James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) sued John Ruskin for libel after Ruskin vilified the painter’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1877), accusing Whistler of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Whistler had lived in Europe since 1855 and had become a fixture of London art circles….
Dennis Barrie, director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, was indicted by a local grand jury for exhibiting photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe, but acquitted on October 5, 1990.
The road used by migrants moving westward in the mid-19th century, known as the Oregon Trail, ran about 2,000 miles from Independence or Westport, Missouri, to Oregon’s Willamette Valley. It took about six months for wagon trains to cover the distance. The Oregon Trail was in use from the 1840s until the advent of the…
Albert Goodwill Spalding (1850-1915) co-founded the sporting goods firm “A. G. Spalding and Brothers” in 1876. Born in Byron, Illinois, Spalding pitched for Boston and Chicago and helped to found the National League.
Warren G. Harding was the first president to ride in an automobile to his inauguration, on March 4, 1921.
People of Mexican descent founded the city of Los Angeles in 1781. Mexicans remained the major population group in Los Angeles (named for Our Lady of the Angels) until the Gold Rush of 1849 brought Anglo-Americans to California in droves. By then, as a result of the Mexican War in 1846-48, California had passed from…