Words! Words! Words!

On this day in 1799, Andrew Ellicott, an early American astronomer, witnessed the Leonids meteor shower from a ship off the Florida Keys. Ellicott’s journal entry is the first known record of a meteor shower in North America. In 1954, Ellis Island, the gateway to America, shut its doors after processing more than 12 million immigrants since opening in 1892. On this day in 1979, President Jimmy Carter responded to a potential threat to national security by stopping the importation of petroleum from Iran. And on this day in 2001, an American Airlines flight out of John F. Kennedy (JFK) Airport in New York City crashed into a Queens neighborhood after takeoff, killing 265 people.

See if your vocabulary skills light up the sky with your brilliance or cover you in a coat of slippery, good ol’ American oil.

On June 12, 1944, Lieutenant John F. Kennedy received the U.S. Navy’s highest honor for gallantry for his heroic actions as a gunboat pilot during World War II. The future president also received a Purple Heart for wounds received during battle. On June 12, 1987, in one of his most famous Cold War speeches, President Ronald Reagan challenged Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, a symbol of the repressive Communist era in a divided Germany. And on June 12, 1994, “someone” murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman in California. That someone has never been convicted in a criminal court.

According to scholars at the University of Paris, the Black Death is created on this day in 1345, from what they call “a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius, occurring on the 20th of March 1345.″ The Black Death, also known as the Plague, swept across Europe, the Middle East and Asia during the 14th century, leaving an estimated 25 million dead in its wake. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was published on this day in 1852. The novel sold 300,000 copies within three months and was so widely read that when President Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862, he reportedly said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” And on this day in 1861, President Abraham Lincoln’s sons, Willie and Tad, are diagnosed with the measles, adding to the president’s many troubles.

On March 13, 1965, guitar legend Eric Clapton left the Yardbirds to chase the Blues. On this date in 1992, a 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck in Turkey, killing (by some estimates) 2,000 people. And on this date in 1868, the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson began. Let’s see how unshakable your vocab skills are today. Will they stand up to trial? Will you strum a positive chord?

On this day in 1919, the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes,” was ratified and became the law of the land. The movement for the prohibition of alcohol began in the early 19th century, when Americans concerned about the adverse effects of drinking began forming temperance societies. By the late 19th century, these groups had become a powerful political force, campaigning on the state level and calling for total national abstinence. By the late teens, the ill effects of alcohol were rampant throughout America. Some say the 18th Amendment was just in time.

Jazz has been called “America’s classical music,” a label that does more than just recognize its American origins. The label also makes the case that jazz is worthy of aesthetic consideration alongside music usually thought of as “classical.” In the current era, when programs of Duke Ellington and J.S. Bach often draw the same highbrow crowds, that argument hardly seems controversial. In the 1930s, however, the notion was almost laughable, which is what made Benny Goodman’s January 16, 1938, concert at New York City’s famed Carnegie Hall so revolutionary. Goodman and his supporting cast claimed a new place for jazz on the American cultural scene that night, in what has come to be seen as the most important jazz concert in history.

On this day in 1493, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, sailing near the Dominican Republic, saw three “mermaids”–in reality manatees–and described them as “not half as beautiful as they are painted.” Mermaids, mythical half-female, half-fish creatures, have existed in seafaring cultures at least since the time of the ancient Greeks. Typically depicted as having a woman’s head and torso, a fishtail instead of legs and holding a mirror and comb, mermaids live in the ocean and, according to some legends, can take on a human shape and marry mortal men. The classic rags-to-riches story got a macho spin in the Oscar-winning Rocky, which was written by its star, Sylvester Stallone, and began filming on this day in 1976. In 1887, on one of the worst days of the “worst winter in the West,” nearly an inch of snow fell every hour for 16 hours, impeding the ability of already starving cattle to find food. Montana ranchers alone lost an estimated 362,000 head of cattle, more than half the territory’s herd.

On this day in 1980, American oil tycoon Armand Hammer paid $5,126,000 at auction for a notebook containing writings by the legendary artist Leonardo da Vinci. The manuscript, written around 1508, was one of some 30 similar books da Vinci produced during his lifetime on a variety of subjects. It contained 72 loose pages featuring some 300 notes and detailed drawings, all relating to the common theme of water and how it moved. On this day in 2000, General Motors declared that it would begin to phase out the 103-year-old Oldsmobile, the oldest automotive brand in the United States. (But that’s not why it was called OLDS-mobile.) And on this day in 1901, Italian physicist and radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi succeeded in sending the first radio transmission across the Atlantic Ocean, disproving detractors who told him that the curvature of the earth would limit transmission to 200 miles or less. The message–simply the Morse-code signal for the letter “s”–traveled more than 2,000 miles from Poldhu in Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland, Canada.

On this day in 1925, The Grand Ole Opry, one of the longest-lived and most popular showcases for country-western music, began broadcasting live from Nashville, Tennessee. The showcase was originally named the Barn Dance, after a Chicago radio program called the National Barn Dance that had begun broadcasting the previous year. On this day in 1582, William Shakespeare, 18, and Anne Hathaway, 26, paid a 40-pound bond for their marriage license in Stratford-upon-Avon. Six months later, Anne gave birth to their daughter, Susanna, and two years later, to twins. And for those not so old to remember the early-60s girl-group explosion, on this day in 1964, the Shangri-Las scored their first and only #1 hit with the famously melodramatic epic “Leader of the Pack.” Vroom, vroom.

On November 14, 2006, state officials closed the last two of Texas’ famed Pig Stand restaurants, the only remaining pieces of the nation’s first drive-in restaurant empire. The restaurants’ owners were bankrupt, and they owed the Texas comptroller more than $200,000 in unpaid sales taxes. (Can you figure which word on our test today originated with Pig Stand restaurants?) Also on this day, in 1969, Apollo 12, the second manned mission to the surface of the moon, launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with astronauts Charles Conrad, Richard Gordon, and Alan Bean aboard. On this day in 1851, Harper & Brothers in New York published the novel Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville. The book flopped at first, and it was many years before the book came to be recognized as an American classic.

On this day in 1901, a 63-year-old schoolteacher named Annie Edson Taylor becomes the first person to take the plunge over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She survived, which is not easy to do. On this day in 1931, eight months ahead of schedule (people worked hard back in the day), New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River. The 4,760-foot-long suspension bridge, the longest in the world at the time, connected Fort Lee, New Jersey with Washington Heights in New York City. On this day in 1945, the United Nations Charter, which was adopted and signed on June 26, 1945, became effective and ready to be enforced.

Test your building skills, talent for survival, and international acumen in today’s word quiz.