4. The person who led the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill was not Theodore Roosevelt, who organized the First Regiment of the U.S. Cavalry Volunteers (the Rough Riders), but Colonel Leonard Wood who, on horseback, led the Rough Riders on foot in their charge up San Juan Hill, which was won on July 1, 1896. Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, Wood’s second in command, had led the Rough Riders’ charge up Kettle Hill earlier that day. The charge up Kettle Hill became mistaken for the Battle of San Juan Hill. The Rough Riders soon called themselves “Wood’s Weary Walkers” because they fought much of the war on foot, not on horseback. The ships transporting the soldiers didn’t have enough room for their horses, which had been left in Florida.
5. The Confederate ship was called the C.S.S. Virginia at the time of its battle with the Monitor, though it had been called the Merrimack earlier. The Confederates built the Virginia on what was left of the frigate U.S.S. Merrimack and gave the vessel a new name.
6. The Battle of Shiloh was not in Shiloh, Tennessee, but in Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee. The battle became known as Shiloh because of the presence of Shiloh Church near the center of the battlefield. The church was named for the original Shiloh, a biblical site north of Jerusalem destroyed by the Philistines about 1000 BCE.
7. George Armstrong Custer’s rank during the Battle of Little Bighorn was not that of general, though he had been a brigadier general and had been promoted to a major general during the Civil War. After the war, Custer became a captain and was later promoted to lieutenant colonel (his actual rank when killed at the Little Bighorn).
8. The oldest seat of government in the United States can be found not in Massachusetts but in Santa Fe, New Mexico, whose governor’s palace was built in 1610, ten years before the Mayflower landed in the New World.
9. The person who led the Indians in the Battle of Little Bighorn was not Sitting Bull, who stayed in the hills making medicine, but Crazy Horse.
10. The full title of the person who is the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court is not “Chief Justice of the Supreme Court” but “Chief Justice of the United States.”
11. The main reason the U.S. government required gas rationing during World War II was not to save gas, since the Allies, at the beginning of the war, had control of about 85 percent of the world’s oil production; rather, the United States instituted gasoline rationing to reduce tire use and conserve rubber until a synthetic product could be developed. Note that after Japan’s incursion into Indochina, it controlled nearly all the world’s natural rubber supply. It was estimated that the United States had only a one-year civilian supply of rubber in reserve, which was inadequate to meet the anticipated military demand for rubber during the war. The U.S. government wanted Americans to drive less, and rationing tires alone would not have accomplished that goal.
12. Until 1796, George Washington officially celebrated his birthday on February 11, not February 22. Because of the conversion from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, George Washington was not born on Washington’s birthday. Why was the Julian calendar replaced by the Gregorian calendar? By the sixteenth century, astronomers had observed a discrepancy between the existing Julian calendar, instituted in 46 BCE, and the true solar year. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII implemented a revised calendar, which came to be known as the Gregorian, or New Style, Calendar and which required the elimination of ten days to correct the accumulated celestial error. The Gregorian Calendar included the present system of leap years to maintain accuracy. Numerous countries did not immediately adopt the new system. In fact, Britain and her colonies did not switch until 1752, by which time eleven days needed to be eliminated because of an even greater error in the Julian calendar. When the conversion took place in 1752, George Washington was twenty. Although he had been born on February 11, 1731 (Old Style), the date became February 22, 1732 (New Style), when colonial Virginia adopted the calendar and made the necessary adjustments.
13. The original purpose of the Mason-Dixon line was not to distinguish the North from the South during the U.S. Civil War but to settle a boundary in the eighteenth century between the Penn family of Pennsylvania and the Calvert family in Maryland. In 1760, the quarreling families agreed to have two English astronomers and surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, settle the dispute. From 1763 to 1767, Mason and Dixon established a boundary between latitude thirty-nine degrees, forty-three minutes, fifteen seconds and thirty-nine degrees, forty-three minutes, and twenty-three seconds. In reality, the east-west Mason-Dixon line is not a true line in a geometric sense but rather a series of adjoining lines.
14. Contrary to popular opinion, Billy the Kid’s real name was not William H. Bonney (which was an alias he was using when he was sentenced to die), but probably Henry McCarty. Some accounts, however, contend that his original name was William Henry McCarty Jr., but his mother preferred to call him Henry and didn’t want him known as Junior.
15. There were ten nineteenth-century American presidents who had been generals: Jackson, W. H. Harrison, Taylor, Pierce, A. Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, and B. Harrison.
16. The longest war fought by the United States was the forty-six-year campaign against the Apache nation, which ended in 1886 with Geronimo’s surrender in New Mexico.
17. There have been forty-three (not forty-four) men who have been president of the United States from Washington to Obama. President Grover Cleveland was president for two nonconsecutive terms, making him the twenty-second and twenty-fourth president.
18. Witches were executed in Salem, Massachusetts, not by being burned but by being hanged. During the Salem witch hunts, 14 women and 5 men were hanged, and 1 man (Giles Corey) was pressed to death under heavy stones. Although more than 150 others were imprisoned, and other women had been hanged as witches elsewhere in New England, witches weren’t burned at the stake in Salem.
19. The first shots of the U.S. Civil War were not at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. South Carolina seceded from the Union and prepared to seize control of federal government forts in Charleston Harbor in 1860. On January 9, 1861, a battery of Confederate soldiers on Morris Island, South Carolina—cadets from the Citadel (military college)—fired seventeen shots at the Star of the West, a civilian Union steamship hired by the federal government to transport military supplies and reinforcements to the garrison of Fort Sumter. On April 12, 1861, three months later, the Confederate army fired on the South Carolina fort.
20. Although nearly everyone believes that Peter Minuit paid $24 for Manhattan, no money was exchanged. An unknown quantity of trinkets and goods was valued by the Dutch at 60 guilders, but, as said, no money was exchanged and dollars did not even exist until about 150 years later. So, then, how did we get the dollar estimate? In the 1840s, a New York newspaper writer speculated on the value of the American goods. Even though no record was made by the Dutch listing the specific items exchanged, the writer speculated that the goods given to the Indians 200 years earlier were worth $24.
21. Lizzie Borden’s verdict was not guilty.
22. The number of U.S. presidents who have been impeached is two—namely, President Andrew Johnson and President Bill Clinton. Both were acquitted by the U.S. Senate; Johnson, by only one vote.
23. Prohibition in the United States (1920-1933) did not outlaw the possession or drinking of alcohol. Rather, the law made illegal “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” The Eighteenth Amendment did not define intoxicating liquor, a task executed by the Volstead Act, which defined the term as “any drink at least 0.5 percent alcohol by volume.” Note that it was quite legal for clubs, including the Yale Club, to serve alcoholic beverages bought before Prohibition. Note further that there were additional legal exemptions (some would say loopholes). For example, alcohol was available through a physician’s prescription, and more people drank alcohol for medicinal purposes during Prohibition than before. Although writing prescriptions for alcohol during Prohibition served the financial interests of physicians, alcohol had be
en removed from the Pharmacopeia of the United States in 1916 and had been rejected as a tonic, stimulant, or food by the American Medical Association in 1917. Nonetheless, physicians were still able to prescribe liquor to patients on a specially designed governmental prescription form. When the supply of medicinal whiskey was low, the government would increase its production, some of which would be diverted to bootleggers and corrupt individuals. Another exemption during Prohibition was sacramental wine. Many people certified themselves as ministers and rabbis to obtain and distribute large quantities of sacramental wine.
24. As an advocate of Vermont independence, Ethan Allen originally organized the Green Mountain Boys not to fight the British in the American Revolution but to fight off the Yorkers—that is, settlers from New York. Disputes arose because settlers from New York were given patents by the colonial governor of New Hampshire to land claimed by settlers from what was later Vermont, originally named New Hampshire Grants (1749-1777). Allen became involved in land speculation and was a proprietor in the New Hampshire Grants.
25. The feminists did not burn their bras but wore them. The closest thing to bra burning happened at the 1968 Miss America Pageant. On September 7, 1968, protesters of the pageant filled a “freedom trash can” with bras, girdles, false eyelashes, men’s magazines, and other items they considered instruments of torture. Some people wanted to burn the items, but they were unable to obtain a permit. Journalist Lindsay van Gelder described the protest in an article for the New York Post whose headline was “Bra Burners and Miss America.” That headline gave birth to an urban legend.
26. The Pentagon was built with about twice as many bathrooms as would have been expected for a building of its size to comply with Virginia’s then-legal code; Virginia law at the time required racial segregation of public buildings.
27. Most of the loss of life and property during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was due to the resultant fire, which raged for three days.
28. President Andrew Jackson was called Old Hickory because of his walking stick.
29. President Franklin Roosevelt did not deliver his chats weekly or monthly. In fact, on average, he gave one only two or three times a year (for a total of twenty-seven times between March 12, 1933, and his death in 1945).
30. The name of the aviation sector of the U.S. Army during World War II was not the “Army Air Force” or “Army Air Corps” but the “Army Air Forces” (note the plural), created on June 20, 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor. The Air Force, as a branch of the U.S. military, was created on July 26, 1947.
31. The colonists involved in the Boston Tea Party were not protesting against higher taxes on imported British tea. On the contrary, the price of tea had been lowered by the British. To understand the motives of those at the Boston Tea Party requires understanding a little history. Many goods imported into the colonies were heavily taxed by the British. To appease angry colonists, the British repealed the tariffs, except the tariff on tea, which the colonists circumvented by buying less-expensive, smuggled Dutch tea. The tea-buying preferences of the colonists led to millions of pounds of surplus British tea. To persuade the colonists to buy the surplus tea, the Parliament passed the Tea Act, which eliminated all duties on British tea and priced it below the cost of smuggled Dutch tea. Despite the lower cost of the British tea, many American colonists resented British involvement in what was increasingly regarded as an American (not British) economy. Accordingly, colonists refused to allow the unloading of the British tea. Then, on December 16, 1773, about sixty men dressed as Indians dumped the cargo of tea from the three British ships into Boston Harbor.
32. George Washington wrote his farewell address with the help of Alexander Hamilton.
33. The seal adopted in 1837 by the U.S. Postal Service was not depicting the Pony Express Service, which was a private service and which did not even begin until 1860; the original seal depicted an intercity postal rider. The Pony Express, by the way, went from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, and lasted only a year and a half; it was made obsolete by the telegraph.
34. President Lincoln’s first choice to lead the Union was not General Grant but Robert E. Lee, who rejected the offer because of his loyalty to Virginia.
35. Paul Revere did not shout, “The British are coming”; he shouted, “The regulars are out.” The regulars were British infantry soldiers. Note, by the way, that many colonists still considered themselves British.
36. Contrary to the image of Daniel Boone popularized by actor Fess Parker on TV, the real Daniel Boone didn’t wear a coonskin hat, which he thought looked uncivilized. Instead, he wore a beaver-felt hunter’s hat, a wide-brimmed, Pennsylvania-style hat, which resembled the hat depicted on a box of Quaker oats. The coonskin hat became tied with Boone in the 1820s during a minstrel show called The Hunters of Kentucky, in which the actor portraying Boone was unable to find a beaver hat and wore a coonskin cap as the closest available substitute.
37. American Pilgrims didn’t regularly dress in black, wear buckles, or black steeple hats. That image was formed in the nineteenth century when buckles suggested quaintness. Some male Pilgrims wore felt hats (but with no buckles), and female Pilgrims wore waist-coats that came in many colors. What’s more, women’s bodices or skirts were often blue, red, earth green, violet, or gray.
38. Although many people think that all the states ratified the Prohibition Amendment, two states (Rhode Island and Connecticut) rejected it.
39. FDR accused Hoover of overspending public money and ran on the promise that he would balance the budget and be more fiscally responsible than Hoover, who created public works programs. What’s more, FDR’s running mate in 1932, John Nance Garner, accused Hoover of moving the country toward socialism. Hoover, not FDR, was the first American president to systematically intervene in response to an economic downturn.
40. The state that describes itself as Land of Opportunity is Arkansas.
Quiz 8
Food
1. According to the Curtiss Candy Company, after whom was the Baby Ruth candy bar named?
2. After whom was the Caesar salad named?
3. After whom was German chocolate cake named?
4. After whom was the dish eggs Benedict named?
5. What is the source of the tails in oxtail soup?
6. What is headcheese?
7. What is the main purpose of searing meat?
8. What is sweetbread?
9. What distinguishes a hot dog from a frankfurter?
10. What is Welsh rabbit?
11. Why is telling Americans to serve red wine at room temperature possibly bad advice?
12. What is the most common main ingredient in mock turtle soup?
13. What percentage of buttermilk is butter?
14. Where were English muffins invented?
15. What country originated the hamburger?
16. What is the difference between mayonnaise and Miracle Whip?
17. What is the difference between Welsh rabbit and Welsh rarebit?
18. Why are some olives green rather than black?
19. What is the main difference between black tea and oolong tea?
20. What is the difference between cocoa and chocolate?
Quiz 8 Answers
Food
1. The Curtiss Candy Company insists that the Baby Ruth candy bar was named after Ruth Cleveland, the firstborn daughter of President Grover Cleveland. Note that the company never got legal permission from Babe Ruth to use what looks like a form of his name. According to Snopes.com, the candy bar was probably named after Babe Ruth, who had become enormously popular when the bar first came out—much more popular than Ruth Cleveland, who had died at the age of twelve, more than seventeen years before the candy bar was produced. Although the Curtiss Company has asserted that Ruth Cleveland had visited its factory, she could not have, since she had died before the factory was built.
2. The Caesar salad was named after Caesar Cardini, who created the Caes
ar salad in Mexico in 1924. The original recipe contained the same ingredients used today, minus the anchovies, which Cardini didn’t think were needed with the tangy Worcestershire sauce.
3. German chocolate cake was named after Sam German, a man who in 1892 created a “sweet baking bar” named Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate. When the chocolate was used as an ingredient in recipes, apostrophes in its original name were left out, leading to the belief in German chocolate.
4. The dish called “eggs Benedict” was not named after Benedict Arnold, the infamous traitor during the American Revolutionary War, but after socialite Samuel Benedict, who, when suffering from a hangover on a morning in 1894, ordered bacon and poached eggs on toast with Hollandaise sauce at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria. Instead of receiving bacon and toast, Samuel Benedict received ham and an English muffin, which became a new breakfast sensation.
5. The tails in oxtail soup come not from oxen but from beef cattle.
6. Headcheese is not cheese but rather portions of the head, feet, and other parts of a pig pressed together and molded in the form of cheese.
7. The main purpose of searing meat is not to seal in moisture but to create a brown crust and to add flavor.
8. Sweetbread is not a bread but the thymus or pancreas of a young animal, usually a calf, though occasionally a lamb or pig.
9. A hot dog normally has a bun; a frankfurter need not have a bun.
10. Welsh rabbit is a cheese dish whose name is an ironic allusion to the poverty of those Welsh people who were too poor to afford meat.
11. Telling Americans to serve wine at room temperature may be bad advice because room temperature, in the wine-growing areas of Europe, is not the 70°F or 72°F common in American homes. In much of Europe, room temperature is often 60°F to 65°F. Although drinking red wine between 55°F and 65°F is advisable, drinking it at 72°F will make it taste way out of balance. In short, it makes sense to serve red wine slightly chilled in much of the United States.
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