Happy Birthday, America!  Celebrations today always include the hot dog.  Here's a "historical Highlight" explaining the origin of that 4th of July menu favorite - from An Apple a Day – The ABC’s of Diet & Disease by Barb Bancroft  (2001).

The History of the Hot Dog

The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council credits the European immigrants with bringing hot dogs to the United States from Germany and Austria in the 1800’s.  The frankfurter was nicknamed dachshund dog because of the resemblance to the little canine.  Legend has it that the term “hot dog” was coined at the Polo Grounds during a baseball game around 1906.  Concessionaire Harry M. Stevens couldn’t sell ice cream and soda on a cold day in April, so he had his vendors load up the sausages and holler, “Get your red hot dachshund dogs!”  It just so happened that a cartoonist for the New York Journal was at the park looking for an idea and penned an illustration of a real dachshund in a bun with the caption, “Get your hot dogs!” As the story goes, the cartoonist, Tad Dorgan, couldn’t spell dachshund, so he shortened the caption to just “hot dogs”. Unfortunately, no one can find the cartoon by Tad Dorgan, so the story has been disputed.