6 Facts About the Mount Rushmore Presidents

Mount Rushmore

Author Nicole Villeneuve

July 19, 2023

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The four prominent U.S. Presidents carved into Mount Rushmore were chosen by sculptor Gutzon Borglum to represent major milestones and ideals in American history. George Washington, the first President, was chosen as a symbol of the birth of the nation; Thomas Jefferson represents the expansion of the country through the Louisiana Purchase; Abraham Lincoln was picked for his role in preserving the union; and Theodore Roosevelt symbolizes the nation’s industrial growth. While all of these famous figures are known for their pivotal roles in the country’s history, there’s much more to each of their stories. Here are six interesting facts about the Mount Rushmore Presidents.

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George Washington Only Had a Grade School Education

America’s first President may be one of the most notable figures in the country’s history, but his legacy all started with a modest education. George Washington was born into a Virginia plantation family in 1732, and his formal schooling was limited to his preteen years. When Washington was just 11 years old, his father died, and plans for the future President to follow in his family’s footsteps and attend Appleby Grammar School in England were halted. Washington instead received private tutoring for his further, albeit limited, education, and he continued to pursue self-education throughout his life. He read books on military strategy and history, which later informed his approach to his military career, in turn laying the groundwork for his path to the presidency. He studied geometry and trigonometry on his own, both of which came in handy for his stint as a land surveyor as a teen. But even with all of his successes, Washington carried embarrassment about his lack of formal education throughout his life, often comparing himself to his peers.

Thomas Jefferson Was a Self-Taught Architect

Though not formally trained, Thomas Jefferson had a deep passion for and understanding of architecture, and he put it to practical use designing some iconic American buildings that still stand today. From his days as a student at the College of William & Mary, where he is said to have purchased his first architecture book, through his time as the United States’ minister to France from 1785 to 1789, Jefferson immersed himself in his own self-directed study of European architecture, particularly classical and Palladian styles. He continued to collect books on the subject, as well as many other subjects, eventually amassing one of the country’s largest private libraries.

Upon returning to the United States, the third President found opportunities to apply his knowledge. One of his most famous architectural achievements is Monticello, his own Virginia home. He also designed the Virginia State Capitol building in Richmond, which is considered one of the first neoclassical buildings in the United States, as well as the iconic Rotunda at the University of Virginia. Jefferson designed and built his Virginia vacation home, too — the stunning and personal Poplar Forest, one of his many octagon-shaped designs, but the only one that came to fruition.

Theodore Roosevelt Impaired His Vision in a White House Boxing Match

Theodore Roosevelt developed his renowned physical vigor and adventurous spirit at a young age. Growing up in New York City, the future President suffered from childhood asthma, and his father encouraged him to combat its weakening effects on the body by building his physical strength. By the time Roosevelt headed to Harvard University, he had transformed into a physically fit and self-assured athlete. He found his place on the wrestling mat and in the boxing ring, and his asthma symptoms mostly subsided.

Throughout his career in the military and politics, including as the governor of New York and, later, President of the United States, Roosevelt continued his active exploits whenever possible. He regularly boxed at the White House, often with his aides, and one of these sparring matches left Teddy with damaged blood vessels, hemorrhaging, and eventually a detached retina, causing permanent impaired vision in his left eye. The injury may have kept him down, but not out, and Roosevelt continued to pursue physical activities, including jiu-jitsu and his beloved hunting: Roosevelt wrote in his autobiography, “If it had been the right eye, I should have been entirely unable to shoot.”

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Abraham Lincoln Created the Secret Service on the Day He Was Assassinated

On April 14, 1865, just hours before he was tragically shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation creating the Secret Service. At the time, however, the new department’s purpose was not to provide presidential protection — it was to combat counterfeit currency.
By the end of the Civil War, nearly one-third of the U.S. currency in circulation was forged; the Secret Service was founded as a bureau within the Treasury Department to rehabilitate and safeguard the country’s monetary system. The night of Lincoln’s assassination, just one local police officer was assigned to escort the President from the White House to the theater, but the officer’s whereabouts at the time of the shooting are unknown. It was not until after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, when Vice President Theodore Roosevelt took over, that the Secret Service’s mandate was expanded to include the protection of the President.

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George Washington Bred the First American Foxhound

Presidential pets have long been beloved members of America’s First Families, dating all the way back to the first U.S. President. George Washington had a deep affection for dogs; he owned and bred various breeds that accompanied him throughout his personal and public life. Though it’s thought that Washington primarily kept canines for fox hunting, historians believe he loved them as pets, too, frequently visiting their kennels and mentioning them in writings and correspondence. The first President kept a variety of breeds at his Mount Vernon home, including Dalmatians, greyhounds, mastiffs, pointers, hounds, and more; some of their names included Sweet Lips, Trulove, Tippler, Drunkard, and Madame Moose. Washington’s aim to breed a faster hunting dog was at least somewhat successful — he is widely recognized as the father of the American foxhound.

A 6-Year-Old Theodore Roosevelt Watched Abraham Lincoln’s Funeral Procession

On April 25, 1865, 10 days after Abraham Lincoln’s death, the late President’s funeral procession made its way through the streets of New York City. Thousands of mourners lined the streets to pay their respects to the fallen leader, and among the spectators was Theodore Roosevelt, who was just 6 years old at the time. In a famous photograph of the event (shown above), Roosevelt can be seen looking out from a window in his grandfather’s home as the procession passed through Broadway and Union Square. Standing with him is his brother, Elliott Roosevelt. Later, when Teddy Roosevelt himself became President, he didn’t shy away from expressing his admiration of Lincoln, telling friends he was “my great hero” and that he meant “more to me than any other of our public men.”

5 Fab Facts About Music’s British Invasion

The Beatles

Author Kristina Wright

July 19, 2023

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On February 7, 1964, the Beatles made their first visit to the United States, prompting Walter Cronkite to quip, “The British invasion this time goes by the code name ‘Beatlemania.’” The band was already popular in the U.K., but their instant appeal to audiences in the U.S. was unlike anything anyone had seen before; thousands of screaming teenagers met the Beatles’ plane at New York’s Kennedy Airport and thousands more were waiting for them to arrive at the Plaza Hotel. Not even Elvis Presley had generated that level of uninhibited euphoria, and it left people, especially the parents of all of those starstruck teens, curious about the shaggy-haired young men who were taking over the airwaves.

Before 1964, only two British singles had ever topped Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, and both of them were instrumentals. The Beatles’ popularity paved the way for many of Britain’s hottest acts to follow, from the Rolling Stones to the Who, ushering in a new musical era dominated by British performers. Here are five fun facts about the Fab Four and the musical phenomenon known as the British Invasion.

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Beatlemania Provided a Diversion to a Nation in Mourning

In February 1963, Chicago DJ Dick Biondi became the first disc jockey to introduce U.S. listeners to the Beatles when he played “Please Please Me,” the band’s first U.S. single. The song was picked up by other radio stations, but it was months before the Fab Four caught on in America. On the morning of November 22, 1963, CBS News aired a story about the Beatles’ popularity in England, but the segment on the band slotted for that evening was shelved when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated later that day.

A few weeks later, Walter Cronkite decided the country could use a break from their collective grief and decided to finally air the Beatles story. Marsha Albert, a 15-year-old girl from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., saw the segment and wrote to WWDC radio to request they play more of the band’s music. Disc jockey Carroll James had also seen the report, got a copy of the track “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and invited Albert to come to the studio to introduce the song on December 17. Radio stations in other major markets followed suit, and Capitol Records, which had been planning to release the single in January, decided to rush-release it on December 26. The label originally planned for 200,000 copies to be pressed, but that jumped to 1 million — all of which were sold by January 10, 1964. Beatlemania had taken hold in the U.S. and the British Invasion was on its way.

Many British Bands Were Influenced by Black American Music

After the Beatles introduced the U.S. to their exciting new sound, they opened the door for many of the bands and solo artists who were already making waves in the U.K. While the beats sounded fresh and original to stateside listeners, many of the British performers were, ironically, influenced by American music, namely Black artists who were changing the musical landscape while facing discrimination in the industry that prevented them from topping the pop charts. British bands found inspiration in American blues, rock and roll, and rhythm and blues artists including Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Little Richard, and James Brown. U.S. audiences hungry for more of the sound that the Beatles helped popularize found what they had been craving in dozens of acts out of the U.K., including the Kinks, the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, and the Yardbirds. Their interesting fashion and charming accents only added to the appeal, and British performers began to dominate the American airwaves.

The Rolling Stones Didn’t Catch on at First

While 1964’s Beatlemania gave way to the full-fledged British Invasion, one of Britain’s best-known bands of all time took longer to catch on. The Rolling Stones are arguably just as legendary as the Beatles (an argument still going strong today), but American audiences didn’t warm up to them at first. The Stones were hitting the U.K. music charts in the summer of 1963, but they spent much of 1964 trying to make an impression on U.S. listeners. That changed in October 1964 when their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show helped boost the single “Time Is on My Side” to No. 6 on the Billboard Pop Singles chart, giving the band their first top 10 hit in the U.S. In June 1965, the Stones saw their first No. 1 U.S. hit with “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” — 11 months after their first U.K. No. 1, “It’s All Over Now.”

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The British Invasion Included Many Trailblazing Female Artists

When we talk about the British Invasion, the focus is usually on the male musicians who dominated the scene, but several British solo female artists also made a significant impact on the U.S. charts and American pop culture, and influenced future generations of solo performers. Among these stylish, talented young women were Dusty Springfield, Sandie Shaw, Petula Clark, and Marianne Faithfull. They introduced American audiences to the groovy fashions of “Swinging Sixties” London, and offered a different vision of 1960s womanhood than the all-girl groups who had topped the U.S. charts prior to 1964.

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It Helped Influence a Second British Invasion on MTV

The Beatles performed their last U.S. concert in 1966 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, marking the unofficial end to the British Invasion. U.K. bands continued to cross the pond in search of new audiences and, by the late 1960s, the top records on the U.S. music charts were a balanced mix of acts from both sides of the pond. Though the Beatles had stopped touring, they continued to film their performances so they could be shown on TV without the band having to appear in person. Other British bands opted to trade live television appearances for recorded shows as well. These recordings evolved into short, image-conscious videos used to promote the music on television, which helped put U.K. bands ahead of the curve when MTV launched in 1981. American acts weren’t ready for the new medium, and the music channel initially relied on a heavy rotation of U.K. music videos to fill out their playlist; some bands debuted videos even before their music was played on U.S. radio stations. As MTV’s popularity and reach grew, the network helped create what was dubbed the “second British Invasion,” led by synth-pop and new wave bands such as Duran Duran, A Flock of Seagulls, The Human League, and Culture Club.

9 World War II Facts Every History Buff Should Know

American marines in 1942

Author Adam Levine

July 19, 2023

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Nearly 80 years after the final shots were fired, the shadow of World War II continues to loom large over the modern world. The scale and impact of the conflict were so profound that the story of this chapter in history has been retold in countless books, films, TV shows, video games, and more. It’s not difficult to understand why: From 1939 to 1945, the Second World War plunged nearly every part of the globe into a violent clash that altered the course of history, impacting virtually every aspect of human civilization, from politics to art to science. Here are nine facts about World War II that every history buff should know.

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The Father of Computer Science Spent the War Cracking Nazi Codes

In 1940, the Germans began communicating using a nearly unbreakable code, encrypted with a machine called Enigma that rendered it indecipherable to nearly every Allied codebreaker. The complex cipher was finally broken by British mathematician and scientist Alan Turing, who later developed the mathematical framework for modern computer science. Working with a team of cryptanalysts, Turing built a computing machine called the Bombe that was capable of deciphering the Enigma code. Thanks to the breakthroughs of Turing and his colleagues, the British were able to decode encrypted Nazi messages in less than an hour, a development that changed the course of the war.

Indigenous Volunteers Defended the Coast of Alaska From Invasion

In June 1942, roughly six months after the attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Japan launched another attack against the United States by invading the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. In response, the U.S. military turned to Alaska’s Indigenous communities to help guard the vulnerable territory, as they had the experience and expertise required to navigate the vast, forbidding landscape of the Alaskan coastline. The Indigenous volunteers who joined this Alaska Territorial Guard came from several tribes throughout the region, including the Yup’ik, Inupiaq, Tlingit, Aleut, and Tsimshian peoples. In addition to defending the Alaskan coastline, the Alaska Territorial Guard protected vital supply routes between the U.S. and Russia.

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A Unit of Black Truck Drivers Played a Crucial Role After D-Day

Following the successful Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day, Allied forces continued inland to liberate occupied France and Belgium from the Nazis. As more than 1 million Allied troops continued to move inland, it became increasingly difficult to transport supplies from the port cities to the soldiers pushing east, especially after Nazi forces destroyed a crucial Belgian port in Antwerp. To solve this problem, the Allied forces established a trucking route known as the “Red Ball Express.” These trucks were predominantly driven by African American soldiers who braved treacherous terrain and the threat of German aircraft to keep Allied soldiers stocked with crucial supplies. The trucking route of the Red Ball Express eventually stretched all the way from Normandy to the French-German border, and drivers would often make the journey almost entirely without stopping to transport their cargo to the front as quickly as possible.

The American armed forces were racially segregated throughout the war, with Black and white soldiers serving in separate units. Due to discrimination, Black soldiers were often relegated to support roles in the service of white troops. However, the bravery of units such as the Red Ball truckers and the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, a decorated group of African American fighter pilots, helped persuade President Harry Truman to integrate the U.S. military shortly after the war.

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The U.S. Military Was Full of Baseball Legends

When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Americans from all walks of life, including professional athletes, enlisted in the armed services. Some of the greatest baseball players of all time put their careers on hold to support the war effort, including Hall of Famers Joe DiMaggio, Hank Greenberg, and Jackie Robinson. One of the most notable major leaguers to serve in the war was legendary hitter Ted Williams, who served in both the Navy and the Marines as a fighter pilot. Williams proved a highly skilled pilot, and even returned to military service during the Korean War, where he flew combat missions with future astronaut John Glenn.

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A Hollywood Icon Invented a Torpedo Guidance System

Austrian-born actress Hedy Lamarr was already a movie star in Hollywood as World War II was looming in Europe. In 1942, in an effort to help the fight against fascism, Lamarr helped invent a novel torpedo guidance system called “frequency hopping,” which allowed for long-range weapons guidance that was resistant to torpedo jamming from the enemy. While the U.S. Navy ultimately decided against using Lamarr’s invention in the war effort, her ingenuity didn’t go to waste. The frequency-hopping technology laid the foundation for future technologies such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and in 2014, Lamarr was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

The U.S. Government Established an Entire Town to Build the Atomic Bomb

As part of the top-secret Manhattan Project, the U.S.-led research project aimed at developing an atomic bomb, the United States government constructed an entire town in Tennessee, known as Oak Ridge, in 1942. Oak Ridge was home to multiple factories and other industrial facilities that produced the materials needed to build nuclear weapons. The work being done in Oak Ridge was so secretive that not even most of the town’s residents knew what exactly they were working on. With the exception of a few high-ranking scientists, most people employed in the town’s science and energy facilities were given a set of instructions for how to do their jobs, but were not told the purpose behind the tasks.

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The United States Was Involved in the War Even Before Pearl Harbor

Although the United States didn’t officially enter World War II until after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government still found ways to support the Allied war effort. For instance, in 1940 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act, which authorized the U.S. to lend weapons to the Allied powers, particularly Great Britain. The Lend-Lease Act allowed the United States to remain technically neutral while still supporting its European allies in the fight against the invading German army. This tenuous policy of neutrality continued until the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. By the next day, the U.S. had declared war on Japan, and just three days later it fully joined the conflict by declaring war on Germany and Italy.

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China and Japan Never Signed a Peace Treaty With Each Other

Although China’s contributions to the Allied war effort are often overlooked in the West, China was the first nation to engage in combat against an Axis power. China had been fighting against Japan’s encroaching imperialism in mainland Asia since 1937, two years before the official beginning of World War II, and when the global conflict broke out, China joined the Allied powers by continuing to fight its island neighbor. More than 14 million Chinese civilians and soldiers were killed in battles throughout Asia over the course of the war. When World War II ended, China was not involved in the Allies’ peace negotiations with Japan, and to this day the two nations have never officially signed a peace treaty to mark the end of their wartime conflict.

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Early NASA Rockets Were Based on Nazi Missile Designs

During World War II, the German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun was the leading engineer behind the development of the deadly supersonic missile known as the V-2 rocket. Development began in 1936, and by 1944, the Nazis were using the missiles to deliver devastating attacks against France, England, and Belgium. At the time, the V-2 was the most advanced ballistic missile in the world: Its innovative use of liquid rocket fuel enabled it to reach speeds up to 3,500 miles per hour and strike from distances of 200 miles; it was also equipped with an onboard computer-based guidance system that allowed it to strike with deadly accuracy. The technology that allowed the V-2 to reach these stunning altitudes and travel with such accuracy also made it the forerunner to modern space rockets. After the war, NASA brought von Braun to the United States, where he used his expertise in rocketry to become one of the leading scientists in the U.S. space race. Though von Braun’s ties to the Nazis tarnished his reputation for the rest of his life, his contributions to the space race earned him high honors from the U.S. government, and he remains a controversial figure in the history of space travel.

6 Amazing Breakthroughs Made by the Ancient Greeks

Aristotle

Author Darren Orf

July 19, 2023

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For more than two millennia, the ideas of the ancient Greeks have spurred some of humanity’s greatest achievements. Philosophy, drama, science, and mathematics sprung from that particular peninsula in the Mediterranean. The work of the Greek scholars propelled Muslim thinkers during the Islamic Golden Age, and the European rediscovery of their ancient texts ignited the Renaissance and sustained the Enlightenment, giving way to new scientific advancements and even new ways of living and governing. These are six amazing breakthroughs from ancient Greece, born from some of history’s greatest minds.

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Pythagoras’ Theorem Formed the Foundation of Geometry

Pythagoras of Samos is arguably the most famous mathematician from ancient Greece (and there were a lot of them), and that’s because nearly every person at some point in their educational journey is taught his eponymous theorem. Expressed as a² + b² = c², the Pythagorean theorem states that the sum of the squares of the two legs of a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse. In ancient times, this proved the existence of irrational numbers and formed the cornerstone of what became Euclidean geometry (more on Euclid later), which plays a very real role in construction and navigation today. Some of the world’s smartest minds have set out to provide proofs of the Pythagorean theorem, including Albert Einstein (he was 12 at the time), and new proofs are still being discovered to this day. Simply put, the world would be a very different place without Pythagoras’ triangular insight.

Hippocrates Looked for a Scientific Cause of Illness

Watch any kind of medical drama, and it won’t be long before you hear the phrase “Hippocratic oath,” meaning a doctor’s sacred duty to “do no harm.” Although a bit of a myth in today’s hospitals, the oath is a lasting testament to the life and work of Hippocrates of Cos. Living in the fifth century BCE, Hippocrates was one of the world’s first physicians to explore the cause of illness beyond the usual divine explanations at the time (Zeus’ displeasure, for instance). He’s known as the “father of medicine” because he took a scientific approach to studying illness and tried devising treatments, as described in the 60 or so of his writings that survive to this day. Hippocrates influenced many future generations, but his most important student was arguably Galen of Pergamum in the second century CE, a Roman physician whose work became bedrock of European and Arabic medicine for more than a millennium, and who once claimed that all his knowledge originated with Hippocrates.

Aristotle Devised a System for Classifying Animals

During Aristotle’s astounding life in the fourth century BCE, he wrote about a cornucopia of scientific subjects including physics, psychology, economics, ethics, government, and poetry. But what is often lost in that academic deluge is the fact that Aristotle was 2,200 years ahead of his time in the field of biology. Today, we classify animals using Latin names in a system devised by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century, but Aristotle created a classification system back in ancient Greece that was remarkably similar to our modern one. Aristotle separated animals into two groups: those with blood and those without blood (or at least red blood), and while Linnaeus didn’t use this particular distinction, it is similar to how the animal kingdom is separated into vertebrates (those with spines) and invertebrates. From there, the Greek thinker divided animals into “genera,” which were broader categories than the genus distinction we use today, and then by species. This groundbreaking foresight into ordering the natural world is why Aristotle is remembered today as the “father of zoology.”

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Euclid Knew That Light Traveled in a Straight Line

Euclid, considered the “father of geometry,” was no slouch when it came to studying the nature of light and vision. Published in 300 BCE, his work Optics is considered the first time a scholar gave serious scientific thought to the nature of light. Euclid theorized that light propagated in rays and traveled in a straight line, a big departure from the Platonic idea of light as an “ethereal emanation.” The nature of light and human vision became a vast field of study, interesting Romans, Muslim astronomers, Renaissance thinkers, Enlightenment scientists, and even 20th-century minds. Albert Einstein, for example, won the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics not for his general theory of relativity (as often presumed) but for a discovery in the field of optics known as the photoelectric effect.

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Aristarchus Knew the Planets Orbited the Sun

The publication of Nicolaus Copernicus’ Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs in 1543 is a major moment in history, as the Polish scientist’s heliocentric theory directly challenged Catholic dogma proclaiming that the Earth was at the center of the solar system. In reality, Copernicus was mostly reiterating what some ancient Greeks knew nearly two thousand years before. In the third century BCE, Aristarchus of Samos (likely drawing from the work of another Greek astronomer, Philolaus of Croton) theorized that the sun was much more massive than the Earth, and he placed the planet in its rightful orbit around the star — the first heliocentric model of the solar system. Much like Copernicus’ work, Aristarchus’ theory was met with pushback (with one Stoic saying he should be indicted for “putting into motion the hearth of the universe”) and his ideas were ultimately rejected. This allowed geocentrism to flourish for far too long until Copernicus, citing both Philolaus and Aristarchus, eventually set the record straight.

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Eratosthenes Accurately Measured the Globe

Around the same time Aristarchus was configuring the solar system into its rightful arrangement, the Greek mathematician Eratosthenes of Cyrene pulled off one of the greatest calculations in world history. For nearly 300 years, the ancient Greeks had known the Earth was round — Pythagoras established as much back around 500 BCE — but understanding that the Earth was a globe and comprehending its precise proportions were two different things entirely, and Eratosthenes set out to solve the latter. On the summer equinox in 240 BCE, Eratosthenes measured a shadow cast by a stick in Alexandria, Egypt, that measured 7.12 degrees (roughly one-fiftieth of a circle). Meanwhile, in Syene (modern-day Aswan, Egypt), a particular well cast no shadow, meaning the sun was directly overhead. The mathematician then hired surveyors to measure the distance from Alexandria to Syene and came up with 5,000 stadia. This measurement enabled him to calculate the Earth’s circumference at 250,000 stadia, or somewhere between 24,000 and 29,000 miles (the exact length of a stadium is debated). Today, we know the Earth measures about 24,900 miles around the equator. In other words, even over 2,200 years ago, Eratosthenes just about got it right.