Resultados Editorial "Charles River Editors" en América

Despite her distinction and other more notable accomplishments, many people today are not familiar with the groundbreaking actress Dorothy Dandridge, even though she was among the most charismatic and beautiful actresses of the era. Her alluring nightclub acts set pulses pounding across the globe, and she was Hollywood’s first black leading actress. Sadly, all of it came at a high price.

Walt Whitman was a great American poet, but many people did not get him when he was alive. His family was like most other families, but his friends were different from most other people living then. He was a teacher and reporter, and then he worked for the government. When he was a young man, he was very serious, but when he was older he liked to play around and have fun. Walt Whitman wrote many poems about America, and his most famous work was Leaves of Grass. It was a lot of poems that took him many years to finish.

Kitty Carlisle surely stands as one of the most recognizable figures of the 20th century, but unlike major actors, actresses, and other artistic luminaries, however, Carlisle was not decorated so much for any specific performances. Instead, she came to embody the very face of art in the United States.

John Smith is one of the most common names in the English language, but every Briton and American is familiar with the explorer and mercenary Captain John Smith, who helped found the first permanent British colony in the New World, at Jamestown, in 1607. He wrote several accounts of his exploration and his time spent in the New World, but in America, Smith is better known for his association with Pocahontas, a Native American princess. Smith credited her with saving him from being killed by the Native Americans. Retellings of the story fictitiously cast the two as lovers.

Sprightly swing music spills across the dimly lit club. The grayish curtains of cigarette smoke part every once in a while to reveal a sparkling stage and tables upon tables of patrons, some incurably inebriated and others high on the fast-paced nightlife. Fabulous flappers in shimmery cocktail dresses and stylish feather headbands throw their hands up and stomp their feet to the addictive beat on the dance floor. Smartly dressed men, their hair neatly parted and slicked back, toss fistfuls of dice onto the plush green baize of the craps tables.

Few figures in Hollywood's history have been as acclaimed and controversial as director Roman Polanski, whose legendary films would stand out if not for the fact that they're often eclipsed by the turbulent life he's led. The son of Polish parents, Polanski survived World War II despite having both parents transferred to concentration camps during the Holocaust, but his mother was killed at Auschwitz. Despite the terrible ordeal and the loss of his mother, Polanski would grow up to become one of Europe's best directors.

Gene Autry came of age at a time when the "singing cowboy" was at the apex of its popularity. In the early 20th century, Westerns were one of the most popular genres in Hollywood. One of the young stars at the forefront was Gene Autry, a Texan whose life story made him a natural to be the country's most famous "singing cowboy". Autry would become a symbol of masculinity and morality onscreen during the 1930s, but it was effortless for someone who had already grown up riding horses to school.

Today, as one of the biggest cities in the country, Chicago means a lot of different things to different people, but the Windy City, as culturally rich as it is, has long been known for controversial political corruption and its gangster past. While those kinds of crimes are less prominent today, one recent documentary Chiraq provided a new chilling, sobering, and wildly unfortunate sobriquet for the city. For far too many of the city’s youth, the places they call home are just a few steps removed from an actual war zone.

"I was a 13 year old boy for 30 years." (Mickey Rooney) In 1939, the year of Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, Time magazine noted, "Hollywood's No. 1 box office bait in 1939 was not Clark Gable, Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power, but a rope-haired, kazoo-voiced kid with a comic-strip face, who until this week had never appeared in a picture without mugging or overacting it."

A lot of ink has been spilled covering the lives of history's most influential figures, but how much of the forest is lost for the trees? In Charles River Editors' American Legends series, listeners can get caught up to speed on the lives of America's most important men and women in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known.

He was a pioneering film director who had 518 films to his credit. His work spanned the silent and sound eras. Most of his films were completed in a span of 15 years. But today he is known only for one of his films, one considered by historians to be a landmark in cinema as well as the most controversial ever made. He could not escape the controversy of this one film before he died in relative obscurity, his contributions to the motion picture industry forever marred.

The Jim Crow South has been notorious for miscarriages of justice for decades, and cases like the Scottsboro Boys continue to be commemorated for the manner in which institutionalized racism ensured the wrongful convictions of minorities. The attention given to these cases raised nearly every potential issue implicating criminal procedure among the states. While the Bill of Rights had ensured a number of rights for criminal defendants, the states had previously been allowed to interpret those rights, leading to instances where defendants weren't provided adequate legal representation.

Clara Barton: The Life and Legacy of the Civil War Nurse Who Founded the American Red Cross chronicles her remarkable life, and the manner in which she changed nursing in America forever. You will learn about Clara Barton like never before.

With the end of the war, concern over German subversives was replaced with concerns over communist subversives. In this powder keg, all that was needed was a spark to create full-blown hysteria, and the spark came on June 2, 1919, when the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was bombed, injuring Palmer and killing the bomber. The anarchist leaflets he was carrying were scattered in the bomb debris, and this attack on his home prompted Palmer, who had been a reformist Quaker, to launch an all-out war against left-wing radicals. The Red Scare had begun in earnest.

When young president Kennedy came to power in 1961, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was eager to test his mettle from the start. Questioning Kennedy's resolve and attempting to placate the concerns of Cuban leader Fidel Castro following the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, Khrushchev attempted to place medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 90 miles off the coast of the United States.

One of the most famous Native American tribes on the Great Plains is the Cheyenne, and their fame may be surpassed only by their influence on American history. The Cheyenne shifted from a sedentary agricultural society to the kind of nomadic group many envision when thinking of groups on the Plains. Land disputes and conflicts with white settlers and the Cheyenne set in motion the chain of events that led to the most famous battle among Native Americans and the American government: the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

The Mayans maintained power in the Yucatan for over 1,000 years, and at the height of its Classical era, the city of Tikal was one of the power centers of the empire. Archaeologists believe Tikal had been built as early as the fifth or fourth century BC. Eventually it became a political, economic, and military capital that was an important part of a far-flung network across Mesoamerica.

As Sherman began his infamous march to the sea, Lincoln instructed Grant to redirect General George H. Thomas' efforts back to Tennessee to protect Union supply lines and stop the offensive mounted by Confederate general John Bell Hood. With Sherman marching east toward the sea, he directed Thomas to try to block Hood around Nashville....

When he died in 1904, most Americans who knew his people's story considered Chief Joseph a military genius and an "Indian Napoleon". This assessment of the Native American leader was based on a 1,500-mile odyssey during which he and his people left their reservation in the hopes of escaping to Canada, where the Nez Percé intended to join Sitting Bull and his Hunkpapa Sioux band. The real Chief Joseph was a gifted speaker and more diplomat than war leader.

On November 30, the Union army began digging in around Franklin, and that afternoon General John Bell Hood ordered a frontal assault on the Union army, which deeply upset his own officers. After repeated frontal assaults failed to create a gap in the Union lines, John Schofield withdrew his men across the river on the night of November 30, successfully escaping Hood's army. Meanwhile, Hood had inflicted nearly 8,000 casualties upon his army (men the Confederacy could scarcely afford to lose), while the Union lost about a quarter of that.