The small, rural town of Britt, Iowa, seems an unlikely location for a convention of hobos—the unwashed but colorful riders of America’s empty boxcars—but for a week each summer its residents play host to this diminishing segment of the population. There is a parade, an arts fair, carnival rides, races, and music. But the real action centers on the hobo camp set up by festival organizers on the outskirts of town, where visitors can hear the life stories of these men who have chosen to travel the country unencumbered by family or property. Discuss
Source: The Free Dictionary
Rawlings was an American author best known for her 1938 novel The Yearling, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. Rawlings worked as a journalist until 1928, when she moved to the rural Florida backwoods and devoted herself to fiction. There, she incorporated the people and land around her into richly atmospheric works that resemble vivid factual reporting and are noted for their magical descriptions of landscape. The Yearling is about a boy who adopts what animal as a pet? 
Longfellow was a popular 19th c. American poet. He wrote some of the most popular poems in American literature and his works created a new body of romantic American legends. In preparation for professorships, he traveled to Europe twice to study languages. His works were immensely popular during his lifetime and remain so, despite critics’ complaints that they are simple, sentimental, and moralizing. As a teenager, Longfellow began a lifelong friendship with what other famous American novelist? 
During World War II, the Japanese occupied the island of Guadalcanal in the South Pacific. Hoping to prevent the Japanese from using this position to threaten supply routes between the US, Australia, and New Zealand, the Allies launched their first large-scale invasion of a Japanese-held island. After six months of bitter fighting on the ground, at sea, and in the air, the Allies captured the island. Why is the victory considered a strategically significant turning point in the war? 
Leakey was a British anthropologist and archaeologist whose work helped establish the course of human evolution in Africa. The son of missionaries, Leakey grew up among the Kikuyu people of Kenya. After attending university in the UK, he returned to E Africa, where he and his wife discovered the first known remains of Homo habilis, an extinct species of hominin widely regarded as the earliest member of the human genus. Who are “Leakey’s Angels,” and what have they gone on to accomplish? 
Ulan Bator, or Ulaanbaator, is the capital of the Republic of Mongolia. Founded in 1649 as a monastery town, today it is the junction point of the country’s major roads and caravan routes; it lies on the Trans-Siberian RR, linking Russia with Beijing. The city is home to a library of ancient Mongolian, Chinese, and Tibetan manuscripts. The 1904 British expedition to Tibet prompted the Dalai Lama to leave Lhasa for Ulan Bator, where he remained for 4 years. In whose honor was Ulaanbaator named? 
In the 1880s, inventor Thomas Edison sought to promote direct current (DC) power distribution by convincing the public that the alternating current (AC) electricity backed by rival George Westinghouse was dangerous. To that end, his partners developed an AC-powered electric chair, which was adopted by the state of New York as an official execution device. In 1889, murderer William Kemmler was sentenced to be the first person to be executed via electric chair. What happened during the execution?