Susanna Madora Salter was born today, March 2, 1860. In 1887, Salter, a 27-year old temperance activist, became the first woman in the United States to be elected to the position of mayor. The town was Argonia, Kansas, a small Quaker village with a population of less than five hundred that had only incorporated two years previous, in 1885. She was nominated, without notification, by men intent upon embarrassing and defeating temperance. Local Republicans uncovered the plan early on election day. They asked if she would serve, if elected. Salter agreed and with the support of Republicans and Prohibitionists, she was elected with a two-thirds majority.

Salter's family was respected, and her father had served as Argonia's mayor and her husband had been selected as town clerk--so Salter knew a great deal about politics. She had four children and was pregnant at the time of her election. Even opponents of woman suffrage were won over, however, by her reputation and her commitment to te...

Because Bulgarian dissident, Georgi Markov was born this week, on March 1, 1929, I thought today would be a good say to tell his compelling, if tragic story.

While waiting at a bus stop in London, he was stabbed with an umbrella that inserted a ricin-filled pellet. He died several days later. It’s believed that the KGB was behind the assassination at the request of the Bulgarian Secret Service, but no one has ever been charged with his murder.

Markov originally worked as a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright in Bulgaria, eventually defecting and relocating to London in 1968. He worked there as a broadcaster and journalist criticizing the Bulgarian regime.

After relocating to London, he worked as a broadcaster and journalist for the BBC World Service, the US-funded Radio Free Europe, and West Germany's Deutsche Welle. Markov used such forums to conduct a campaign of sarcastic criticism against the incumbent Bulgarian regime, which, according to his wife at the time he died, ev...

On this Day, February 28, 1849, the first prospectors for the Gold Rush of '49 arrive in San Francisco. Gold was discovered by James Marshall on Sutter's Mill the previous year. Over 300,000 people, known as "forty-niners" (from year 1849), would go to California to seek their fortune.

James Wilson Marshall was born to Philip Marshall and Sarah Wilson on his family’s homestead in Hopewell Township, New Jersey on October 8, 1810. The family homestead was known as the Round Mountain Farm and is still known as Marshalls Corner. He was the oldest of four children, and the only son. He followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming a skilled carpenter and wheelwright.

At age eighteen, after his father died, James Marshall left New Jersey in 1834 and headed west. After spending time in Indiana and Illinois, he settled in Missouri in 1844, and began farming along the Missouri River near Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. There, he contracted malaria, and in 1844, on the advice of his doctor, Mar...

This story came to mind today, because it was on this Day, February 26, 1829, that Levi Strauss was born in Buttenheim, Bavaria. Levi was the son of Hirsch Strauss and his second wife, Rebecca.

At age 18, Levi Strauss travelled with his mother and two sisters to the United States to join his brothers Jonas and Louis, who had begun a wholesale dry goods business in New York City called J. Strauss Brother & Co. Their business was thriving.

When the Gold Rush hit, they wanted to meet the needs of the miners and farmers also seeking their fortune, and devised a plan for Levi to travel to the West Coast and set up a version of their dry goods business there.

Strauss boarded a steamer bound for Panama, then walked across the isthmus and boarded another steamer sailing north to the shores of the California Gold Rush. He arrived on a rainy March day in 1853, and soon set up a dry goods wholesale business on San Francisco’s waterfront under his own name —Levi Strauss & Co.

Within two ...