United States
The United States of America known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U. S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D. C. and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico; the State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean; the U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The diverse geography and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century; the United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776; the war ended in 1783 with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties; the United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848. During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery.
By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a global military power; the United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Sweeping civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawed discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U. S. Moon landing; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower. The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation, it is a representative democracy.
The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, other international organizations. The United States is a developed country, with the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for a quarter of global GDP; the U. S. economy is post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U. S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country. Despite wide income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, worker productivity.
The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, is a leading political and scientific force internationally. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America in honor of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci; the first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" is from a letter dated January 2, 1776, written by Stephen Moylan, Esq. to George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army, Lt. Col. Joseph Reed. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort; the first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776. The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed by June 17, 1776, at the latest, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the'United States of America'".
The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence; this draft of the document did not surface unti
Mary Pickford
Gladys Louise Smith, known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian-born American film actress and producer. With a career spanning 50 years, she was a co-founder of both the Pickford–Fairbanks Studio and the United Artists film studio, one of the original 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who present the yearly "Oscar" award ceremony. Pickford was known in her prime as "America's Sweetheart" and the "girl with the curls", she was one of the Canadian pioneers in early Hollywood and a significant figure in the development of film acting. Pickford was one of the earliest stars to be billed under her own name, was one of the most popular actresses of the 1910s and 1920s, earning the nickname "Queen of the Movies", she is credited as having defined the ingénue archetype in cinema. She was awarded the second Academy Award for Best Actress for her first sound-film role in Coquette and received an honorary Academy Award in 1976. In consideration of her contributions to American cinema, the American Film Institute ranked Pickford as 24th in its 1999 list of greatest female stars of classic Hollywood Cinema.
Mary Pickford was born Gladys Louise Smith in 1892 at 211 University Avenue, Ontario. Her father, John Charles Smith, was the son of English Methodist immigrants, worked a variety of odd jobs, her mother, Charlotte Hennessey, was of Irish Catholic descent and worked for a time as a seamstress. She had two younger siblings, called "Lottie", John Charles, called "Jack", who became actors. To please her husband's relatives, Pickford's mother baptized her children as Methodists, the religion of their father. John Charles Smith was an alcoholic; when Gladys was age four, her household was under a public health measure. Their devoutly Catholic maternal grandmother asked a visiting Roman Catholic priest to baptize the children. Pickford was at this time baptized as Gladys Marie Smith. After being widowed in 1899, Charlotte Smith began taking in boarders, one of whom was a Mr. Murphy, the theatrical stage manager for Cummings Stock Company, who soon suggested that Gladys age seven, Lotti age six, be given two small theatrical roles — Gladys portrayed a girl and a boy, while Lottie was cast in a silent part in the company's production of The Silver King at Toronto's Princess Theatre, while their mother played the organ.
Pickford subsequently acted in many melodramas with Toronto's Valentine Stock Company playing the major child role in its version of The Silver King. She capped her short career in Toronto with the starring role of Little Eva the Valentine production of Uncle Tom's Cabin, adapted from the 1852 novel. By the early 1900s, theatre had become a family enterprise. Gladys, her mother and two younger siblings toured the United States by rail, performing in third-rate companies and plays. After six impoverished years, Pickford allowed one more summer to land a leading role on Broadway, planning to quit acting if she failed. In 1906 Gladys and Jack Smith supported singer Chauncey Olcott on Broadway in Edmund Burke. Gladys landed a supporting role in a 1907 Broadway play, The Warrens of Virginia; the play was written by William C. deMille, whose brother, appeared in the cast. David Belasco, the producer of the play, insisted that Gladys Smith assume the stage name Mary Pickford. After completing the Broadway run and touring the play, Pickford was again out of work.
On April 19, 1909, the Biograph Company director D. W. Griffith screen-tested her at the company's New York studio for a role in the nickelodeon film Pippa Passes; the role went to someone else but Griffith was taken with Pickford. She grasped that movie acting was simpler than the stylized stage acting of the day. Most Biograph actors earned $5 a day but, after Pickford's single day in the studio, Griffith agreed to pay her $10 a day against a guarantee of $40 a week. Pickford, like all actors at Biograph, played both bit parts and leading roles, including mothers, charwomen, slaves, Native Americans, spurned women, a prostitute; as Pickford said of her success at Biograph:I played scrubwomen and secretaries and women of all nationalities... I decided that if I could get into as many pictures as possible, I'd become known, there would be a demand for my work, she appeared in 51 films in 1909 – one a week. While at Biograph, she suggested to Florence La Badie to "try pictures", invited her to the studio and introduced her to D. W. Griffith, who launched La Badie's career.
In January 1910, Pickford traveled with a Biograph crew to Los Angeles. Many other film companies wintered on the West Coast, escaping the weak light and short days that hampered winter shooting in the East. Pickford added to her 1909 Biographs with films made in California. Actors were not listed in the credits in Griffith's company. Audiences identified Pickford within weeks of her first film appearance. Exhibitors, in turn, capitalized on her popularity by advertising on sandwich boards that a film featuring "The Girl with the Golden Curls", "Blondilocks", or "The Biograph Girl" was inside. Pickford left Biograph in December 1910; the following year, she starred in films at Carl Laemmle's Independent Moving
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American newspaper based in New York City with worldwide influence and readership. Founded in 1851, the paper has won more than any other newspaper; the Times is ranked 17th in the world by circulation and 2nd in the U. S; the paper is owned by The New York Times Company, publicly traded and is controlled by the Sulzberger family through a dual-class share structure. It has been owned by the family since 1896. G. Sulzberger, the paper's publisher, his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. the company's chairman, are the fourth and fifth generation of the family to helm the paper. Nicknamed "The Gray Lady", the Times has long been regarded within the industry as a national "newspaper of record"; the paper's motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print", appears in the upper left-hand corner of the front page. Since the mid-1970s, The New York Times has expanded its layout and organization, adding special weekly sections on various topics supplementing the regular news, editorials and features.
Since 2008, the Times has been organized into the following sections: News, Editorials/Opinions-Columns/Op-Ed, New York, Sports of The Times, Science, Home and other features. On Sunday, the Times is supplemented by the Sunday Review, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine and T: The New York Times Style Magazine; the Times stayed with the broadsheet full-page set-up and an eight-column format for several years after most papers switched to six, was one of the last newspapers to adopt color photography on the front page. The New York Times was founded as the New-York Daily Times on September 18, 1851. Founded by journalist and politician Henry Jarvis Raymond and former banker George Jones, the Times was published by Raymond, Jones & Company. Early investors in the company included Edwin B. Morgan, Christopher Morgan, Edward B. Wesley. Sold for a penny, the inaugural edition attempted to address various speculations on its purpose and positions that preceded its release: We shall be Conservative, in all cases where we think Conservatism essential to the public good.
We do not believe that everything in Society is either right or wrong. In 1852, the newspaper started a western division, The Times of California, which arrived whenever a mail boat from New York docked in California. However, the effort failed. On September 14, 1857, the newspaper shortened its name to The New-York Times. On April 21, 1861, The New York Times began publishing a Sunday edition to offer daily coverage of the Civil War. One of the earliest public controversies it was involved with was the Mortara Affair, the subject of twenty editorials in the Times alone; the main office of The New York Times was attacked during the New York City Draft Riots. The riots, sparked by the beginning of drafting for the Union Army, began on July 13, 1863. On "Newspaper Row", across from City Hall, Henry Raymond stopped the rioters with Gatling guns, early machine guns, one of which he manned himself; the mob diverted, instead attacking the headquarters of abolitionist publisher Horace Greeley's New York Tribune until being forced to flee by the Brooklyn City Police, who had crossed the East River to help the Manhattan authorities.
In 1869, Henry Raymond died, George Jones took over as publisher. The newspaper's influence grew in 1870 and 1871, when it published a series of exposés on William Tweed, leader of the city's Democratic Party—popularly known as "Tammany Hall" —that led to the end of the Tweed Ring's domination of New York's City Hall. Tweed had offered The New York Times five million dollars to not publish the story. In the 1880s, The New York Times transitioned from supporting Republican Party candidates in its editorials to becoming more politically independent and analytical. In 1884, the paper supported Democrat Grover Cleveland in his first presidential campaign. While this move cost The New York Times a portion of its readership among its more progressive and Republican readers, the paper regained most of its lost ground within a few years. After George Jones died in 1891, Charles Ransom Miller and other New York Times editors raised $1 million dollars to buy the Times, printing it under the New York Times Publishing Company.
However, the newspaper was financially crippled by the Panic of 1893, by 1896, the newspaper had a circulation of less than 9,000, was losing $1,000 a day. That year, Adolph Ochs, the publisher of the Chattanooga Times, gained a controlling interest in the company for $75,000. Shortly after assuming control of the paper, Ochs coined the paper's slogan, "All The News That's Fit To Print"; the slogan has appeared in the paper since September 1896, has been printed in a box in the upper left hand corner of the front page since early 1897. The slogan was a jab at competing papers, such as Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, which were known for a lurid and inaccurate reporting of facts and opinions, described by the end of the century as "yellow journalism". Under Ochs' guidance, aided by Carr
Burbank, California
Burbank is a city in Los Angeles County in the Los Angeles metropolitan area of Southern California, United States, 12 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles. The population at the 2010 census was 103,340. Billed as the "Media Capital of the World" and only a few miles northeast of Hollywood, numerous media and entertainment companies are headquartered or have significant production facilities in Burbank, including Warner Bros. Entertainment, The Walt Disney Company, Nickelodeon Animation Studios, The Burbank Studios, Cartoon Network Studios with the West Coast branch of Cartoon Network, Insomniac Games; the Hollywood Burbank Airport was the location of Lockheed's Skunk Works, which produced some of the most secret and technologically advanced airplanes, including the U-2 spy planes that uncovered the Soviet Union missile components in Cuba in October 1962. Burbank consists of two distinct areas: a downtown/foothill section, in the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains, the flatland section; the city was referred to as "Beautiful Downtown Burbank" on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
The city was named after David Burbank, a New Hampshire–born dentist and entrepreneur who established a sheep ranch there in 1867. The city of Burbank occupies land, part of two Spanish and Mexican-era colonial land grants, the 36,400-acre Rancho San Rafael, granted to Jose Maria Verdugo by the Spanish Bourbon government in 1784, the 4,063-acre Rancho Providencia created in 1821; this area was the scene of a military skirmish which resulted in the unseating of the Spanish Governor of California, his replacement by the Mexican leader Pio Pico. Remnants of the military battle were found many years in the vicinity of Warner Bros. Studio when residents dug up cannonballs. Dr. David Burbank purchased over 4,600 acres of the former Verdugo holding and another 4,600 acres of the Rancho Providencia in 1867 and built a ranch house and began to raise sheep and grow wheat on the ranch. By 1876, the San Fernando Valley became the largest wheat-raising area in Los Angeles County, but the droughts of the 1860s and 1870s underlined the need for steady water supplies.
A professionally trained dentist, Burbank began his career in Maine. He joined the great migration westward in the early 1850s and, by 1853 was living in San Francisco. At the time the American Civil War broke out he was again well established in his profession as a dentist in Pueblo de Los Angeles. In 1867, he purchased Rancho La Providencia from David W. Alexander and Francis Mellus, he purchased the western portion of the Rancho San Rafael from Jonathan R. Scott. Burbank's property reached nearly 9,200 acres at a cost of $9,000. Burbank would not acquire full titles to both properties until after a court decision known as the "Great Partition" was made in 1871 dissolving the Rancho San Rafael, he became known as one of the largest and most successful sheep raisers in southern California, as a result, he closed his dentistry practice and invested in real estate in Los Angeles. Burbank later owned the Burbank Theatre, which opened on November 27, 1893, at a cost of $150,000. Though the theater was intended to be an opera house, instead it staged plays and became known nationally.
The theatre featured famous actors of the time including Fay Bainter and Marjorie Rambeau, until it had deteriorated into a burlesque house. When the area that became Burbank was settled in the 1870s and 1880s, the streets were aligned along what is now Olive Avenue, the road to the Cahuenga Pass and downtown Los Angeles; these were the roads the Native Americans traveled and the early settlers took their produce down to Los Angeles to sell and to buy supplies along these routes. At the time, the primary long-distance transportation methods available to San Fernando Valley residents were stagecoach and train. Stagecoaching between Los Angeles and San Francisco through the Valley began in 1858; the Southern Pacific Railroad arrived in the Valley in 1876, completing the route connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles. A shrewd businessman, foreseeing the value of rail transport, Burbank sold Southern Pacific Railroad a right-of-way through the property for one dollar; the first train passed through Burbank on April 5, 1874.
A boom created by a rate war between the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific brought people streaming into California shortly thereafter, a group of speculators purchased much of Burbank's land holdings in 1886 for $250,000. One account suggests Burbank may have sold his property because of a severe drought that year, which caused a shortage of water and grass for his livestock. 1,000 of his sheep died due to the drought conditions. The group of speculators who bought the acreage formed the Providencia Land and Development Company and began developing the land, calling the new town Burbank after its founder, began offering farm lots on May 1, 1887; the townsite had Burbank Boulevard/Walnut Avenue as the northern boundary, Grandview Avenue as the southern boundary, the edge of the Verdugo Mountains as the eastern boundary and Clybourn Avenue was the western border. The establishment of a water system in 1887 allowed farmers to irrigate their orchards and provided a stronger base for agricultural development.
The original plot of the new townsite of Burbank extended from what is now Burbank Boulevard on the north, to Grandview Avenue in Glendale, California on the south, from the top of the Verdugo Hills on the east to what is now known as Clybourn Avenue on the west. At the same time, the arrival of the railroad provided immediate access for the farmers to bring crops to market. Packing houses and warehouses were built alo
Charlie Chaplin
Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin was an English comic actor and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, "The Tramp", is considered one of the most important figures in the history of the film industry, his career spanned more than 75 years, from childhood in the Victorian era until a year before his death in 1977, encompassed both adulation and controversy. Chaplin's childhood in London was one of poverty and hardship, as his father was absent and his mother struggled financially, he was sent to a workhouse twice before the age of nine; when he was 14, his mother was committed to a mental asylum. Chaplin began performing at an early age, touring music halls and working as a stage actor and comedian. At 19, he was signed to the prestigious Fred Karno company, he began appearing in 1914 for Keystone Studios. He soon formed a large fan base, he directed his own films and continued to hone his craft as he moved to the Essanay and First National corporations.
By 1918, he was one of the best-known figures in the world. In 1919, Chaplin co-founded the distribution company United Artists which gave him complete control over his films, his first feature-length film was The Kid, followed by A Woman of Paris, The Gold Rush, The Circus. He refused to move to sound films in the 1930s, instead producing City Lights and Modern Times without dialogue, he became political, his next film The Great Dictator satirized Adolf Hitler. The 1940s were a decade marked with controversy for Chaplin, his popularity declined rapidly, he was accused of communist sympathies, while he created scandal through his involvement in a paternity suit and his marriages to much younger women. An FBI investigation was opened, Chaplin was forced to leave the United States and settle in Switzerland, he abandoned the Tramp in his films, which include Monsieur Verdoux, Limelight, A King in New York, A Countess from Hong Kong. Chaplin wrote, produced, starred in, composed the music for most of his films.
He was a perfectionist, his financial independence enabled him to spend years on the development and production of a picture. His films are characterized by slapstick combined with pathos, typified in the Tramp's struggles against adversity. Many contain political themes, as well as autobiographical elements, he received an Honorary Academy Award for "the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century" in 1972, as part of a renewed appreciation for his work. He continues to be held in high regard, with The Gold Rush, City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator ranked on lists of the greatest films of all time. Charles Spencer Chaplin was born on 16 April 1889 to Charles Chaplin Sr.. There is no official record of his birth, although Chaplin believed he was born at East Street, Walworth, in South London, his mother and father had married four years at which time Charles Sr. became the legal guardian of Hannah's illegitimate son, Sydney John Hill. At the time of his birth, Chaplin's parents were both music hall entertainers.
Hannah, the daughter of a shoemaker, had a brief and unsuccessful career under the stage name Lily Harley, while Charles Sr. a butcher's son, was a popular singer. Although they never divorced, Chaplin's parents were estranged by around 1891; the following year, Hannah gave birth to a third son – George Wheeler Dryden – fathered by the music hall entertainer Leo Dryden. The child was taken by Dryden at six months old, did not re-enter Chaplin's life for 30 years. Chaplin's childhood was fraught with poverty and hardship, making his eventual trajectory "the most dramatic of all the rags to riches stories told" according to his authorised biographer David Robinson. Chaplin's early years were spent with his mother and brother Sydney in the London district of Kennington; as the situation deteriorated, Chaplin was sent to Lambeth Workhouse. The council housed him at the Central London District School for paupers, which Chaplin remembered as "a forlorn existence", he was reunited with his mother 18 months before Hannah was forced to readmit her family to the workhouse in July 1898.
The boys were promptly sent to another institution for destitute children. In September 1898, Hannah was committed to Cane Hill mental asylum – she had developed a psychosis brought on by an infection of syphilis and malnutrition. For the two months she was there and his brother Sydney were sent to live with their father, whom the young boys scarcely knew. Charles Sr. was by a severe alcoholic, life there was bad enough to provoke a visit from the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Chaplin's father died two years at 38 years old, from cirrhosis of the liver. Hannah entered a period of remission but, in May 1903, became ill again. Chaplin 14, had the task of taking his mother to the infirmary, from where she was sent back to Cane Hill, he lived alone for several days, searching for food and sleeping rough, until Sydney – who had enrolled in the Navy two years earlier – returned. Hannah was released from the asylum eight months but in March 1905, her illness returned, this time permanently.
"There was nothing we could do but accept poor mother's fate", Chaplin wrote, a
