Nearly 25 years after Ulysses S. Grant’s death, a peculiar story hit the pages of the Washington Evening Star. Within the paper’s Sunday edition one day in 1908, retired police officer William H. West recounted how he had caught the 18th president speeding through the streets of Washington, D.C. — and decided the only appropriate course of action was to proceed with an arrest. 

The U.S. government has at times set the maximum speed limit on highways.

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President Nixon signed the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act in 1974, dropping highway speed limits to 55 mph. At the time, OPEC’s 1973 fuel embargo had created an energy crisis; Nixon’s move tried to reduce fuel use by cutting down on speeding. The law was repealed in 1995.

West’s tale hearkened back to 1872, during a particularly bad bout of traffic issues, when complaints of speeding carriages were on the rise. West had been out investigating a collision when he witnessed Grant — then the sitting president — careening his horse-drawn carriage down the road. The officer flagged down the carriage, issued a warning, and sent Grant on his way. But Grant, who had a reputation for high-tailing horse rides, couldn’t resist the need to speed. West caught him the very next day once again tearing through the city. Feeling he had no other option, the officer placed the president under arrest. At the police department, Grant was required to put $20 (about $490 in today’s money) toward his bond before being released.

Historian John F. Marszalek, who oversaw Grant’s presidential collection at Mississippi State University, says the situation blew over pretty quickly. Grant’s arrest wasn’t the first time he had been cited for speeding. It also wasn’t a political quagmire for either party. At the time, West — a formerly enslaved Civil War veteran who became one of just two Black police officers in Washington, D.C., immediately after the war — was commended for his actions in trying to make the city streets safer. And Grant owned up to his mistake — though he did choose to skip his court appearance scheduled for the following day, which meant he forfeited his $20. He didn’t face any further consequences, however.

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Not many Americans know the name Charles G. Dawes today, but they should. As one of only three U.S. vice presidents to receive the Nobel Peace Prize during their lifetimes (for his work to preserve peace in Europe), he has reserved a place in the history books alongside Theodore Roosevelt and Al Gore. But perhaps even more notably, he’s also the only veep with a No. 1 hit pop song. Dawes was a self-trained pianist and flautist as well as a banker, and in 1911, 14 years before he would become Calvin Coolidge’s vice president, he wrote a short instrumental piece titled “Melody in A Major.” The song received some attention during Dawes’ lifetime, but it wasn't until 1951 — the year he died — that American songwriter Carl Sigman put lyrics to Dawes’ creation and called it “It’s All in the Game.” Seven years later, Tommy Edwards became the first Black artist to reach No. 1 in the U.S. with his doo-wop-influenced rendition of Sigman’s song.

Bob Dylan, the only U.S. songwriter to win the Nobel Prize, has no No. 1 hits.

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Not true, but just barely. Surprisingly, folk legend Bob Dylan has only one No. 1 hit under his own name, and it arrived in 2020 with the 17-minute-long song “Murder Most Foul,” which debuted atop Billboard’s Rock Digital Song Sales chart (his first time topping any Billboard chart).

But that wasn’t the end of Dawes’ posthumous music stardom. The song soon transformed into a pop standard, and was covered by a variety of artists across several genres. There’s Nat King Cole’s big band affair (1957), Elton John's upbeat cover (1970), Van Morrison’s sorrowful take (1979), Issac Hayes’ soulful remix (1980), and Merle Haggard’s country creation (1984), just to name a few. To this day (and for likely many days to come), Dawes remains the only chief executive — president or vice president — to score a hit on the Billboard Hot 100.

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Much human innovation is a collective effort — scientists, innovators, and artisans building off the work of predecessors to develop some groundbreaking technology over the course of decades, or even centuries. But in the case of writing systems, scholars believe humans may have independently invented them four separate times. That’s because none of these writing systems shows significant influence from previously existing systems, or similarities to another. Experts generally agree that the first writing system appeared in the Mesopotamian society of Sumer in what is now Iraq. Early pictorial signs appeared some 5,500 years ago, and slowly evolved into complex characters representing the sounds of the Sumerian language. Today, this ancient writing system is known as cuneiform. 

Half the world population is multilingual.

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Experts estimate that at least half of the human population can speak two languages or more. However, the U.S. is drastically behind compared to other countries. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only 20% of Americans speak another language, whereas that number is 56% in Europe.

However, cuneiform wasn’t a one-off innovation. Writing systems then evolved in ancient Egypt, in the form of hieroglyphs, around 3200 BCE — only an estimated 250 years after the first examples of cuneiform. The next place that writing developed was China, where the Shang dynasty set up shop along the Yellow River and wrote early Chinese characters on animal bones during divination rituals around 1300 BCE. Finally, in Mesoamerica, writing began to take shape around 900 BCE, and influenced ancient civilizations like the Zapotecs, Olmecs, Aztecs, and Maya. Sadly, little is known about the history of many Mesoamerican languages, as Catholic priests and Spanish conquistadors destroyed a lot of the surviving documentation.

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Difficult times can lead to great art. Case in point: the volcanic explosion that caused a “year without a summer” in 1816 — and inspired the novel Frankenstein. The eruption took place at Indonesia’s Mount Tambora, many thousands of miles away from author Mary Shelley’s home in England. In addition to a harrowing death toll, the April 1815 explosion caused mass amounts of sulphur dioxide, ash, and dust to fill the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and plunging the global temperature several degrees lower, resulting in the coldest year in well over two centuries. In part because of the volcano, Europe and North America were subjected to unusually cold, wet conditions the following summer, including a “killing frost” in New England and heavy rainfall that may have contributed to Napoleon’s infamous defeat at Waterloo.

“Frankenstein” was originally published anonymously.

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The literary world didn’t exactly welcome female authors with open arms in the early 19th century, and Shelley wasn’t alone in initially publishing her book anonymously. Many believed that Percy Shelley was the author of “Frankenstein,” a falsehood Mary later had to correct many times.

So what does that have to do with Shelley’s masterpiece? Then 18 and still going by her maiden name of Godwin, she and her lover/future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, traveled to Lake Geneva in April 1816, a time of extremely gloomy weather. One fateful night that July, the two were with their friend Lord Byron, the infamous poet, when he suggested, “We will each write a ghost story.” Shelley completed hers in just a few days, writing in the introduction to Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus that “a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.” Who knows: If it had been bright and sunny that week, we might never have gotten the endlessly influential 1818 book, which later spawned an assortment of movies, TV shows, plays — and of course, iconic Halloween costumes.

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