How much did a night in a New York hotel cost fifty years ago?
In 1939, a night at the Essex House on Central Park South cost $6.
Today, a night in the same hotel starts at $185.
No one knows exactly how old is the song “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” is. It seems to have begun as “The Levee Song” among African-American workers building levees on the Mississippi River in Louisiana in the 1830s-40s. It was later adapted to railroad building and associated with Irish work gangs in the West….
Yes, Ford was the first incumbent president to agree to public debates. He gained that claim to fame in 1976 when he debated Jimmy Carter. The debates helped Ford to narrow Carter’s lead in the race, although he eventually lost the election.
The Hotel Pennsylvania was located at Seventh Avenue and Thirty-third Street in Manhattan. It was built in 1918. The phone number Pennsylvania 6-5000 was that of the hotel’s Club Rouge, where Miller and his band often appeared. The hotel is now the New York Penta Hotel.
The government-owned land known as Teapot Dome, rich in oil, was located in Wyoming. The scandal began when a Senate investigating committee discovered that the Teapot Dome and Elk Hills, California, reserves had been secretly leased by Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall to private oil companies in 1922. Fall was eventually convicted of…
Of 76 million Americans, 87 percent were white, 11.4 percent were black, and nearly 2 percent were “other.” According to the 1990 census, of 248.7 million Americans, 80.3 percent are white, 12.1 percent are black, and nearly 8 percent are “other.” Asians and Pacific Islanders now represent 2.9 percent of the population, compared to less…
The Tet Offensive was a general attack in January 1968 by North Vietnamese forces against South Vietnamese cities. Militarily, North Vietnam lost since they suffered heavy losses and failed to hold any city. But strategically North Vietnam delivered a severe blow to the U.S. by showing that the war was far from over and undermining…