The Golden Gate Bridge is unquestionably an American icon whose symbolism power rivals that of the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty, in part through its representation of optimism, a distinctly American trait. Its visual linkage of form and n…
Can the world ever forget Vikki Dougan, the model who was once known as “The Back” of Hollywood? Vikki was a provocateur who turned heads during her prime, and many decades later, people who saw her in her acts and people who only heard about her still talk ab…
Clint Eastwood, in full Clinton Eastwood, Jr., (born May 31, 1930, San Francisco, California, U.S.), American motion-picture actor who emerged as one of the most popular Hollywood stars in the 1960s and went on to become a prolific and respected director-produ…
Ellis Island served as the United State’s largest immigration station, processing up to 12 million people between 1892 and 1954. These historical photos were taken between 1906 and 1914 by amateur photographer Augustus Sherman. Sherman was an untrained,…
By 1930, Texas was already the nation’s leading oil producing state, yet East Texas remained the only area of the state that had not obtained high-volume oil production in spite of having the state’s first oil discovery. This changed when on October 3, 1930…
Born on September 30, 1968, Bellucci grew up in the small Italian village of Citta di Castello, where her father owned a trucking company. At 18, she enrolled at the University of Perugia with plans to study law. To pay her tuition, Bellucci started modelin…
In his lifetime, Arnold Schwarzenegger has worn many shoes. A former champion builder to a Hollywood action icon to a politician, Schwarzenegger has been them all, and more. He has won several titles from Mr. Universe to Mr. Olympia during his bodybuilding …
Brigitte Bardot was born in September 1934 in Paris and is a French actress, singer, and model. Famous for portraying sexually emancipated personae with hedonistic lifestyles, she was one of the best-known sex symbols of the late 1950s and 1960s. Bardot…
Helen Mirren was born in London to a Russian-born father and a Scottish mother. The family’s last name was Mironoff until Helen’s father decided to Anglicize it when she was 10 years old. She joined Britain’s National Youth Theatre at age 18 and the Royal S…
Arising as a daredevil stunt in the aerial shows of the 1920s, wing walking was the act of moving along the wings of a biplane during flight. It started around 1920 at aerial barnstorming shows and originally began as a demonstration of planes’ balance …
The Lebanese Civil War was both an internal Lebanese affair and a regional conflict involving a host of regional and international actors. It revolved around some of the issues that dominated regional politics in the Middle East in the latter part of the 2…
On January 30, 1864, Harper’s Weekly started to publish portraits of children captioned “Emancipated Slaves—White and Colored,” as part of a publicity campaign to raise funds for schools for recently emancipated slaves in New Orleans. The children featured …
Born in 1958 in Bay City, Michigan with the official name of Madonna Louise Ciccone, Madonna was the first daughter of Madonna and Silvio Anthony “Tony” Ciccone. She was nicknamed Nonno to avoid confusion with the elder Madonna, who was of French Canadian d…
By the first week of September 1914, the Germans had come within thirty kilometers of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. The French and British armies were engaged in fierce fighting with the Germans in the First Battle of the Marne which repelled the G…
When an amateur inventor and designer named Earl Silas Tupper first invented Tupperware around 1942 (from a refined version of polyethylene that he referred to as “Poly-T: Material of the Future), he envisaged the total “Tupperization” of the American home…
These colored photos by Jules Gervais-Courtellemont will take you back through time to see how Paris looked in 1923. The vivid images are produced using the autochrome technique in which the plates are covered in microscopic red, green and blue colored pot…
This black and white image, taken by White House photographer Cecil Stoughton, is the only known photograph of JFK and Monroe together. Monroe is still wearing the infamously tight-fighting, sheer rhinestone-studded dress she wore when singing earlier a…
Before anyone ever heard the word “cowgirl,” there were women who ventured west. Most traveled with their families on covered wagons, beginning in the 1840s. They moved from crowded eastern cities to settle in western states such as Kansas, Nebraska, Co…
It’s difficult to convey to a modern audience the emotional impact of the stock market’s gyrations in the 1980s, or indeed in any distant decade because the most popular measures of market value have grown so much in the intervening years. For example, …
The process that led up to the national park idea is complex. From arts and literature came the Romantic movement, which encouraged the experience of the mountains and wilderness. Authors like Henry Davia Thoreau and Washington Irving exhorted Americans…