US History
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The 25th president of the United States, William McKinley, was assassinated on September 6, 1901, during a public event at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley was attending a reception at the Temple of Music, where he was greeting members of the public as part of his duties at the exposition, a grand…
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There are moments in history when the violence of an age becomes concentrated into the life of a single human being. Emmett Louis Till was fourteen years old when that happened to him. He was a child from Chicago who travelled south in the summer of 1955 to visit relatives in Mississippi. He arrived carrying…
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No matter how you twist or turn it, when you are complicit to a crime, you are just as guilty as the perpetrator, and perhaps even more guilty because you were an enabler of that crime. Hermann Stieve was Director of the Berlin Institute of Anatomy from 1935 to 1952, which was from the early…
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In the great annals of American history, there are certain dates that echo across the decades: July 4, 1776; December 7, 1941; July 20, 1969. And then, of course, January 26, 1998 — the day President Bill Clinton stood before the nation, wagged his finger at the camera, and gave us the immortal line: “I…
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On the night of August 7, 1930, the small city of Marion, Indiana became the site of one of the most infamous and haunting episodes of racial violence in American history—the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. What makes this event particularly searing in the American consciousness isn’t just the brutality of the act.…
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On this day, July 5, 1937, Hormel Foods Corporation, headquartered in Austin, Minnesota, USA, first introduced the product SPAM, a square can of pork, salt, water, sugar, potato starch, and sodium nitrite that rolled off the assembly lines 82 years ago during the late Depression era. Hormel created SPAM to capitalize on the previously unprofitable pork…
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On March 10, 1865, just weeks before the final collapse of the Confederacy, a slave named Amy Span was hanged on a sycamore tree before the courthouse of Darlingon, S.C., for anticipating her liberty a little too exuberantly. Amy Spain’s slave master was Major Albertus C. Spain, a Mexican-American War veteran who owned a large…
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For Americans, the 4th of July is a great day of celebration; it is Independence Day. However, for three Presidents, it was not such a great day; it was the day they died. Two American Presidents, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both died on July 4, 1826. This date was the 50th anniversary of the…
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Most of us will have heard the phrase, “It’s raining cats and dogs.” The phrase is supposed to have originated in England in the 17th century. City streets were filthy then, and heavy rain would occasionally carry along dead animals. Richard Brome’s The City Witt, 1652, has the line, ‘It shall rain dogs and polecats.’…
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The first television commercial aired in the United States on July 1, 1941. This 9-second spot was for Bulova watches and was broadcast on NBC’s WNBT station before a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. The commercial featured a simple visual of a Bulova clock superimposed on a map of the…
History of Sorts 