“City of New Orleans” is a song, written by singer-songwriter Steve Goodman, about riding the titular passenger train from Chicago to New Orleans.
The song has been covered by numerous artists, and was a hit for both Arlo Guthrie (in 1972) and Willie Nelson (in 1984). It has also been covered by a number of European artists; many of them have used the song’s melody, but with different (often non-English) lyrics and themes.
Among the most scenic passenger train rides in the USA, according to thrillist.com, is the White Pass & Yukon Railroad heading northeast out of Skagway, Alaska up to White Pass Summit and Summit Lake at the Canadian border. The route follows the White Pass and the Chilkoot Trail up the Chilkoot Pass, the same routes climbed by foot during the Klondike Hood Rush of 1897.
The Canadian authorities required each of the “Klondikers” to bring a year’s supply of food, to prevent starvation. In all, the Klondikers’ equipment weighed close to a ton, which most carried themselves, in stages.
In the summer of 1899, gold was discovered around Nome in west Alaska, and many prospectors left the Klondike for the new goldfields. This marked the end of the Klondike Gold Rush.
The California Gold Rush began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. The first people to rush to the goldfields, beginning in the spring of 1848, were the residents of California themselves. Soon, prospectors from Oregon, Hawaii, and Mexico made their way to California. By the beginning of 1849, word of the Gold Rush had spread around the world, and an overwhelming number of gold-seekers and merchants began to arrive from virtually every continent. It is estimated that approximately 90,000 people arrived in California in 1849—about half by land and half by sea. Of these, perhaps 50,000 to 60,000 were Americans, and the rest were from other countries. Merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush; Levi Strauss was one of these, selling denim to miners.
Sam Brannan, who had led a group of Mormon pioneers to California, had opened a store in Sutter’s Fort, not far from Sutter’s Mill. After the discovery of gold, he purchased every available pick, pan, and shovel in California. In the next seventy days he sold $36,000 in equipment, which would be close to a million bucks today.
Brannan Street in San Francisco was named after the same Sam Brannan.
Patriot leader Sam Adams is depicted in Robert Lawson’s 1953 children’s book, Mr. Revere and I (told as if by Paul Revere’s horse, Sherry) as a blowhard, a rabble-rouser, a spendthrift and a mooch, with a talent for dropping in at the Reveres’ home at mealtime.
The Patriot League is a collegiate athletic conference, consisting of schools in the northeastern U.S. The United States Naval Academy and the United States Military Academy are core members of the Patriot League; the other core members are all private universities: American University, Boston University, Bucknell University, Colgate University, College of the Holy Cross, Lafayette College, Lehigh University, and Loyola University Maryland.
Most of the Patriot League’s schools are highly exclusive, and the league’s schools have a very high student-athlete graduation rate.
Currently on display in an Ellis Island exhibit on immigration restriction is this 1926 quote by George Cutten, then president of Colgate University:
“The danger the ‘melting pot’ brings to the nation is the breeding out of the higher divisions of the white
race and the breeding in of the lower divisions.”
The Melting Pot is a chain of fondue restaurants across the United States and one location in Canada.
Ken Burns noted in his documentary on the Statue of Liberty that - notwithstanding the melting pot ideal of American society - in all the hours of speeches at the 1886 dedication of the statue (including by President Grover Cleveland), there was not one word about immigration.
Frank Oz is a puppeteer, actor, and filmmaker, who initially rose to fame as one of the main “Muppeteers” for Jim Henson’s Muppets. Oz was the original performer for several of the primary Sesame Street Muppets, including Bert, Cookie Monster, and Grover, as well as the non-Sesame Street characters Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Animal, and Sam the Eagle. Oz was also the puppeteer/performer of Yoda in the Star Wars films.
David Harbour, while hosting SNL, did a parody of the movie Joker called “Grouch” - a dark origin story of Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street.
Arriving just ahead of Christmas this year, The Mean One is a dark retooling of Dr Seuss’ beloved children’s fable, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” David Howard Thornton stars as the titular character and Krystle Martin plays the adult Cindy (aka “Cindy Lou Who”) who returns to her hometown after suffering severe mental trauma from when, as a child, she encountered the monster.
According to NPR, the idiomatic phrase ‘OK’ originated with our 8th President, Martin Van Buren. Van Buren was born in Kinderhook, New York, and earned the nickname ‘Old Kinderhook’. His supporters shortened the nickname to ‘OK’, and the rest is history.
Other sources tell of a different origin for the phrase, however.
The term “kindergarten” (German for “garden of children”) was coined by German pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel in 1840, reflecting his belief that young children should be nurtured, “like plants in a garden.” The kindergarten movement quickly spread to other countries, often by female instructors who had trained under Fröbel; the first true kindergarten school in the U.S. was started in Watertown, Wisconsin in 1856, by one of Fröbel’s former students, Margarethe Schurz.
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. They were described as a remarkable feat of engineering with an ascending series of tiered gardens containing a wide variety of trees, shrubs, and vines, resembling a large green mountain constructed of mud bricks.
The Hanging Gardens are the only one of the Seven Wonders for which the location has not been definitively established. There are no extant Babylonian texts that mention the gardens, and no definitive archaeological evidence has been found in Babylon. Three theories have been suggested to account for this: firstly, that they were purely mythical; secondly, that they existed in Babylon, but were destroyed sometime around the first century AD; and thirdly, that the legend refers to a well-documented garden that was built on the River Tigris, near the modern city of Mosul.
The hanging of Louis Riel, Métis leader in western Canada, occurred on November 16, 1885 in Regina, North-West Territories.
The Métis flag, adopted in 1816, predates the Flag of Canada by at least 150 years. The Flag of Canada was adopted in 1965. The Métis flag is the oldest patriotic flag indigenous to Canada. It is a white lemniscate on either a blue or red background.
The term “lemniscate” for curves of this type comes from the work of Jacob Bernoulli in the late 17th century. A lemniscate, ∞, is a hippopede, which is a plane curve determined by an equation of the form (x² + y²)² = cx² + dy² for constants c and d, where c > d > 0. Hippopedes are bicircular rational algebraic curves of degree 4 and are symmetric with respect to both the x and y axes.
There has never been, since the establishment of the United Nations, an all-blue or an all-red national flag without any other insignia. The national flag of Libya under the Qaddafi regime was an all-green flag, however.
According to the Guinness folks, the most common color that appears on national flags is red, which can be found on 74% of national flags. White is a close second at 71%, while blue ranks third at 50%.