The first movie at Radio City Music Hall was The Bitter Tea of General Yen, directed by Frank Capra and starring Barbara Stanwyck and Nils Asther. It opened in January 1934. The final movie was The Promise, directed by Gilbert Cates and starring Kathleen Quinlan and Stephen Collins. The final showing was on April 25,…
The most destructive air attack of World War II was not the atomic bombing of Hiroshima but the firebombing of Tokyo by 279 Superfortress bombers on March 9-10, 1945. Over 1,650 tons of incendiary bombs were dropped on the city, raising a massive firestorm and killing from 80,000 to 120,000 people. The bombing represented a…
The United Nations occupied four sites, three of them in New York. The first regular session of the General Assembly was held in October 1945 at Central Hall in London. The United Nations then moved to Hunter College in the Bronx, before establishing interim headquarters at Lake Success on Long Island in August 1946. The…
Yale University students appear to have begun the Frisbee in the 1920s, when they threw around metal pie tins from the Frisbie Bakery of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Middlebury College in Vermont has also taken credit for inventing the game. As a commercial venture, however, Frisbee began with a saucer-shaped toy invented by Walter Frederick Morrison in…
With lyrics altered to reflect the country, “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” is called “Britannia, the Pride of the Ocean.” Written by Englishmen David T. Shaw and Thomas a Becket, the “Columbia” version (referring to an alternate name for the United States) was first published in 1843 under the name “Columbia, the Land of…
In 1894, a U.S. congressional resolution made Labor Day a legal holiday in the U.S. Promoted by the Knights of Labor since 1887, the holiday had already been celebrated in several states.