The first public showing of a motion picture in the U.S. took place on April 23, 1896, at New York’s Koster & Bial Music Hall on 34th Street and Broadway. The 12 short-subject films, projected on Thomas Edison’s Vitascope, accompanied a vaudeville show. Previously, Edison’s films could only be viewed peep-show style on his Kinetoscope…
The composer Cole Porter wrote nearly 800 songs and two dozen musicals, including Kiss Me, Kate (1948) and Can-Can (1953).
The federal government founded the National Rail Passenger Corporation Amtrak in 1970 to prevent the imminent extinction of passenger railroads in the U.S. Unable to compete with airlines, the commercial railroads had been eliminating most of their passenger service and concentrating on freight. Railroad passenger-miles traveled in a single year had declined from a height…
Roosevelt had polio in August 1921, when he was 39. By that time, he had been assistant secretary of the navy, a vice presidential nominee (in 1920), and a member of the New York State Senate.
Ten million Americans were employed in the health care field in 1992, an increase of 43 percent in four years. This vigorous growth contrasts with an increase of only 1 percent in private employment overall during the same period. The Commerce Department expects health spending in the U.S. to exceed $1 trillion in 1994.
The name “America” first appeared in print in 1507 in Cosmographiae Introductio by German mapmaker Martin Waldseemuller. Waldseemiiller named it in honor of explorer Amerigo Vespucci, whom he believed was the true discoverer of America. Vespucci’s claims to have been the first to reach the American mainland (in 1497) and the first to realize that…