As a professor at the first law school established in the United States, Connecticut legal luminary James Gould helped educate some of the most important legal minds in early 19th-century America. Gould was born in Branford, Connecticut today in 1770. His parents initially doubted his promise as a scholar because of his exceptionally poor…
Tag: new haven
November 23: Connecticut’s First African-American Civil War Regiment
In late May of 1863, nearly six months after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation declared that all black men and women in slave-holding Confederate states were free, the Federal government created the Bureau of Colored Troops, effectively authorizing the use of black troops throughout the Union Army. While some Northern states quickly raised their…
November 21: Football’s Largest Crowd Gathers to Launch Football’s Largest Stadium
Today in 1914, over 68,000 fans gathered in the largest sports arena the world had ever seen to watch Yale University’s football team lose to Harvard in a 30 – 0 shutout in the first game ever held at the Yale Bowl. The new Yale Bowl was an architectural marvel. Modeled after classical Roman…
November 20:Newly Discovered Bones Challenge the Bible in a Hartford Saloon
Today in 1845, awestruck visitors gathered at Gilman’s Saloon in Hartford to view the skeleton of an extinct great American mastodon recently unearthed at a marl pit near Newburgh, New York. At a time before the discovery of the great dinosaurs, when ideas about the world’s origins conflicted with deeply held theological views of…
November 14: Paul Sperry (and His Dog) Invent the Boat Shoe
Today in 1939, New Haven-born sailor-turned-shoemaker Paul Sperry received a patent for one of the most famous and enduring pieces of American footwear: the Sperry Top-Sider, or “boat shoe.” Born in 1895, Sperry’s life revolved around the sea; growing up along the Connecticut coast, he developed a lifelong love for sailing at an early…
November 9: The Nation’s First Planned Burying Ground Receives Its First Resident – During an Epidemic
In the 1790s, a deadly epidemic of yellow fever swept throughout the eastern United States, hitting densely populated urban centers like New Haven especially hard. As fever-related fatalities multiplied, the burying grounds located behind the churches on the New Haven green — operation for nearly 150 years — quickly exceeded capacity. City leaders responded…
October 27: Yankee Division Doughboys Honor One of Their Own
Born in 1898 to Irish immigrants living in New Haven, Timothy Francis Ahearn was still a teenager when he enlisted in the 102d Infantry Division — famously known as the Yankee Division owing to the New England origins of most of its men — and was deployed overseas to fight the Germans during World…
October 23: They Met, Married, & Became the First Protestant Missionaries to the Hawaiian Islands – All in 24 Days
During the first quarter of the 19th century, the tidal wave of Protestant Christian revivalism known as the Second Great Awakening transformed Connecticut’s social and cultural landscape. New Protestant denominations finally gained a foothold in the once exclusively Congregational state, church attendance among all sects dramatically increased, and scores of young Connecticut men and…
October 16: The United States’ First African-American Diplomat
Today in 1833, Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett was born near Litchfield, Connecticut to free black parents who held prominent roles in Connecticut’s free black community. Bassett’s father was a businessman who had served as one of Connecticut’s Black Governors — an honorary leadership role in the state’s black community — and his grandfather was…
October 13: Connecticut’s “Food City” Gives Birth to the “Lolly Pop.” Sweet!
From world-famous pizza to the world’s first (or longest continuous source of the ) hamburger, New Haven is, bite for bite, home to more remarkable American food history than most other American cities regardless of their size or age. When it comes to one-of-a-kind tastes and All-American choices – with a decidedly international influence,…
September 27: The Man Who Made Long Wharf the Longest in the United States
Though the name Long Wharf is today associated with a number of shops, businesses, ships and projects along the New Haven coastline (not to mention Allen wrenches and cinnamon buns), it originally referred to an actual wharf that extended into the harbor, reaching ¾ of a mile out into deep water. The wharf construction…
August 27: “Substance X” Leads To the Nation’s First Chemotherapy Treatment
Today in 1942, following top-secret research on the effects of the war-poison mustard gas, physicians at Yale University made medical history as they administered the first use of intravenous chemotherapy as a cancer treatment in the United States. This medical milestone was the culmination of experiments aimed at defending against the horrors of mustard…