By Peter McGraw and Joel Warner Charles Dickens thought Americans weren’t very funny. “They certainly are not a humorous people,” he wrote in 1868, “and their temperament always impressed me as being of a dull and gloomy character.” That’s not to say there weren’t early-American humorists. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain helped […]

By David Kithcart – 700 Club Features Director Flowers, candy, red hearts and romance. That’s what Valentine’s day is all about, right? Well, maybe not. The origin of this holiday for the expression of love really isn’t romantic at all—at least not in the traditional sense. Father Frank O’Gara of Whitefriars Street Church in Dublin, Ireland, […]

By Marissa Willman, Viator.com Travel Blog With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, stores are flooded with candy hearts, chocolates and stuffed animals. In the U.S., shelves brimming with teddy bears and boxes of chocolate are typical Valentine’s Day fare, but not every country turns to greeting cards and heart-shaped candies to declare love. Some […]

By: Karl Smallwood Clapping is the near-ubiquitous way we show our appreciation of something, particularly when we’re in large groups. But have you ever wondered why slapping our hands together has come to be so closely associated with approval and where the practise originated from? To begin with, the idea of clapping to show appreciation is […]

from Harriet-Tubman.org The Underground Railroad was formed in the early 19th century and reached its height between 1850 and 1860. Much of what we know today comes from accounts after the Civil War and accurate statistics about fugitive slaves using the Underground Railway may never be verifiable. It is believed that around 100,000 slaves between […]

by Kevin Sheridan http://kevinsheridanllc.com/ According to a 2016 survey by CareerBuilder, more than half of American companies said a bad hiring decision had negatively impacted their business this year. Many company leaders cited associated challenges such as lost revenue, poor productivity, lower employee morale, and strained client relations. Furthermore, 27 percent said a single bad hire […]

By Ian Crouch The New Yorker Halfway through the third quarter of the Super Bowl, after the Atlanta Falcons scored a touchdown to go ahead 28–3 over a dazed-looking New England Patriots team, it appeared that the entertainment value of the game had peaked at halftime, when Lady Gaga dove off the roof of Houston’s NRG […]

From DisneyParkHistory.com The Hall of Presidents is an Audio-Animatronic theater show featuring all 44 (soon to be 45) United States Presidents.  The exterior of the show building is a reduced size replica of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s Independence Hall, where the founding fathers met to write the Constitution.   The numerals 1787, the year of the Constitutional Convention, […]

European Roots (Adapted from “Groundhog Day: 1886 to 1992” by Bill Anderson) Groundhog Day, February 2nd, is a popular tradition in the United States. It is also a legend that traverses centuries, its origins clouded in the mists of time with ethnic cultures and animals awakening on specific dates. Myths such as this tie our […]

By Jimmy Stamp SMITHSONIAN.COM   In a catalog assembled for the 2014 Venice Biennale to accompany an exhibition on architectural elements, the bathroom is referred to as “the architectural space in which bodies are replenished, inspected, and cultivated, and where one is left alone for private reflection – to develop and affirm identity.” I think that […]