The Golden Gate opened in 1906 in what is now downtown Las Vegas, making it the first hotel and casino to open in the city.
Harry Golden was an essayist and publisher of The Carolina Israelitem a newsletter of his musings and nostalgia for growing up Jewish in New York city (before settling as a reporter in North Carolina) that was published from 1942 to 1968. He was an early spokesman for civil rights in the 40s and 50s.
The first boll weevil found in South Carolina is on display at the Pendleton District Agricultural Museum.
In the 1980s, conservative Southern Democrats who supported Ronald Reagan’s agenda were nicknamed the Boll Weevil.
The boll weevil insect crossed the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas to enter the United States from Mexico in 1892 and reached southeastern Alabama in 1915. By the mid 1920s it had entered all cotton growing regions in the U.S., travelling 40 to 160 miles per year. It remains the most destructive cotton pest in North America. Mississippi State University has estimated that since the boll weevil entered the United States it has cost U.S. cotton producers about $13 billion, and in recent times about $300 million per year.
All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw is a classic in the field of oral history; it is the true story of a Jim Crow era black sharecropper in Alabama who went to prison for founding a union; his real name was Ned Cobb but it was changed to protect his family. The title refers partly to the boll weevil; the full quote is “All God’s dangers ain’t white men, there’s the rattler and the tornado and the boll weevil too”, a reference to how hard the life of a sharecropper and small farmer was in and of itself even before adding in racism.
“Jim Crow” originally referred to a black character in 1800s minstrel shows in which white performers wore blackface and pretended to be black characters. In 1881, Tennessee passed the first Jim Crow law, which segregated train cars.
Woodrow Wilson was a Southern Democrat and the first Southern-born president of the post-Civil War period. He introduced segregation in federal offices, although Washington, D.C. and federal offices had been integrated since after the Civil War.
Woodrow Wilson’s first name was Thomas, Calvin Coolidge’s first name was John, Grover Cleveland’s first name was Steven, and Ulysses Grant’s first name was Hiram.
Hawaii’s Hiram Fong, one of the state’s first two Senators, was also the first Asian-American to hold that office, and remains the only Republican to represent Hawaii in the Senate.
In 1964 Hiram Fong was the first Asian-American to run for the Republican Party’s nomination for President.
Virginia Senator William Spong, according to his cousin, “was invited with the other freshman senators to address the National Press Club. Fearful that someone on radio or television would call him Senator Sponge, he used his brief five-minute introductory speech to that body to secure proper name identification. His first act as a senator, he announced in his southern drawl, would be to introduce a bill to protect the rights of songwriters in Hong Kong. He would be joined in this effort by the senior senator of Louisiana, Russell Long, and the senior senator from Hawaii, Hiram Fong, and together they would present the Long Fong Spong Hong Kong Song Bill. His name was never mispronounced by members of the media.”
Hong Kong has the world’s 6th highest GDP per capita.
The colony of Hong Kong consisted of three areas: Hong Kong (an island), Kowloon (on the mainland), and the New Territories. The UK were granted sovereignty over Hong Kong and Kowloon in perpetuity, but the New Territories were added to the colony in 1899 on a 99-year lease. By the time the lease was ending, the colony had integrated the New Territories so much that if they were lost, then Kowloon and Hong Kong Island were unsustainable. China was in no mood to extend the lease, so the UK worked out a transfer of the other sections to China in return for special status.
Before its demolition per a UK/China agreement, the Kowloon Walled City was the most densely-populated area on Earth. It was an enclave officially in China’s jurisdiction, since it was the former site of an army fort not included in the transfer, but effectively run by its “triad” drug gangs.
The name “Kowloon” translates as “nine dragons”, a reference to eight peaks plus one emperor (Bing, of the Song Dynasty, who took the throne in what is now Hong Kong).
Penry Pooch, a janitor at a police station, was secretly Hong Kong Phooey, an incompetent crimefighting martial artist, who always needed his cat Spot to bail him out of trouble.
Hong Kong Phooey was voiced by Scatman Crothers.
Scatman Crothers portrayed a blacksmith in John Wayne’s last movie, The Shootist; one of the men gunned down by Wayne in that movie was an unnamed outlaw played Jonathan Goldsmith, now famous as "The Most Interesting Man in the World’ on Dos Equis commercials.
Contrary to popular belief, John Wayne did not have cancer when he made The Shootist (1976). His entire left lung and several ribs had been removed in surgery on September 16, 1964, and in 1969 he was declared cancer-free. It was not until January 12, 1979, almost three years after the movie had been filmed, that the disease was found to have returned.
Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska were the only U.S. Senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which drastically expanded American military presence in Vietnam.