At the nation’s pivotal moment — the Civil War — two seventeenth-century vessels kept sailing through the American mind: the Mayflower and the slaver White Lion. Their wakes still cut our waters.
Congress forbade living persons from appearing on paper currency in 1866, after an unpopular Treasury Department official put himself on the five-cent note.
The Humane Society and later the U.S. Life-Saving Service rescued thousands of shipwreck victims operating from lifesaving stations throughout the New England coast and beyond.
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