America's 16th president didn't have an especially large appetite. Although he stood at 6 feet 4 inches tall, Abraham Lincoln was characterized by a decidedly gaunt frame, not betraying any penchant for food (even though he inspired the name for the Log Cabin maple syrup brand). For a truly good meal, by his standards, Lincoln named humble corn cakes as his all-time favorite food, and was also known to favor simple, Southern home-cooking classics like corned beef and cabbage and chicken fricassee.
George Washington, the first president of the United States, has everything to do with Presidents' Day. The holiday evolved out of a remembrance of the man who helped defeat the British and usher the country into a new era as an independent nation. Washington served as head of state from 1789 to 1797 and died in 1799. The following year many began celebrating his legacy on his birthday, February 22.
Like nearly all Americans, you descended from an immigrant, the British penny. Those coins were once so valuable that they were split into halves and even quarters your late British cousins, the halfpenny and the farthing. In Britain, the coin's history goes back to the time when kings and queens had names like Offa and Cynethryth and Aethelred the Unready, and your name likely traces its lineage from the German for pan pfanne, for pan, which evolved to pfennig, for penny.
Abraham Lincoln penned the entreaty on behalf of his young friend, William Johnson, because ironically, his dark complexion caused freed Black White House staffers with lighter skin to shun him. "The difference of color between him and the other servants is the cause of our separation," Lincoln wrote in the March 16, 1861, letter that private collector Peter Tuite donated in August to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, where it is now on public display.
The greatest virtue of the Steven Spielberg biopic Lincoln, which the playwright Tony Kushner adapted from Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals, is that it's about the fundamental lack of virtue that comes with being president. For as much as Abraham Lincoln is flattened out into "Honest Abe," the universal choice for the greatest of all American presidents, his lionization papers over the horse-trading