Historical Facts
Research has revealed that pre-humans living 75,000 years ago customized tools and created decorative patterns. There is evidence that women wore necklaces made of shells.
According to both the Hebrew Bible and the Qur'an, Abraham is the forefather of many tribes, including the Ishmaelites, Israelites, Midianites and Edomites. Abraham was a descendant of Noah's son, Shem. Christians and Jews believe that Jesus is a descendant of Abraham, while Muslims believe that Muhammad was a descendant, through Ishmael.
As fewer people created their own goods after the Industrial Revolution, expert knowledge of handiwork skills and materials became obsolete. Leftovers and scraps that were once considered valuable and reusable became trash. The first organized incineration of trash began in England in 1874.
The first census was carried out by the French, in New France (later Quebec), when Jean Talon, who was in charge of the colony, traveled on horseback to count every individual. This took place in 1666, and he counted 3,215, but didn't include any of the native population.
On April 6, 1896, the Olympic Games, a long-lost tradition of ancient Greece, were reborn in Athens 1,500 years after being banned by Roman Emperor Theodosius I. At the opening of the Athens Games, King Georgios I of Greece and a crowd of 60,000 spectators welcomed athletes from 13 nations to the international competition.
When it was time to build the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., a contest was held to select the architect. The winner was William Thorton, a doctor and amateur architect, who received $500 and a city lot as his prize.
In 1897, Adelaide Hunter founded the Federation of Women's Institutes of Canada. This early feminist also helped found the National Council of Women, the Victorian Order of Nurses and the YWCA in Canada.
In 1893, the first mosque in the United States was built.
The first agreement to form a stock exchange in New York was made in 1792 by 24 brokers standing under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street. The New York Stock Exchange was formally founded 25 years later. The exchange provided capital for the industrialization of the US in the 19th century and is today the world’s largest securities market.
On July 19, 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, a French soldier discovered a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles north of Alexandria. The irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic. The ancient Greek on the Rosetta Stone told archaeologists that it was inscribed by priests honoring the king of Egypt, Ptolemy V, in the second century B.C. More startlingly, the Greek passage announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning. The artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a written language that had been “dead” for nearly 2,000 years.
The world's first underground was the London Underground in 1863. It has 275 stations and 253 miles of track.
Yellowstone was established as the world's first National Park on March 1, 1872. It is larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined and resides in three different states - Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. You can cross the Continental Divide more than once while traveling through Yellowstone. It has the largest concentration of free-roaming wildlife in the lower 48 states. There are approximately 10,000 geothermal features within the park.
But the largest National Park in the U.S. is Adirondack Park. It covers six million acres across upstate New York. It is bigger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon combined.
The presidential faces on Mount Rushmore are as high as a five-story building, about 60 feet from chin to top of the head. The pupils of eyes are 4 feet across and the mouths are 18 feet wide. The carving took 14 years, from 1927-1941. The total cost was about $990,000. A total 450,000 tons of stone was removed.
General George Armstrong Custer graduated at the bottom of his West point class in 1861.
Amedeo Giannini, son of Italian immigrants to the US, started the Bank of America in a converted saloon in San Francisco 1904. Giannini changed the name to Bank of America in 1928 and remained chairman until 1963.
The first credit card was issued in 1951.
The world's first nuclear reactor was built in a squash court beneath a Chicago football stadium on December 2, 1942. While it only generated enough power to light a flashlight, it proved that nuclear power was feasible.
The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago was opened in 1893, as part of the Columbian Exposition (the World's Fair that transformed Chicago's downtown). In 1933, they changed their name officially to the Museum of Science and Industry, and built a working coal mine. In 1954, the obtained a submarine, and in 1994, a 727 jet plane.
In 1829, James Smithson, a British scientist, died in Italy, leaving behind a will with a peculiar footnote. In the event that his only nephew died without any heirs, Smithson decreed that the whole of his estate would go to “the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” Smithson’s curious bequest to a country that he had never visited aroused significant attention on both sides of the Atlantic. On August 10, 1846, after a decade of debate, President James K. Polk signed the Smithsonian Institution Act into law.
At the turn of the last century, Ward McAllister compiled a list of New York City's “Four Hundred,” the elite aristocrats who ran corporations and social life. The number was supposedly how many people could fit into Mrs. William Astor's ballroom.
The term National Socialist—or Nazi, for short—was added to the name of the German Workers’ Party the year after it was founded. On the day it was renamed, swiftly-rising new member Adolf Hitler outlined the party’s official platform before 2,000 people, its largest audience yet. During the Great Depression, millions of jobless voters joined the party, and in 1932 it became the largest bloc in the Reichstag.
Using Xs at the end of a letter for kisses started in the Middle Ages when people couldn't write and used crosses as signatures.
Kissing at the conclusion of a wedding ceremony can be traced to ancient Roman tradition where a kiss was used to sign contract.
Francis Scott Key was a young lawyer who wrote the poem, The Star Spangled Banner, after being inspired by watching the Americans fight off the British attack of Baltimore during the War of 1812. The poem became the words to the national anthem.
A 1784 satire written by Benjamin Franklin proposed taxing shutters, rationing candles, and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise. But he didn't actually suggest Daylight Savings Time. That didn't come until William Willett conceived DST in 1905, and it wasn't widely accepted until 1916.
Former U.S. President James Garfield could write with both hands at the same time, and in two different languages!
Jimmy Carter was the first U.S. president born in a hospital.
An only child has never been elected as President of the United States.
Hewlett-Packard, Revlon and La-Z-Boy all established their businesses during the Great Depression.
Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952, but he declined.
The first city to reach a population of 1 million people was Rome, Italy, in 133 B.C. There is a city called Rome on every continent.
On August 24, 79AD, after centuries of dormancy, Mount Vesuvius erupted in southern Italy, devastating the prosperous Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and killing thousands. The cities, buried under a thick layer of volcanic material and mud, were never rebuilt and largely forgotten in the course of history. In the 18th century, Pompeii and Herculaneum were rediscovered and excavated, providing an unprecedented archaeological record of the everyday life of an ancient civilization, startlingly preserved in sudden death.
Romans discovered that mixing lead with wine not only helped preserve wine, but also gave it a sweet taste. It's now thought that chronic lead poisoning was one of the causes of the decline of Rome.
Roman coins were used to publicize the emperor, his achievements, and his family in a world with no mass media.
Stacy Schiff's biography of Cleopatra reveals that women in ancient Egypt were able to buy land, become mathematicians, doctors and poets, unlike the rest of the ancient world. They had many legal opportunities unavailable to women anywhere else for the next 2000 years.
Florida did not become part of the United States until Spain surrendered it in a treaty in 1819. It didn't actually became a state until 1845.
Damascus, Syria, was flourishing a couple of thousand years before Rome was founded in 753 BC, making it the oldest continuously inhabited city in existence.
In 1907, the first taxis in the U.S. arrived in New York City.
The first coast to coast telephone was established in 1914.
New Haven, Connecticut, was the first planned city in the U.S., and Yale University was the first planned campus. Yale was also the first college to have a mascot, published the first college daily newspaper, and appointed America's first professor of paleontology.
On May 10, 1869, the presidents of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads meet in Promontory, Utah, and drive a ceremonial last spike into a rail line that connects their railroads. This made transcontinental railroad travel possible for the first time in U.S. history.
1765, in an effort to raise funds to pay off debts and defend the vast new American territories won from the French in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), the British government passed the Stamp Act. This levied a direct tax on all materials printed for commercial and legal use in the colonies, from newspapers and pamphlets to playing cards and dice. These stamps on playing cards are a remnant of that tax.
In the middle of the 18th century, Chippendale had a thriving cabinet and furniture-making business, produced the first catalog of his designs. At the same time, wallpaper became an affordable way to decorate the walls of the middle class, who couldn't afford expensive tapestries, and the Sheffield silver company began to produce a less expensive version of silver: a thin layer of silver fused over a copper base. This "silver-plated" flatware and serving pieces remained popular through the beginning of the 20th century.
General Gen. George Armstrong Custer graduated at the bottom of his West point class in 1861.
President James Garfield could write Latin with one hand and Greek with the other hand simultaneously.
In 1885, the Statue of Liberty, a gift of friendship from the people of France to the people of the United States, arrived in New York City’s harbor. Originally known as “Liberty Enlightening the World,” the statue was proposed by French historian Edouard Laboulaye to commemorate the Franco-American alliance during the American Revolution. Designed by French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, the statue is 151 feet tall.
At the turn of the last century, Ward McAllister compiled a list of New York City's “Four Hundred,” the elite aristocrats who ran corporations and social life. The number was supposedly how many people could fit into Mrs. William Astor's ballroom.
The U.S. Constitution embodies the fundamental principles upon which the American republic is conducted. It was drawn up at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and signed in 1787, and it was ratified by the required number of states the following year. It superseded the Articles of Confederation in force since 1781 and established the system of federal government that began to function in 1789. It includes seven articles and a preamble.
The American Civil War provided rural doctors with training in hospital organization, safer surgical techniques, improved anesthesia, embalming techniques, and an organized ambulance corps. It also resulted in 15,000 miles of new telegraph lines, mass production of canned food, can openers, home-delivered mail, and a national paper currency.
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