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America's Last Living Emancipated Slave, Civil War Veteran and Oldest Man: The Remarkable Story of 130 Year Old Sylvester Magee

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“A.P. Andrews of the Civil War Roundtable of Jackson, Mississippi and Dr. Laurin C. Post of San Diego State College, and other historians, say they have confirmed that Sylvester Magee was born in Carpet, N.C in 1841, that later he became a slave to Hugh Magee of the Dry Creek area of Covington County, Mississippi and that he fought in the Civil War for the Northern Army.”  ftrom the Monday May 2, 1966 edition of The Hattiesburg American . In 1966, on his supposed 125th birthday, Governor Paul B. Johnson, Mississippi’s first Governor who wasn’t a staunch segregationist or overt racist, declared May 29, 1966 to be Sylvester Magee day in honor of the Hattiesburg man who claimed to be America’s last living enslaved person, last surviving Civil War Veteran and the oldest living person in the history of the United States. Lyndon B. Johnson the then President of the United States, a man known as a Civil Rights reformer in the 1960’s, personally wrote Mr. Magee a note of congratulations ...
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Did This Really Happen?! The Van Meter Visitor of 1903 and the Paranormal Legacy Sealed Inside an Abandoned Iowa Coal Mine

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  In September and October of 1903 the small rural Iowa farming community of Van Meter was terrorized for five nights by an unknown winged creature that many described as being both half-bat and half human and, that some say, emitted beams of light from its forehead not unlike those of a coal miner's headlamp.  The creature was said to bounce from rooftop to rooftop, cackling and screaming like a banshee while emitting a foul smelling odor like sulphur or rotten eggs--an odor so awful that many witnesses became faint and passed out from terror and the overpowering stench.   Each and every night for an entire week during October of 1903 the odiferous humanoid cackling creature, or creatures, appeared to terrorize the residents of Van Meter, Iowa who dubbed their cryptid the “Van Meter Visitor”.  And then, after a posse of local men armed with shotguns and revolvers chased the creature into the shaft of an abandoned coal mine on the outskirts of town, the Van Me...
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The Fight for America February 7, 1849: How an Illegal Outdoor Boxing Match Changed Sports, Media and American Immigration Forever

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  The media called it the “Fight for America” and like almost every single major prize fight ever since with high stakes involved, and even higher public interest, the bout was dubbed “The Fight of the Century”--the Fight of the 19th Century that is!   Ten thousand dollars and some would say the future of what it even meant to be called an “American” were on the line that day when on February 7, 1849 at a farm in Maryland, located forty miles from Baltimore on a desolate snow covered island, what the press called “The Fight for America” and what the public referred to as “The Fight of the Century” took place in front of less than 200 spectators, mostly gamblers and former fighters themselves, because at that time boxing despite its underground popularity, and its popularity as a legitimate sport in the United Kingdom, was illegal almost everywhere in the United States of America. It was definitely not an auspicious place or time of year to hold an outdoor boxing match...
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