Problem: What team had a hard time crossing mountain passes due to snow?  Answer the above question based on the context below:  The first U.S. Government sponsored expedition to enter Jackson Hole was the 1859–60 Raynolds Expedition. Led by U.S. Army Captain William F. Raynolds and guided by mountain man Jim Bridger, it included naturalist F. V. Hayden, who later led other expeditions to the region. The expedition had been charged with exploring the Yellowstone region, but encountered difficulties crossing mountain passes due to snow. Bridger ended up guiding the expedition south over Union Pass then following the Gros Ventre River drainage to the Snake River and leaving the region over Teton Pass. Organized exploration of the region was halted during the American Civil War but resumed when F. V. Hayden led the well-funded Hayden Geological Survey of 1871. In 1872, Hayden oversaw explorations in Yellowstone, while a branch of his expedition known as the Snake River Division was led by James Stevenson and explored the Teton region. Along with Stevenson was photographer William Henry Jackson who took the first photographs of the Teton Range. The Hayden Geological Survey named many of the mountains and lakes in the region. The explorations by early mountain men and subsequent expeditions failed to identify any sources of economically viable mineral wealth. Nevertheless, small groups of prospectors set up claims and mining operations on several of the creeks and rivers. By 1900 all organized efforts to retrieve minerals had been abandoned. Though the Teton Range was never permanently inhabited, pioneers began settling the Jackson Hole valley to the east of the range in 1884. These earliest homesteaders were mostly single men who endured long winters, short growing seasons and rocky soils that were hard to cultivate. The region was mostly suited for the cultivation of hay and cattle ranching. By 1890, Jackson Hole had an estimated permanent population of 60. Menor's Ferry was built in 1892 near present-day Moose, Wyoming to provide access for wagons to the west side of the Snake River. Ranching increased significantly from 1900 to 1920,...

A: Raynolds Expedition


Problem: What was the last year for the plague in Constantinople?  Answer the above question based on the context below:  Following the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II immediately set out to revitalize the city, by then sometimes called Istanbul. He urged the return of those who had fled the city during the siege, and resettled Muslims, Jews, and Christians from other parts of Anatolia. He demanded that five thousand households needed to be transferred to Constantinople by September. From all over the Islamic empire, prisoners of war and deported people were sent to the city: these people were called "Sürgün" in Turkish (Greek: σουργούνιδες). Many people escaped again from the city, and there were several outbreaks of plague, so that in 1459 Mehmet allowed the deported Greeks to come back to the city. He also invited people from all over Europe to his capital, creating a cosmopolitan society that persisted through much of the Ottoman period. Plague continued to be essentially endemic in Constantinople for the rest of the century, as it had been from 1520, with a few years of respite between 1529 and 1533, 1549 and 1552, and from 1567 to 1570; epidemics originating in the West and in the Hejaz and southern Russia. Population growth in Anatolia allowed Constantinople to replace its losses and maintain its population of around 500,000 inhabitants down to 1800. Mehmed II also repaired the city's damaged infrastructure, including the whole water system, began to build the Grand Bazaar, and constructed Topkapı Palace, the sultan's official residence. With the transfer of the capital from Edirne (formerly Adrianople) to Constantinople, the new state was declared as the successor and continuation of the Roman Empire.

A: 1570


Problem: What is the name of the person who, according a Village performer, "start[ed] singing ['Hard Rain']...finished singing it, and no one could say anything"?  Answer the above question based on the context below:  Dylan was only 21 years old when he wrote one of his most complex songs, "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", often referred to as "Hard Rain". Dylan is said to have premiered "Hard Rain" at the Gaslight Cafe, where Village performer Peter Blankfield recalled: "He put out these pieces of loose-leaf paper ripped out of a spiral notebook. And he starts singing ['Hard Rain'] ... He finished singing it, and no one could say anything. The length of it, the episodic sense of it. Every line kept building and bursting". Dylan performed "Hard Rain" days later at Carnegie Hall on September 22, 1962, as part of a concert organized by Pete Seeger. The song gained added resonance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, just one month after Dylan's first performance of "Hard Rain", when U.S. President John F. Kennedy gave his warning to the Soviet Union over their deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba, . Critics have interpreted the lyric 'hard rain' as a reference to nuclear fallout, but Dylan resisted the specificity of this interpretation. In a radio interview with Studs Terkel in 1963, Dylan said, "No, it's not atomic rain, it's just a hard rain. It isn't the fallout rain. I mean some sort of end that's just gotta happen … In the last verse, when I say, 'the pellets of poison are flooding the waters', that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers." Many people were astonished by the power and complexity of this work. For Robert Shelton, who had given Dylan an important boost in his 1961 review in The New York Times, this song was "a landmark in topical, folk-based songwriting. Here blooms the promised fruit of the 1950s poetry-jazz fusion of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Rexroth." Folk singer Dave Van Ronk later commented: "I was acutely aware that it represented the beginning of an artistic revolution." Pete Seeger expressed the opinion that this song would last longer than any other written by Dylan.

A:
Dylan