Count Toussaint-Guillaume Picquet de la Motte was a French admiral who, during the American Revolutionary War, distinguished himself as a member of Admiral d’Estaing’s squadron in Martinique, during the Battle of Grenada, and the Siege of Savannah. Four vessels of the French Navy have been named in his honour, the most recent being the first-rank frigate Lamotte-Picquet. The Paris Métro station La Motte-Picquet – Grenelle in the 15th arrondissement of Paris was also named after him.
On September 28, 1784 Gov. John Houstoun granted four 5,000-acre tracts of vacant land in Franklin County, Georgia to Adm. Charles Henri Hector d’Estaing and his heirs. Unfortunately, the admiral was executed by guillotine by the French revolutionary government during the Reign of Terror in 1794.
During the Reign of Terror, the future King Louis-Philippe lived in Boston and worked as a teacher of the French language. His apartment is now the site of the Union Oyster House, the oldest operating restaurant in the United States.
Although the Constitution Act,
1867, refers to creating the union of four provinces into Canada, the term “Union” is rarely used to describe Canada. Instead the common term is “Confederation”, as in “Saskatchewan joined Confederation in 1905.”
The data code for Switzerland, CH, is derived from Latin Confoederatio Helvetica (English: Helvetic Confederation). The Swiss began to adopt the name for themselves after the Swabian War of 1499, used alongside the term for “Confederates”, *Eidgenossen *(literally: comrades by oath), used since the 14th century. *Helvetica *is derived from the Helvetii, a Gaulish tribe living on the Swiss plateau before the Roman era.
The Confederate dollar, often called a ‘Greyback’, was first issued into circulation in April 1861, when the Confederacy was only two months old, and on the eve of the outbreak of the Civil War. It was not backed by hard assets, but simply by a promise to pay the bearer after the war, on the prospect of Southern victory and independence. As the war progressed and it began to be apparent that the Union would prevail, confidence in the currency diminished, and inflation followed. By the end of 1863, the Confederate dollar was quoted at just six cents in gold.
The United States Constitution’s Art. I, Sec. 10 provides, “No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation… [or] without the Consent of Congress …keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, [or] enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State… or engage in War,” but most Southern states beginning in 1860 did so anyway.
A Southern blot is a method used in molecular biology for detection of a specific DNA sequence in DNA samples. Southern blotting combines transfer of electrophoresis-separated DNA fragments to a filter membrane and subsequent fragment detection by probe hybridization.
The method is named after the British biologist Edwin Southern who first published it in 1975. Other blotting methods (i.e., western blot, northern blot, eastern blot, southwestern blot) that employ similar principles, but using RNA or protein, have later been named in reference to Edwin Southern’s name.
Edwin McMasters Stanton of Steubenville, Ohio was lead counsel on a case for which a young prairie lawyer named Abraham Lincoln was also hired by the same client. Stanton treated Lincoln very rudely, gave him nothing to do and would not even dine with him, but Lincoln was willing to forgive him. Later, as President, Lincoln appointed him Secretary of War. The two became close friends and it was Stanton who said, when Lincoln died of an assassin’s bullet on the morning of April 15, 1865, “Now he belongs to the ages” (sometimes quoted as “to the angels”).
Frances Oldham Kelsey, a pharmacologist with the Food & Drug Administration, helped prevent an epidemic of birth defects in the United States. Despite pressure from the manufacturer of Thalidomide and even though it had already been approved in Canada and more than 20 European and African countries, she insisted that the drug be fully tested before approval and release. She was proved right when births of deformed infants in Europe were linked to thalidomide taken by their mothers during pregnancy. Kelsey’s efforts were recognized as heroic and she received the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service from John F. Kennedy in 1962.
Allen Kelsey Grammer is an American actor, voice actor, producer, director, writer, singer, and activist. From the age of 16, with his mother’s approval, he began to smoke a pipe. He has also provided the voice of Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons, winning an Emmy Award for his work in the episode “The Italian Bob”, one of five Emmys he has won.
The Emmy Award is an American award that recognizes excellence in the television industry, and is the equivalent of an Academy Award (for film), the Tony Award (for theater), and the Grammy Award (for music). The Los Angeles-based Academy of Television Arts & Sciences established the Emmy Award as part of an image-building and public relations opportunity. The first Emmy Awards ceremony took place on January 25, 1949, at the Hollywood Athletic Club, and was solely to honor shows produced and aired locally in the Los Angeles area. During that first awards ceremony, Shirley Dinsdale earned the distinction of receiving the very first Emmy Award, for Most Outstanding Television Personality,
“Immy”, the nickname for an “image orthicon”, is where the name Emmy comes from.
The NAACP Image Award is an annual awards ceremony presented by the American National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to honor outstanding people of color in film, television, music, and literature.
The Colorado River derives its name from its red color, colorado being the Spanish word for “colored” – in this case, red. Oddly, Colorado and Red are the names of the pairs of rivers in the USA of which there two different rivers with the same name. One of each occurs in Texas. The Colorado is the longest river entirely inside the state of Texas, and the Red forms part of the state line. The other Red River places part of the USA outside the watershed of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, with some waters of North Dakota and Minnesota eventually flowing into the Arctic Ocean.
There have been three warships of the United States Navy to bear the name USS Minnesota. The most recent, a Virginia-class fast attack nuclear submarine, was commissioned in September 2013. The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating a naval contractor for a faulty reactor pipe joint found aboard the Minnesota; two other submarines of the class were found with similarly defective parts.
Tina Smith was appointed senator from Minnesota to replace Al Franken, who resigned his seat in January of 2018. The other Minnesota senator is Amy Klobuchar; this is the first time that Minnesota has been represented in the Senate by two women.
Minnesota is now the sixth state to have two women senators. The first was California, when Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein both held the office of senator beginning in 1993. Other states that have had two women senators concurrently holding office are Kansas, Maine, Washington, and New Hampshire, which twice has had two women senators.
Parts of what are now Minnesota and North Dakota were claimed by Britain, as part of Rupert’s Land, which was defined as the territory whose waters drained into Hudson Bay.
Britain gave up its claims to those lands when it ceded the territory south of the 49th parallel to the US in the Treaty of 1818. The US in turn ceded the northern bit of the Missouri territory to Britain, establishing the 49th parallel as the boundary between the US and BNA.
The 1941 film 49th Parallel tells of a German U-boat crew stranded in Canada after being sunk in Hudson’s Bay, trying to make their way to the then-neutral United States, where the film’s target audience resided. Raymond Massey, Laurence Olivier and Leslie Howard all agreed to work at half their normal fee, because they felt it was an important propaganda film. This is the only time that Canadian-born Massey played a Canadian on screen. At one point in the film the Germans encounter a Hutterite community, but find them less sympathetic to the German cause than their ethnicity might suggest.
Hutterites are a religious group that is a communal branch of Anabaptists who, like the Amish and Mennonites, trace their roots to the Radical Reformation of the 16th century. Nearly extinct by the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Hutterites found a new home in North America. Over the last 130 years, their population recovered from 400 to around 45,000.