The active sponsor of Jefferson's measure for religious liberty in Virginia, Madison played the most influential single role in the drafting of the Constitution and in securing its ratification in Virginia, founded the first political party in American history, and, as Jefferson's Secretary of State and his successor in the Presidency, guided the nation through the troubled years of our second war with Britain.

He had taken out first papers for American citizenship ; ;

On one visit he stopped at the office of the American, where he was known surreptitiously as `` the Great White Chief '', and for the first time met his managing editor, fat Moses Koenigsberg.

This was historic in its way, for it marked the first time an American Presidential aspirant had advertised his own virtues in his own string of newspapers spanning the land.

In later years Josephus Daniels was to claim that World War 1, was the first in American history in which there was great concern for both the health and morals of our soldiers.

It was the first American war in which the death rate from disease was lower than that from battle, due to the provision of trained medical personnel ( of the 200,000 officers, 42,000 were physicians ), compulsory vaccination, rigorous camp sanitation, and adequate hospital facilities.

Obviously, if this club is going to move from second to first in the American League, it will have to show improvement someplace.

Thus, when the Russians sent up their first sputnik, American chagrin was human enough, and American determination to put American satellites into orbit was perfectly understandable.

Independence Day is the appropriate date as a symbolical reminder of the American article of faith that governments are instituted among men to secure to them certain inalienable rights, the first of which is life, and when any government becomes subversive of that end, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

His first thought is about the question itself: Is there a question here for American foreign policy, and, if so, what is it??

He is interested in public opinion for two reasons: first, because it is important in itself, and, second, because he knows that the American public cares about a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.

Since the mid 1950s, when urethane foam first made its appearance in the American market, growth has been little short of fantastic.

If one wishes to discuss a literary figure who uses folklore in his work, the first thing he must realize is that the literary figure is probably part of this ignorant American public.

Although it was at the Battle of The Little Horn, about which more words have been written than any other battle in American history, that the 7th Cavalry first made its mark in history, the regiment was ten years old by then.

Over the first five frames, Jack Fisher, the big righthander who figures to be in the middle of Oriole plans for a drive on the 1961 American League pennant, held the A's scoreless while yielding three scattered hits.

The trial will be held, probably the first week of March, in the famous Old Bailey central criminal court where Klaus Fuchs, the naturalized British German born scientist who succeeded in giving American and British atomic bomb secrets to Russia and thereby changed world history during the 1950s, was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

`` Much of the navy's future depends upon her '', an American naval announcement said on the Skipjack's first arrival in British waters in August, 1959, for exhibition to selected high officers at Portland underwater research station.

`` You see, first of all and in a sense as the source of all other ills, the unshakeable American commitment to the principle of unconditional surrender: The tendency to view any war in which we might be involved not as a means of achieving limited objectives in the way of changes in a given status quo, but as a struggle to the death between total virtue and total evil, with the result that the war had absolutely to be fought to the complete destruction of the enemy's power, no matter what disadvantages or complications this might involve for the more distant future ''.

A brisk, satirical spoof of contemporary American mores entitled `` An American Journey '' was given its first New York performance at Hunter College Playhouse last night by the Helen Tamiris-Daniel Nagrin Dance Company.

The Moiseyev Dance Company dropped in at Madison Square Garden last night for the first of four farewell performances before it brings its long American tour to a close.

Gershwin based An American in Paris on a melodic fragment called " Very Parisienne ", written in 1926 on his first visit to Paris as a gift to his hosts, Robert and Mabel Schirmer.

His first generation of students included Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir and Ruth Benedict, who each produced richly detailed studies of indigenous North American cultures.

* 1513 – Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León first sights land in what is now Florida.

British explorer David Thompson was the first European to navigate the entire length of the Columbia River in 1811.

Amerigo Vespucci () ( March 9, 1454February 22, 1512 ) was an Italian explorer, financier, navigator and cartographer who first demonstrated that Brazil and the West Indies did not represent Asia's eastern outskirts as initially conjectured from Columbus ' voyages, but instead constituted an entirely separate landmass hitherto unknown to Afro-Eurasians.

* Daniel Boone ( November 2, 1734 October 22 – September 26, 1820 ) was an American pioneer, explorer, and frontiersman whose frontier exploits made him one of the first folk heroes of the United States.

Antoine Thomson d ' Abbadie d ' Arrast ( January 3, 1810 – March 19, 1897 ) was an Irish-French and Basque explorer, geographer, ethnologue, linguist and astronomer notable for his travels in Ethiopia during the first half of the 19th century.

The Dutch explorer and entrepreneur David de Vries gives the first mention of it in his journal for the year 1642 (" the Wickquasgeck Road over which the Indians passed daily ").

Though Columbus was not the first European explorer to reach the Americas ( having been preceded by the Norse expedition led by Leif Ericson in the 11th century ), Columbus's voyages led to the first lasting European contact with America, inaugurating a period of European exploration and colonization of foreign lands that lasted for several centuries.

Giovanni Caboto ( John Cabot ) reportedly visited the island in 1497 to become the first Renaissance European explorer to visit present-day Canada.

File: Cabotslanding. jpg | Cabot's Landing, Victoria County, commemorating the " first land seen " by explorer John Cabot in 1497

The National Speleological Society of the USA was later founded in 1941 ( originally formed as the Speleological Society of the District of Columbia on May 6, 1939 ) and the Swiss Society of Speleology created in 1939 in Geneva, but the first speleological institute in the world was founded in 1920 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, by Emil Racovita, a Romanian biologist, zoologist, speleologist and explorer of Antarctica.

However, it was French explorer Jacques Cartier who made the first detailed reconnaissance of the region for a European power, and in so doing, claimed the region for the King of France.

The first known contact between Guam and Western Europe occurred when Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer, anchored his small 3-ship fleet in Umatac Bay on March 6, 1521.

In 1875, British explorer Ernest Giles became the first European to cross the desert.

Edgerton worked with the undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau, by first providing him with custom designed underwater photographic equipment featuring electronic flash, and then by developing sonar techniques used to discover the Britannic.

Early reference to the Chinese export of ivory is recorded after the Chinese explorer Zhang Qian ventured to the west to form alliances to enable for the eventual free movement of Chinese goods to the west ; as early as the first century BC, ivory was moved along the Northern Silk Road for consumption by western nations.

A Scientology profile says that he was brought up on his grandfather's " large cattle ranch in Montana " where he spent his days " riding, breaking broncos, hunting coyote and taking his first steps as an explorer ".

It is believed that the French explorer Jean Nicolet was the first non-Native American to reach Lake Michigan in 1634 or 1638.

In this group, the explorer Antoine Simon Le Page du Pratz may be the first historian of Louisiana with his Histoire de la Louisiane ( 3 vols., Paris, 1758 ; 2 vols., London, 1763 )

The name Madageiscar was first recorded in the memoirs of 13th-century Venetian explorer Marco Polo as a corrupted form of the name Mogadishu, the Somali port with which Polo had confused the island.

Islands in the archipelago were first explored by Europeans in the 1520s, with Spanish explorer Alonso de Salazar sighting an atoll in August 1526.

Spanish explorer Alonso de Salazar was the first European to see the islands in 1526, commanding the ship Santa Maria de la Victoria, the only surviving vessel of the Loaísa Expedition.

* 1576 – Spanish explorer Diego García de Palacio first sights the ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Copán.

He and Matthias Ringmann are credited with the first recorded usage of the word America, on the 1507 map Universalis Cosmographia in honour of the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci.

In 1788 the African Association was formed in England to promote the exploration of Africa in the hopes of locating the Niger, and in June 1796 the Scottish explorer Mungo Park was the first European to lay eyes on the river.