Starting with Sinclair Lewis in 1930, the first six Americans to win the Nobel Prize in Literature were:
1930: Sinclair Lewis
1936: Eugene O’Neill
1938: Pearl Buck
1949: William Faulkner
1954: Ernest Hemingway
1962: John Steinbeck
The unique luster of pearls depends upon the reflection, refraction, and diffraction of light from the translucent layers. The thinner and more numerous the layers in the pearl, the finer the luster. The iridescence that pearls display is caused by the overlapping of successive layers, which breaks up light falling on the surface. In addition, pearls (especially cultured freshwater pearls) can be dyed yellow, green, blue, brown, pink, purple, or black. The very best pearls have a metallic mirror-like luster.
The Pearl is a 1947 novella by John Steinbeck. It is the story of a pearl diver, Kino, and explores man’s nature as well as greed and evil. Steinbeck’s inspiration was a Mexican folk tale from La Paz, Baja California Sur, Mexico, which he had heard in a visit to the formerly pearl-rich region in 1940. The story is one of Steinbeck’s most popular books and has been widely used in high school classes.
Jack Kerouac’s 1962 novel Big Sur recounts the events surrounding Kerouac’s (here known by the name of his fictional alter-ego Jack Duluoz) three brief sojourns to a cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur, owned by Kerouac’s friend and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The novel departs from Kerouac’s previous fictionalized autobiographical series in that the character Duluoz is shown as a popular, published author.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s middle name was Monsnto, and he was descended from the Monsanto family, founders of the chemical superpower.
Lawrence Expressway in Santa Clara CA is named after Alfred Chester Lawrence, a cabinet maker who came to California during the Gold Rush. He placed a squatter’s claim to land just west of old Santa Clara. He became a farmer, helped lay out Lawrence Road and became station agent when a railroad station was built near his property
Santa Clara, in the center of Cuba, was the site of the last battle of the Cuban Revolution on New Year’s Eve, 1958, when the combined forces of Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos captured a garrison of dictator Fulgencio Batista’s army. More recently, Santa Clara received the first US commercial airline flight into Cuba since the end of most of the embargo - a short JetBlue run from Fort Lauderdale.
The narrator of the musical Evita is called “Che,” which simply is a Spanish slang term for “friend.” He is never identified as Ernesto “Che” Guevara, who never met Eva Peron.
According to Patti LuPone, “Evita was the worst experience of my life. I was screaming my way through a part that could only have been written by a man who hates women. And I had no support from the producers, who wanted a star performance onstage but treated me as an unknown backstage. It was like Beirut, and I fought like a banshee.”
The Beirut Hilton terrorist bombing of 23 October 1983 killed 241 US servicemen, 58 French servicemen, and 6 civilians. Of the US servicemen, 220 were Marines, 18 were Navy, and 3 were Army. The building served as the barracks for BLT 1/8 - Battalion Landing Team, 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment out of Camp Lejeune NC. 1/8 is now nicknamed the Beirut Battalion.
This was the deadliest single-day death toll for the US Marine Corps since World War II’s Battle of Iwo Jima, the deadliest single-day death toll for the US Armed Forces since the first day of the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, the deadliest single terrorist attack on American citizens in general prior to the September 11 attacks, and the deadliest single terrorist attack on American citizens overseas.
The battle of Iwo Jima is remembered primarily by Joe Rosenthal’s Associated Press photograph of the raising of the U.S. flag on top of the 169 m (554 ft) Mount Suribachi by five U.S. Marines and one U.S. Navy combat corpsman. The photograph (and a color film by Marine Staff Sgt. Bill Genaust) records the second flag-raising on the mountain, both of which took place on the fifth day of the 36-day battle. Rosenthal’s photograph promptly became iconic—of that battle, of the Pacific War, and of the Marine Corps itself—and has been widely reproduced.
Corporal Harlon Block, shown as one of the marines raising the flag on the iconic picture from Iwo Jima, was the first Texas-born American to ever be depicted on a US postage stamp. Sam Houston and Stephen Austin appeared on earlier stamps, but neither was born in Texas.
The famous Joe Rosenthal photograph of the second U.S. flag-raising on Iwo Jima inspired the designs of both the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Va., and the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle, Va.
Admission to the National Museum of the Marine Corps is free. Located in Triangle VA, it is just outside the gates of Marine Corps Base Quantico.
In the 1950 United States Census, Triangle VA was combined with Dumfries VA, to form Dumfries-Triangle. However, the two communities were separated again by the time of the 1960 census.
Censuses are mentioned in the Bible. God commands a per capita tax to be paid with the census in Exodus 30:11-16 for the upkeep of the Tabernacle. The Book of Numbers is named after the counting of the Israelite population (in Numbers 1-4) according to the house of the Fathers after the exodus from Egypt. A second census was taken while the Israelite were camped in the plains of Moab, in Numbers 26.
The fact of a census is one of the arguments against the birth of Christ occurring in December. Joseph and Mary had gone to Bethlehem to be enumerated in the ceusus, which wold not have been scheduled for a winter month, when the climate can be severe in that part of the world.
The biblical matriarch Rachel, wife of Jacob (Israel) and mother of Joseph and Benjamin, was buried by Jacob on the road to Efrat, just outside Bethlehem. Today a site claimed to be Rachel’s Tomb, located between Bethlehem and the Israeli settlement of Gilo, is visited by tens of thousands of visitors each year.
Rachel is a census-designated place (CDP) in Lincoln County, Nevada, United States. As of the 2010 census it had a population of 54. Being that it is the closest habitation to the Nellis Air Force Range and more importantly, the ‘famous’ Area 51, Rachel enjoys a modest celebrity, particularly among aviation enthusiasts and UFO hunters.
Rachel Maddow was born on April Fool’s Day, 1973, exactly 100 years after the birth of composer Sergei Rachmaninoff.