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Rhode Island is the least populated state
Don’t judge a state by its small size—even if it’s the smallest state of Rhode Island, home to 1.06 million residents! Wyoming, the tenth largest state, is the least populated stated with only 579,000 residents.
The largest mountain carving is Mount Rushmore in South Dakota
But not for long, hopefully! The Crazy Horse Memorial, also in South Dakota, is the largest mountain carving in-progress. Once it’s completed, the proposed measurements will come in at 641 feet long and 563 feet high compared to Mount Rushmore, which only measures in at 60 feet high and 185 feet long. An Oglala Lakota Chief invited sculptor Korczack Ziolkowski to carve a memorial of Lakota leader Crazy Horse to honor all North American Indians. The construction has been ongoing since 1948. Issues with the rock face and reliance on private funding are to blame for the sculpture’s painstakingly slow construction.
Tennessee is the only state with most bordering U.S. states
Missouri and Tennessee both tie in this category with eight states each that border them. Colorado and Kentucky come in second with seven neighboring states.
Vermont has the most ski areas in the nation
When you think of snow and skiing, you probably think of Vermont. But the National Ski Areas Association reports that New York has the most ski resorts in the country with a whopping 52 ski areas compared to the 26 ski areas operating in Vermont.
The oldest city in America is Jamestown, Virginia
The distinction for the first U.S. settlement belongs to St. Augustine, Florida founded and established by the Spanish in 1565. Jamestown wasn’t settled until 1607. In 2015, St. Augustine celebrated its 450th birthday!
Washington holds the record for most consecutive rainy days
From 1939 to 1940, Maunawili Ranch on the Hawaiian island of Oahu saw 331 straight days of measurable rain, Brian Brettschneider, a climatologist with the University of Alaska-Fairbanks and the Western Regional Climate Center (WRCC) told weather.com. Meteorological records define measurable precipitation as 0.01 inches or more of rain and/or melted snow in a given day.
Kansas is the flattest state
Jokes abound about midwestern states like Kansas and Nebraska being flat as flat can be—but neither of those is the flattest state in the U.S.A. The actual flattest state is not in the midwest at all. A pair of geographers set out to determine if Kansas really was the flattest state by assessing every state’s topography in precise detail. Kansas turned out to only be the seventh flattest state, and Nebraska barely even cracked the top 20 at #19! The actual flattest state, their research found, is Florida. Another surprising result of the study? The least flat state is not a state in the Rocky Mountains vicinity—it’s West Virginia!
WELCOME TO PAGE 444 - 444 CI IS 7.3 LTS !!!
The Reuben originated in New York
What place in America comes to mind when you imagine sinking your teeth into a delicious, corned beef–loaded Reuben sandwich? It’s probably New York, right? You might even specifically think of the Carnegie Deli. But another state has a pretty valid (though impossible to fully prove) claim that it, not New York, is the place where the Reuben originated. That state is Nebraska, where, in 1934, the first-ever reference to a “Reuben” appeared on the menu of a hotel in Omaha. Nebraskans attribute the sandwich to a hotel cook, Bernard Schimmel, and the request of a hungry customer named Reuben Kulakofsky in the 1920s. New Yorkers insist that the sandwich that would become the Reuben was in fact the work of a sandwich shop owner named Arnold Reuben in 1914. Perhaps it was a case of multiple discovery.
North Carolina was the undisputed “first in flight”
Here’s another state face-off that rages to this day. History and aviation buffs know that the Wright brothers first flew an aircraft in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. You may have even visited the Wright Brothers Memorial, also in Kitty Hawk, where you can see the exact spots where the craft landed. But there’s another state that claims to be the site of the first-ever controlled, powdered airplane flight. And no, it’s not Ohio, even though Ohio is the state whose license plates say “Birthplace of Aviation.” (That’s because the Wright brothers were born in Ohio.)
The Pilgrims first landed on Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts
Yes, the Pilgrims docked the Mayflower in Massachusetts, but the iconic American landmark Plymouth Rock was not the first spot they landed. Nor was it their original destination—according to History.com, they were supposed to dock in Virginia but storms steered them toward Massachusetts instead. And they first landed, not in Plymouth, but in Provincetown, at the very tip of Cape Cod. They sent a scouting party ashore and then, a few weeks later, sailed to Plymouth, on the inner side of Cape Cod Bay.
BREAK TIME - I"LL BE BACK SOON !!!
Arizona was the last of the contiguous United States to become an official state
Okay, so this is a tricky one that is not technically false—Arizona was the 48th state added to the Union, succeeded only by Alaska and Hawaii. But when Congress approved Ohio’s request for statehood in 1803, they forgot to ratify the state constitution. It wasn’t until 150 years later, in 1953, that an Ohio Congressman sought to correct this error and make his state “officially” official. And though Congress backdated the state constitution to keep Ohio’s date of statehood as 1803, its ratification in 1953 would place it after Arizona, added in 1912, and before Alaska and Hawaii.
That state’s capital is…
State capitals—and the fact that only 17 of them are also the most populous city in their state—can cause a whole lot of confusion. To name a few state capital facts that seem counterintuitive, New York City is not the capital of New York, nor is Chicago the capital of Illinois. Neither Philadelphia nor Pittsburgh is the capital of Pennsylvania, and the capital of California is not Los Angeles, nor San Francisco, nor San Jose, nor San Diego.
The first Cheesehead hat was worn at a Green Bay Packers game in Wisconsin
If you’ve ever gone to a Green Bay Packers football game, you’ve probably seen fans don a giant foam wedge of cheese on their heads, famously known as the Cheesehead. It’s no wonder Wisconsinites are called cheeseheads, formerly a derogatory term reportedly coined by their neighboring state, Illinois. Ralph Bruno, a Milwaukee native and creator of the Cheesehead, crafted the popular headpiece with a turkey slicer in 1987 and wore it proudly for the first time at County Stadium in Milwaukee for a Brewers-White Sox game. The hat gained instant popularity and now people can pay about $25 for a large Cheesehead hat that weighs nearly one pound and measures 14 inches on each side.
Are you guys doing alright?
Alright is a relative term. I expect we are having fun, but I am not sure if we are alright, given the circumstances.
P.S. I am back from my break now. Time to get rolling again on the way to page 450.
Rosa Parks was not sitting in the white-only section
No one can deny that Rosa Parks played a pivotal role in the Civil Rights movement by refusing to move to the back of the bus for being African American, but one can deny she was sitting in the whites-only section. Back on that late December day in 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, History.com confirms that Ms. Parks was actually sitting in the first row of the middle section for African Americans—the “colored” section. But when more passengers boarded, the bus became packed and a white man was left standing. The driver then demanded Parks and three other African American passengers move further back so this man could take their seats. As the story goes, Rosa wouldn’t stand for it—and that earns her a spot in the ranks of pioneering women who changed history.
The Emancipation Proclamation only freed some slaves
If you thought this historical executive order put the final kibosh on slavery you’d be wrong. “Students think that it ‘freed the slaves,’ but in reality it only applied to those areas still controlled by the Confederacy and so didn’t actually free the slaves directly,” explains William D. Carrigan, chair and professor of history at Rowan University. “What it did was allow the slaves to ‘free themselves’ by running away to Union lines or the North (which between 500,000 and 700,000 did).” Carrigan explains that it was the 13th Amendment that actually put a final end to slavery. However, it wasn’t until December 1865, eight months after Lee surrendered to Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse, that the 13th Amendment was ratified.
The practice of Chinese foot-binding was not only about catching a man
Women have historically gone to extreme measures to meet cultural standards of beauty to attract the opposite sex, from wearing tight corsets to walking in heels. In China this standard of beauty was achieved by foot-binding. A young girl’s bones were broken and her feet tightly bound so that her “lotus feet” now appeared small and dainty. In their research book Bound Feet, Young Hands, authors Lauren Bossen and Hill Gates reveal that some girls’ feet were bound at a very young age not to catch a husband, but to force them to work. “What’s groundbreaking about our work is that [foot-binding was] not confined to the elite,” Laurel Bossen, the book’s co-author, told HuffPost. The study, Bossen added, dispels the view that the goal was only to try to please men.
The authors interviewed over 1,800 women across China to uncover that foot-binding was prevalent among many peasant families to create immobility for girls so that they would stick around doing handwork that families depended on for selling goods.
The Thanksgiving holiday commemorates a tragedy
Thankfully, this holiday has become one of heart-warming stories. Thanksgiving sure didn’t start off happy. According to Ramona Peters, the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe’s Tribal Historic Preservation Officer, quoted in the Indian Country Today Media Network, President Lincoln promoted the celebration of a happy meal between the Pilgrims and Indians to create a feeling of harmony and bring together the country after the Civil War. But there was nothing harmonious about how the Thanksgiving holiday came about—the massacre of an entire Indian tribe. In 1636, when a murdered man was discovered in a boat in Plymouth, English Major John Mason and his soldiers blamed the Pequot Indians. They then killed 400 of them in retribution, including women and children. The Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Newell, proclaimed: “From that day forth, shall be a day of celebration and thanks giving for subduing the Pequots.”
The Titanic didn’t sink because it hit an iceberg
People have long been fascinated with the tragedy of the unsinkable ship that hit an iceberg in 1912. Turns out it may not have been the iceberg that took the Titanic down in the North Atlantic, but a roaring fire. In a recent analysis of photos found in an attic that were taken by the ship’s electrical engineer experts have determined there was a fire burning in the ship’s hull unnoticed for three weeks before the collision. It took 12 men to try to contain the flames, but to no avail. By the time the Titanic hit the iceberg, the damage to the hull was too far gone and ship’s lining was torn open. In the 2017 documentary Titanic: The New Evidence, journalist Senan Molony said: “The official Titanic inquiry branded [the sinking] as an act of God. This isn’t a simple story of colliding with an iceberg and sinking. It’s a perfect storm of extraordinary factors coming together: fire, ice and criminal negligence.”
George Washington chopped down the term of his Presidency, not a cherry tree
Misinformation about Washington has made the rounds with school children and adults over the years, mostly about his teeth and chopping down his father’s cherry tree. Washington certainly wasn’t showing off a set of pearly whites when he smiled, but nor were his teeth made from wood, rather they were a combination of gold, ivory, lead, and human and animal teeth. And the cherry tree chopping tale never happened at all. That story grew out of a myth included in The Life of Washington, a book by Mason Locke Meems, George Washington’s first biographer. Then another writer, William Homes McGuffey, repeated the story in his children’s reader. So as the story goes although Washington couldn’t tell a lie, we’ve been telling one about him for over two hundred years.
Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the telephone
On the ABC show Shark Tank, the ‘sharks’—aka investors—are big on asking entrepreneurs if they’ve obtained a patent on their product. Rightly so as without a patent an idea or invention could be claimed by someone else. Back in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell didn’t need to watch Shank Tank to get their message: He wasn’t the inventor of the telephone like we were all taught—he was the first to patent it. Turns out Bell was actually one of several men who were working on the telephone idea at the same time, but he got to the patent office before them. However, in 2002 U.S. Congress recognized an impoverished Florentine immigrant as the inventor of the telephone rather than Alexander Graham Bell. The Guardian reported, “Historians and Italian-Americans won their battle to persuade Washington to recognize a little-known mechanical genius, Antonio Meucci, as a father of modern communications, 113 years after his death.”
The resolution declared Meucci’s “teletrofono”, demonstrated in New York in 1860, made him the inventor of the telephone in the place of Bell even though it was Bell who took out a patent 16 years later.
“It is the sense of the House of Representatives that the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged,” the resolution stated.
Anne Boleyn wasn’t sporting six digits
If Housewives of the Tudors were a thing, Anne Boleyn would certainly have been its star. For over four hundred years rumors have been flying when it comes to Henry VIII’s second wife. Not only did her husband cut ties with the Catholic Church to obtain a divorce and marry her, he eventually cut off her head for cheating on him. But like a reality show on steroids Anne Bolelyn’s saga didn’t end there. Speculation that she was a witch simmered over the years fueled by rumors she had six fingers on one hand. In a book written decades later by the Catholic propagandist Nicholas Sander he wrote the queen “…had a projecting tooth under the upper lip, and on her right hand, six fingers.” He also noted she hid an ugly cyst on her neck. Back then moles and other imperfections like extra fingers were the sign of the devil or witchcraft. Turns out Sanders had a vendetta against Anne’s daughter Queen Elizabeth I and may have made it all up. Plus people who actually hung out with the queen described her as a looker. According to History.com, George Wyatt, a biographer who spoke to Anne’s former attendants, noted that she did have several moles and an extra nail on the little finger of her right hand, but no sixth digit. And when a doctor exhumed the supposed burial site at the Tower of London back in the 19th century, none of the bodies showed any sign of an additional finger.
Pocahontas wasn’t crushing on John Smith
Disney had it all wrong. Pocahontas and John Smith never had a thing going. In fact, Pocahontas was only about eight years old when John Smith arrived, and was later married to another young Indian warrior who eventually died according to tribal oral histories as well as The True Story of Pocahontas, by members of the Mattaponi Tribe. Supposedly she had a baby that was given to relatives before she was forced into captivity at about 15 or 16 years of age. As Buck Woodard, a cultural anthropologist and former director of the American Indian Initiative at Colonial Williamsburg told Indian Country Today: “At a very young age, Pocahontas helped establish a relationship between the Algonquin and the English.” It was said there was a mutual admiration between her and Smith, who later described her as unrivaled in wit and spirit, but that’s where the love story ends—their “romance” is one of the famous moments in history that never actually happened.
Columbus took a shortcut and lucked out
Ah, Columbus. He proved the world wasn’t flat and discovered America to boot. Wrong. That’s not exactly what happened although we’ve been teaching it that way in schools for years and years. Truth is no one in 1492 believed the Earth was flat, according to the Washington Post. Columbus was just trying to prove you could get from Europe to China by sailing west rather than east. His shortcut plans got derailed when he hit land and discovered a whole new continent in the process. He ended up an esteemed player in the founding of America. The thing is, Columbus never even landed in what would become the United States—he actually landed in the Caribbean.
The Wright brothers weren’t the first to earn their wings
This brother team from Dayton, Ohio, did come up with the first truly controllable aircraft, we’ll give them that, but the real claim for first in flight fame goes to a German immigrant named Gustav Whitehead that occurred in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In 2013, Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft, which calls itself the world’s foremost authority on aviation history, named the August 1901 flight by Whitehead as the first successful powered flight in history, according to flyingmag.com. Jane reviewed evidence from aviation researcher John Brown that Whitehead may have made one and possibly two flights in a small monoplane of his own design (and powered by a tiny motor also of his own design) as early as 1901—two full years before the Wright Brothers.
Charles Lindbergh was not the first to cross the Atlantic by air
Many people have a fear of flying, but “Lucky Lindy” certainly knew the tricks to ease one’s flying nerves. After all, Charles Lindbergh did complete the 34-hour grueling flight from New York to Paris all by himself. But most people think he was also the first to fly nonstop across the Atlantic. Actually, he was around the 85th man to do so. The honor for number one goes to British pilots John Alcock and Arthur Brown who back in 1919 flew nonstop from Newfoundland to Ireland in a Vickers Vimy biplane before crash landing in a bog. Still, it wasn’t a small feat to cross the Atlantic by airplane between two major international cities on your own.