On the 29th November 1781, the crew of the slave ship Zong threw the first of at least 132 African slaves overboard in a massacre intended to allow them to cash in their insurance policy.
Henry Morton Stanley, a Welsh-American journalist and explorer, allegedly greeted the missing Scottish missionary David Livingstone with the phrase, “Dr Livingston, I presume?”
Abraham Lincoln was elected barely five months before the outbreak of the American Civil War, and was assassinated less than a month before its end.
On the 13th October 1792 the cornerstone of the White House, which at the time was to be known as the United States Executive Mansion, was laid.
On the 17th June 1885, the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbour on board the French steam ship Isère.
On the 1st August 1834, the Slavery Abolition Act came into force in the United Kingdom, although it had received royal assent a year earlier.
On the 9th March 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that captive Africans who had seized control of the Amistad ship had been taken into slavery illegally and were therefore free under American law.
Dred Scott was a slave owned by John Emerson, an army surgeon from the slave state of Missouri.
Having previously served as a senator and later military governor for the state of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson was chosen by Abraham Lincoln to be his running mate in the election of 1864.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, under his pen-name Mark Twain, had previously published the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in which the character of Huckleberry “Huck” Finn is introduced for the first time.
24th January 2020
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