I’ve made mention many times that I’m a lover of history. Being an American I’m doubly interested in the history of this country and all of the good things and bad things that it’s done in order to exist in its present form. Today’s post will be a few facts of American history that I am reasonably sure not many of you are aware of. Let’s see if I can surprise you a little.
- The name “United States of America” was coined by a man who lived the last years of his life in disrepute and who’s bodily remains eventually were lost. I’m talking about Thomas Payne. Payne lived his first 37 years in London, mostly in poverty, and only a fluke meeting in London with Benjamin Franklin encouraged his move to America. Later, in 1776, he wrote his popular and famous revolutionary tract, Common Sense.
- Robert R. Livingston and James Munroe sailed to Paris for the sole purpose of buying a small piece of French held land in the West near New Orleans and for expanding waterway traffic. They ended up buying half a billion acres of wilderness called the Louisiana Purchase.
- In the United States only 80 miles separate the highest point of land in the lower forty-eight states and the lowest point. Mount Whitney on the eastern border of Sequoia National Park in California is 14,496 feet high, and a pool called Badwater in Death Valley is 280 feet below sea level.
- Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States of America (1789).
- Beginning in 1882, immigrants had to pay to enter the United States. A tax of $.50 per person was imposed that year; it was increased to two dollars in 1903 and then again to four dollars in 1907.
- The official manual of the Internal Revenue Service of the United States and is an agglomeration of 38,000 pages. It has been appropriately described as ” the world’s most confusing publication.”
- When the United States was just 60 years old in 1836, Narciso Prentiss Whitman and Eliza Heart Spalding were perhaps the first women to cross the continent. They reached Oregon that year in a party organized by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missionaries. The success of the expedition stimulated emigration to the territories in the Northwest.
- The United States Automobile Association was formed in 1905 for the express purpose of providing “scouts” who could warn motorists of hidden “police traps.”
- The population of New Hampshire increased only 8.3% between the start of the War of Independence and the 1970 census. In the same 194 years, the total population of the original 13 states, which included New Hampshire, increased from 2,616,000 (estimated) to just under 75 million – a gain of 2767%.
- The first automobile to cross the United States took 52 days in 1903, to go from San Francisco to New York.
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