I was afraid of this – you took me seriously. But the smileys all seemed too blatant.
There is no way that Adams would ever have agreed to a peaceful reconciliation with Britain. I suspect Franklin wouldn’t either, but he’d be more ambiguous about it.
AFAIK, Adams’ frustration with franklin didn’t begin until he saw him in action in France. Adams didn’t dislike Franklin — they’d had dealing before.
Slavery wasn’t just a Southern phenomenon by any means. Boston was a major slave trading port as was Newport, RI. Most (all?) of the original colonies had legal slavery at one time. My in-laws have a census book documenting their tiny New Hampshire town that listed 9 African slaves in 1790 for example and that well well after the peak. This doesn’t include indentured servitude which was another matter.
New Orleans had a large free black population before the Civil War. It also had terms for the percent of black ancestry of the African population such as quadroon which indicated 1/4 black ancestry and octoroon which indicated 1/8 black ancestry. There were wealthy freed blacks in Southern Louisiana and elsewhere and even some black slaveowners.
The case of Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson caused quite a stir when DNA tests in the 1990’s strongly suggested that they had a long-term affair and children of their own. What is largely unreported is that Sally Hemmings was Thomas Jefferson’s sister-in-law via his late wife. Furthermore, she was just 1/4 black making her a quadroon and reported to look almost completely white despite remaining technically in slavery. The children that that Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings had together most likely looked completely white yet Thomas Jefferson seemed to adhere to the “one-drop” rule even for his own kids and refused to formally acknowledge them as such.
Another interesting factoid is that New Orleans held two distinct “black” populations for a long time, one free (the “colored Creoles”, who considered themselves to be basically French) and one not (what we now call African-Americans). It was a relatively pleasant place to live for non-Creole blacks before Jim Crow laws finally hit Louisiana. Eventually, “colored Creoles” were officially considered black, and fell down the social ladder at terminal velocity. One facet of this forced downward integration was this: the Creoles, whose musicians tended to be classically trained players of strictly European music, were finally forced to play with the blacks whose percussive, rhythmic music they had looked down their nose upon before. This was one of the reasons that New Orleans gave birth to jazz when it did.
It depends on how you define “Princeton.” There’s Princeton Borough, and there’s Princeton Township. Plus, everything between Trenton and New Brunswick is *called * Princeton This or Nassau That. There are several towns, or sections of towns, who use the prestigious 08540 zip code, including the southern end of Franklin Township, Kingston, which is actually in a different county. Only two of the codes, 08540 and 08542 are portions of town. Two others, 08541 and 08544, are codes for specific organizations, and the fifth, 08553, is used for PO boxes.
During the news reports on the Virginia Tech shooting one reporter called it “the worst school shooting in US history, but not the worst episode of school violence”. I was certain I would have heard of it if there had been a worse episode, I was wrong.
It caught me off guard because we think of school violence as a product of our times, but the odd psycho has always existed. This one really made me think because of the devastation to a small community that lost so many of its children.
(ETA: to MLS re township vs. borough) Are you sure we’re talking about the same country? 
During the early years of the French and Indian War, the British were dealt a bloody defeat by the French and their native allies at the Battle of Monongahela, also known as “Braddock’s Defeat”, after the British general in command of the action and who was killed during the battle. Among the officers fighting for the British in this battle were Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Gage (later the commander of British forces in North America at the start of the American Revolution) and Colonel George Washington of the Virginia Miitia (later to lead the Patriot forces against General Gage’s British troops).
Despite the crushing defeat, Colonel Washington came out of the whole affair as “The Hero of Monongahela”, after he took command and formed a rear guard to allow the British troops to retreat to safety, and he earned a reputation for coolness under fire.
During the Civil War, when almost half the Union Army in Tennessee had been exposed to STDs, the US Officials in Nashville (which had fallen by this time) actually militarized/nationalized (a case could be made for either) prostitution. Prostitutes had to have a license, they had to be checked by doctors twice weekly, they had to pay a tax that was used to pay the doctors for them and the Union troops, etc… Uniquely for a government run regulation of a trade, it seems to have worked beautifully for both troops and prostitutes. After the war, of course, prostitutes were sinners who required protection no more, so the incidents of VD went through the roof again.
Also during the Civil War: turn to the classifieds of the New York Times and most other major northern newspapers on almost any day (try this if you’ve microfilm- pick a day at random) and you’ll find blatant, only slightly veiled ads for abortion. Most speak of “natural cycles restored” or “obstructed menses cured”, and they range from less than a dollar for a tonic or tincture to several dollars for physician visits. Unwanted and or unwed pregnancies were epidemic, and deaths from quack potions and hack midwives and doctors were probably rather common as well.
The stupidest publicity stunt in history was probably the one that occurred in McLennan, Texas on September 15, 1896. More than 20,000 viewers gathered to watch two engines, both scheduled to be retired, from the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railroad crash into each other at top speed. The man responsible for the crash, whose name ironically was William Crush, had been assured that when the two engines (whose engineers had leapt off a few hundred feet before the crash) collided, they would both leap vertically into the air. Of course nobody had informed the two 60 ton steam engines, both heated to the point of near explosion, that this was the plan, so instead when they hit they both blew to hell and back and showered 20,000 people with tons and tons and tons of glowing hot missiles. Amazingly only 3 people were killed and a few more seriously injured. The crowd members who didn’t know any of the casualties, however, described it as thrilling and a total success.
The first slaves in Virginia were actually treated as indentured servants and given freedom, land, and money at the end of 7 or 10 years. Obviously, this didn’t last long (about a generation).
Patrick Henry’s first wife was insane. He kept her chained in the basement, but at least one of their children was conceived during this period. At the time the nation had only one lunatic asylum; it was in Williamsburg and was considered, even for the rich, to be less desirable than being chained in a basement.
Joseph Wheeler, promoted to general by Jefferson Davis when he was in his 20s, was the only Confederate general to later serve as a general in the United States military (albeit a volunteer corps). He was a hero of Teddy Roosevelt’s and was present for the charge up San Juan Hill.
Winston Churchill was once shown a new gun called “The bastard rifle” because it was half-American and half-English in manufacture and design. He is said to have remarked “Then what would you call me, who is also half-American and half-English in manufacture and design” (his mother being the American heiress, Jennie Jerome), to which the person demonstrating the rifle replied “I would call you… Winnie”.
Kinship in most southeastern Indian tribes (as well as many northeastern and western tribes) was 100% through the mother, meaning that a woman’s son or daughter was a member of her clan and entitled to all responsibilities and privileges thereof. Consequently, when Indian women began marrying and or mating with white men, and then their daughters did likewise, and so on, you came to a generation in which it was not uncommon for some tribe members to be 7/8 or more white (with blue eyes, fair skin, blonde hair even) or in some cases black (Indians owned and married with slaves) and yet they were 100% members of their mother’s clan by the reckoning of the Indians. For this reason, many Indian chiefs, such as Alexander McGillivray and William McIntosh, had British or otherwise European names and features. William Weatherford, a Creek Indian chief who abhorred his predominantly white blood much as a modern day Islamicist abhors any modernization of his country, was called Red Eagle when he led the Creek Nation in the war, and the reason he was called that was because he had red hair and freckles (and was by some accounts green eyed).
Cornelius Vanderbilt (ggg grandfather of Anderson Cooper) was the richest man in the world with an estate worth well over $100 million in 1877- many billions in today’s estimation. While not as psychotic as Hetty Green (he at least lived in a nice house and had horses he loved), he was so stingy that he bought his furniture and clothes second hand, and when his doctor advised him to drink white wine he asked couldn’t he drink soda water instead. He was so superstitious he slept with bowls of salt under his bed to repel evil spirits, and his oldest surviving son actually inherited 99% of his father’s estate by bribing his favorite spiritualist (Victoria Woodhull, first female stockbroker and first female presidential candidate) to convince the old man that his other 11 children were all plotting against him.
When a man who worked for Vanderbilt tried to cash a large forged check on the old bastard’s account he was immediately arrested. The banker knew it was a forgery for the simple reason that Vanderbilt never used the pre-printed checks he was issued by the bank because there was a charge to replace them once they were gone; instead he used pieces of scrap paper when he needed to write a check and the banker recognized his signature and handwriting.
Eli Whitney, who invented the cotton gin, claimed to have gotten the inspiration for the invention while watching a cat pull the body of a chicken through the wire of the coop.
Sacagawea’s husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, had a thing for adolescent Indians. He was married to two of them at the time of the expedition, both of them recently acquired in a trade, and had earlier been almost fatally stabbed by the mother of an adolescent Indian girl he sexually assaulted. When he died in the 1840s he was about 86 years old and his widow, who was at least his 7th wife, was about 15.
No American president has ever been the only child of both of their parents (though several have had only half-siblings).
FDR and Eleanor had one of the most complicated relationships of any first couple. They by all accounts loved and respected each other but they had a miserable marriage and would have divorced had Franklin’s mother not informed him she’d cut him off without a nickel (and she would have- very tough old broad) as she knew it would ruin his political future. He contented himself with mistresses, most notably Lucy Mercer, who he had an affair with in the 1910s and later in the 1940s. He was unique among older rich and powerful men in that his preferred mistress was his age.
During WWII there was a project to test the merits of making a super-sized (2,000,000 tonnes displacement - a Nimitz class CVN displaces 100,000 tonnes, fully loaded.) aircraft carrier out of a wood-pulp and water ice material known as Pykrete. While begun under British auspices, and the test project was on Lake Alberta in Canada, it was a joint project funded by both the UK and US.
Pictures from this event do exist, and they get used a lot in boiler safety classes.
And, yes, the universal opinion I’ve heard is that it was sheer idiocy. And that it would have been really, really cool to see - from an armored bunker. 
The first use of U.S. Marines as an amphibious invasion force was at Guantanamo Bay Cuba during the Spanish American War. The landing and the later Battle of Cuzco Wells (which is within the confines of the current naval base) was covered by a young reporter, Stephen Crane.
Mark Twain was a correspondent in Hawaii for a while for a California newspaper. His stories from that time are priceless. I especially remembered his thoughts on visiting the Kilauea volcano on the Big Island while the wife and I were visiting it ourselves.
One of the greatest myths about the Flying Tigers is that they were fighting the Japanese well before the attack on Pearl Harbor. This is not true. They were in place and undergoing training, but they did not enter combat until several days after the Pearl Harbor attack.
Talk about a trooper- one of the photographers was blinded in one eye (artist representation: ;)).
The history of television traces its origins to the sinking of the Titanic, the Russian pogroms, and a 14 year old Mormon farmboy. I won’t go into the really really long explanation, but a google of David Sarnoff and Philo Taylor Farnsworth should do it.
Aleksandr Kerenski, the Prime Minister of the government that deposed the last Tsar (and who was in turn deposed by Lenin), spent his mornings during the last few years of his life doing the same thing many other old men do each morning: feeding the pigeons in Central Park. Several people who became friendly with the old man with the accent were very shocked when he died to learn of his role in world history.
A century before General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna of The Alamo fame had also been a devotee of Central Park while in exile. He was pretty much broke, Swiss accounts not existing yet, but the U.S. government, determined to milk him for any useful info, paid for the services of a private secretary, a bilingual middle aged man named Thomas Adams. Adams hit it off with the old man and became addicted [not literally] to the dried sapodilla sap that the one legged old tyrannical has-been brought with him from Mexico and chewed on constantly. A few years later Santa Anna was allowed to return to Mexico. “The Napoleon of the West”, as he once styled himself, a man who had carried a jeweled silver plated full-sized bathtub with him on campaign and spent the equivalent of millions USD on a funeral for his amputated leg and kept a dozen mistresses and numerous relatives and hangers on living in opulence, died blind and crippled and penniless in the shack of a peasant cousin, while his former secretary Adams marketed a flavored version of sapodilla sap (chicle) as Tutti Frutti Chewing Gum and became a millionaire.
There’s also a Union Army barracks at Two Harbors on Catalina Island, isn’t there? Set up at about the same time? Similar purpose, presumably?
I need a little help here; I seem to recall in doing some research for a college paper that one of the famous names from the Old West actually got a start running a stagecoach between Los Angeles and San Bernardino - but I can’t remember the name.
The paper was a report on another curious little fact of Southern California history; that before the LA/Long Beach breakwater was built, one of the railroad barons lobbied Congress to spend the money on a breakwater at Santa Monica, instead - because that’s where the baron already had a rail line.
(It would have been a far poorer choice - the water off Santa Monica is much deeper than the water off of San Pedro, so the breakwater would have been more expensive and the harbor would have been smaller.)
I seem to recall reading that it actually came down to a pretty close vote.
Alabama is the only state to have a card carrying member of the Communist Party on their quarter, an irony that I’ve never once heard addressed. Helen Keller is most famous today for The Miracle Worker, which covers only the first 8 years of her 88 year life. It’s largely forgotten today that in adulthood she was an outspoken (no bad joke intended) and devout Communist who named Lenin with Jesus Christ and Thomas Edison among the three greatest people who had ever lived. She was also an ardent feminist who believed in legalized abortion and birth control, and her hatred of racism [a particularly stupid thing to a blind person] led her to break off communications with her father and to a long estrangement from her mother and siblings.
She also had a ribald sense of humor and even liked some Helen Keller jokes (though I’m sure she didn’t hear some of the ones I’ve heard). When she was read the dismal reviews of her silent movie, Deliverance, she remarked “Well at least I have an excuse for not knowing what I was doing- the director and writers cannot say the same”. As an old woman she was told by her doctor that she had to give up her daily toddy and occasional cigarette (in case you’re wondering, somebody else lit it for her and made sure it was attended) she refused and gave the response “I’m old, I’m blind, I’m deaf, my mind is going. What the hell else is going to happen?”
Rutgers University, too.
From the link:
The Old Queens campus is rife with history dating several years before the construction of the Old Queens building. During the American Revolution, Alexander Hamilton commanded a battery of artillery which fired upon British positions under the command of William Howe, 5th Viscount Howe to provide time for General George Washington to escape south through New Brunswick in 1777 following the fall of New York City
Not quite a battle, but still pretty good.
IIRC, they were still operating more or less on their own for a time after Pearl Harbor before they were integrated into the USAAF.
Gore Vidal tells a story that was related to him by a Hollywood actress that both he and JFK knew. She told him that JFK liked to have sex in hot tubs and just as he was about to climax he would push the girl’s head under water. The surprise and panic caused vaginal contractions which the president believed heightened the effects of his own orgasm. Seymour Hersh who wrote a book about JFK told Vidal that he had heard the same story (not about the actress but about JFK’s pecccadillo) from a Secret Service agent who procured hookers for JFK and he wondered if Vidal had made the story up. Vidal said that not only did he not make up the story he could not even have thought up the story.
Ohio and Michigan almost went to war with each other.
In the end, Ohio got Toledo and Michigan got most of the UP.
I’ve been to both, and must say Michigan got the better end of the deal. 