150 Great American Events

By William J. Bennett and John T.E. Cribb

Almost a decade ago, author and educator William J. Bennett and John T. E. Cribb published a 365-day almanac of our nation's history. Now, in this new two-volume series compiled from The American Patriot’s Almanac, Bennett and Cribb’s masterful grasp of our history offers 150 examples of fascinating details of great American events.

A two-volume series compiled from William J. Bennett's bestselling book, revised and updated.

150 Great American Events includes:

• American drama and interesting facts about American figures
• Obscure details about American history
• Patriotic facts to broaden one’s sense of the past
• Bold personalities and internal conflicts

Discoveries, ideas, and more

In these easy-to-read entries, historical American events reemerge not as cold facts or boring details in a textbook, but as authentic events experienced by full-blooded, heroic pioneers whose far-reaching vision forged our nation. Great for history buffs, homeschoolers, teachers, and people who are interested in American history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: Oct 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9781400326341

William J. Bennett

Dr. William J. Bennett is one of America’s most influential and respected voices on cultural, political, and educational issues. Host of The Bill Bennett Show podcast, he is also the Washington Fellow of the American Strategy Group. He is the author and editor of more than twenty-five books. Dr. Bennett served as the secretary of education and chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities  under  President  Ronald  Reagan  and  as  director  of  the  Office  of  National  Drug  Control  Policy  under  President  George  Herbert  Walker Bush.

Book preview

HOW AMERICA GOT ITS NAME

America is named after the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci, one of the early explorers of the New World. Between 1497 and 1504 Vespucci made as many as four voyages across the Atlantic. He took part in expeditions that explored the coast of South America between Venezuela and southern Brazil.

Christopher Columbus had already sailed across the Atlantic in 1492, but he believed that he had made landfall in Asia. Vespucci insisted in a report titled Mundus Novus (New World) that a giant, uncharted land mass lay between Europe and Asia.

In April 1507, a German mapmaker named Martin Waldseemüller published a book called Cosmographiae Introductio in which he coined the term America to honor Vespucci. He mistakenly believed that Vespucci had been the first to discover the New World. I do not see why anyone should by right object to name it America . . . after its discoverer, Americus, a man of sagacious mind, since both Europe and Asia took their names from women, Waldseemüller wrote.

Waldseemüller also made maps bearing the name America, and soon other Europeans began using the term. At first the name applied only to South America, which Vespucci had explored, but later mapmakers used America for all of the New World.

OLD AMERICAN CONGREGATIONS

THE OLDEST CATHOLIC PARISH in the United States is the parish of St. Augustine, Florida. It traces its roots to September 8, 1565, when a Spanish landing party led by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés came ashore and conducted a Mass. The parish register dates to 1594.

THE FIRST PROTESTANT CHURCH in a permanent settlement was erected at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. At first the settlers used a tent to worship, then a series of wooden structures. In 1617 they built a church of timber construction on a foundation of brick and cobble. In 1619 the first representative legislative assembly in the Western Hemisphere met in this church.

THE OLDEST STANDING PROTESTANT CHURCH is Historic St. Luke’s Church in Smithfield, Virginia. Built circa 1632 and once known as the Old Brick Church, it was founded as an Anglican church. It is the nation’s only original Gothic church building and houses the nation’s oldest intact organ.

THE FIRST SYNAGOGUE was a one-room house in New York City, rented in 1682 by Congregation Shearith Israel (the nation’s oldest Jewish congregation, established in 1654). In 1730 the congregation constructed a small stone building on Mill Street (now South William Street).

THE OLDEST STANDING SYNAGOGUE is the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, completed in 1763. In a famous letter to the congregation about religious liberty, George Washington avowed that the United States gives to bigotry no sanction and that when anyone wishes to worship God in his own way, there shall be none to make him afraid.

THE FIRST CATHEDRAL was the Baltimore Cathedral, now officially known as the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Its cornerstone was laid July 7, 1806, and the building was dedicated on May 31, 1821.

THE LOST COLONY OF ROANOKE

The fate of the lost colony of Roanoke remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of American history. There were actually two attempts to establish a settlement at Roanoke Island just off the North Carolina mainland, both organized by Sir Walter Raleigh. The first, in 1585, was England’s earliest attempt to colonize America. It lasted a year before the weary, half-starved settlers returned home.

In 1587 Raleigh sent a second expedition, 117 men, women, and children under the leadership of John White. On August 18, 1587, shortly after they reached Roanoke, Governor White’s daughter, Eleanor White Dare, gave birth to the first child of English parents born in America. The baby girl was christened Virginia Dare.

A few days later, John White departed for England to procure much-needed provisions. He arrived home at a bad time. Britain and Spain were at war, and no ships or supplies could be spared for the tiny colony. Three years passed before the anxious governor could return to Roanoke.

He arrived on his granddaughter’s third birthday. But the colonists were gone. White found carved on a post the word CROATOAN. Reasoning that the colonists had moved to the nearby island of the friendly Croatoan Indians, White sailed in that direction, but a storm arose, damaging his ships and forcing him back to England. He was never able to return to the New World.

What happened to little Virginia Dare and her companions? Some believe that hostile Indians or Spaniards destroyed the colony. Others suggest that, giving up hope of relief, they sailed for England in boats White had left them but were lost at sea. Still others believe that the Lost Colonists of Roanoke made their way inland, where they lived with the Indians, and that their blood still runs in twenty-first-century Carolinian veins.

JAMESTOWN, VIRGINIA

On April 26, 1607, three small ships from England named the Susan Constant, Godspeed, and Discovery sailed into the Chesapeake Bay. On board were 104 colonists who came ashore, erected a wooden cross, and gave thanks to God for their passage across the Atlantic. In the following days they ventured inland along a wide river they named the James, after their king, and established themselves on a low island sixty miles from the bay’s mouth. Jamestown would turn out to be the first permanent English settlement in North America.

That the colony survived comes close to being a miracle. The land the settlers chose was swampy and mosquito infested. The drinking water was bad. Malaria, typhoid, and dysentery took their toll, as did clashes with the Indians. Some of the colonists were ill prepared for frontier life. At times they spent more energy looking for gold than trying to stay alive. During the first summer, fifty died.

More ships arrived with more colonists and supplies, but still it was tough going. During the winter of 1609–1610, a siege by the Indians brought the starving time. One settler remembered that many times three or four [died] in a night; in the morning their bodies trailed out of their cabins like dogs to be buried. Out of about 214 colonists, only 60 survived. They decided to return to England but had sailed only a few miles downriver when they met a new governor arriving with yet more settlers, so they turned around.

Jamestown endured partly due to the discovery of tobacco—a crop as good as gold—but largely because of dogged perseverance.

COMMITTED TO GOD

On September 16, 1620 the Pilgrims boarded the Mayflower and set sail from Plymouth, England, for the New World. One hundred and two passengers plus crew crowded onto the tiny ship, which probably measured about one hundred feet long and twenty-five feet wide. William Bradford, longtime governor of the Plymouth Colony, left us a flavor of the perilous two-month voyage across the Atlantic in his book Of Plymouth Plantation.

After they had enjoyed fair winds and weather for a season, they were encountered many times with cross winds and met with many fierce storms with which the ship was shroudly [wickedly] shaken, and her upper works made very leaky; and one of the main beams in the midships was bowed and cracked, which put them in some fear that the ship could not be able to perform the voyage. . . . But in examining of all opinions, the master and others affirmed they knew the ship to be strong and firm under water; and for the buckling of the main beam, there was a great iron screw the passengers brought out of Holland, which would raise the beam into his place; the which being done, the carpenter and master affirmed that with a post put under it, set firm in the lower deck and otherwise bound, he would make it sufficient. And as for the decks and upper works, they would caulk them as well as they could, and though with the working of the ship they would not long keep staunch, yet there would otherwise be no great danger, if they did not over-press her with sails. So they committed themselves to the will of God and resolved to proceed.

THE MAYFLOWER COMPACT

In November 1620, after a stormy, two-month Atlantic voyage, the Pilgrims reached the coast of what is now Massachusetts. When they realized they had blown north of the region in which they had contracted to settle, some of the colonists announced they no longer felt bound by any legal authority and that none had power to command them. The Pilgrim leaders quickly solved the problem with a new contract.

On November 21 (November 11 by the Old Style calendar), as the Mayflower lay at anchor off Cape Cod, the settlers drew up an agreement to live together peacefully. They pledged to enact, constitute and frame such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the Colony. After writing out the compact, forty-one adult males signed it, and then the signers agreed that John Carver would be their governor.

In essence, the Mayflower Compact was an agreement for self-government. It was not a forced bargain among unequals, such as a monarch and his subjects or a lord and his vassals. Rather, it was a social contract between pioneers with a common purpose.

Here was a group of people capable of forging a new society in a New World. In the coming years, as Pilgrim leader William Bradford wrote, they met and consulted of laws and orders, both for their civil and military government as the necessity of their condition did require. Throughout the infant American colonies, settlers gained practice in something very rare for that time: government of the people and by the people.

THE ARK, THE DOVE, AND A MILESTONE IN RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

On March 25, 1634, about two hundred English settlers climbed off of two small ships named the Ark and the Dove anchored in the Potomac River, rowed ashore to a slice of land they named St. Clement’s Island, erected a cross, and held a thanksgiving service. It was the beginning of the colony of Maryland—a good day for religious freedom.

Maryland was founded by Cecilius Calvert, also known as Lord Baltimore, who received a charter from England’s King Charles for some twelve million acres at the northern end of the Chesapeake Bay. Calvert was a Roman Catholic at a time when Catholics were persecuted in England, and he founded his colony to be a haven where Catholics could worship freely. He named it Maryland in honor, he said, of Queen Henrietta Maria, King Charles’s wife, although Catholics quietly understood the land to be named in honor of Mary, mother of Jesus.

Calvert wanted Maryland to be a place where both Catholics and Protestants could worship freely, partly because he knew he would need Protestants to help settle his colony. In 1649 the colonial assembly passed a Toleration Act guaranteeing that no Christian in Maryland would be in any waies troubled, Molested or discountenanced for or in respect of his or her religion nor in the free exercise thereof. Such toleration led Puritans and Quakers to flee to Maryland from Virginia, where they were persecuted by Anglicans. Maryland became renowned for its religious liberties.

By modern standards, those liberties were restrictive. They applied only to Christians. There were times in the colony’s history when Catholics and Protestants fought each other and people were indeed persecuted for their religion.

Nonetheless, Maryland’s Toleration Act was a historic step forward for freedom. It laid down a principle now central to our way of life.

A CERTAIN PLACE OF UNIVERSAL STUDY

The year 1693 saw the birth of the College of William and Mary, one of the nation’s oldest colleges. At the request of Virginia colonists, King William III and Queen Mary II granted a charter that established a certain place of universal study, a perpetual college of divinity, philosophy, languages, and the good arts and sciences . . . to be supported and maintained, in all time coming.

Americans have long recognized the importance of a strong university system. By the time of our nation’s founding, a handful of institutions of higher learning had already been established. The following are the oldest US colleges (with the year in which each institution became a bachelor’s degree–granting institution):