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150 new citizens at Mount Vernon
The heat
The heat that day was awful. In Washington, the official celebrations of the 250th ran into the same weather, and lightning and a biblical deluge followed.
The World Cup
The FIFA World Cup was going on at the same time. Over a six-week span, hundreds of thousands of Americans and non-Americans came together around it. Foreign visitors told their hosts that America was not as bad as they had heard, and Americans came together and felt good about it, though not necessarily because they cared about soccer.
A historian attends
A historian who lives in Scotland and teaches at the University of Edinburgh was at Mount Vernon that day, and he went to the ceremony.
Why did Washington's home become a national shrine?
The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, founded in 1853 by Ann Pamela Cunningham, raised money to save the estate when it had fallen into disrepair. The association bought the property in 1858 from Washington's great-grandnephew John A. Washington Jr. It is one of the earliest historic preservation efforts in the United States. The purchase price was 200,000 dollars.
How do naturalization oaths trace back to 1790?
The Naturalization Act of 1790 set a two-year residency requirement for free white persons and required an oath to support the Constitution. Immigrants have taken some form of oath ever since. The Naturalization Act of 1795 raised the residency requirement to five years. Congress opened naturalization to people of African descent in 1870 and to Asian immigrants only in the 1940s and 1950s.
How is the heat index calculated?
The National Weather Service heat index combines air temperature and relative humidity to estimate how hot it feels. Humid air slows the evaporation of sweat, so the body sheds heat less efficiently. The formula grew out of work by meteorologist Robert Steadman, who published his apparent temperature model in 1979. The index assumes shade, and direct sunlight can raise the felt temperature by as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit.
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