This topical category is for articles and content that focus on U.S. history.
Four Presidents — Hiram ULYSSES Grant, Stephen GROVER Cleveland, Thomas WOODROW Wilson, and John CALVIN Coolidge — effectively used their middle names as first names. In this article, I examine each of these interesting presidential name cases.
Former First Lady Grace Coolidge was a big baseball fan. She was not, however, a fan of intentional bases on balls.
Calvin Coolidge described seeing then-President Benjamin Harrison speak when Coolidge was in college. I decided to find the story of Harrison’s 1891 orations in Bennington, Vermont.
We begin with a patriotic bedtime story and conclude with Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts on the bald eagle vs the turkey.
Re-printing a British officer’s account of his 1827-28 visit to Benjamin Franklin’s modest grave site.
“He is the son of our present minister to Prussia, who is a close personal friend of Senator Trumbull and myself. We are not willing for the boy to be shot…”
“You made a magnificent beginning; a grand consummation is within your easy reach. Do not let it slip.”
Where we discover that early basket ball was sometimes uncomfortably close to football.
The first basketball game was played in 1891. Let’s see some original newspaper articles about the “new” sport from 1892.
“Though our mode of life has greatly changed, [the Thanksgiving] custom has always survived.”
The first Veterans Day proclamation.
A photograph of a vintage “American Beauty PASTA” mural seen on the side of a building in Brooklyn’s Columbia Street Waterfront District.