He was born Henry McCarty on Nov. 23, 1859 in the Irish tenements of New York City. As a teenager, his family moved to Wichita and eventually New Mexico. After his mother died of tuberculosis when he was 14, his Read more…
The most famous pirate of the Golden Age of Piracy was born Edward Thach (more likely than Teach) in Bristol, Great Britain in 1680. He was a privateer (a legally sanctioned pirate encouraged to attack enemy shipping) during Queen Anne’s Read more…
Henrietta Robinson was born on Nov. 21, 1834. She came from a wealthy Quaker family. She learned business and finance from her father and grandfather. At age 13, she took over as accountant for her family business. At age 20, Read more…
On August 12, 1819 the whaling ship Essex set sail from Nantucket, the whaling capital of America. The voyage was supposed to last more than two years. On board were 21 men and a rookie captain named George Pollard, Read more…
The ceremony was for the dedication of the national cemetery on Nov. 19, 1863. It contained only the Union dead. Some of them were being buried during the ceremony. The town of Gettysburg had only 2,500 citizens and 15,000 people Read more…
This is the anniversary of the second worst mass civilian casualty event due to a deliberate act in American History. Here are some interesting facts. Jim Jones created the Peoples Temple in Indianapolis in 1956. Jones, a civil rights activist, Read more…
It is thought that Egyptian pharaoh Sensuret III had a canal built connecting the Red Sea to the Nile around 1850 B.C. Later, Persian Emperor Darius I constructed a similar east – west waterway. In 1798, during his Egyptian campaign, Read more…
Jack Sheppard became the most famous criminal in early 18th Century England. Born to poor parents in 1702, he was apprenticed to a carpenter. After five years, he was one year away from completing his training, but that’s when Read more…
Erwin Rommel was born on Nov. 15, 1891. His father was the headmaster of a school. As a boy, Erwin was described as gentle and unaggressive. He was interested in math and engineering and dreamed of becoming an aeronautical engineer. Read more…
Nellie Bly was the first investigative reporter. She had famously masqueraded as a mentally ill woman to go undercover in an insane asylum for ten days, among other sensational stunts for the New York World newspaper. By 1889, she Read more…