The phrase “Reading the Riot Act” comes from a British law of 1715, which allowed British officials to order any gathering of 12 or more people to disperse within an hour, or to face the death penalty. The text of the act was prescribed by law"
There is at least one case where the last four words were left off the reading of the proclamation, thus rendering it void.
The law remained on the books until its repeal in 1973.
Say, isn’t Wyoming also the home of Dick (heh) Cheney? 
The first recorded riot in the US was the Doctors’ Mob of 1788.
Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, a veritable hit-song-writing machine of a partnership, wrote “Riot in Cellblock Nine”, which has been covered by The Grateful Dead, The Beach Boys, Wanda Jackson, The Robins, Johnny Winter, Dr. Feelgood, The Blues Brothers, Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, and Johnny Cash. The best known version is The Robins’ song from 1954, which hit number one in the R & B charts.
The comedy duo of Stiller & Meara (Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara) first broke into TV entertainment by appearing on the popular Fifties variety program, The Ed Sullivan Show.
Ed Sullivan died shortly after his namesake show was canceled.
Baseball Hall of Famer Ed Delahanty died when he drunkenly fell off the International Bridge in Niagara Falls and fell into the River, going over the falls. Delahanty had been tossed off a train for threatening other passengers and tried to cross on foot, not noticing that the drawbridge was up.
Abraham Lincoln is thought by most biographers never to have left U.S. territory during his lifetime, although he and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln once visited Niagara Falls before the Civil War, and it is unclear whether they crossed over the border into Canada, at that time a British possession.
In 1944, both the Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello performed the old vaudeville Niagara Falls routine (“Slowly I turned…”) in films - the Stooges in “Gents Without Cents” and A&C in “Lost in a Harem”.
In 1901 a 63-year old teacher named Annie Edson Taylor was the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Since then 14 others have duplicated the stunt. Most survived.
For much of the 20th c., Niagara Falls was the cliche honeymoon destination for U.S. couples.
The Brady Bunch episode entitle “The Honeymoon” is the only one to show the girls’ cat, Fluffy. (Also, Tiger the dog could not have actually opened the car-door window with the automatic switch to escape, because the car was not running.)
Robert Reed refused to appear in what turned out to be the Brady Bunch series finale. (Greg accidentally dyes his hair orange)
White House Press Secretary James Brady was badly wounded in the assassination attempt against President Ronald Reagan in March 1981, and has committed the rest of his life to supporting the passage of strong gun control laws and reducing violence in American society.
In 1814, shortly after the burning of the White House and other buildings in Washington, D.C. by the British, a tornado hit the city, destroying even more property and hurling cannons great distances. The storm was said to have killed more British soldiers than the American militia had in the battle for the city.
William Conrad was the original voice of Matt Dillon on the Gunsmoke radio show. When the time came to turn it to a TV show, he was not considered, because he was a rather corpulent man. Conrad continued voice work (most notably as the narrator for Rocky and Bullwinkle) until he finally was able to star as Cannon in 1971.
William J. Clinton of Arkansas was, in 1996, the first Democratic President to be reelected to a second full term since Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York, sixty years earlier.
Franklin Roosevelt married Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, his fifth cousin once removed.
Both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had long-time girlfriends on the side. FDR, in fact, died on a trip to the polio spa of Warm Springs, Georgia with secretary Lucy Mercer, not Eleanor, who no doubt found consolation with journalist Lorena Hickok.
Self-taught (literally – he taught himself to read) British scientist John Mercer developed, among other things, a process of treating cotton thread to give it a slightly shiny appearance on the spool. His idea of “mercerized” cotton is still being used today, albeit with some technical changes.
Johnny Mercer was an American singer and lyricist. His collaboration with composer Harold Arlen produced such Great American Songbook classics as “Blues in the Night,” “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” “That Old Black Magic” and “Come Rain Or Come Shine.”