Samuel Langley's Aerodrome

On May 6, 1896, spectators lined the banks of Washington’s Potomac River to watch the grand experiment. Using a catapult on top of a houseboat, Samuel Langley launched  his “aerodrome,” a 16-foot-long, 25-pound unmanned aircraft with two sets of silk-covered wings. Powered by a steam engine and two propellers, the craft rose 100 feet above the water and flew half  a mile down the river before dropping gently to the water. This was the first sustained flight by a heavier-than-air, powered vehicle.

Langley was an astrophysicist whose studies of solar radiation had earlier won him international recognition. In 1887, he had become secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. There he began studying how surfaces move through the air. Working with model planes powered  by rubber bands, he experimented with different designs until he launched his “aerodrome” in 1896.

Langley’s efforts to launch an aircraft with a man aboard were not successful, probably because  of structural weaknesses in his designs. But he lived to see his dream of manned, powered flight come true when the Wright brothers made their historic flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903.

The U.S. Navy’s first aircraft carrier, the USS Langley, honored Langley’s pioneering work, Langley Air Force Base in Virginia is also named for him.

John Wesley Powell

John Wesley Powell was one of the most daring explorers of the American West. In 1869, he personally financed and launched a bold expedition to study the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. Powell’s four-boat flotilla completed the perilous 900-mile journey down the Green and Colorado rivers in 14 days.

The expedition was so successful that the U.S. government financed a second trip in 1871. This time, the party included photographers, and the images they captured gave most Americans their first look at the splendors of the West. Later, as a member of the U.S. Geological Survey, Powell made more than 30 trips through Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. His detailed reports and precise maps set the standard for generations of geographers.

In 1878, Powell had turned his attention to preserving the land he knew so well. He sought government protection for natural resources and lobbied against irrigation, which he predicted would disrupt the fragile ecology. Powell also worked to preserve the culture of vanishing Native American tribes. He created the first classification system for Indian languages and, in 1878, became the first director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution.

While Powell is remembered for his exploration and preservation exploits it is not as well known that during the Civil War he served in the Union army and lost an arm at Shiloh.

Susan B. Anthony

Until the 19^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution became law in 1920, American women were not allowed to vote.   Susan B. Anthony’s 50-year fight for women’s suffrage, or the right to vote, made this amendment possible.

Susan B. Anthony grew up in a Quaker home.  Like her parents, she believed the men and women should be treated equally.  In 1851, she began working with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, another suffragette.  Their first success was the passage of a law in 1860 in New York that gave women the right to own property and to keep their children if they divorced.

Anthony also fought for the abolition or end, of slavery, and for the right of former slaves to vote.  After the Civil War, she was disappointed when former slaves were given that right, but women were not.  

As a result, she formed suffrage associations and lectured all over the world.  She saw women get the right to vote in other countries, but not in the U.S.  But she remained hopeful, and in a month before her death in 1906, she said, “failure is impossible.”   She was right.   Fourteen years after Anthony’s death, the 19^th Amendment became law, amd people called it is the “Anthony Amendment”.

In 1979, the U.S. government minted $1 coins with Susan B. Anthony’s picture on them.  This made her the first woman to be pictured on an American coin in general circulation.

Millard Fillmore

Millard Fillmore is considered one of the least successful Presidents.  But his administration had two important accomplishments:  the Compromise of 1850 and the opening of Japan.

Born in a poor family, Fillmore became a lawyer in Buffalo, New York, and a congressman.  In 1848, he was elected Vice President, and the death of President Zachary Taylor in July, 1850, made him President.

At that time, Congress was debating the Compromise of 1850, a group of laws designed to calm the disputes over slavery.  Fillmore disliked slavery but wanted to preserve the Union.  So he supported the Compromise, which admitted California as a free state and ended slavery  in the District of Columbia and made it easier for southerners to recover runaway slaves.  The Compromise helped delay the Civil War for 10 years

With California now a state, the U.S. looked to the Pacific.   In 1852, Fillmore sent a fleet under Commodore Matthew C. Perry to Japan, which had been closed to foreigners for 200 years.

This show of force resulted in a treaty opening two Japanese ports to U.S. trade.   But when the treaty was signed in 1854.  Fillmore was no longer President.   Unpopular for his support of the Compromise of 1850, he was denied the 1852 presidential nomination.

IN 1856, Fillmore ran for President for the anti-immigrant Americans, or Know-Nothing Party.   Maryland was the only state he carried.

1865

“With malice toward none, with charity for all….let us strive….to bind up the nation’s wounds.”  Abraham Lincoln spoke these words on March 4, 1865, as he was sworn in for a second term as President.  The Civil War, which had set North against South since 1861, was coming to a close.  Americans were ready to answer Lincoln’s call and “do all which may achieve a just and lasting peace.”

Peace finally came in 1865. On April 9, Southern General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.   Although scattered fighting continued, Lee’s surrender signaled the end of the war.  But the nation’s joy was cut short five days later.  President Lincoln, attending a play in Washington, D.C., was shot and killed by John Wilkes Booth, an actor who was a diehard supporter of the South.

Thousands of people came out to view the train that carried Lincoln’s body to the his home state, Illinois, to be buried. 

“Now he belongs to the ages,” a cabinet member said.   Vice President Andrew Johnson was immediately sworn in as President, and by the end of May, the last of the Southern forces had surrendered. 

In December, the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution became law.  It banned slavery – a goal Lincoln had embraced during the war.

Ironically, the last battle of the war was fought May 12-13, 1864, at Palmetto Ranch, Texas, and the Southern forces won.

The picture is taken from the funeral procession held in New York City as the funeral train made its way to Illinois.

Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth could neither read nor write.  But when this tall African-American woman strode on stage to speak out against slavery, she held everyone’s attention.  She began almost every speech with the same words:  “Children, I talk to God and God talks to me.”

Sojourner Truth was born a slave named Isabella on a farm in New York State.  Before she was freed, Sojourner Truth had several children, most of whom were sold into slavery by her masters.

She gained her freedom after New York abolished slavery, when she was about 30 years old.  She then moved to New York City, where she worked as a servant.  Deeply religious, she sometimes preached on street corners, both against slavery and on behalf of women’s rights.  

Then in 1843, she came to believe that God wanted her to “travel up and down the land” preaching his word. 

She took the name Sojourner (which means wanderer) Truth and began traveling through the country, speaking wherever she could find an audience.  She suffered abuse and physical attacks, but her eloquence made her famous.  In 1864, Abraham Lincoln invited her to the White House and appointed her counselor to freedmen in the capital.

After the Civil War, Sojourner Truth continued to work tirelessly to help the newly freed slaves and improve the lives of women.

"Lemonade Lucy" Hayes

The press jokingly called her "Lemonade Lucy," because no alcoholic beverages were served in the White House while she was First Lady.  But Lucy Hayes, wife of the 19th President, was widely respected as a kind an intelligent woman.  She was, her husband Rutherford B. Hayes said, "the Golden Rule incarnate."  

A doctor's daughter, Lucy Ware Webb grew up in Ohio.  She graduated from Wesleyan Female Seminary, a college, in 1850.  Two years later, she married "Rud" Hayes, who became a congressman and governor of Ohio.  Lucy had a keen interest in politics and helped her husband in his career.  


She worked to outlaw slavery and alcohol, and raised money for the poor.  Because President and Mrs. Hayes came from Ohio, the rule that no liquor could be served in the White House was called “the Ohio idea.”

President Hayes and his wife had seven sons and one daughter.

Lucy Hayes was a thoroughly modern First Lady.   She was the first one to hold a college degree.  And during her time in the White House, a host of new inventions were introduced there.

These included indoor plumbing, telephones, typewriters, and record players.  But Lucy Hayes also had traditional values.  She held family prayers each morning, as well as frequent songfests around the sitting-room piano.   And she introduced the Easter egg roll on the White House lawn, an event that has been held ever since.

1860

“A house divided against itself cannot stand”……Abraham Lincoln warned in 1858.   Two years later, Lincoln was elected President of a nation divided by the bitter issue of slavery.  And as he predicted, the house began to shake.

In June, 1860, the Democratic Party had split apart.  Northern Democrats, opposed to slavery, named Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas as their presidential candidate.  Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky.  The Republicans were united in their antislavery stand and nominated Lincoln, the Illinois lawyers whose speeches opposing the spread of slavery had made him a hated figure in the South.   No candidate won a majority of the popular vote, but Lincoln won the largest share and a majority of the electoral vote.

Infuriated by Lincoln’s victory, South Carolina’s leaders did not wait for his inauguration.  They met in Charleston on December 20 and voted to secede from the United States.  Bells rang out and crowds cheered.  The Charleston Mercury published a special edition with a headline reading, “The Union Is Dissolved.”   As the fateful year of 1860 drew to a close, the U.S. was rushing headlong into the tragic, agonizing Civil War.

The Bustle

Casual, comfortable clothing is preferred by most people today. But in the nineteenth century, American women chose to be uncomfortable rather than unfashionable. They wore tight corsets and long, heavy dresses that restricted their movements . And they also wore a series of strange contraptions that were designed to give them the shape considered attractive then.

One odd fashion device of the 1870s was the bustle, or “dress improver.” The bustle was either a padded cushion of cork or down, or a frame made of metal or whalebone. A woman tied it around her backside at waist level. When she put her dress on over the bustle, her skirt stuck out in back.

If the bustle was small, it merely gave the impression that extra material had been gathered at the back of the skirt. But some bustles were huge. They jutted out like shelves, provoking jokes about bustles big enough to serve tea on!

By the 1890s, the bustle was no longer in fashion. Women could once again sit down without having to make allowance for the awkward “dress improver” behind them.

Prior to bustles, women wore petticoats with wide steel hoops so that their skirts would swell out into enormous circles. Some skirts were ten yards in circumference!