Paul Revere's Ride

During 1775, the year the American Revolution began, tensions rose between the American colonist and the British army. The situation was most explosive in Massachusetts, where the Patriots were organizing to oppose British rule. In April, 1775, the British general in Boston decided to march his troops to the villages of Lexington and Concord to seize the Patriot leaders and capture their weapons.

Paul Revere, a Boston silversmith learned of the British plans. On the night of April 18, Revere set out on horseback for Lexington and Concord to warn the Patriots. Through the moonlit night Revere galloped, spreading the alarm. “In Medford, I awaked the Captain of the Minute Men,” Revere said, “and after that, I alarmed almost every House, until I got to Lexington.” There Revere warned two important Patriot leaders, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, that the British were coming; the two escaped.

Later, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow made Paul Revere’s ride famous in a poem known by every American schoolchild:

Listen my children, and you shall hear,

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere……

Paul Revere would be famous even if his midnight ride had never happened. He was a superb silversmith, and today his silver bowls and other works may be seen in leading museums.

This website has several images of Revere silver including this one:

It’s a silver tea set that was made in 1799, and presented to Edmund Hart who was the man who constructed the ship Boston. The tea service can be seen at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston

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.

Amy Tan

In Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, a group of Chinese-American women meets regularly to play mah-jongg, a Chinese game played with small ivory tiles. The women all came to the U.S. from China years earlier, and have kept their Chinese traditions. Their old-fashioned ways embarrass the book’s heroine, the grown daughter of one of the women. Above all, she wants to be American. But as the women tell their touching and often tragic stories of their lives, the daughter begins to understand and appreciate her Chinese heritage.

Amy Tan’s Chinese given name, An-mei, means “blessing from America.”

The story is close to Tan’s own experience. Her parents come to California from China, and she grew up with many of the same conflicts faced by the young heroine of the book. Tan’s parents wanted her to have a successful live in American, but they hoped she would think of herself as Chinese. As a girl, Tan wanted only to blend into American society, but when she began to write stories in the mid-1980s, she brought her two worlds together. Her personal experiences enabled her to write movingly about the relationships between immigrant parents of their children.

The Joy Luck Club, Tan’s first novel, was a surprise best-seller in 1989 and later a successful movie. Her second book, The Kitchen God’s Wife, was also successful. And in 1995 she was back on the best-seller list with The Hundred Secret Senses, a novel about a Chinese-American woman and her Chinese half sister.

Abigail Adams

In America’s early days, women had no voice in government and were not expected to know much about politics. But Abigail Adams, the wife of the second U.S. Prwsident, was ahead of her time. She was well-informed and held strong opinions about politics and government.

John Adams was a country lawyer when he married Abigail Smith in 1764. He played a key role in the struggles for independence and was often away from home. Abigail Adams raised their four children and managed the family farm, and she kept up a steady stream of letters to her husband.

When a neighbor complained because Abigail had sent a young servant to school, she wrote to John, “Merely because his face is black, is he to be denied instruction?”
And when John Adams was helping to plan the new country’s government, she wrote, “In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.”

Abigail Adams was the first First Lady to live in the White House. But only a few rooms of the mansion were ready in 1800 when the Adamses moved in. In a letter to her daughter, Abigail revealed that she hung her family’s laundry in the unfinished East Room, later the scene of elegant receptions.

Abigail Adams is also remembered as the mother of John Quincy Adams, the sixth President.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” novelist Ernest Hemingway wrote. “It’s the best book we’ve had.” Many critics share this high opinion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Yet some people have called the book crude and racist, and it has been banned by some libraries.

Set in the South before the Civil War, the book tells the story of young Huck Finn, who runs aways from his abusive father. Huck teams up with a runaway slave named Jim, and the two head down the Mississippi River on a raft. Along the way, they meet feuding families, crooks, and Huck’s friend from an earlier Twain book, Tom Sawyer.

When Jim is captured by slave catchers, Huck and Tom rescue him. At the end of the book, Jim learns that he has been freed by his owner, and the self-reliant Huck heads west to avoid being adopted and “civilized.”

It is a humorous tale, yet the author explores such key themes in American history as slavery, independence, and equality. Moreover, he captures with amazing accuracy the speech of ordinary people of the time. Twain, however, jokingly threatened to prosecute, banish, or shoot anyone who found a motive, moral, or plot in Huckleberry Finn. He wanted people to enjoy reading it. And for more than 110 years, they have.

Like his character, Huck Finn, Mark Twain grew up in a small Missouri town on the Mississippi River.

Timothy O'Sullivan

Taking pictures in the early years of photography was hard work. Cameras were large, heavy boxes that sat on strong tripods. Bright light, and at least several seconds were needed to take a picture. The negative images were recorded on fragile glass plates that had to be coasted with light-sensitive chemicals just before the exposure was made, then developed immediately afterward. So a photographer working away from his studio had to carry a portable darkroom in his horse-drawn wagon. It would not be until the 1880s when rolls of film replaced glass plates for photographic negatives.

Despite these limitations, some early photographers managed to take remarkable pictures. One of the best photographers was Timothy O’Sullivan, who had a natural talent for selecting interesting subjects and making striking visual compositions. O’Sullivan learned his craft from the famous photographer Matthew Brady. During the Civil War, O’Sullivan accompanied the Union army; his heartbreaking battlefield images were published in a book, Harvest of Death, in 1863.

After the war he traveled with survey expeditions to the American West, taking memorable pictures of the Great Salt Lake, Arizona’s Canyon de Cheily, and other wonders of the then little-known region. He was the first to photograph the ruins of the ancient Native American civilization that flourished in the Southwest around 1100 A.D.

The image with this post is a Timothy O'Sullivan photograph.

Marquis de Lafayette

He was called “the hero of two worlds” because of his important role in both the American and the French revolutions. He was the Marquis de Lafayette, a French nobelman who devoted his life to fighting for liberty under law.

Lafayette came to America in 1777 to help the 13 colonies in their revolt against England. At first the colonists were suspicious of the 19-year-old Frenchman, but Lafayette volunteered to serve without pay in the colonial army. He fought bravely and was wounded at the Battle of Brandywine. He lived through the hard winter with George Washington at Valley Forge and became one of Washington’s closest friends and most successful generals. But more important was his key role in convincing the French government to provide support for the colonials.

Lafayette was present at Yorktown, Virginia. In October 1781, when a large British army was trapped by American troops and French forces that had come to help the colonials. The British surrendered, bringing the Revolution to an end. Lafayette returned to France and worked for the liberty of his own countrymen. When he died in 1834, flags flew at half-mast all across the U.S. in honor of the Frenchman known as “America’s Marquis.”

Lafayette visited the U.S. in 1824. When he returned to France, he took with him a box of American soil. Ten years later that soil was used to cover his grave.

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 and 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 then 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. The Hayeses 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.

Because the Hayeses came from Ohio, the rule that no liquor could be served at the White House was called “the Ohio Idea.”

Mercy Otis Warren

“Be it known unto Britain even American daughters are politicians and patriots,” wrote Mercy Otis Warren. Women were not educated outside their homes in colonial America, and they were not allowed to participate openly in public affairs. But Warren had a natuiral talent for literature and for politics, and she used both to support the Patriot cause. She has been called the “First Lady of the Revolution.”

Warren’s brother, James Otis, and her husband, James Warren, were both Patriot leaders in Massachusetts. Through them, Warren knew most of the important figures of ther day including Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. By 1772, she had become a supporter of American indepdence. To encourage patriotic feeling in the colonies, Warren wrote a series of plays that were published anonymously. They satirized the British colonial government and attacked specific public officials. Soon after the Revolutionary War began, Warren started to record its history.

Her three-volume work, History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, was published in 1805, under her own name. It provides an insider’s view of the struggle by a woman who believed that revolutions are “permitted by Providence to remind mankind of their natural equality.”

Some poems written by Mercy Otis Warren were published in 1790, but much of her poetry was not published until modern times.

I.M. Pei

In Washington D.C., a bold structure in the shape of two connecting triangles makes a dramatic addition to the National Gallery of Art. In Boston, the green-glassed John Hancock Tower soars above the skyline. In Paris, a 70-foot-high glass pyramid serves as the controversial new entrance to the Louvre museum. These notable buildings were all designed by I.M. Pei, one of America’s leading architects.

Born in China, Ieoh Ming Pei moved to the United States in 1935. He studied architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then he taught at Harvard University and worked for an architectural firm in New York. Pei became an American citizen in 1954 and, a year later, opened his own firm.

Pei’s first greatest success was the Mile High Center in Denver, Colorado. Since then his designs, marked by elegant simplicity, geometric patterns, and richly contrasting materials, have won him worldwide fame.

Critic Robert Hughes wrote that Pei’s design for the East Building of the National Gallery of Art “takes its place among the great museum buildings of the past hundred years.” In 1983, he was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize for having “given this century some of its most beautiful interior spaces and exterior forms.”

In 1978, Pei returned to china to design a hotel in Beijing.

Thomas Alva Edison

“There’s a better way to do it,” was Thomas Edison’s lifelong motto. Edison proved that motto at his “invention factory” in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he and his staff created a steady stream of new devices.

Born in poverty, Edison had very little formal schooling. But he read widely to satisfy his enormous curiosity. Whatever money he could earn as a teenager he spent on science books or on equipment for his laboratory. He was just 21 years old when he produced his first major invention---a stock ticker for printing stock-exchange quotations.

Edison liked to boast that his laboratory turned out a new invention every few days. Thomas Edison was awarded over 1,000 patents in his lifetime. One after another they appeared; the first successful lightbulb, a system for distributing electricity from power stations, the first phonograph, and improved telephone, a fluoroscope for medical research, an electric storage battery, a mimeograph machine, a moving-picture machine. The list of achievements was staggering, and it made Eidson one of the most admired men of his time. He was a prime example, people said, of the American dream of success achieved through talent and hard work.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain once defined a classic as “a book that people praise but don’t read.” But he was wrong where his own works were concerned. Although undeniably classics, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are read by generation after generation of delighted readers.

Twain’s books about boyhood on the Mississippi River were written in part from his own experience. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, he grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and later worked as a riverboat pilot. He chose “Mark Twain” as his pen name because that was the phrase rivermen yelled out to indicate that the river was two fathoms deep---deep enough for riverboats.

Before he took the pen name of Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens used such other names as Sergeant Fathom, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, and W. Epaminandos Adrastus Blab.

After working as a miner and a journalist in the West, Twain turned full-time to writing and lecturing. No one else wrote with such a sharp ear for American speech or with such wonderful humor. His many books---including A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Roughing It---added to his fame and wealth. He later lost his money in bad business ventures, but managed to repay his debts. His reputation as a uniquely American genius has grown brighter with time.

Kit Carson

Kit Carson was one of America’s most famous frontiersmen. As a hunter, a guide, and a soldier, he played an important role in opening the West for settlement.

Carson grew up in Missiouri, but headed west in search of adventure when he was 17. For years he lived the rugged existence of a mountain man, trapping furs in the Rocky Mountains and frequently fighting for his life against Indians and thieves. In 1842, he met Lieutenant Colonel John C. Fremont, who was assigned to explore the West for the United States government. Carson served as Fremont’s guide on three separate expeditions. Their journeys through the mountains made both men equally famous and opened the way for thousands of settlers.

During the Mexican War, Carson served in the army in California. When U.S. troops were nearly defeated at the Battle of San Pasqual, he crawled through enemy lines and walked 30 miles to get help. Carson fought on the Union side in New Mexico during the Civil War. Later, he participated in campaigns that forced the Apache and Navajo Indians on reservations and caused the deaths of thousands. Although at first Carson protested the army’s cruel treatment of Native Americans, he carried out the orders of his superiors. Carson died in 1868 at the age of 59, but his name lives on as one of the legends of the West.

Carson City, Nevada’s capital, is named in honor of Kit Carson.

The Phonograph

President Rutherford B. Hayes couldn’t believe his ears---a box was politely asking about his health! Hayes had invited Thomas A. Edison, the famous inventor from New Jersey, to the White House to demonstrate his latest invention. The device was called a phonograph and it could both record and replay sound. It amazed Americans and many people thought it was a trick.

But Eidson’s phonograph was no trick. The “record” was a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a metal cylinder. A disc with a needle in it was set vibrating by the sound of the human voices, causing the needle to make grooves of varying depths in the tinfoil as the cylinder rotated. A second disc-and-needle unit was employed to play back the sound; as the second needle traveled over the same grooves, its disc vibrated, recreating the sound.

Eidson charged admission to people who wanted to hear his early phonographs play”Yankee Doodle”, and sold several hundred tinfoil phonographs. But he considered them oddities, and concentrated on other projects. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, improved on Edison’s idea, introducing wax-covered cylinders. Recorded disks, or “records,” were the idea of German inventor Emile Berliner. Millions of records could be stamped from a single master disk. They were first marketed in the United States in 1893. And Americans were soon cranking up phonographs to listen to their favorite singers and dance to the newest tune.

Samuel Gompers

Long hours, low pay, and unsafe working conditions were the rule for most American workers in the late 1800s. Samuel Gompers helped change that by bringing thousands of workers together in unions to bargain for better treatment from employers.

Born in England, Gompers came to the United States with his family in 1863. He learned his father’s cigarmaking trade and joined the Cigarmakers’ Union. He became president of that union in 1874. In those days, unions were small and served only skilled workers in specific trades. Gompers realized that unions would be stronger if they banded together. In 1881, he helped found a federation of labor unions that became the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1886.

Gompers was president of the AFL until his death. Under his presidency, membership grew to four million. Gompers pressed for higher wages, fewer hours, and better working conditions. He believed that these goals should be won by collective bargaining, not strikes. Unlike some labor leaders, he was not very interested in political change. His purpose was to make life better for American workers. While Gompers led the AFL, average wages increased 205 percent and the average workday was shortened to nine hours. Because of his imporant role in their struggle, he is known as the “father of the modern labor movement.”