Dallas

The shining skyscrapers of Dallas are visible from far across the praries of northeastern Texas. Considered the financial center of the Southwest, Dallas is the home of banks, oil companies, insurance companies, and many other businesses. It is also a culturual center and an important transportation hub.


Dallas was born in 1841, when John Neely Bryan built a trading post on the banks of the Trinity River. The town that grew around his log cabin was named for George M. Dallas, a United States Vice President who heped Texas achieve statehood. The arrival of the railroad in the 1870s allowed the farmers near Dallas to ship cotton they grew in the rich prarie soil. When oil fields opened in east Texxas in the 1930s, Dallas became the headquarters for hundreds of oil companies.

After World War II, Dallas becoame a center of manufacturing, financial services, and trade shows. Skyscrapers shot up. The tallest of these, National Bank Plaza, is 72 stories high. Prosperity helped Dallas become a center for culture and recreation. Its theater, opera, and music groups are world famous. So are its museums, its zoos; and its football team, the Dallas Cowboys. The Texas State Fair is the country’s largest, drawing three million people to Dallas each October.

John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza in Dallas is near the spot where Kennedy was shot in November, 1963.

Board Games

Whether they are set up on the kitchen table or spread out on the living-room floor, board games bring friends and families together. Although games like chess and checkers go back to ancient times, board games have only been around since the mid-1800s. that was when many Americans first began to have leisure time, and they looked for ways to fill it.


The first board game manufactured in the US was the “Mansion of Happiness,” an instant hit in 1843. Like many other board games of the 1800s, it taught a moral lesson: Landing on spaces representing good behavior sped players toward the finish line. iN the 1860s, Milton Bradley introduced a series of popular board games, including the “Checkered Game of Life” and a set of pocket games for Civil War soldiers.

Parcheesi, based on ancient Indian game, was America’s favorite from 1900 to 1930. The word game, Scrabble, introduced in the 1940s, is still popular today. But the most successful board game of all time remains Monopoly. It came out in 1935, during the Great Depression. Americans love this fantasy game, in which players buy and develop property while trying to force their opponents into bankruptcy.

Monopoly was based on a handmade board game designed by Lizzie Magie of Virginia in 1904. Pennsylvanian Charles Darrow adapted it in 1933. He became a millionaire when his version was later published by Parker Brothers.

George G. Meade

Early on the morning of June 28, 1863, General George Gordon Meade was awakened by a messenger with a letter from Abraham Lincoln. The President, the letter said, had appointed Meade the new commander of the Union’s Army of the Potomac. Five days later, the general won the greatest Northern victory of the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg.


Meade was born in Spain, where his father was a US naval agent, and graduated from the US Military Academy in 1835. The next year, he resigned from the army to become a civil engineer. But he returned to duty during the Mexican War of 1846-1848, and then the Civil War broke out in 1861, he was given command of the brigade of Pennsylvania volunteers. An able leader and brave soldier, Meade fought in many of the war’s early battles and was severely wounded in one of them. When Lincoln put Meade in command of the Union army in June, 1863, the South’s General Robert E. Leehad just invaded Pennsylvania. Meade and Lee met at the small crossroads town of Gettysburg on July 1.

There the battle raged for three days, after which the defeatedLee was forced to retreat. “I think I have lived as much in this time as in the last thirty years,” Meade wrote his wife about the fierce struggle at Gettysburg. He continued to lead the Armey of the Potamac until the Confederate surrdender in April, 1865.

Meade died in 1872 from complications related to wounds he received during the Civil War.

Germans in America

Christmas trees, wedding rings, kindergartens, hot dogs. These are a few of the familiar things immigrants from Germany brought to America.


The first group of Germans arrived in the New World in 1683, aboard the Concord, which has been called “the German Mayflower.” They came from the Rhineland in search of religious freedom.

Fittingly, they named their Pennsylvania settlement Germantown. Since then, more than seven million Germans have come to America. The peak decade was the 1880s, whien 1.5 milllion Germans left the political and economic problems of their homeland to find better lives in the United States.  In the 1930s and 1940s, many Germans fled Nazi oppression and reached safety in America. Because the United States fought against Germany in two world wars, many German-Americans were the victims of anti-German feeling in America.

Today, more than one in every five Americans can point proudly to a German ancestor. Across the country, place names such as Frankfort, Kentucky; Berlin, New Hamp;shire; and Bismark, North Dakota attest to the strong German thread in the fabric of the United States.  

The Germans who settled in Pennsylvania became known as Pennsylvania Dutch, not because they came from Holland but because Deutsch means “German” in the German Language.

The Battle of Princeton

On January 3, 1777, George Washington outfoxed the British. A week before, his army had won one of the most remarkable victories of the Revolution. They had surprised and beaten Hessian mercenaries (German troops hired by the British) at Trenton, New Jersey. But British General Lord Cornwallis had marched on Trenton with about 8,000 redcoats, who were now positioned to attack Washington’s 2500 troops.

Instead of fighting Cornwallis, Washington decided to make a surprise attack on another British force. After midnight, the Americans slipped quietly away from their camp. They left their campfires burning so the British would think they were still there. Marsching sliently south and east around Cornwallis’ army the Americans headed utoward Princeton, 10 miles away. At daybreak, they attacked and defeated two British regiments.

The victories at Trenton and Princeton raised the morale of patriots throuout the country. And they caused the British to evacuate western New Jersey, leaving the Americans with an open supply route between Philadelphia and New York. Washington’s army moved into winter headquarters at Morristown, New Jersey, with renewed pride and confidence.

Washington almost lost many of his men just before the Battle of Princeton because their enlistment terms expired January 1,. The general’s personal appeals convinced tmost of them to stay on.

New Orleans

New Orleans is one of the most picturesque and interesting cities in the US In the section known as the French Quarter, or the Vieux Carre (old square), the pastel-colored houses with their courtyards and wrought-iron balconies seem more Latin American than North American. In another section, the Garden District, large handsome houses with broad verandas and white columns recall the era before the Civil War. Even the city’s cemeteries are different: Because much of the city is below sea level, the earth is too wet for burials, so the tombs all lie above ground. Famous for its fine restaurants, New Orleans is also the birthplace of jazz and the site each year of the famous Mardi Gras, the carnival that precedes Lent.


New Orleans is the southernmost Mississippi port, not far from the Gulf of Mexico. There cargoes are exchanged between seagoing vessels and the steamboats and barges of the Mississippi river system. Today the port of New Orleans handles more freight than any other US port.

New Orleans was established in 1718 by the French. In the 1760s it fell under Spanish control. Returned to France in 1800, the city was acquired by the US in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase.

New Orleans was the original “Dixie Land,” so named for a ten-dollar bill with a large DIX (French for ten) printed on it that circulated in the city before the Civil War.

Peter Minuit Buys Manhattan

In the summer of 1826, Peter Minuit made one of the best deals in real estate history. He bought an island at the mouth of the Hudson River from Native American leaders for cloth, beads and other goods that would be worth about $24 today. The Native Americans called the island “Manhatta” – heavenly land. Today we know it as Manhattan, the heart of one of the world’s greatest cities, New York.
Minuit had been sent by the Dutch West India Company to take charge of the scattered Dutch settlements in present-day New Jersey and New York. Minuit decided to move most of the settlers to the southern tip of Manhattan. After buying the island, he built a crude fort and about 30 houses there. Minuit returned to Europe after five years, but the settlement continued to grow. Known as New Amsterdam, it became a busy port and the center of a thriving colony. It was renamed New York by the British, who seized it in 1664.

As for Peter Minuit, he returned to the New World in 1638, in the service of Sweden, and made another smart purchase. He bought land along the Delaware River from Native Americans. Today that land is the site of Wilmington, Delaware.

Peter Minuit was killed in a hurricane in 1638, while on a trading expedition to the West Indies.