium nitrate. It is used to make explosives.
Sonja Henie (1912-1969) of Norway, who won the gold medal in 1928, 1932, and 1936, won the most number of Olympic gold medals. Between 1927 and 1936, she also won 10 world figure-skating championships.
By crossing the Atlantic on May 20-21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh won the $25,000 award offered by a New York hotel owner.
Until 1929, the Waldorf-Astoria stood at the southwest corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue in New York. On October 1 of that year, demolition of the famous hotel began, and on May 1, 1931, the Empire State Building opened on the space. In the same year, the Waldorf reopened at its current address between … Read more
By 1780, the British were fighting not only the United States and its ally France during the American War of Independence, but also Spain, the Netherlands, and the ruler of Mysore in India. The conflicts were not all related to American independence, but they did keep the British busy on many fronts, aiding the U.S. … Read more
John Shaft, “the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks,” was played by Richard Roundtree in the movie Shaft. The Oscar-winning “Theme from Shaft” was by Isaac Hayes.
Electric lights were first used for a baseball game between Fort Wayne and Indianapolis teams on May 28, 1883, in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
The first black person to win the prize, the American statesman and civil rights leader Ralph Bunche earned the honor of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for mediating an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict in 1949.
Denise Crosby was Lieutenant Tasha Yar, the security officer who was killed off on “Star Trek: The Next Generation”.
Shortly after the turn of the century, President Theodore Roosevelt said that the writers of exposes who flourished at the time reminded him of John Bunyan’s Man with the Muckrake. The Man with the Muckrake when offered a heavenly crown, “would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake … Read more
Ian Carmichael was the original Lord Peter Wimsey on the PBS TV series. Edward Petherbridge has also played the role. The “Lord Peter Wimsey” stories originally aired on the BBC in Great Britain (1972-75, 1987) and have been carried by PBS on “Masterpiece Theatre” (1971) and “Mystery!” (1981).
Most likely, the K in K rations represents the first letter of the last name of the product’s developer, Ancel Keys (b. 1904). Keys, a physiologist from Minnesota, developed the portions of food for soldiers in World War II.
Sappho (b. 612 B.C.), a lyric poet whose work exists only in fragments, was called the “tenth muse” by some classical writers. Married, she lived in Lesbos and led a group of women who were devoted to music and poetry.
Senator Mark Hanna of Ohio said, “Now look! That damned cowboy is president of the United States” of Theodore Roosevelt in 1901.
De Havilland’s (1916–). Fontaine’s (1917–) real name is Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland. Both were born in Tokyo to British parents and brought to California in childhood.
Named by the studio, not the Brothers Grimm, the Seven Dwarfs were: Bashful Doc Dopey Grumpy Happy Sleepy and Sneezy.
The announcement of President Kennedy’s assassination was made on TV at 1:40 P.M. EST on Friday, November 22, 1963. On CBS, “As the World Turns” was interrupted by Walter Cronkite with the news bulletin. Actress Helen Wagner had just been saying, “I gave it a great deal of thought, Grandpa,” when the episode was cut … Read more
General Winfield Scott, who also led troops in the Mexican War was “Old Fuss and Feathers”. Scott’s vain and blustering ways earned him his nickname.
Millard Fillmore (1850-53) was the last president from the Whig party. Three other presidents were Whigs: William Henry Harrison (1841), John Tyler (1841-45), and Zachary Taylor (1849-50).
The official name of the Wobblies is The Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW. Founded in Chicago in 1905 and composed mostly of unskilled workers, the union advocated direct action to further the cause of worker control of the means of production. Their aim was to create “one big union” for all workers.
“The Richard Pryor Show” (NBC) ran for five episodes, from September to October, 1977.
The fastest downhill speed for skiing to date for a man is 139.03 miles per hour by Michael Pruffer of France. The fastest woman on skis is Tara Mulari of Finland, clocked at 133.234 miles per hour. Both records were set at Les Arcs, France, in 1988.
In H. G. Wells’s novel, the name of the Invisible Man was Griffin. The Invisible Man was published in 1897. Griffin remains invisible until he is dying.
Lucille Ball (Lucy) died on April 26, 1989, at age 77. Desi Arnaz (Ricky) died December 2, 1986, at age 69. Vivian Vance (Ethel) died on August 17, 1979, at age 72. William Frawley (Fred) died on March 3, 1966, at age 79.
The American word “buckaroo” comes from the Spanish vaquero, meaning cowboy. It was picked up as Americans moved into western lands once owned by Mexico.
Over the course of 12 years’ service to Eurystheus, king of Mycenae, Hercules performed the following known as The Twelve Labours of Hercules: 1. Killed the Nemean lion 2. Killed the hydra of Lerna 3. Captured the Erymanthian boar 4. Captured the hind of Artemis 5. Killed the man-eating Stymphalian birds 6. Cleaned the Augean … Read more
The two U.S. beachheads at Normandy in the D-Day invasion were Omaha Beach and Utah Beach. The beachheads were secured in the invasion of June 6, 1944.
The official name of the Statue of Liberty is “Liberty Enlightening the World.” A gift from France, the statue was designed by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi and dedicated in New York harbor in 1886.
New York socialite Edith Newbold Jones (1862-1937) married George Wharton in 1885. Their marriage lasted twenty-seven years until 1912, when she divorced him. By then she was living in France, where she remained until her death.
Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the “I Have a Dream” address to more than 200,000 people on the mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.
Paul Gauguin’s life is the basis for W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence (1919). In the novel, Charles Strickland is a London stockbroker who leaves his family to paint in the South Seas.
There is no difference between Hoover Dam and Boulder Dam. Both are names for the same dam, erected in 1931-36 on the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona. The dam is over 700 feet high and 1,200 feet long.
The New York City department store Bloomingdale’s owned by Lyman, Joseph, and Gustave Bloomingdale opened in 1886 at Third Avenue and 59th Street, near a station of the Third Avenue El. By 1927, Bloomingdale’s occupied the entire block, where it is located to this day.
Chop Suey is an authentic Chinese-American dish. It was created either by a dishwasher in San Francisco around 1860 or by Chinese restaurant owners in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. As befits its origin, chop is an English word; suey is derived from the Chinese sui, meaning “bits.”
The old saying waiting till the cows come home is almost 400 years old. It refers to the early-morning hour when cows line up at the farm gates, ready to be milked.
According to the song “Think Pink” in Funny Face (1957), Banish the black, burn the blue, and bury the beige.
Detroit lawmen coined the term in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They realized that Saturday night holdups were committed with handguns purchased in quick one-hour trips to Toledo, Ohio. There, guns could be bought at filling stations and flower shops for $5 or $10, without time restrictions.
The highest tariff in U.S. history was the Hawley-Smoot Tariff, a 1930 protectionist bill that placed a duty of about 60 percent on imported goods. Aimed at alleviating the Depression, the tariff instead sparked a trade war and worsened economic conditions in the U.S. and Europe.
The 32,000-ton liner the Lusitania sunk by a German submarine on May 6, 1915, was British. Of the 1,200 passengers who lost their lives, 128 were Americans, a fact that aroused strong anti-German feeling in the U.S.
Noah’s Ark was 300 by 50 by 30 cubits, according to Genesis 6:15. One cubit equals 18 inches.
In 1904, German composer Richard Strauss conducted the world premiere of his work Symphonia Domestica in Wanamaker’s Department Store in New York City.
More Americans (19.6 percent) report German ancestry than any other. In second place is Irish ancestry (13.1 percent) and in third place English (11 percent).
The first woman to receive the award twice, Edith Wharton was awarded the Pulitzer in Literature in 1920 for The Age of Innocence and in Drama in 1935 for The Old Maid.
Asia probably got its name from the Assyrian asu, meaning “sunrise, east.” Asu originally referred only to the east coast of the Aegean Sea but gradually came to include the whole continent.
The hero of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man has no name. He is a young man from the South who finds his way to a hidden existence in a coal cellar in New York.
Dorothy (Beatrice Arthur) was a teacher; Rose (Betty White) was a counselor; Blanche (Rue McClanahan) was an art-gallery assistant on the TV series “The Golden Girls” (NBC, 1985-92).
NASCAR, headquartered in Daytona Beach, Florida, was founded by William H. G. France in 1947.
The males of the fighting fish species do indeed fight. They nip each other’s fins and show off their extended gill covers and intensified colors. Their battles are exciting enough that the Thai have domesticated the fish for use in contests.
General Matthew B. Ridgway replaced General Douglas MacArthur as commander of U.N. forces in South Korea during the Korean War. Truman removed MacArthur from command on April 11, 1951, for publicly criticizing Truman’s policy of limiting the war to the Korean peninsula.
Pianist and wit Oscar Levant (1906-1972) made the claim after Doris Day became known for her virginal sex farces with Rock Hudson.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed on June 19, 1953, at Sing Sing prison in Ossining, New York. They were found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage and were labeled communists. Julius Rosenberg, thirty-five, was executed at 8:04 P.m. His wife, Ethel, thirty-seven, was executed at 8:11 P.M. It was the first execution of civilians … Read more
These personifications of war, the Four Horsemen, appear in the Book of Revelation 6:1-8. They are: Conquest, Slaughter, Famine, and Death, riding horses that are, respectively, white, red, black, and green.
The five largest Lakes in the world are: 1. Kaspiyskoye More (or Caspian Sea). USSR–Iran 2. Superior. United States–Canada 3. Victoria. Tanzania–Uganda–Kenya 4. Aralskoye More (or Aral Sea). USSR 5. Huron. United States–Canada
President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary to the Monroe Doctrine said that the U.S. could itself intervene in Latin America to correct what it considered “chronic wrongdoing.”
The importation of slaves was outlawed in the U.S. on January 1, 1808, nearly six decades before the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery in 1865. However, it is estimated that 54,000 additional slaves were brought illegally to the U.S. between 1808 and the Civil War.
Werner Groebli, “Frick,” took his stage name from a border town in his native Switzerland. Hansreudi Mauch, “Frack,” took his name from the German word forfrock. The team of two clowns appeared in such films as Silver Skates (1942) and Lady, Let’s Dance (1943).
The zip code was named for the national Zoning Improvement Plan.
A bildungsroman (in German, it means “education novel”) deals with the formation of a young person and includes common coming-of-age stories. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is an example. A roman a clef (in French, it means a “novel with a key”) contains one or more characters or situations … Read more
The game on December 25, 1971, between the Miami Dolphins and the Kansas City Chiefs lasted 82 minutes and 40 seconds. It went into a second period of sudden death before Garo Yepremian kicked a field goal and won the game for the Dolphins, 27-24.
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 … Read more
The highest-scoring pro basketball game was a 1983 game in which the Detroit Pistons beat the Denver Nuggets, 186-183.
There are several words in the English language that use all five vowels. These include the words sequoia and facetious.
In his confrontation with a bank robber in Dirty Harry (1971), Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) fired six shots. The robber was not shot.
Most of the employees in the early years of the Boston Manufacturing Company, which was one of the first American cloth factories, were young, unmarried women. Founded at Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1814 by Francis Cabot Lowell, the company ran the first American factories to produce both yarn and finished textiles. Its employees were daughters of … Read more
Shirley Temple, aged five, was presented a miniature Oscar statuette “in grateful recognition of her outstanding contributions to screen entertainment during the year 1934 for such films as Stand Up and Cheer, Little Miss Marker, and Bright Eyes.
Tamburlaine the Great was an Islamic Turkic conqueror born in what is now Soviet Uzbekistan in 1336. By 1400, he and his nomad warriors had conquered the whole area from Mongolia to the Mediterranean. He died in 1405 while on his way to conquer China. Known to historians as Timur Lenk, he is best known … Read more
The full title of Dickens’s David Copperfield is The Personal History, Experience and Observations of David Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone Rookery, Which He Never Meant To Be Published On Any Account.
The full name of Khan, the “Star Trek” villain was Khan Noonian Singh (Ricardo Montalban). He was seen on the TV series (NBC, 1966-69) in an episode called “Space Seed” and in the theatrical movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982).
The play A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams opened in New York in 1947 and ran for 855 performances.
The character Bugs Bunny was created in 1936 by a group of artists at Warner Bros., including Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng. The original sketches, however, were submitted by a Warner story man Ben (“Bugs”) Hardaway. He marked the drawings “Bugs Bunny.” The rest is history.
Every soldier defending the fort at the Alamo (about 182 in all) died in the fighting on March 6, 1836, or were killed as prisoners soon after. The dead included Travis, knife-inventor James Bowie, and frontiersman and former U.S. Congressman Davy Crockett.
Potsdam was the setting of the July 1945 meeting between Truman, Churchill, and Stalin is near Berlin, Germany.
The 1793 invention, the cotton gin, by Eli Whitney mechanically removed seeds from a cotton bloom without harming its fiber. Previously, seeds had to be removed laboriously by hand. The invention led to an economic boom for the South by increasing the amount of cotton the southern states could provide to textile manufacturers. It also … Read more
The medieval term the four humors refers to what were thought to be the primary bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. These represented a human’s four basic temperaments: sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. The idea remained popular into the Elizabethan Age.
The line appears in the first volume of The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense (1905-1906). The philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952) did not say any of the common variations: “Those who do not learn from history . . . Those who cannot learn . . . Those who will not learn . . .”
The first protest was at a segregated lunch counter begun by four black college students at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 1, 1960. In the next two weeks, sit-ins spread to 15 cities across the South.
