Things I learned this week...

Nearly every day at school I check in to find some historical event whose anniversary we can celebrate.

My former source was the History Channel's This Day in History page, but it's begun to crash my school computer. Instead, I've been heading to Wikipedia and looking up each day of the year.

This past week I learned that in spite of the accident at the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, one of the reactors there is still operational. I always assumed that they'd shut down the entire plant. Also pretty stunning was the fact the Jimmy Carter was a nuclear (or maybe just submarine) engineer

I also learned that Cincinnati has a frighteningly impressive history of riots - eleven separate riot incidents recorded on Wikipedia's page. The 1884 Courthouse riots - whose anniversary was this week - were by far the most deadly with fifty-six people dying and the riots only being quelled when 300 national guardsmen came in with a Gatling gun to clear the streets.

And, finally, I've always heard that the purchase of Alaska from Russia was nicknamed Seward's Folly. That appears not to be true. The phrase Seward's Folly instead seems to have meant that the folly was in William Seward and Andrew Johnson trying to force the Senate to approve the treaty for the purchase of Alaska before their adjournment. I always assumed that people thought the actual purchase of Alaska was folly. Apparently that's not the case...

I love learning things...love it so much.