Erected in June 1892 on a nine-story building near Broadway and Twenty-third Street, the first electric sign in New York measured 60 by 68 feet and read:
Buy Homes On Long Island
Swept By Ocean Breezes
Manhattan Beach
Oriental Hotel
Manhattan Hotel
Gilmore’s Band
Brock’s Fireworks
Fans of Frank Sinatra rioted at the Paramount Theater on Columbus Day 1944, at the height of his popularity. Thirty thousand bobbysoxers rioted at the New York theater where Sinatra was performing. It was reported that cries of “Frankie, Frankie!” could be heard blocks away.
Jim Crow was a black stage character invented by minstrel star Thomas Rice in the decades before the Civil War. The name came to be applied to the segregationist laws that kept blacks separate from whites beginning in the 1870s. The Supreme Court declared Jim Crow laws unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education in…
President Lyndon Johnson appointed Thurgood Marshall to fill the seat on the Supreme Court vacated by Thomas C. Clark, who resigned when his son, Ramsey Clark, was appointed as U.S. Attorney General. Marshall (190892), a noted civil rights lawyer, became the first African-American Supreme Court justice.
Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the “I Have a Dream” address to more than 200,000 people on the mall between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.
Generations of fans and enemies of rock and roll have thought that it does, but in all probability it does not. The original song as written and recorded by Richard Berry in 1956 has tame lyrics about longing to see a certain girl while sailing across the Caribbean Sea. However, in the hit version by…
Imprisoned for nearly two years after a questionable 1914 murder conviction in Utah, Hill was executed on November 14, 1915. The night before the execution, he cabled friend and IWW cofounder “Big Bill” Haywood, “Don’t waste any time in mourning. Organize.”