1. Daylight Saving Time was created mainly to please farmers, who needed more daylight hours during the summer to finish their chores.

False. Farmers have almost universally opposed Daylight Saving Time. Its main proponents have historically been retail merchants, international financial traders, and industrialists. During World War I and World War II, Daylight Saving Time was temporarily adopted as a measure to conserve fuel and to increase industrial output. The first national scheme to implement Daylight Saving Time went into effect in 1917.

2. The adoption of Daylight Saving Time has been definitively shown to save the country fuel and energy.

False. The claim has often been made, but energy usage has been notoriously difficult to quantify. Savings in electrical energy during one part of the day, for example, can be offset by increased gasoline consumption, or increased use of coal or fuel oil at other times of day.

3. The move to create standard time zones across the U.S. was stimulated mostly by railroad companies, who needed to standardize their train schedules.

True. The simplification of long-distance transportation schedules was the driving force behind the establishment of standard time zones in the 19th century. The Railway General Time Convention of 1883 set standard time zones nationally.

4. The United States contains four time zones.

False. The U.S. crosses eight time zones: Atlantic (Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands), Eastern, Central, Mountain, Pacific, Yukon, Alaska-Hawaii, and Bering.

5. The Department of Transportation currently has responsibility for setting time zone boundaries in the U.S.

True. Previously, the responsibility for setting time zone boundaries lay with the Interstate Commerce Commission.

1. When Pocahontas, daughter of Algonquian chief Powhatan, met King James I in England, he chided her husband, colonist John Rolfe, for having dared to marry a royal.

True. Or at least, he is recorded as doing so in colonist Robert Beverley's 1705 The History and Present State of Virginia, today a major resource in early Virginian and colonial history. Beverley gives a full account of Pocahontas's story (though historians debate its accuracy). According to Beverly, in England,

"Pocahontas had many Honours done her by the Queen . . . she was frequently admitted to wait on her Majesty, and was publickly treated as a Prince's Daughter; she was carried to many Plays, Balls, and other publick Entertainments, and very respectfully receiv'd by all the Ladies about the Court. Upon all which Occasions she behaved her self with so much Decency, and show'd so much Grandure in her Deportment, that she made good the brightest Part of the Character Capt. Smith had given of her. In the mean while she gain'd the good Opinion of every Body, so much that the poor Gentleman her Husband had like to have been call'd to an Account for presuming to marry a Princess Royal without the King's Consent . . ."

2. Queen Lili'uokalani, forced to abdicate her throne in 1893, was the last female royal of the Hawaiian monarchy.

False. Upon coming to the throne in 1891—following the death of her brother, King Kalakaua—Queen Lili'uokalani appointed Victoria Ka'iulani Cleghorn, her half-Scottish half-Hawaiian niece, as Crown Princess of Hawaii. Born in 1875 and educated in the UK, Ka'iulani spent the latter part of her short life advocating for the restoration of her country's independence. She died of illness in 1899, at the age of 23—shortly after the U.S. officially annexed Hawaii. The Hawaiian royal line continues today, but Ka'iulani was the last princess appointed while the monarchy held political power.

3. One female sachem (an Algonquian tribal chief) took part in the bloody 1675-1676 conflict between New England colonists and Native Americans known as King Philip's War.

False. Two female sachems took part in King Philip's War. The most famous is Weetamoo, sachem of the Wampanoag tribe called the Pocassets and sister-in-law of Metacom, sachem of the Pokanoket. Called Philip by the English, Metacom was the Philip of King Philip's War and, with Weetamoo and her tribe, fought against the English. Less famous is Awashonks, female sachem of the Sakonnets. Though she originally sided with Weetamoo and Philip, she later chose to ally her tribe with the English.

4. The marriage of Japanese imperial princess Kazunomiya to the acting ruler of Japan, shogun Tokugawa Iemochi, was a direct reaction to the 1854 Convention of Kanagawa, in which American Commodore Matthew C. Perry intimidated Japan into opening its ports to the U.S.

False. The imperial family objected to the opening of Japan—which had kept its borders largely shut to outsiders for centuries—to the U.S., but the imperial princess' marriage did not take place until several years after the shogun concluded a second treaty, this one with the first U.S. Consul General to Japan, Townsend Harris. The shogunate, essentially a monarchy made up of warrior-rulers, had long held the power of government in Japan, while the traditional monarchy of the imperial family had become largely ceremonial. However, the shogunate's agreeing to open the country to Westerners in the treaties of 1854 and 1858 created a political divide between supporters of the shogun and of the emperor; Kazunomiya's marriage to Iemochi in 1862 was meant to bridge this divide.