There’s truly a first time for everything. In fact, people often use this phrase to encourage others to try something unusual or surprising. Of course, the saying is entirely true–even though we don’t always quite know when some things happened for the first time. Here are some interesting examples of some “firsts” we do know about.
President #1
George Washington, our very first President, established a style and behaved in a manner that very few others have emulated. Yale Professor Akhil Amar sites two that did, however: Dwight Eisenhower and Ulysses Grant.
He Wasn’t Always Mark Twain
As many of you undoubtedly know, Samuel Clements was the real name of one of America’s premier writers and humorists–the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Boston U Professor Chris Daly details exactly when he started using his new name, Mark Twain.
It Started in Ancient Greece
The very first Olympic Games in Ancient Greece featured a five-event competition called the Pentathlon, which the modern Olympics still includes, as explained by Dartmouth’s Paul Christesen.
World War One
Generating American enthusiasm and enlistments to fight the first world war was not an easy task at all. Claremont U Professor Jennifer Keene tells us about it.
The First American Pandemic
The Covid pandemic led to quite a bit of worldwide interest in the 1918 Flu epidemic. However, as Lynn U Professor Robert Watson explains, the very first American pandemic was long before that — a full 230 years ago.
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