HISTORY OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
We know this polymath as a writer, publisher, printer, merchant, scientist, moral philosopher, international diplomat, and inventor. Musically he invented the glass harmonica, but he also invented the Franklin stove, and started the first lending library and fire brigade in Philadelphia.
He did experiments in electricity and developed the lightning rod.
As one of [...]
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Ben Franklin
HISTORY OF THE 4th OF JULY: THOMAS JEFFERSON
Perhaps no one person is more associated with the 4th of July in American History than Thomas Jefferson, probably because it was his hand that penned the immortal Declaration of Independence.
As my friend Clay Jenkinson — who has been portraying Jefferson for over 20 years — says in [...]
HISTORY OF INDEPENDENCE DAY
Independence Day, or the Fourth of July celebrates the adoption by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, of the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming the severance of the allegiance of the American colonies to Great Britain. It is the greatest secular holiday of the United States, observed in all the states, territories [...]
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4th of July,
Benjamin Franklin,
Independence,
john adams,
Thomas Jefferson
HISTORY OF FATHERS DAY
The celebration of Father’s Day goes back all the way to the beginning, actually to the Garden of Eden when Abel gave his father Adam a razor while his brother Cain gave his father a snake-skin tie. This was the beginning of Cain’s downward slide.
Scholars have debated for ages why Mother’s [...]
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berkeley,
Fathers_Day
HISTORY OF MEMORIAL DAY
The city of Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, an American village on the National Historic Register, claims to be the birthplace of Memorial Day, as do some 24 other towns in America. But Boalsburg’s claim goes back to a practice at the end of the Civil War. It does have a local museum, and a [...]
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memorial day
HISTORY OF PRESIDENTS’ DAY
During my lifetime, two American holidays got consolidated into one. In 1971, both Lincoln’s Birthday on February 12 and Washington’s Birthday on February 22 became a single Federal holiday, Presidents Day — alternately spelled President’s Day or Presidents’ Day — to be observed on the third Monday in February, to honor [...]
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History,
holiday,
Lincoln,
US,
Washington
HISTORY OF THE SUPER BOWL
The Super Bowl, also known as simply Superbowl — a territory acquisition athletic contest played upon a fixed agrarian grid using as a token an inflated porcine prolate spheroid — is the most important holiday of the year in America. Some will say that it is a secular holiday, others argue [...]
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History,
holiday,
Super Bowl