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Thomas Jefferson directed the University of Virginia to require all law students to read President George Washington’s Farewell Address.
John Avlon, Washington’s Farewell: The Founding Father’s Warning to Future Generations (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 6-7.
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When Democrat Huey Long planned a third party run for president in 1936 against Democratic incumbent President Franklin Roosevelt, he knew he was unlikely to win, but he was hoping to undermine Roosevelt’s ability to win reelection so that the Republican candidate would win, do a poor job of managing the economy, and thereby make it easier for Long to win the presidency as the Democratic Party’s candidate in 1940.
Richard D. White, Jr., Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long (New York: Random House, 2006), 242. Of the approximately $20 billion the U.S.’s Coalition Provisional Authority had sent to Iraq starting in 2003, at least $11.7 billion went missing.
James Risen, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), 19. 464 men were killed or injured working in Colorado mines in 1913.
David Traxel, Crusader Nation: The United States in Peace and the Great War, 1898 – 1920 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 105. From 2010 through 2018, the U.S. Department of Energy tracked and took possession of 160 nuclear bombs-worth of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium from around the world.
Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk (Great Britain: Allen Lane, 2018), 41. Secretary of State William Henry Seward’s 1867 deal in which the U.S. purchased Alaska was widely supported in the press in the spring of that year, however, it is commonly said to have been considered “Seward’s Folly” at the time; that conception was incorrectly applied years later.
Walter Stahr, Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 487-88. The 1920 census showed for the first time that the U.S.’s urban population was higher than the rural population.
Eric Burns, 1920: The Year That Made the Decade Roar (New York: Pegasus Books, 2015), 90. When Chief Sitting Bull was invited to speak at the Northern Pacific Railroad’s ceremony to mark the completion of its transcontinental railroad track in 1883, he denounced the audience by calling them “thieves” and “liars”; his speech was given a standing ovation nevertheless because the translator spoke the kinder remarks of Sitting Bull’s previously prepared text.
Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (London: Vintage, 1991), 426-27. As a lieutenant in the Army, John Ross fought alongside Andrew Jackson during the Creek War in 1814, but as Cherokee leader in the 1830s, he fought against President Jackson in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the removal of the Cherokee due to the Indian Removal Act.
Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 428. During the Civil War, Union General David Hunter gave an order freeing slaves in three Southern states, and he formed the first black Army regiment; President Abraham Lincoln reversed both actions.
Erik Loomis, A History of America in Ten Strikes (New York: The New Press, 2018), 37. Before the British burned the President’s House (White House) during the War of 1812, the troops drank some wine and ate some of the food that had been prepared for dinner.
Gene Allen Smith, The Slaves’ Gamble: Choosing Sides in the War of 1812 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 123. When speaking in opposition to the Aldrich-Vreeland bill in 1908, Senator Robert La Follette broke the record for the longest filibuster by speaking for 18 hours and 23 minutes; lines of spectators wanting to watch filled the Capitol’s halls.
Michael Wolraich, Unreasonable Men: Theodore Roosevelt and the Republican Rebels Who Created Progressive Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2014), 119-20. George Washington surrendered Fort Necessity at the start of the French and Indian War on July 4, 1754.
Walter R. Borneman, The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 41. The size of the U.S. force used in Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003 – 2011) peaked at 240,000 U.S. troops, less than half the amount used in Operation Desert Storm (1991).
Mark K. Updegrove, The Last Republicans: Inside the Extraordinary Relationship Between George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 338. Check out the Civics 101 features including notes and links to videos that make learning important topics easy and interesting - great if you are learning civics for the first time or are just brushing up. When Ulysses S. Grant worked in finance in New York City after his presidency, Mark Twain often visited him at his office.
Charles Bracelen Flood, Grant’s Final Victory: Ulysses S. Grant’s Heroic Last Year (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2011), 8. Although Charles Carroll attended the First Continental Congress, he was not officially part of Maryland’s delegation because of his Roman Catholic faith; two years later he attended the Second Continental Congress and became the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence.
Jay P. Dolan, The Irish Americans: A History (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 14. From the end of the Civil War to 1890, the number of college students increased from 50,000 to 150,000.
James Piereson, Shattered Consensus: The Rise and Decline of America’s Postwar Political Order (New York: Encounter Books, 2015), 270. Of the 3,600 Jamestown settlers who arrived between 1619 – 1622, 3,000 died.
Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (New York: Viking, 2006), 5. During the War of 1812, President James Madison appointed his secretary of state, James Monroe, to also serve as secretary of war.
Charles A. Cerami, Jefferson’s Great Gamble: The Remarkable Story of Jefferson, Napoleon and the Men Behind the Louisiana Purchase (Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2003), 266. At a CIA prison in Afghanistan called the “Salt Pit,” in 2002 a wet, naked, and chained prisoner died of hypothermia overnight in his cell; he was buried in an unmarked grave.
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 225. |
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