Don't Know Much About® Anything

Everything You Need to Know but Never Learned About People, Places, Events, and More!

Kenneth C. Davis

• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN:
  9780061828553
• Print ISBN:
  9780061251467
• Subtopic: History Reference

FAMOUS PEOPLE

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT

Benjamin Franklin

HAD HE ONLY INVENTED bifocals and the stove bearing his name, he would have been notable. If he had only experimented with electricity and charted the Gulf Stream, he would have been a giant of science. If he had only helped draft the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, he would have been a legend. But Benjamin Franklin did all of these things—and much more. America’s first true international celebrity, Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706, the fifteenth child in a family of seventeen children, the son of a soap and candle maker. In a remarkable life, Franklin became wealthy, famous, and one of the most important Founding Fathers. When he died at the age of eighty-four on April 17, 1790, nearly twenty thousand admirers attended his funeral. What else do you know about this unique man who helped “invent” America?

• 1. Franklin was the only person to sign the four key documents that created America. What are they?
• 2. Which office did Franklin’s illegitimate son hold?
• 3. What did Franklin produce every year for twenty-five years?
• 4. What did his famous kite experiment prove?
• 5. What was his greatest accomplishment during the Revolutionary War?
• 6. Franklin preferred what animal as America’s symbol?
• 7. What was Franklin’s final public role?

ANSWERS

• 1. The Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Alliance with France, the Treaty of Peace with Great Britain, and the Constitution of the United States.
• 2. Loyal to England, William Franklin became the Royal Governor of New Jersey. During the Revolutionary War, he was arrested and later went to London.
• 3. He wrote and published Poor Richard’s Almanac from 1733 to 1758. Its fame rests on the wit and wisdom that Franklin scattered through each issue.
• 4. In 1752, he flew a homemade kite during a thunderstorm accompanied by his son William. Franklin proved that lightning is electricity. Then he invented the lightning rod.
• 5. As a commissioner sent to represent the United States in France, Franklin got the French to join the war against England. Their aid was crucial to America winning its independence.
• 6. In what may have been his only bad idea, he preferred the turkey to the eagle, which he thought was a bird of bad moral character.
• 7. In 1787, he was elected president of America’s first antislavery society, and his last public act was to sign an appeal to Congress calling for abolition.

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT

Walt Whitman

HE “HEARD AMERICA SINGING.” And his work has inspired some, bedeviled others (mostly students), and stood as the work of a unique American voice for more than 150 years. In July 1855, a former schoolteacher turned newspaper publisher, Walt Whitman self-published 795 copies of the first edition of twelve of his poems in a book called Leaves of Grass. Over the years, Whitman (1819–1892) would add many more poems to later editions of the work that may be the most famous American book of poems ever published. Sample a bit of Whitman in this quick quiz.

• 1. Where did Whitman attend college?
• 2. How did Whitman serve during the Civil War?
• 3. What event inspired the poems “O Captain! My Captain!” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”?
• 4. Why did he lose his government job in 1865?

ANSWERS

• 1. He didn’t. Born on Long Island, New York, he went to school for about six years before becoming a printer’s apprentice and was largely self-educated after that.
• 2. After his brother was wounded in battle, he became a volunteer nurse, aiding the sick in Washington, D.C., hospitals while working for the Army’s paymaster’s office.
• 3. The death of Abraham Lincoln, whom Whitman greatly admired.
• 4. He was fired for his poems, which the Secretary of the Interior found offensive, presumably for some of their homosexual themes.

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT

Rosa Parks

HISTORY IS TAUGHT as the record of presidents, kings, and generals. But sometimes it is the extraordinary story of an “ordinary” person that history must tell. On December 1, 1955, one woman’s act of defiance changed history. But it wouldn’t be fair to call Rosa Parks, who was born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama, and died October 24, 2005 at age ninety-two, an ordinary person. What do you know about this courageous woman who helped spark the civil rights movement that transformed America? Get aboard this quick quiz.

• 1. Where and why was Rosa Parks arrested?
• 2. Before her arrest, was Rosa Parks involved in the civil rights movement?
• 3. How much education did Rosa Parks, the descendant of slaves, receive?
• 4. What action did her arrest trigger?
• 5. Who was elected president of the organization that ran the boycott?

ANSWERS

• 1. She refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus. A city law required that whites and blacks sit in separate rows. The law also required blacks to leave their seats to make room for white passengers.
• 2. Yes. Rosa Parks had become one of the first women to join the Montgomery chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1943, serving as its secretary until 1956. Employed as a seamstress, she lost her job as a result of the boycott and later moved to Detroit.
• 3. She attended Alabama State Teachers College.
• 4. Her arrest triggered a boycott of the city’s segregated bus system that had been planned by local civil rights leaders who were awaiting the right moment. The arrest of Rosa Parks was that moment. For 382 days, thousands of blacks refused to ride Montgomery’s buses and the boycott ended when the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated seating on the city’s buses unconstitutional.
• 5. A young and unknown Martin Luther King, Jr., then a Baptist minister in Montgomery, was chosen as president, providing his first national stage.

DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT

Malcolm X

BLACK NATIONALIST LEADER Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21,1965. The focus of Spike Lee’s 1992 film starring Denzel Washington, Malcolm X remains one of the most widely admired, yet controversial, African Americans in recent history. The Autobiography of Malcolm X was named one of the “Ten Most Important Nonfiction Books of the 20th Century” by Time magazine. What do you know about this fiery and charismatic leader?

TRUE OR FALSE?

• 1. He used “X” as a last name because he was an ex-convict.
• 2. In 1964, Malcolm X publicly broke with the Nation of Islam.
• 3. His famed Autobiography was written by novelist James Baldwin.
• 4. While interested in Africa, Malcolm X never traveled there.
• 5. In 1964, he changed his name again after a pilgrimage to Mecca.

ANSWERS

• 1. False. He chose “X” as a way to renounce what he considered a “slave name.” Born Malcolm Little (1925), he changed his name in 1952 after joining the Nation of Islam, which he learned about while in prison.
• 2. True. After helping enlarge the Nation of Islam’s membership as a highly effective spokesman, Malcolm X left the group in a dispute over leader Elijah Muhammad’s extramarital affairs.
• 3. False. It was a collaboration with journalist Alex Haley, later famous as the author of Roots.
• 4. False. He went to Africa four times. After his fourth trip, which included a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, he returned to the United States to start the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
• 5. True. After a conversion to Orthodox Islam, he chose the name El-Hajj Malik. He also came to believe that interracial brotherhood was possible based on his pilgrimage experience.

DON’T KNOW MUCH ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Famous People
• Exceptional Places
• Historic Happenings
• Holidays and Traditions
• Everyday Objects and Remarkable Inventions
• Space and the Natural World
• Sports
• Entertainment
• Food
• Civics
• Afterword
• Index of Subjects
• About the Author
• Praise
• Books by Kenneth C. Davis
• Copyright
• About the Publisher