Every presidential election season, you’re liable to hear pundits and other prognosticators make bold predictions about how the upcoming election is going to hinge on how one or two certain states vote.  It’s certainly true that in most election years, everything tends to hinge on a handful of states.  In the 2016 election, there were six or seven states that were watched and analyzed and pondered more than any of the other forty-some states, and in the end, the election really did come down to how those few turned out.  Talking heads made the same conclusion about this year’s presidential election, and while recently talk has moved away from that as new variables begin to change the dynamics of this election in most atypical ways, the fact remains that there are certain states that we usually regard as bellwethers.  In the past, there have been other states that have lost their bellwether status.  Today’s fact, then, will be a handful of facts, looking at the...

Of the 44 men who have so far served as President of the United States, Historians generally agree that the term of William Henry Harrison, which lasted from March 4, 1841 to his death on April 4, 1841, was the shortest.  “But wait!” says the trivia collector at the end of the bar, ready to take bets from all patrons, because he knows that’s wrong.   “I can name a president who held the job less than that!”   “No!” respond the other customers, sure that the old souse doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  But he does—sort of.   So when the bar patrons place their bets, the old souse offers up a name, and the arguing begins. The name, of course, is David Rice Atchison, a Democratic senator from Missouri, and the storied “president for a day.”  Your school textbooks and restaurant placemats with the portraits of all the presidents might never have mentioned him, but he was real, and quite popular in his day.  He was popular enough in the Senate for his c...

John F. Kennedy—known to his friends as “Jack”—is remembered for a lot of things.  There was his service on PT-109 during World War II, his popular presidency that was contemporarily referred to as “Camelot”, the Cuban Missile Crisis, a tragic and violent assassination, and a series of train robberies.  Okay, that last item comes off as a little… incongruous, I’ll admit.  Presidents don’t usually get up to criminal activity until after they’ve been in office, so where would Kennedy find the time to slip away from the Oval Office and go stick up trains? Well, there were actually two different John F. “Jack” Kennedys.  The better-known one was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1917.  The train robber was born somewhere in Missouri, sometime in 1870.  (Sorry, but that’s as specific as his biographers are able to get.)  The first Jack Kennedy’s fame was eclipsed considerably by the second Jack Kennedy.  Despite identical names, the two are not kn...