The town of Las Vegas was a sparsely populated mining and ranching community before it became a center for gambling.
Gambling did take place in the town throughout most of its history, but Las Vegas did not become known as a mecca for gambling until after the Flamingo Hotel was opened in 1946 by gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.
Malcolm X was shot dead on February 21, 1965, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem where he was preparing to speak. It is widely alleged that his assassins were members of the Nation of Islam.
It was during and just after the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1871). So called for its materialism and political corruption, the period was given its name in a satirical novel, The Gilded Age (1873), written by Mark Twain with Charles Dudley Warner.
Harpers Ferry is in what is now West Virginia (then part of Virginia). John Brown led a party of 22 in seizing the U.S. arsenal there in October 1859. Brown, an abolitionist born in Torrington, Connecticut, planned to arm the local slaves and start a full-scale rebellion, but his plan was foiled by state and…
A six-cylinder Marmon Wasp, driven by Ray Harroun at an average speed of 74.59 miles per hour, won the first 500-mile race at the Indianapolis Speedway in 1911.
There are more than 97 million items are in the collections of the Library of Congress, including books, films, photographs, manuscripts, and records.
There were three pioneering suburban housing developments bearing the Levittown name: the one in Hempstead, New York, in the late 1940s; one near Philadelphia in the 1950s; and one in New Jersey in the 1960s.