Lee Harvey Oswald, a loathsome person in most other ways (a murderer, a mooch, a bully, an egotist and a whiner, among others), at least always made it a point to defy his hometown of New Orleans’s segregation laws, and sat in the back of buses with the black passengers.
(removed, will write a new one)
City of New Orleans is a song written by singer-songwriter Steve Goodman, inspired by a train trip which Goodman had made to visit his in-laws.
Cover versions of the song have been hits for Arlo Guthrie (his 1972 recording reached #18 on the Billboard Hot 100) and Willie Nelson (whose 1984 recording reached #1 on the Billboard Country chart, and earned Goodman a posthumous Grammy for Country Song of the Year).
Steve Goodman and John Prine co-wrote the song ‘You Never Even Called Me By My Name’, although Prine requested that he be uncredited on the song, as he thought it was a “goofy, novelty song”. Goodman released it on his 1971 album Steve Goodman, but it got very little notice. However, in 1975, David Allan Coe included the song on his album Once Upon A Rhyme, and also released it as a single. It got as high as #8 on Billboard’s country charts.
It is, in fact, the perfect country and western song. It even says so in the lyrics.
Edgar Allan Poe’s cause of death has never been determined. He was found delirious and wearing clothes that were not his own on the day of an election, and it has long been suggested that he was the victim of cooping, a ballot-box-stuffing scam in which victims were abducted and drugged, and then used to vote for a political party at multiple locations. More recently, analysis suggesting that Poe died of rabies has been presented.
Edgar Allen Poe died in 1849, in Baltimore MD — the site of America’s oldest railroad (America’s first common carrier), the Baltimore and Ohio. At first the B&O was located entirely in the state of Maryland, running between Baltimore’s port and what today is Ellicott City, a distance of about 13 miles. It opened on 24 May 1830. The B&O’s first locomotive was the “Tom Thumb” (image, replica — https://is.gd/aldNGm). It was made in America and would pull passenger and freight cars at 18 miles per hour.
Ray Bradbury once wrote a short story in which time travelers save a dying, struggling, pre-Civil War American writer, who sounds a lot like Edgar Allan Poe but is not named as such, so that he can be healed and continue to write wonderful stories in their time.
An estimated 620,000 men lost their lives in the line of duty during the Civil War. That number is approximately 2.5% of the total population of the US at that time. During the conflict, the average number of deaths per day was 504.
An estimated two-thirds of those who died during the American Civil War lost their lives due to disease, post-battle infection or malnutrition; only about a third died on the battlefield as an immediate result of wounds.
The shortest recorded war in history was the Anglo-Zanzibar War, which lasted for somewhere between 38 and 45 minutes, on the morning of August 27, 1896.
The longest continual war in recorded history was the “Reconquista” Iberian Religious War between the Catholic Spanish Empire and the Moors in what is today Morocco and Algeria. The conflict spanned over 700 years. Its recognized beginnings and endings are the Battle of Covadonga in 718 A.D. (or 722), and the fall of the Nasrid kingdom of Granada in 1492.
After the Reconquista, the entire Iberian peninsula was controlled by Christian rulers. This resulted in the expulsion or forced conversion of all non-Christians. The Spanish Inquisition was established toward the end of the conflict; its original mission was to identify heretics among those who had converted from Judaism and Islam to Catholicism.
In his award-winning 1979 short story “The Way of Cross and Dragon,” George R.R. Martin wrote of a distant-future interstellar Roman Catholic Church which welcomed aliens (including as top church officials) and fought various heresies across the galaxy, including a particularly bizarre cult that posited that Judas Iscariot had been a Christian saint who tamed dragons and had once been a powerful emperor.
The Hood Canal Bridge in western Washington crosses a portion of Puget Sound and connects the Olympic and Kitsap Peninsulas. First opened in 1961, it is the world’s fourth-longest floating bridge. On February 13, 1979, the bridge was destroyed by a windstorm that had sustained winds of 85 mph and gusts up to 120 mph. The bridge was rebuilt and re-opened in 1982.
The English poet Thomas Hood (1799–1845) was regarded in his own time as a humorist. Near the end of his life, on his sick bed, he wrote a number of poems commenting on unjust Victorian social conditions, including “The Song of the Shirt”, which condemns the exploitation of seamstresses. “The Bridge of Sighs” describes a beautiful young girl, branded as a “fallen woman”, who drowns herself in the Thames; the poem inspired artworks by artists including Millais and Watts.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which occurred in Greenwich Village, New York City on March 25, 1911, was one of the deadliest fires in U.S. history. 146 seamstresses and garment workers, many of them immigrant teenaged girls, died in the fire, largely because the building’s doors and stairwells were locked shut, to prevent the workers from taking unauthorized breaks or committing theft.
The tip of the land on which downtown Pittsburgh, Penna. now stands is known as the Triangle, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers come together to form the Ohio. It was the site of Ft. Duquesne, later captured by the British during the French and Indian War and renamed Ft. Pitt. The area can be briefly seen early in Groundhog Day, as the TV news crew leaves to drive to Punxsutawney.
Dolores Della Penna was tortured, murdered by dismemberment, and beheaded in Philadelphia in 1972. She was 17, and it is believed that her boyfriend’s drug involvement may have been a motive. The crime has never been solved.
Ford’s Theatre is just down the street from FBI Headquarters, the J. Edgar Hoover Building, in Washington, D.C. - the site of one of the most notorious American crimes, the April 1865 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, close by the offices of one of the top Federal crime-fighting agencies.
In June of 1908, the Attorney General of the US, Charles Bonaparte, created a force of special agents within the Department of Justice. Ten former Secret Service employees and a number of Department of Justice investigators became Special Agents of the Department of Justice. On July 26, 1908, Bonaparte ordered them to report to Chief Examiner Stanley W. Finch. This action is recognized as the beginning of the FBI.