Each year, 10 billion doughnuts are made in the United States. That’s 30 doughnuts (and a few extra pounds) for every single person in America. With 13,000 doughnut shops lining America’s streets, it should be easy to find one of your favorites on June 2, National Donut Day.

Doughnuts have been a beloved treat in America since the 17th century. It was the Dutch, settling in New Amsterdam (present-day New York), who first fried dough in oil.

These first doughnuts were called olykoeks, or “oily cakes.” Of course, these original olykoeks were more fried dough than doughnut and did not yet have their signature hole in the middle. We have to fast-forward almost 200 years until Elizabeth Gregory, the mother of a ship captain, created what we might recognize as the first true doughnut.

Gregory fried her dough with nutmeg, cinnamon, and lemon rind, ingredients undoubtedly borrowed from her son’s cargo hold. She also added hazelnuts and walnuts to the doughy center, the spot that might be undercooked.

Gregory thoughtfully called her new recipe a doughnut. It was her son, Captain Gregory, who made the doughnut round with a hole in its center. Some claim that the hole allowed the doughnut to be placed on the spoke of the ship’s wheel, allowing the captain to steer with both hands. In an interview with the Boston Post newspaper, Captain Gregory recollected how he cut the first hole in a doughnut with the top of a round, tin pepper box.

Doughnuts did not become the beloved treat they are today until World War I, when Salvation Army volunteers brought doughnuts to American soldiers in the trenches to lift their spirits and remind them of home. And it wasn’t until the first Dunkin’ Donuts opened in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1950 that the spelling changed from doughnut to donut. It was once spelled donut only in America, but we now find donuts (and doughnuts) as far away as Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.

Going Postal
On June 13, 1920, the United States Postal Service declared that it would no longer send
children by parcel post. As strange as it may seem, we now remember June 13 as
No Mailing Children Day. On January 1, 1913, the U.S. Post began mailing parcels and packages. Americans could now buy and sell large dry goods by mail. Some, however, took advantage of this service and sent their children through the mail. After all, the delivery cost of mail was cheaper than a train
ticket. Newspaper headlines captured the phenomenon: “Mail Carrier Safely Delivers Boy of 10 3/4 lbs to Grandmother, Cost 15 Cents.” Assistant Postmaster General John Koons eventually declared that children didn’t fit within the classifiction of harmless live animals.

A Witch History
There was a time when Salem wanted to forget its sordid history. As late as 1895—over 200 years after the hysteria—the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a headline reading, “The People of Salem Do Not Like to Be Questioned in Regard to the Witchery Affair.” It wasn’t until playwright Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953 as an allegorical response to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist hearings that the witch trials entered the popular imagination.

Historians and scientists began to reexamine the cause of the hysteria. Some scholars suggested that piety was the root of the problem. Notions of witchcraft came straight from scripture. Pious people accused others of witchcraft, while pious judges adjudicated the trials.

Others have blamed ergot poisoning. The theory goes that stores of rye contaminated with ergot fungus caused residents of Salem to hallucinate, convulse, and suffer delusions, symptoms that were equated with witchcraft. Over the years, this theory was debunked, only to be revived, debunked, and revived again. No one truly knows how the all-consuming witch hysteria gripped the community of Salem and other surrounding towns. Other theories point to corrupt church politics, family feuds, and the absence of a modern justice system. What we do know is that the city of Salem has tried to make amends to Bridget Bishop and the hundreds of other victims who were wrongfully charged and punished. Salem opened the popular Salem Witch Museum in 1972 and dedicated a Witch Trials Memorial in 1992.