Thomas Paine wrote “These are the times that try men’s souls” in “The American Crisis,” a series of pamphlets he published between 1776 and 1783. When he wrote the opening sentence to the first pamphlet, the Revolutionary army had just retreated across New Jersey and defeat seemed imminent.
There were two film versions of Holiday. The 1930 film featured Ann Harding as Linda Se-ton and Robert Ames as John Case, the roles taken by Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in the 1938 version. Edward Everett Horton played the same role in both films, Nick Potter.
Ten Americans have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature: Sinclair Lewis (1930); Eugene O’Neill (1936); Pearl S. Buck (1938); William Faulkner (1949); Ernest Hemingway (1954); John Steinbeck (1962); Saul Bellow (1976); Isaac Bashevis Singer, a naturalized citizen (1978); Czeslaw Milosz, a naturalized citizen (1980); and Joseph Brodsky, a naturalized citizen (1987).
Paul Henning produced the CBS “rural sitcoms” of the 1960s including “The Beverly Hillbillies” (1962-71), “Petticoat Junction” (1963-70), and “Green Acres” (1965-71)?.
Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, were the two major all-black musicals released in 1943.
“The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” (CBS, 1967-69) was canceled on April 1969.
A secretary named Margaret Herrick, who later became executive director of the Academy gave the Academy Award statuette the name “Oscar”. According to legend, she looked at the statuette and said, “Why, he reminds me of my Uncle Oscar.” The uncle’s full name was Oscar Pierce.
Natty Bumppo’s Indian sidekick was Chingachgook. He appears in Cooper’s The Deer-slayer (1841), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Pioneers (1823).
The title of Carlyle’s 1833-34 satire on German philosophy Sartor Resartus means “the tailor retailored” in Latin. It comments on the work of the fictitious Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, philosopher of clothes.
Statesman Henry Clay (1777-1852) said, “I would rather be right than be president”.
There were several practical reasons why the young Columbia graduate student Margaret Mead decided to do field work on Samoan adolescence. She thought her fluency in French and German would help her in the Polynesian island chain, and there were regular steamship stops there. More important, she wanted to know how much of human behavior … Read more
Born as Malcolm Little (1925-65), Malcolm X served six years in prison for burglary, beginning at age 21. While in prison, he joined the Nation of Islam and took the Muslim name El-Hajj Malik ElShabazz and the public name of Malcolm X. Malcolm became a vocal opponent of white racism and advocate for black rights. … Read more
Walter Cronkite anchored “The CBS Evening News” from April 16, 1962, to March 6, 1981.
A bullet shot through a victim’s heart sometimes precipitates a final laugh before death.
Theodor Seuss Geisel known as Dr. Seuss died on September 24, 1991, at age eighty-seven. Dr. Seuss had written about fifty books that sold more than 200 million copies. His last book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go (1990), was still on the bestseller list when he died.
In the caves of France, archaeologists have found carved bones that appear to be wind and percussion instruments. These instruments date from about 25,000 to 20,000 B.C.
According to the Report of the Postmaster General, 106,311,062,000 pieces of mail traveled through the system in 1980. On a given day, therefore, approximately 291,263,000 items passed through the country’s post offices. What’s more, this prodigious amount of mail traveled through many fewer post offices than at the turn of the century. In 1900, there … Read more
William Travis, commander of the Alamo, was not from Texas but from South Carolina. A lawyer and lieutenant-colonel, Travis was one of many Southerners who responded to Texas’s call for volunteers to help in their revolution against Mexico, which began in 1835. Southerners sympathized with the rebels because the province of Texas was a slave-owning … Read more
Gloriana was the name of the Faerie Queene in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590-96).
George Gobel was known as “Lonesome George”. His TV series, “The George Gobel Show,” ran from 1954 to 1960 on NBC.
Dore Schary replaced Louis B. Mayer as studio head of MGM in 1951. Schary himself was fired in 1956.
An hour divided into 60 minutes because it is based on the sexagesimal system of notation, a system based on the number 60 that predates the decimal system. It was developed about 2400 B.C. by the Sumerians. Since ancient times, the sexagesimal system has been used to divide circles into 360 degrees (60 x 6), … Read more
The symbols Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity appeared at the beginning of “Ben Casey” (ABC, 1961-66).
In 1913, Illinois stonemason Charles Pajean brought the toy he created for his children to the American Toy Fair in New York City. Within one year, 1 million Tinkertoy sets had been sold.
Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest man to become president of the U.S. Roosevelt was a 42 year-old vice president when he took office upon the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. At 43, John F. Kennedy was the youngest man to be elected president.
Ted Cassidy’s hand played Thing on the TV series “The Addams Family” (ABC, 1964-66). He also played the butler, Lurch.
Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920) was the book about the Holy Grail quest that T. S. Eliot drew upon in his poem, The Waste Land.
Until the late 19th century, Americans used sales catalogues, newspapers, pamphlets, fliers, or whatever other paper they could find for toilet paper. The materials were kept in the bathroom or outhouse, where they provided reading matter as well as sanitation. Toilet paper in rolls, sold in plain brown wrappers, was first marketed in the U.S. … Read more
John Barrymore played Ahab in the original film version of Moby Dick. No one played Ishmael. The character was cut out of the screenplay, which differed heavily from Herman Melville’s novel.
“And so, as Tiny Tim observed, ‘God Bless us, Every One!’ “
Hattie T. Caraway, a Democrat from Arkansas, was elected to the Senate in 1932, making her the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate.
Joel McCrea regularly listed acting as his hobby. He listed his occupation as “rancher.”
Wendell Holmes never served as chief justice of the Supreme Court. He was an associate justice from 1902 to 1932, during the terms of four different chief justices.
Caged Heat (1974), a low-budget epic released by New World, was director Jonathan Demme’s women-in-prison movie. Demme also wrote the screenplay.
Chuck Courtney was Billy the Kid in Billy the Kid vs Dracula (1966). John Carradine was Dracula. William Beaudine directed.
These occupations of characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c. 1387-1400) refer to the following: summoner—an officer who summoned suspects before the ecclesiastical courts canon’s yeoman—an attendant of a canon; a canon was a clergyman associated with a cathedral or large church franklin—a prosperous country man of low birth manciple—a steward of a community of lawyers … Read more
In a set of five episodes on the TV series “Wiseguy”, Jerry Lewis played New York garment mogul Eli Sternberg.
The renowned American painter Winslow Homer (1836-1910) worked for Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War. One of his first important paintings, Prisoners from the Front in 1866, drew on this experience.
Richard Henry Dana was a college student at Harvard before he shipped out as a sailor in the voyage recounted in Two Years Before the Mast (1840). Dana (1815-82) suffered eye problems that led him to go out to sea in hopes of improving his health. Working as a common seaman, he traveled around South … Read more
President William Henry Harrison died in 1841 after only 31 days in office. James A. Garfield was a close second. In 1881, he died of a gunshot wound after only six months in office.
The E.H. in E. H. Shepard stands for Ernest Howard. Shepard illustrated A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh books (1926-28) and the 1931 edition of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908).
The first party platform was negotiated by the Democratic Party for the 1840 election.
Krook, the junk merchant, spontaneously combusts in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Krook, the junk merchant.
At the Pacific Ocean’s greatest depth-36,198 feet (in the Marianas trench southwest of Guam), the pressure is 16,124 pounds per square inch, more than 1,000 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level (14.7 pounds per square inch).
Harpers Ferry is in what is now West Virginia (then part of Virginia). John Brown led a party of 22 in seizing the U.S. arsenal there in October 1859. Brown, an abolitionist born in Torrington, Connecticut, planned to arm the local slaves and start a full-scale rebellion, but his plan was foiled by state and … Read more
The Catholic anarchist and pacifist newspaper The Catholic Worker founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin has been published since May 1933. The cost, then and now, is one cent per copy.
Yes, there was really a Dr. Scholl. In the late nineteenth century, William (“Billy”) Scholl left farm life in La Porte, Indiana, for life as a shoemaker in Chicago. After noticing how much abuse the average foot takes, he decided to become a podiatrist and treat the problems he saw. Once established as a medical … Read more
Goose bumps are a vestige from the days when humans were covered with hair. When it got cold, the hairs stood on end, creating a trap for air and providing insulation. The hairs have long since disappeared, but in the places where they used to be, the skin still bristles, trying to get warm.
Eighteenth-century political philosopher Edmund Burke is credited with the term the “fourth estate”. Burke is supposed to have said, “Yonder [in the Reporters’ Gallery] sits the fourth estate, more important than them all.” The three other estates were the Lords Spiritual (clergy), the Lords Temporal (knights and barons), and the Commons.
The woman taken from her Berkeley, California, home on February 5, 1974, by the Symbionese Liberation Army did so. She adopted the name Tania in honor of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara’s mistress, Tania Guitterez Baer.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association sponsors the Golden Globe awards. Founded in 1940, it is an association of foreign journalists covering the Los Angeles entertainment scene. The awards were first presented in 1944, with the first Best Motion Picture award going to The Song of Bernadette (1943).
Russian writer Ivan Turgenev coined the word “nihilist” in his 1862 novel Fathers and Sons.
Slumber Party Massacre (1982) was the first slasher film to be made by women. It was written by feminist author Rita Mae Brown, produced by Amy Jones and Aaron Lipstadt, and directed by Amy Jones.
Hugs and Kisses (1966, Sweden) was the first movie to show full frontal female nudity.
Bill Gannon, played by Harry Morgan, was Joe Friday’s partner in the TV series “Dragnet” (NBC, 1952-59, 1967-70) when the TV series was revived in 1967. Jack Webb played Sergeant Joe Friday. Friday’s previous partners were played by Barton Yarborough, Barney Phillips, Herb Ellis, and Ben Alexander.
Needle Park, the infamous hangout in New York for addicts and dealers in the 1960s and 1970s was Verdi Square Park. It is named for the Italian composer, and occupies a triangular area between Seventy-second and Seventy-third Streets at Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue.
The worst earthquake east of the Mississippi River occurred in Charleston, South Carolina, on August 31, 1886, and registered what would have been 6.6 on the Richter scale. Sixty people were killed.
The term Stark Naked is a corruption of the term start naked. In the thirteenth century, when the phrase originated, start took the Anglo-Saxon form steort, which meant “tail” or “rump.” Therefore, stark naked refers to someone naked to the tail.
Margaret Sanger (1883-1966) coined the term “birth control” in 1914. Sanger founded the first birth control clinic in the U.S., in 1916. In 1921, she established the American Birth Control League, predecessor to the Planned Parenthood Federation.
Brigitte Bardot played the woman in Roger Vadim’s first version of And God Created Woman (1957). Rebecca De Mornay played the woman in Vadim’s 1987 And God Created Woman?
Shangri-La, the setting for James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon supposedly has a real-life counterpart in Hunza, Pakistan. The community, which boasts of having the healthiest people in the world, many over 100 years old, is located at the borders of Pakistan, China, and the Soviet Union.
The TV series “Bridget Loves Bernie” was loosely based on Abie’s Irish Rose (1946), in which an Irish girl named Rosemary (Joanne Dru) marries a Jewish boy named Abie (Richard Norris), leading to family conflict. In the TV show, Meredith Baxter played Bridget and David Birney played Bernie.
John Foster Dulles, secretary of state under Dwight D. Eisenhower from 1953 to 1959, often expressed his belief that the containment policy of the Truman years did not go far enough. In the 1952 presidential campaign, he called for a “rollback” of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the “unleashing” of Taiwanese leader Chiang Kai-shek. … Read more
Frankie Thomas played the lead in “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet” which was rival to “Captain Video” (DuMont, 1949-55). “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet” ran from 1950 to 1955 and aired successively on all four networks, CBS, ABC, NBC, and DuMont.
The capitals of the 50 states are: Alabama – Montgomery Alaska – Juneau Arizona – Phoenix Arkansas – Little Rock California – Sacramento Colorado – Denver Connecticut – Hartford Delaware – Dover Florida – Tallahassee Georgia – Atlanta Hawaii – Honolulu Idaho – Boise Illinois – Springfield Indiana – Indianapolis Iowa – Des Moines Kansas … Read more
The first U.S. census was taken in 1790. It included six questions and recorded a population of 3,929,214 persons, of whom 3,172,006 were white and 757,208 were black. The white population was evenly divided between males and females-1,615,434 males, 1,556,572 females. Virginia was the most populous state, with 747,610 inhabitants.
Benjamin Franklin performed the kite experiment that proved lightning is electricity in 1751.
William H. Bonney (1859-81), the New York-born symbol of the outlaw West also known as Billy the Kid, was shot dead by Sheriff Pat Garrett. Barely into his twenties, Bonney had become infamous as a cattle rustler in frontier New Mexico.
Misty Rowe played Marilyn Monroe in the screen biography Goodbye, Norma Jean (1975). The title refers to Monroe’s real name, Norma Jean Baker.
The powerhouse Saturday night lineup that baby boomers remembered watching on CBS in the 1973-74 season was: 8:00 “All in the Family”; 8:30–“M*A*S*H”; 9:00 “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”; 9:30—”The Bob Newhart Show”; 10:00 “The Carol Burnett Show.”
The name is derived from the logo for Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency, an eye with the slogan, “We Never Sleep.” As the fame of the agency (founded in 1850) spread, criminals talked about their fear of “private eyes,” as opposed to the public eyes of the police.
There were four King Herods. Herod the Great was the tetrarch, or subordinate ruler, of the Roman province of Judaea from 41 B.C. to 4 B.C. He was probably in power when Jesus Christ was born. Between 4 B.C. and A.D. 34, three sons of Herod the Great, Herod Archelaus, Herod Antipas, and Philip, ruled … Read more
No, the Baby Ruth candy bar was named for Ruth Cleveland. Ruth Cleveland was the oldest daughter of President Grover Cleveland.
Meaning literally the “playing of a scene,” a mise-en-scene refers in film theory to the content of an individual frame. Orson Welles, F. W. Murnau, and Max Ophuls are all considered masters of the mise-en-scene, masters of composing a shot.
Bar manager Catherine Genovese was stabbed to death in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York, in the early morning hours of March 13, 1964. Her neighbors looked on from their windows but ignored her calls for help. The case became a paradigm for urban lawlessness and apathy.
The fair exists in literature, created by John Bunyin in The Pilgrim’s Progress (Part I, 1678; Part II, 1684). Established in the town of Vanity by Beelzebub, Apollyon, and Legion, it lasts all year and sells all manner of earthly treasures and enjoyments.
King Solomon, the son of and successor to David is said to have ruled during the mid-tenth century B.C.
Richard Gere hired Julia Roberts for three thousand dollars a week, cash in Pretty Woman.
In the 1898 essay “What is Art?” Leo Tolstoy defines art as: “a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.”
Jon Peters produced A Star Is Born (1976) and coproduced (with Streisand) The Main Event (1979). Peters went on to team with Peter Guber to produce Flashdance (1983), Rain Man (1988), and Batman (1989).
Five, dating back to 1808, when the first Hamilton Fish was born to Nicholas Fish (1758-1833), Revolutionary War patriot and friend of Alexander Hamilton, for whom Nicholas named his son. Each Hamilton Fish was father to another one, in this order: Hamilton Fish (1808-93) Hamilton Fish (1849-1936) Hamilton Fish, Jr. (1888-1991) Hamilton Fish, Jr. (1926) … Read more
Yes folks, American women still earn less money than American men. In 1988, the median weekly earnings of full-time female workers in all occupations were 70.2 percent of male workers’ earnings.
Tillie’ s Punctured Romance (1914), directed by Mack Sennett, was the first feature-length comedy.
The Chevrolet Corvair, made by General Motors, was exposed by Ralph Nader in Unsafe at Any Speed. Nader’s crusading book, published in 1965, led to passage of the Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966.
The Disney movie Son of Flubber (1963) was a sequel to The Absent-Minded Professor (1961). Both films starred Fred MacMurray as Professor Ned Brainard. Flubber, or “flying rubber,” was an invention of his.
Coca-Cola is older than Pepsi-Cola, by ten years. It was introduced to the American public in 1886, Pepsi-Cola in 1896. For decades, Coca-Cola was sold in a six-and-one-half-ounce bottle. Depending on the bottler, Pepsi-Cola came in six, six and-one-half, and seven-ounce sizes. Starting in 1934, however, Pepsi was sold in 12-ounce bottles, but for the … Read more
Sally Rogers’s (Rose Marie’s) off-and-on boyfriend on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was Herman Glimscher, played by Bill Idelson. After appearing on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” Idelson became a comedy writer. He also produced many of the episodes of “The Bob Newhart Show” (CBS, 1972-78) in its first year.
The poorest county in the United States is Shannon County, South Dakota, site of the Pine Ridge Reservation, which is home to the Oglala branch of the Sioux Indians. In 1987, 63.1 percent of all 9,900 residents here lived in poverty, compared to a national poverty rate of 13.5 percent.
For late 19th-century immigrants from Europe, to travel to America in “steerage” meant a passage below decks, near the ship’s steering gear. The price for these uncomfortable but low-fare accommodations was about $15.
