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...

Norman Mailer (left) and Jimmy Breslin (right): would-be architects of the 51st state. American history is filled with failed, idealistic campaigns for office. It is also filled with failed, idealistic attempts to form new states. Most states, at least once in their histories, have seen proposals to split the states into two or more pieces. Texas and California have been the subjects of such proposals many times—in fact, a plan to split California into six states was advanced in 2014, but failed when proponents were caught submitting fraudulent petitions to inflate support for the measure. An attempt to split California into three states was shot down by the California Supreme Court in 2018. Splitting states sometimes works out. Kentucky and West Virginia were split from Virginia; Tennessee was split from North Carolina; Alabama was split from Georgia; and Maine was split from Massachusetts. The most recent partitioning of a state, however, was the creation of West Virgini...

The St. Bonaventure College baseball team in the 1890s.  How can you play the game without a splendid uniform? Probably the nastiest team in the history of baseball—or in any sport, ever—were the Midnight Terrors.  The Midnight Terrors started out in the 1890s not as athletes but as a teenage street gang, operating out of Manhattan’s First Ward—what’s now known as Battery Park and the Financial District.  Their ages ranged from 11 to 19, and they gave themselves that name because they did their best work at night.  When forming baseball teams got popular, they got the idea to form their own team.  They weren’t allowed to form a team unless they had their own uniforms, which was a problem.  Uniforms cost money, and no one was willing to sponsor them.  Their solution was to start the Midnight Terrors’ Uniform Fund, which was supported entirely by a rash of armed robberies.  They picked pockets, snatched purses, robbed people at gunpoint a...

In 1869, traffic in Manhattan was a nightmare.  It's not so great today, but it could be a lot worse.  Broadway, the main north/south artery, was regularly clogged with horse carts, pedestrians and omnibuses, slowly making their way up and down the island.  The avenues of New York, which also run north to south, weren't much better.  There had to be a better way.  A train would make sense, except that the city was so crowded, there was nowhere to lay the tracks.  An underground train would be great, but the only engines available at the time were steam engines, which give off a lot of smoke.  An underground train would be impossible to adequately ventilate. Alfred Ely Beach An inventor from Springfield, Massachusetts named Alfred Ely Beach thought he had a solution.  He conceived what he called the Beach Pneumatic Transit, which he proposed would be New York's first subway system.  He imagined a series of underground cars that would be...