In November 1908, the Superior Hotel in Iron Mountain, Montana, became the first hotel to have Bibles placed in all its rooms by the Gideons. The Gideons were an organization for Christian business travelers founded in 1899 by Samuel Eugene Hill. By 1975, the Gideons had placed more than 10 million Bibles in hotels, hospitals, … Read more
The 1921 site houses the Cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta, a depiction of the Civil War battle for control of the Georgia railroad on July 22, 1864. The 1885-86 artwork blends an enormous circular painting with a three-dimensional model of the action. The painting is 358 feet in circumference and 42 feet tall. It … Read more
Stephen A. Douglas (1813-61), the short but politically powerful congressman from Illinois, was known as “The Little Giant”. A Democrat, he represented Illinois in the House of Representatives (1843-47) and the Senate (184761). He lost the 1860 presidential election to Abraham Lincoln.
Alphonso D’Abruzzo. Robert Alda Gladys Greene. Jean Arthur Albert Einstein. Albert Brooks Richard Jenkins. Richard Burton Tula Finklea. Cyd Charisse Lily Chauchoin. Claudette Colbert Declan McManus. Elvis Costello Alexandra Zuck. Sandra Dee Margarita Cansino. Rita Hayworth Krishna Bhanji. Ben Kingsley Laszlo Loewenstein. Peter Lorre Susan Tomaling. Susan Sarandon Michael Shalhoub. Omar Sharif Gordon Sumner. Sting
In the 1500s, the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy were the Cayuga, Mohawks, Oneida, Onondaga, and Seneca. Around 1720, these five nations, based in New York, were joined by another tribe, the Tuscarora.
The Augean stables that Hercules had to clean held 3,000 cattle and had not been cleaned in thirty years. Cleaning them was the sixth of Hercules’ seven labors. Hercules’ story was told by Ovid (43 B.c.-17 A.D.) and Apollodorus (first-second century A . D. ).
“Roseanne” (ABC, 1988) was the top-rated TV program in 1990.
Only one U.S. president served nonconsecutive terms. Grover Cleveland was president from 1885 to 1889. After being defeated by Republican Benjamin Harrison in the 1888 election, the Democrat Cleveland defeated Harrison in 1892 and won a nonconsecutive second term (1893-97).
In the opening lines of Sunset Boulevard (1950), William Holden says, “Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. It’s about five o’clock in the morning. That’s the homicide squad, complete with detectives and newspapermen. A murder has been reported from one of those great big houses in the ten-thousand block.”
Steve Reeves was born in Glasgow, Montana, in 1926. The bodybuilding champion became famous in Italian mythological epics beginning with Hercules (aka Le Fatiche di Ercole) in 1957.
The names of the three tragedies in Aeschylus’s Oresteia are: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, all first presented in 458 B.C.
Three dozen Navy Seals arrived on the beach at Mogadishu early on December 9, 1992, to begin the famine relief operation. They were outnumbered two to one by more than 75 reporters and camera crew members waiting to cover the story.
The “Trail of Tears” refers to the “removal,” or forced exile, of 17,000 Cherokee from Georgia in 1838-39, under the terms of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. About 4,000 people, one in four Cherokees, died of hunger and disease on their way to Oklahoma.
Jim McKay appeared on several shows for ABC, “Sports Spot” (1951), “Make the Connection” (1955), and “The Verdict Is Yours” (1958) before “ABC’s Wide World of Sports”. In 1961, he appeared on “Wide World of Sports” and has never left.
Clifford Odets wrote a play called Paradise Lost that was not based on Milton’s poem, in 1935. The play was about the fall of a middle-class family.
Caesar Enrico Bandello, played by Edward G. Robinson in the 1930 film Little Caesar.
Five Dirty Harry movies have been made: Dirty Harry (1971), Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988).
The men who were found innocent of inciting riots during the 1968 Democratic National Convention were: Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Lee Weiner. They were known as the Chicago Seven.
Kurt Russell, with songs dubbed by Ronnie McDowell, played Elvis Presley in the TV movie “Elvis” (1979). The film was directed by John Carpenter.
The first known gladiatorial contest took place in Rome in 264 B.C. It featured three pairs of armed fighters. Later contests featured hundreds or even thousands of pairs of duelists.
President Richard Nixon was charged with three counts of impeachment. On July 30, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee charged the U.S. president with three counts related to the Watergate case: obstructing justice; abuse of power; and defying the House Judiciary Committee subpoenas.
There has been only one female winner of the U.S. Medal of Honor. It was Mary Walker who served as a surgeon in the 52nd Ohio Regiment during the Civil War. She was awarded the medal in 1865 by President Andrew Johnson.
The 1984-85 season of Dallas was a dream. It was revealed to have been a dream of Pam Ewing to explain the reappearance of her husband Bobby (Patrick Duffy), previously killed off.
The name Betty Crocker was created by the Washburn Crosby Company (a forerunner of General Mills) in 1921 to be used in response to letters and recipe requests from homemakers. In 1924, Betty’s voice was first heard on the Betty Crocker “Cooking School of the Air,” the first food service program on daytime radio. Not … Read more
The name of Miss Havisham’s house in Dickens’s Great Expectations is Satis House.
Shakespeare’s wife was eight years older than him. They were married in 1582, when he was eighteen.
Yes, there a real Baron Miinchausen. Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Miinchausen (1720-1797), a German adventurer, is believed to have served in the Russian army against the Turks. He was known for exaggerating his exploits. Satirical stories about him were told by Rodolf Erich Raspe in Baron Miinchausen, Narrative of his Marvellous Travels (1785).
“The Man Trap,” televised as a “sneak preview” on September 8, 1966, was the first episode of “Star Trek” to be televised. The episode dealt with a creature on planet M-113 who lives on salt sucked from humans.
John McLaughlin’s sign-off line on “The McLaughlin Group” was “Bye-bye.”
The first televised baseball game was a May 1939 game between Columbia and Princeton.
A chinook was a dance to summon the warm wind to melt the snow. It also refers to the wind itself and to the Chinook people of the Columbia River valley. “Chinook jargon” is a pidgin language based on Indian languages, French, and English, formerly spoken in the Pacific Northwest.
The light-green beans called lima beans were introduced to the U.S. from Lima, Peru, by U.S. Navy Captain John Harris in 1824.
The numbers 10, 2, and 4 represented the times between meals when a person’s energy is at its lowest and can be revived by Dr. Pepper.
Vermont widow Ida May Fuller received the first Social Security check in 1940. The check totalled $22.54.
There are two members from each state for a total of 100 in the U.S. Senate.
There were 1,400 actresses who interviewed for the part of Scarlett O’Hara in Scarlett Letters. Four hundred were asked to do readings.
With their periods of reign, they are: 1. Pepi II, king of Egypt. 90 years (c. 2566-2476 B.C.) 2. Louis XIV, king of France. 72 years (1643-1715) 3. John II, prince of Liechtenstein. 71 years (1858-1929) 4. Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria. 68 years (1848-1916) 5. Victoria, queen of England. 64 years (1837-1901)
William Howard Taft, at a top weight of 352 pounds was the heaviest U.S. president.
The New York Daily Inquirer was Kane’s first newspaper in Citizen Kane.
The 52 American hostages were held for 444 days, from November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president.
Only fifty kids at a time sat in the Peanut Gallery on “Howdy Doody”.
Drago (Dolph Lundgren) was the name of the Russian boxer in Rocky IV.
The American nuclear family is not very typical, according to an analysis of 1990 census data by the Center for the Study of Social Policy. The most common type of household in the United States is a married couple without children: There are 27.5 million of these. In second place (at 26.9 million) are non-family … Read more
As of the early 1980s, the United States held the largest supply, with nearly 27 percent of the world’s uranium reserves. Other countries with large supplies were: Australia, with 18 percent; Sweden, with 16 percent; South Africa, with 15 percent; and Canada, with 9 percent.
The characters in the original TV series “Mission: Impossible” (CBS, 1966-73) were: Agent Briggs (Steven Hill), Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain), Barney Collier (Greg Morris), Willie Armitage (Peter Lupus), and Rollin Hand (Martin Landau). James Phelps (Peter Graves) joined the cast in 1968.
In our galaxy alone, there are about 100 billion stars. In the universe that we can see, the number of stars is estimated at 10^22.
The word is used by astronomers to describe the position of three bodies that are approximately in line. For example, when the moon is full, it is in syzygy with the earth and sun, because it is on the far side of the earth from the sun.
Aeneas descends into the underworld in book VI of XII of Vergil’s Aeneid.
Humorist Dorothy Parker made the quip “How can they tell?” after U.S. President Calvin Coolidge’s death in 1933.
It isn’t certain. Constantine abolished the gladiator shows in A.D. 325, but they persisted. Honorius abolished them again in the fifth century, but even then they may have continued.
Thomas Paine, the eighteenth-century American pamphleteer who wrote Common Sense, was called filthy little atheist. Paine was actually 5 feet, 10 inches tall, neat in appearance, and believed in God.
His father punished Alfred Hitchcock for a since-forgotten offense by sending him to the police station with a note. The chief of police read it and locked Hitchcock up for five to ten minutes, saying, “This is what we do to naughty boys.” Hitchcock was four or five years old at the time.
Elizabeth P. Hoisington was the first female general in the U.S. armed forces. She was appointed to the post of director of the Women’s Army Corps in June 1970.
The city Dubuque in Iowa is named for French-Canadian Julien Dubuque, who first settled the region in 1785. The town received the name at its founding in 1833.
The first book printed in English is The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a prose romance by Raoul Lefevre, printed by William Caxton in 1474 in Bruges, Belgium. Caxton himself translated it from the French. Caxton also printed the first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, published on November … Read more
The most destructive hurricane in U.S. history, Andrew’s winds reached speeds of 175 miles per hour as they gusted into Dade County, Florida, on August 24, 1992. South-central Louisiana was hit by 120 mile-per-hour winds two days later. The hurricane killed 38 people and caused billions of dollars in losses.
A company of French and Caughnawaga Indians killed about 50 of the 300 residents of the English colonial village of Deerfield, Massachusetts. It was a predawn raid on February 29, 1704, during Queen Anne’s War. Almost 100 settlers were taken to Canada as prisoners.
The male advice columnist Miss Lonelyhearts wrote for the New York Post-Dispatch in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1946).
The author of Gone With the Wind (1936) Margaret Mitchell died in 1949 at age forty-eight after being hit by a taxi in Atlanta. The author of Gone With the Wind (1936) died in 1949 at age forty-eight after being hit by a taxi in Atlanta.
The subtitle of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death.
The name of the ship in Mister Roberts was the USS Reluctant.
In the traditional list, there are seven continents: Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. However, Europe and Asia are sometimes considered a single continent, Eurasia, making only six. Asia is the largest continent, comprising about 17 million square miles. Australia is the smallest, comprising only about 3 million square miles.
A veteran of Vietnam and Grenada and head of the U.S. Central Command, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf had been revising contingency plans for war in the Mideast when Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Having just completed a command-post exercise with Iraq as the mock enemy, Schwarzkopf was prepared to take charge of the … Read more
The practice of ceasing to work but occupying the workplace first occurred on a mass scale in the rubber factories of Akron, Ohio, in 1936. Sit-down strikes in Flint, Michigan, and Cleveland, Ohio, followed. In 1939, the Supreme Court ruled sit-down strikes illegal.
Joel McCrea and Frances Dee were married for fifty-seven years, from 1933 to his death in 1990. They appeared together in films like Wells Fargo (1937) and Four Faces West (1948).
About 700,000 people worldwide speak Basque. Most of them live in a narrow area of about 3,900 square miles in Spain and France. Basque is not Indo-European; it is the only remnant of the languages spoken in southwestern Europe before the region was Romanized.
C. S. Lewis married Joy Davidman in 1956. She died of cancer in 1960, three years before Lewis’s own death in 1963. Their story is told in Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961).
Sabotage (1936, UK; released in the U.S. as A Woman Alone). It was based on Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent. It is not to be confused with Hitchcock’s The Secret Agent, released earlier that year and based on Somerset Maugham’s novel Ashenden.
Hamartia is the fatal flaw that brings a good character to ruin. Hubris is pride, the classic example of hamartia.
Orson Welles’s 1942 movie The Magnificent Ambersons was based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Booth Tarkington. Tarkington also won a Pulitzer for the novel Alice Adams (1921).
It has appeared on most American coins since about 1864. During the Civil War, rising popular religious sentiment prompted Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase to put the country’s faith where its money was. Other slogans suggested were God Our Trust and God and Our Country. The motto is not required by law.
The renegade androids in Blade Runner (1982) were called Replicants. “Blade runners” were the people assigned to hunt them down.
The largest animal ever seen alive was a 113.5-foot, 170-ton female blue whale. The whale is able to reach such large size because water helps support its weight.
Emma Lazarus (1849-87), a New York Jewish poet, wrote the poem “The New Colossus” with its words, “Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” It was written in honor of the planned Statue of Liberty in 1883, but the poem was not part of the statue when it was … Read more
The forerunner to the modern movie theater, the nickelodeon, first opened in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, in 1905. The nickelodeon showed motion pictures with musical accompaniment.
John Hancock’s (1737-93) most distinctive contribution to the rebel cause was money which earned him a place as president of the Continental Congress. Hancock was a merchant who had inherited a fortune from a smuggler uncle. He used his wealth to help finance the revolution. He is best remembered now for his flamboyant signature on … Read more
Though the origin of the name Europe is not known for certain, the name is very old. A Greek hymn to Apollo from the sixth century B.C. mentions the name, which originally applied only to part of the Balkan Peninsula. Europe probably derives from a word meaning “mainland,” though it may be related to the … Read more
Alfred Hitchcock’s first film with sound was Blackmail (1929). He actually filmed two versions, sound and silent. In the sound version, the German star Ann Ondra’s voice was supplied by English actress Joan Barry.
Best Picture—Wings (1927) (Best “Production”) Best Actor—Emil Jannings in The Last Command (1927) and The Way of All Flesh (1927) Best Actress—Janet Gaynor in Seventh Heaven (1927), Street Angel (1927), and Sunrise (1927) Best Director—Frank Borzage for Seventh Heaven (1927)
“The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” which ran for fourteen seasons (1952-66) on ABC, was the longest-running sitcom on TV.
On one side of the Bank War (1833-36) was President Andrew Jackson, who wanted to abolish the Second Bank of the United States. On the other side was the Second Bank’s president, Nicholas Biddle. Jackson vetoed the Second Bank’s early renewal in 1832 and withdrew all federal funds in 1833 In retaliation, Biddle contracted credit … Read more
The first American Express Travelers’ Cheque was issued in 1891. Then as now, Travelers’ Cheques were designed to allow travelers to carry funds safely. American Express levied a surcharge on buyers of the cheques and paid banks a commission for each sale.
The rainbow in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is the arc a rocket makes from launch to target. The novel is set in World War II Europe at the time German V-2 rockets were falling on London.
Rebecca Welles’s father was Orson Welles; Princess Yasmin Aga Khan’s father was Prince Aly Khan.
The city on the TV series “Hill Street Blues” was never named. Some exteriors in the opening credits were filmed in Chicago.
Born Thelma McQueen in 1911, in Tampa, Florida, she got her nickname Butterfly McQueen when she danced as a young woman in the Butterfly Ballet in a theatrical production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She is best known for playing the weepy slave Prissy in Gone With the Wind (1939).
The name Swift gave to his race of rational horses in Gulliver’s Travels is spelt Houyhnhnms. Their subjects, a race of nasty human-like creatures, had an easier name: Yahoos.
Jack Hawkins played Pharaoh in Land of the Pharaohs (1955).
Anthony Hopkins supplied the voice of Laurence Olivier in the restored bath scene in Spartacus (1960, restored 1991).
C. K. Scott Moncrieff took the title Remembrance of Things Past for his 1922 English translation of Proust from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past.” The literal translation of Proust’s title is “In Search of Lost Time.”