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In 1910, Senator Nelson Aldrich invited three bankers and two government officials to secretly meet at Jekyll Island to draw up plans for what would become the Federal Reserve System; their cover story was that they were going duck hunting.
Roger Lowenstein, America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve (New York: Penguin Press, 2015), 107-08.
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Prior to the U.S. joining the NATO military alliance in 1949, the only previous alliance the U.S. entered into was with France in 1778.
Gordon S. Wood, American Revolution: A History (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), 82. New York ratified the 15th Amendment on April 14, 1869, rescinded it on January 5, 1870, and ratified it again on March 30, 1870.
Allan J. Lichtman, The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding Fathers to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 87. When George Washington was selected to lead the Continental Army in 1775, his last military experience was 17 years prior.
James L. Nelson, George Washington’s Great Gamble: And the Sea Battle That Won the American Revolution (New York: McGraw Hill, 2010), 331. Prior to serving as president, James Monroe was a governor, senator, secretary of state, and secretary of war (called defense now).
Paul Brandus, Under This Roof: The White House and the Presidency (Guildord, CT: Rowan & Littlefield, 2015), 40. In 1898, South Dakota became the first state to allow citizens to be directly involved in lawmaking through the initiative and referendum processes.
Michael Waldman, The Fight to Vote (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 105. After the U.S.S.R. shot down the U.S.’s U-2 spy plane in 1960, the Soviets were able to recover wreckage of the plane as well as the pictures it took because the plane’s self-destruct mechanism was not powerful enough to destroy the evidence.
Francis Gary Powers, Jr. and Keith Dunnavant, Spy Pilot: Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 Incident, and a Controversial Cold War Legacy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2019), 79. Prior to the infamous Iran Hostage Crisis that started November 4, 1979 and lasted 444 days, nine months earlier, on February 14, 1979, U.S. embassy staffers were held hostage for four hours.
Antonio Mendez and Matt Baglio, Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History (New York: Viking, 2012), 8. People lost the ability to convert gold to U.S. dollars in 1933; foreign governments maintained that right until 1971.
Charles Wheelan, Naked Money: A Revealing Look at What It Is and Why It Matters (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), 145. After years of failed negotiations, in 1826 Britain agreed to pay over $1 million in reparations for slaves taken out of the U.S. during the American Revolution.
Fred Kaplan, Lincoln and the Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery, and the Civil War (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 123. The U.S.’s first use of aerial surveillance photography during a war came when Corporal William A. Eddy attached a camera to a kite during the Spanish-American War.
Heidi Boghosian, Spying On Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2013), 221. In 1921, the Bureau of Indian Affair’s Circular 1665 eliminated religious freedom for Native Americans; two years later the circular was modified to allow tribal members age 50-plus to participate in ceremonial dances on “one day in the midweek.”
David Treuer, Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life (New York: Tlantic Monthly Press, 2012), 96-97. The interest owed on the U.S.’s debt at the end of the 1780s, $4.5 million a year, was greater than the U.S.’s yearly revenue.
Fergus M. Bordewich, Washington: The Making of the American Capital (New York: Amistad, 2008), 34. The United States government made 371 treaties with Indigenous nations before the Indian Appropriation Act of 1871 banned the practice.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 142. When Nelson Rockefeller introduced Richard M. Nixon as the Republican Party’s nominee for president at the party’s convention in 1960, he incorrectly announced him as “Richard E. Nixon.”
David Pietrusza, 1960: LBJ vs. JFK vs. Nixon: The Epic Campaign that Forged Three Presidencies (New York: Union Square Press, 2008), 230. Republican President Herbert Hoover was excited Franklin D. Roosevelt was chosen as the Democratic Party’s candidate for president in 1932 because he thought Roosevelt was the weakest of the Democratic contenders.
William E. Leuchtenburg, Herbert Hoover (New York: Times Books, 2009), 138. General William Westmoreland was in Washington, D.C. during the 1968 riots following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination; he noted that D.C. “looked worse than Saigon did at the height of the Tet Offensive.”
Clay Risen, A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009), 162. In addition to outlawing slavery, Vermont’s constitution was ahead of the 13 original states by excluding a property requirement to vote and by mandating primary schools in every township.
Christopher S. Wren, Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom: Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys and the American Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 91. The total amount of money spent on public schools increased from $70,000,000 in 1871 to $200,000,000 at the turn of the century.
Fon W. Boardman, Jr., America and the Gilded Age: 1876 – 1900 (New York: Henry Z. Walck, Inc., 1972), 116. Voter turnout declined from 80% in the election of 1896 to 49% in the election of 1924.
Michael Waldman, The Fight to Vote (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016), 94. |
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