What percentage of New Yorkers in 1930 were members of immigrant families?
Seventy-five percent of the population of New Yorkers in 1930 consisted of foreigners and their children.
Italians and Eastern European Jews were the largest groups.
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.
A vial containing the air representing Thomas Alva Edison’s last exhalation is a prime draw at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Originally known as the Edison Institute for Technology in honor of Ford’s inventor friend, the museum also includes a slab of concrete with Edison’s footprints in addition to more general Americana like…
Ellis Island in Upper New York Bay, named for its former owner Sam Ellis, operated as an immigration center from 1892 to 1943. It was a detention place for deportees until 1954. In 1965 it became part of the Statue of Liberty National Monument. Following restoration of its Registry Room, the point of entry for…
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.
On Friday, September 23, 1949, President Truman announced: “We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.”
The first black candidate to launch a major presidential campaign, Jesse Jackson ran twice for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. presidency, in 1984 and 1988.