Purdue University and the cities of Lafayette and West Lafayette, IN are in Tippecanoe County, Indiana. The Tippecanoe River is 182 miles long and lies entirely in north-central Indiana.
The name “Tippecanoe” comes from a Native American Miami-Illinois word for buffalo fish, kiteepihkwana.
The Roe River near Great Falls, Montana was once listed as the shortest river in the United States by the Guinness Book of World Records. The river, such as it is, flows from Giant Springs to the Missouri River and has a total length of 201 feet.
Guinness no longer lists a shortest river in the United States.
The Wade in the key abortion-rights decision Roe v. Wade was Dallas District Attorney Henry Wade. He was also the Texas official who would have prosecuted Lee Harvey Oswald for the Nov. 22, 1963 murder of President John F. Kennedy and Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit. There was no Federal law against attacking or killing the President at the time.
Jane Roe in Roe v. Wade is a pseudonym, for Norma McCorvey. Later in her life she was an opponent of abortion rights. She said, “You know what? I now feel very strongly that abortion ought to be legal, but only through the first trimester of pregnancy. Because after that, you might be killing a baby.”
Norma McCorvey was represented by Sarah Weddington. When Weddington argued Roe v Wade, ultimately in front of the Supreme Court, she was only 26 years old and it was her first case.
The case of Roe v. Wade was heard and ruled upon by the Burger Court (1969 - 1986). Of the nine male justices, one was appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, two by Dwight D. Eisenhower, one by John F. Kennedy, one by Lyndon B. Johnson (Thurgood Marshall, the first person of color appointed to the SCOTUS), and four by Richard M. Nixon (including Chief Justice Warren E. Burger).
Years before he was named to the Supreme Court of the United States, attorney Thurgood Marshall led the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. In that role, Marshall won 29 of the 32 civil rights cases he argued before the Supreme Court, including the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954.
Thurgood Marshall is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, in Arlington VA.
In December 1955, Thurgood Marshall married Cecilia “Cissy” Suyat, a secretary for the NAACP, after his first wife Vivian died of cancer. Suyat was Filipino-Hawaiian, born in Maui to parents who migrated there in 1910. She feared that their interracial marriage might attract negative attention to both the NAACP and Marshall, but Marshall’s response was, “So what?”
On 14 November 1970, the Douglas DC-9 of Southern Airways Flight 932, flying from Kinston NC to Huntington WV crashed and killed all 75 people on board. On board were 37 members of Marshall University Thundering Herd football team plus 8 members of its coaching staff, and 25 team boosters. 5 on board worked for the flight or airline. The Marshall Thundering Herd were returning home after a 17–14 loss to the East Carolina Pirates in Greenville NC. This crash is recognized as "the worst sports-related air tragedy in US history.
This was the second college football team plane crash in a little over a month, after the October 2 crash that killed 31 (head coach, 14 Wichita State players, and 16 others).
East Carolina University started in 1907 as a teacher training school for North Carolina.
The “Carolina” in the names of the states of North Carolina and South Carolina is a reference to King Charles I of England (“Carolus” in Latin); the name was given to the region by his son, Charles II, when he created the Province of Carolina in 1663.
In June 1718, the pirate Blackbeard ran his flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, aground at Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, in present-day Carteret County. After the grounding her crew and supplies were transferred to smaller ships. In November 1718, after appealing to the governor of North Carolina, who promised safe-haven and a pardon, Blackbeard was killed in an ambush by troops from Virginia.
Queen Anne’s Lace is also referred to as Wild Carrot, Bee’s Nest-plant, Devil’s Plague, and Bird’s-Nest.
Although Queen Anne’s Lace is edible as a carrot, it looks very similar to the poison hemlock which (as its name implies) is very poisonous as Socrates found out and has no antidote that we know of.
Out of play: Like mushroom hunting, unless you know exactly what you’re doing and are willing to have your insides liquified if you are wrong, if you see what you think is Queen Anne’s Lace in the wild and wonder if it does taste like a carrot DON’T DO IT!
Queen Anne, who ruled Great Britain and Ireland from 1702 until her death in 1714, ascended to the throne after the death of her brother-in-law, William III. Despite 17 pregnancies, she died childless and thus was the last monarch of the House of Stuart. She was succeeded by her second cousin George I of the House of Hanover.
Harrison Ford appeared in Hanover Street (1979) after being Han Solo in Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977) and before becoming Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). As such, when this movie was made, it was actually sandwiched between two of Ford’s and film history’s biggest blockbusters of all time.
An adapted state flag of Indiana appeared as the flag of Gotham City in the mayor’s office in the Tim Burton-directed 1989 superhero movie Batman.
When the American flag is faded and/or worn out, it should be disposed of. The appropriate way to dispose of it is to burn it in a solemn ceremony, then toss it in the trash. When in the trash it should not be recognizable as an American flag.
Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima are a pair of companion films, directed by Clint Eastwood, and released in 2006. Both films are about the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II; the former film depicts the battle from the American perspective, and focuses on the men who raised the American flag on the island during the battle (as depicted in a famous photograph), while the latter film depicts the battle from the Japanese perspective.