William Howard Taft started the tra­di­tion of the Pres­i­den­tial “first pitch” of base­ball sea­son. The event took place on April 4, 1910, dur­ing an open­ing day game between the Wash­ing­ton Sen­a­tors and the Philadel­phia Ath­let­ics. Since Taft’s first pitch [1. See Wikipedia for a com­plete list.], every Pres­i­dent but one has opened at least one […]

Mica­jah Autry [1. From The Hand­book of Texas Online.]had made his choice. Once he’d entered the Alamo his fate had pretty much been sealed. Out­num­bered and out­gunned, he and the band of rebels that occu­pied the mis­sion were wait­ing for the inevitable attack they knew would come. He had vol­un­teered for mili­tia duty dur­ing the War […]

Nixon speech writer William Safire wrote a pro­posed speech in the event that dis­as­ter struck the Apollo 11 lunar lan­der [1. You can see the orig­i­nal doc­u­ments at The Smok­ing Gun.] and Neil Arm­strong and Buzz Aldrin couldn’t get off of the Moon and return to Earth. It’s kind of creepy to think of it […]

For 11 days in April of 1836, the cap­i­tal of Texas was the steam­boat Cayuga. The 80-ton side-wheeler had been haul­ing cargo on the Bra­zos River dur­ing 1834 and 1835. After their vic­tory at the Alamo on March 6, 1836, Mex­i­can Gen. Anto­nio López de Santa Anna and his troops began mov­ing toward Har­ris­burg (today […]

The Year With­out a Sum­mer took place in 1816 when freak­ishly bizarre cli­matic changes took place because of a large amount of vol­canic activ­ity in the recent years lead­ing up to 1816. The erup­tions believed to have caused the anom­aly were — The 5 April — 15 April 1815 vol­canic erup­tions of Mount Tamb­ora on the island […]