Harriet Tubman lived as a slave, and escaped from, the rough vicinity of Madison MD, which is about 60 miles southeast of Annapolis and on the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay (Annapolis is on the west of the bay). Her exact location is not known except for being somewhere in Dorchester County MD.
As with many slaves her exact year of birth is not known, but sometime around her late 20s or early 30s, in the year 1849, she escaped and walked mostly on foot almost 150 miles to the northeast, to Philadelphia PA.
When she crossed into Pennsylvania from either Maryland or Delaware (her exact route is not known), she realized she was free. She said, later, “When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.”
She did not share details of her route for a long time because it was being used by other slaves.
Tubman first returned to Maryland in 1851 to free more family members. Over 11 years she made repeated trips on foot between Philadelphia or St. Catharines, Ontario back to Maryland – a distance of over 400 miles.
Abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman was approved by the Obama Administration for placement on the $20 bill, replacing President Andrew Jackson. That decision was not explicitly reversed by the Trump Administration, but it was slow-walked, to say the least. Perhaps the Biden Administration will get things moving again on that front, too.
The city of Jackson, Mississippi is the state’s captial. It was originally a settlement called LaFleur’s Bluff, named after Louis LaFleur, a French-Canadian trader, and the area’s first European settler.
In 1821, the Mississippi general assembly, seeking to place the state’s permanent capital in a central location, selected LaFleur’s Bluff. As part of the selection, it was renamed Jackson, after Andrew Jackson, in honor of his victory at the Battle of New Orleans.
Jackson Hole is a valley in Western Wyoming. At the south end is Jackson, Wyoming and to the east Jackson Peak and to the northwest Jackson Lake, all named for William Henry Jackson
Jackson County Oklahoma was named after Stonewall, not Andrew.
The seat of that Jackson County is Altus, one of the few (maybe only) towns (with an anagram twin in the same state (Tulsa)
Stonewall’s state of birth changed during his lifetime – Clarksburg WV
The Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village, site of the 1969 riots which first brought gay rights into national prominence, was named a National Historic Landmark in 2000, during the Clinton Administration. It is the first LGBTQ-related site thus named.
Greenwich Mean Time, based on the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England, was established during the height of the British Empire. (The French had a different system, where the prime meridian was based on Paris.)
With the decline of the British Empire and greater recognition of the need for scientific neutrality, Greenwich Mean Time has been replaced by Universal Time, based on the time on the prime meridian of latitude (which happens to be the location of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich).
The Astronomer Royal is referred to in Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 comic opera The Pirates of Penzance, as to Feb. 29 and the recognition of leap years. Somewhat surprisingly (to me, at least), the opera premiered in New York City and not in London or any other British city.
The Arecibo Observatory, located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, was home to the Arecibo Telescope. Completed in 1963, it was the world’s largest single-aperture telescope for 53 years and played a part in key astronomical discoveries. Due to a number of failures in the supporting cables, the telescope was de-commissioned and was slated for demolition. However, on December 1 of this year, the remaining cables failed and parts of the structure fell over 400 feet onto the reflector disk.
Coquito, a traditional Puerto Rican Christmas drink, is sometimes called an eggnog, but it contains no egg. Its 4 main ingredients are coconut milk, coconut cream, Puerto Rican rum and condensed milk.
The Arecibo Observatory was the world’s largest fixed aperture radio telescope for 53 years until 2016 when the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (or, FAST) in south-central China came on line. It is about 250 miles south of Chongqing.
The first European settlement on Puerto Rico was founded by Juan Ponce de León in 1508. He named it Caparra, but in 1821 it was renamed to Puerto Rico, which means ‘rich port’. Eventually, the entire island was referred to as Puerto Rico, while the city itself became San Juan.
Kings of Leon are an American rock band, which formed in Nashville in 1999. The band consists of three brothers – Caleb, Nathan, and Jared Followill, and their cousin Matthew Followill.
The group named themselves after their grandfather, Leon, though the term “Kings of León” can also be used in references to the monarchs of the Kingdom of León, which existed on the Iberan Peninsula from 910 until 1230 CE, when it was incorporated into the Kingdom of Castile.
La Cueva de Leon, in Leon. Nicaragua, has the reputation for having the worst restaurant service in Latin America. It’s like a sit-down Soup Nazi, where you don’t have to stand in line.
Nicaragua is one of seven countries that comprise the area known as Central America. The others are Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, and Panama. Five of these countries border both the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Belize only borders the Caribbean, while El Salvador only borders the Pacific.
