Passing (racial identity)
Racial passing occurs when a person classified as a member of one racial group is accepted as a member of a racial group other than their own. The term has been used in the United States to describe a person of color or multiracial ancestry who has assimilated into the white majority during times when legal and social conventions of hypodescent classified the person as a minority, subject to racial segregation and discrimination, regardless of their actual ancestry. To understand how some African-American people pass as white, one must acknowledge the rape of slave women at the hands of white plantation owners. Although anti-miscegenation laws outlawing racial intermarriage existed in America as early as 1664, there were no laws preventing the rape of enslaved women. For generations, enslaved black mothers bore mixed-race children who were deemed "mulattos", "quadroons", "octoroons" or "hexadecaroons" based on their percentage of "white blood."Although the aforementioned mixed-race people were half white or more, institutions of hypodescent and the 20th-century one drop rule classified them as black and therefore, inferior after slavery became a racial caste.
But there were other mixed-race people who were born to unions or marriages in colonial Virginia between free white women and African or African-American men, indentured, or slave, became ancestors to many free families of color in the early decades of the US, as documented by Paul Heinegg in his Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Delaware. Mixed-race African Americans sometimes used their racially ambiguous appearance in order to pass as white and evade the restrictions against them to seek better lives. For some people, passing as white and using their whiteness to uplift other black people was the best way to undermine the system that relegated black people to a lower position in society. Although reasons behind passing are individual, the history of African Americans passing as white can be categorized by the following time periods: the antebellum era, post-emancipation, Reconstruction through Jim Crow, present day. During the antebellum period, passing as white was a means of escaping slavery.
Once they left the plantation, escaped slaves who could pass as white found safety in their perceived whiteness. To pass as white was to pass as free. However, once they gained their freedom, most escaped slaves intended to return to blackness - passing as white was a temporary disguise used to gain freedom. Once they had escaped, their racial ambiguity could be a safeguard to their freedom. If an escaped slave was able to pass as white, they were less to be caught and returned to their plantation. If they were caught, white-passing slaves such as Jane Morrison could sue for their freedom, using their white appearance as justification for emancipation. Post-emancipation, passing as white was no longer a means to obtain freedom; as passing shifted from a necessity to an option, it fell out of favor in the black community. Author Charles W. Chestnutt, born free in Ohio as a mixed-race African American, explored circumstances for persons of color in the South after emancipation, for instance, for a enslaved woman who marries a white-passing man shortly after the conclusion of Civil War.
Some fictional exploration coalesced around the figure of the "tragic mulatta", a woman whose future is compromised by her being mixed race and able to pass for white. During the Reconstruction era, black people gained the constitutional rights of which they were deprived during slavery. Although they would not secure full constitutional equality for another century until after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, reconstruction promised African Americans legal equality for the first time. Abolishing slavery did not abolish racism. During Reconstruction whites tried to enforce white supremacy, in part through the rise of Ku Klux Klan chapters, rifle clubs and paramilitary insurgent groups such as the Red Shirts. Passing was used by some African Americans to evade segregation; those who were able to pass as white engaged in tactical passing or passing as white in order to get a job, go to school, or to travel. Outside of these situations, "tactical passers" still lived as black people, for this reason, tactical passing is referred to as "9 to 5 passing."
The writer and literary critic Anatole Broyard saw his father pass in order to get work after his Louisiana Creole family moved north to Brooklyn before World War II. This idea of crossing the color line at different points in one's life is explored in James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, but the narrator closes the novel by saying "I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage", meaning that he regrets trading in his blackness for whiteness. The idea that passing as white was a rejection of blackness was common at the time and remains so to the present time. People chose to pass for good during Jim Crow and beyond; the US civil rights leader Walter Francis White was of mixed-race European ancestry: 27 of his 32 great-great-great-grandparents were white. He identified with it, he served as the chief executive of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1929 until his death in 1955. In the earlier stages of his career, he conducted investigations in the South, during which he sometimes passed as white in order to gather information more on lynchings and hate crimes, to protect himself in hostile env
Racial segregation
Racial segregation is the systemic separation of people into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life. It may apply to activities such as eating in a restaurant, drinking from a water fountain, using a public toilet, attending school, going to the movies, riding on a bus, or in the rental or purchase of a home or of hotel rooms. Segregation is defined by the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance as "the act by which a person separates other persons on the basis of one of the enumerated grounds without an objective and reasonable justification, in conformity with the proposed definition of discrimination; as a result, the voluntary act of separating oneself from other people on the basis of one of the enumerated grounds does not constitute segregation". According to the UN Forum on Minority Issues, "The creation and development of classes and schools providing education in minority languages should not be considered impermissible segregation, if the assignment to such classes and schools is of a voluntary nature".
Racial segregation is outlawed, but may exist de facto through social norms when there is no strong individual preference for it, as suggested by Thomas Schelling's models of segregation and subsequent work. Segregation may be maintained by means ranging from discrimination in hiring and in the rental and sale of housing to certain races to vigilante violence. A situation that arises when members of different races mutually prefer to associate and do business with members of their own race would be described as separation or de facto separation of the races rather than segregation. In the United States, segregation was mandated by law in some states and came with anti-miscegenation laws. Segregation, however allowed close contact in hierarchical situations, such as allowing a person of one race to work as a servant for a member of another race. Segregation can involve spatial separation of the races, mandatory use of different institutions, such as schools and hospitals by people of different races.
Wherever there have been multiracial communities, there has been racial segregation. Only areas with extensive miscegenation, or mixing, such as Hawaii and Brazil, despite some social stratification, seem to be exempt. Following its conquest of Ottoman controlled Algeria in 1830, for well over a century France maintained colonial rule in the territory, described as "quasi-apartheid"; the colonial law of 1865 allowed Arab and Berber Algerians to apply for French citizenship only if they abandoned their Muslim identity. Camille Bonora-Waisman writes that, "n contrast with the Moroccan and Tunisian protectorates", this "colonial apartheid society" was unique to Algeria; this "internal system of apartheid" met with considerable resistance from the Muslims affected by it, is cited as one of the causes of the 1954 insurrection and ensuing independence war. In fifteenth-century north-east Germany, people of Wendish, i.e. Slavic, origin were not allowed to join some guilds. According to Wilhelm Raabe, "down into the eighteenth century no German guild accepted a Wend."German praise for America's institutional racism found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, radical Nazi lawyers were advocates of the use of American models.
Race based U. S. citizenship laws and anti-miscegenation laws directly inspired the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. The ban on interracial marriage prohibited sexual relations and marriages between people classified as "Aryan" and "non-Aryan." Such relationships were called Rassenschande. At first the laws were aimed at Jews but were extended to "Gypsies and their bastard offspring". Aryans found guilty could face incarceration in a concentration camp, while non-Aryans could face the death penalty. To preserve the so-called purity of the German blood, after the war began, the Nazis extended the race defilement law to include all foreigners. Under the General Government of occupied Poland in 1940, the Nazis divided the population into different groups, each with different rights, food rations, allowed housing strips in the cities, public transportation, etc. In an effort to split Polish identity they attempted to establish ethnic divisions of Kashubians and Gorals, based on these groups' alleged "Germanic component."
During the 1930s and 1940s, Jews in Nazi-controlled states were made to wear yellow ribbons or stars of David, were, along with Romas, discriminated against by the racial laws. Jewish doctors were not allowed to treat Aryan patients nor were Jewish professors permitted to teach Aryan pupils. In addition, Jews were not allowed to use any public transportation, besides the ferry, were able to shop only from 3–5 pm in Jewish stores. After Kristallnacht, the Jews were fined 1,000,000 marks for damages done by the Nazi troops and SS members. Jews and Roma were subjected to genocide as "undesirable" racial groups in the Holocaust; the Nazis established ghettos to confine Jews and sometimes Romas into packed areas of the cities of Eastern Europe, turning them into de facto concentration camps. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest of these ghettos, with 400,000 people; the Łódź Ghetto was the second largest, holding about 160,000. Between 1939 and 1945, at least 1.5 million Polish citizens were transported to the Reich for forced labour.
Although Nazi Germany used forced laborers from We
Waffle
A waffle is a dish made from leavened batter or dough, cooked between two plates that are patterned to give a characteristic size and surface impression. There are many variations based on the type of waffle recipe used. Waffles are eaten throughout the world in Belgium, which has over a dozen regional varieties. Waffles may be made fresh or heated after having been commercially precooked and frozen; the word "waffle" first appears in the English language in 1725: "Waffles. Take flower, cream..." It is directly derived from the Dutch wafel. While the Middle Dutch wafele is first attested to at the end of the 13th century, it is preceded by the French walfre in 1185. Alternate spellings throughout modern and medieval Europe include waffe, wafer, wâfel, iauffe, goffre, wafe, waffel, wåfe, wāfel, vaffel, våffla. In ancient times the Greeks cooked flat cakes, called obelios, between hot metal plates; as they were spread throughout medieval Europe, the cake mix, a mixture of flour, water or milk, eggs, became known as wafers and were cooked over an open fire between iron plates with long handles.
Waffles are preceded, in the early Middle Ages, around the period of the 9th–10th centuries, with the simultaneous emergence of fer à hosties / hostieijzers and moule à oublies. While the communion wafer irons depicted imagery of Jesus and his crucifixion, the moule à oublies featured more trivial Biblical scenes or simple, emblematic designs; the format of the iron itself was always round and larger than those used for communion. The oublie was, in its basic form, composed only of grain flour and water – just as was the communion wafer, it took until the 11th century, as a product of The Crusades bringing new culinary ingredients to Western Europe, for flavorings such as orange blossom water to be added to the oublies. Oublies, not formally named as such until ca. 1200, spread throughout northwestern continental Europe leading to the formation of the oublieurs guild in 1270. These oublieurs/obloyers were responsible for not only producing the oublies but for a number of other contemporaneous and subsequent pâtisseries légères, including the waffles that were soon to arise.
In the late 14th century, the first known waffle recipe was penned in an anonymous manuscript, Le Ménagier de Paris, written by a husband as a set of instructions to his young wife. While it technically contains four recipes, all are a variation of the first: Beat some eggs in a bowl, season with salt and add wine. Toss in some flour, mix. Fill, little by little, two irons at a time with as much of the paste as a slice of cheese is large. Close the iron and cook both sides. If the dough does not detach from the iron, coat it first with a piece of cloth, soaked in oil or grease; the other three variations explain how cheese is to be placed in between two layers of batter and mixed in to the batter, or left out, along with the eggs. However, this was a waffle / gaufre in name only. Though some have speculated that waffle irons first appeared in the 13th–14th centuries, it was not until the 15th century that a true physical distinction between the oublie and the waffle began to evolve. Notably, while a recipe like the fourth in Le Ménagier de Paris was only flour and wine – indistinguishable from common oublie recipes of the time – what did emerge was a new shape to many of the irons being produced.
Not only were the newly fashioned ones rectangular, taking the form of the fer à hosties, but some circular oublie irons were cut down to create rectangles. It was in this period that the waffle's classic grid motif appeared in a French fer à oublie and a Belgian wafelijzer – albeit in a more shallowly engraved fashion – setting the stage for the more gridded irons that were about to become commonplace throughout Belgium. By the 16th century, paintings by Joachim de Beuckelaer, Pieter Aertsen and Pieter Bruegel depict the modern waffle form. Bruegel's work, in particular, not only shows waffles being cooked, but fine detail of individual waffles. In those instances, the waffle pattern can be counted as a large 12x7 grid, with cleanly squared sides, suggesting the use of a thin batter, akin to our contemporary Brussels waffles. Earliest of the 16th century waffle recipes, Om ghode waffellen te backen – from the Dutch KANTL 15 manuscript – is only the second known waffle recipe after the four variants described in Le Ménagier de Paris.
For the first time, partial measurements were given, sugar was used, spices were added directly to the batter: Take grated white bread. Take with that the yolk of an egg and a spoonful of pot sugar or powdered sugar. Take with that half water and half wine, ginger and cinnamon. Alternately attributed to the 16th and 17th centuries, Groote Wafelen from the Belgian Een Antwerps kookboek was published as the first recipe to use leavening: Take white flour, warm cream, fresh melted butter and mix together until the flour is no longer visible. Add ten or twelve egg yolks; those who do not want them to be too expensive may add the egg white and just milk. Put the resulting dough at the fireplace for four hours to let it rise better before baking it; until this time, no recipes contained leavening and could therefore be cooked in the thin moule à oublies. Groote Wafelen, in its use of leavening, was the genesis of contempora
Barnard College
Barnard College is a private women's liberal arts college located in Manhattan, New York City. Founded in 1889 by Annie Nathan Meyer, who named it after Columbia University's 10th president, Frederick Barnard, it is one of the oldest women's colleges in the world; the acceptance rate of the Class of 2023 was 11.3%, the most selective and diverse class in the college's 129-year history. The college was founded as a response to Columbia's refusal to admit women into their institution. Despite Barnard being and financially separate from Columbia University, it issues US$5.0 million annually to maintain itself as an affiliate college of the university. Students share pre-selected classes, Greek life, sports teams and more with Columbia University. Barnard offers Bachelor of Arts degree programs in about 50 areas of study. Students may pursue elements of their education at greater Columbia University, the Juilliard School, the Manhattan School of Music, The Jewish Theological Seminary, which are based in New York City.
Its 4-acre campus is located in the Upper Manhattan neighborhood of Morningside Heights, stretching along Broadway between 116th and 120th Streets. It is directly near several other academic institutions; the college is a member of the Seven Sisters, an association of seven prominent women's liberal arts colleges. For its first 229 years Columbia College of Columbia University admitted only men for undergraduate study. Barnard College was founded in 1889 as a response to Columbia's refusal to admit women into its institution; the college was named after Frederick Augustus Porter Barnard, a deaf American educator and mathematician who served as the tenth president of Columbia from 1864 to 1889. He advocated equal educational privileges for men and women, preferably in a coeducational setting, began proposing in 1879 that Columbia admit women; the board of trustees rejected Barnard's suggestion, but in 1883 agreed to create a detailed syllabus of study for women. While they could not attend Columbia classes, those who passed examinations based on the syllabus would receive a degree.
The first such woman graduate received her bachelor's degree in 1887. A former student of the program, Annie Meyer, other prominent New York women persuaded the board in 1889 to create a women's college connected to Columbia. Barnard College's original 1889 home was a rented brownstone at 343 Madison Avenue, where a faculty of six offered instruction to 14 students in the School of Arts, as well as to 22 "specials", who lacked the entrance requirements in Greek and so enrolled in science; when Columbia University announced in 1892 its impending move to Morningside Heights, Barnard built a new campus on 119th-120th Streets with gifts from Mary E. Brinckerhoff, Elizabeth Milbank Anderson and Martha Fiske. Milbank and Fiske Halls, built in 1897–1898, were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003. Ella Weed supervised the college in its first four years; as the college grew it needed additional space, in 1903 it received the three blocks south of 119th Street from Anderson who had purchased a former portion of the Bloomingdale Asylum site from the New York Hospital.
By the mid-20th century Barnard had succeeded in its original goal of providing a top tier education to women. Between 1920 and 1974, only the much larger Hunter College and University of California, Berkeley produced more women graduates who received doctorate degrees. Students' Hall, now known as Barnard Hall, was built in 1916. Brooks and Hewitt Halls were built in 1926 -- 1927, respectively, they were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2003. Jessica Finch is credited with coining the phrase, "current events," while teaching at Barnard College in the 1890s. Bachelor of Arts degree in about 50 areas of study is offered to Barnard graduates. Joint programs for the Bachelor of Science and other degrees exist with Columbia University, Juilliard School, The Jewish Theological Seminary; the six most popular majors at the college are English, political science, economics and biology. The liberal arts requirements are called the Nine Ways of Knowing. Students must take one year of one laboratory science, study a single foreign language for four semesters, complete one 3-credit course in each of the following categories: reason and value, social analysis, historical studies, cultures in comparison and deductive reasoning and visual and performing arts.
The use of AP or IB credit to fulfill these requirements is limited, but Nine Ways of Knowing courses may overlap with major or minor requirements. In addition to the Nine Ways of Knowing, students must complete a first-year seminar, a first-year English course, one semester of physical education; the Nine Ways of Knowing was replaced with Foundations in 2016. Students must take the First Year Experience which includes two semesters of seminars, complete Distributional Requirements within many subjects, six Modes of Thinking courses. Admissions to Barnard is considered selective by U. S. News & World Report, it is the most selective women's college in the nation. The class of 2021's admission rate was 14.8% of the 7,716 applicants, the lowest acceptance rate in the institution's history. The early-decision admission rate for the class of 2020 was 47.7%, out of 787 applications. The median SAT Combined was 2080, with median subscores of 700 in Math, in 705 Critical Reading, 720 in Writing; the Median ACT score was 32.
The average GPA of the class of 2021 was 96.13 on a 100-point scale
Maple syrup
Maple syrup is a syrup made from the xylem sap of sugar maple, red maple, or black maple trees, although it can be made from other maple species. In cold climates, these trees store starch in their roots before winter. Maple trees are tapped by drilling holes into their trunks and collecting the exuded sap, processed by heating to evaporate much of the water, leaving the concentrated syrup. Maple syrup was first collected and used by the indigenous peoples of North America, the practice was adopted by European settlers, who refined production methods. Technological improvements in the 1970s further refined syrup processing; the Canadian province of Quebec is by far the largest producer, responsible for 70 percent of the world's output. Maple syrup is graded according to the Canada, United States, or Vermont scales based on its density and translucency. Sucrose is the most prevalent sugar in maple syrup. In Canada, syrups must be made from maple sap to qualify as maple syrup and must be at least 66 percent sugar.
In the United States, a syrup must be made entirely from maple sap to be labelled as "maple", though states such as Vermont and New York have more restrictive definitions. Maple syrup is used as a condiment for pancakes, French toast, oatmeal or porridge, it is used as an ingredient in baking and as a sweetener or flavouring agent. Culinary experts have praised its unique flavour, although the chemistry responsible is not understood. Three species of maple trees are predominantly used to produce maple syrup: the sugar maple, the black maple, the red maple, because of the high sugar content in the sap of these species; the black maple is included as a subspecies or variety in a more broadly viewed concept of A. saccharum, the sugar maple, by some botanists. Of these, the red maple has a shorter season because it buds earlier than sugar and black maples, which alters the flavour of the sap. A few other species of maple are sometimes used as sources of sap for producing maple syrup, including the box elder or Manitoba maple, the silver maple, the bigleaf maple.
Similar syrups may be produced from walnut, birch or palm trees, among other sources. Indigenous peoples living in northeastern North America were the first groups known to have produced maple syrup and maple sugar. According to aboriginal oral traditions, as well as archaeological evidence, maple tree sap was being processed into syrup long before Europeans arrived in the region. There are no authenticated accounts of how maple syrup production and consumption began, but various legends exist. Other stories credit the development of maple syrup production to Nanabozho, Glooskap, or the squirrel. Aboriginal tribes developed rituals around sugar-making, celebrating the Sugar Moon with a Maple Dance. Many aboriginal dishes replaced the salt traditional in European cuisine with maple syrup; the Algonquians recognized maple sap as a source of nutrition. At the beginning of the spring thaw, they used stone tools to make V-shaped incisions in tree trunks; the maple sap was concentrated either by dropping hot cooking stones into the buckets or by leaving them exposed to the cold temperatures overnight and disposing of the layer of ice that formed on top.
In the early stages of European colonization in northeastern North America, local Indigenous peoples showed the arriving colonists how to tap the trunks of certain types of maples during the spring thaw to harvest the sap. André Thevet, the "Royal Cosmographer of France", wrote about Jacques Cartier drinking maple sap during his Canadian voyages. By 1680, European settlers and fur traders were involved in harvesting maple products. However, rather than making incisions in the bark, the Europeans used the method of drilling tapholes in the trunks with augers. During the 17th and 18th centuries, processed maple sap was used as a source of concentrated sugar, in both liquid and crystallized-solid form, as cane sugar had to be imported from the West Indies. Maple sugaring parties began to operate at the start of the spring thaw in regions of woodland with sufficiently large numbers of maples. Syrup makers first bored holes in the trunks more than one hole per large tree; the buckets were made by cutting cylindrical segments from a large tree trunk and hollowing out each segment's core from one end of the cylinder, creating a seamless, watertight container.
Sap filled the buckets, was either transferred to larger holding vessels mounted on sledges or wagons pulled by draft animals, or carried in buckets or other convenient containers. The sap-collection buckets were returned to the spouts mounted on the trees, the process was repeated for as long as the flow of sap remained "sweet"; the specific weather conditions of the thaw period were, still are, critical in determining the length of the sugaring season. As the weather continues to warm, a maple tree's normal early spring biological proce
Atlantic City, New Jersey
Atlantic City is a resort city in Atlantic County, New Jersey, United States, known for its casinos and beaches. In 2010, the city had a population of 39,558, it was incorporated on May 1854, from portions of Egg Harbor Township and Galloway Township. It borders Absecon, Pleasantville, Ventnor City, Egg Harbor Township, the Atlantic Ocean. Atlantic City inspired the U. S. version of the board game Monopoly the street names. Since 1921, Atlantic City has been the home of the Miss America pageant. In 1976, New Jersey voters legalized casino gambling in Atlantic City; the first casino opened two years later. Because of its location in South Jersey, hugging the Atlantic Ocean between marshlands and islands, Atlantic City was viewed by developers as prime real estate and a potential resort town. In 1853, the first commercial hotel, the Belloe House, was built at the intersection of Massachusetts and Atlantic Avenues; the city was incorporated in 1854, the same year in which the Camden and Atlantic Railroad train service began.
Built on the edge of the bay, this served as the direct link of this remote parcel of land with Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That same year, construction of the Absecon Lighthouse, designed by George Meade of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, was approved, with work initiated the next year. By 1874 500,000 passengers a year were coming to Atlantic City by rail. In Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, Corruption of Atlantic City, "Atlantic City's Godfather" Nelson Johnson describes the inspiration of Dr. Jonathan Pitney to develop Atlantic City as a health resort, his efforts to convince the municipal authorities that a railroad to the beach would be beneficial, his successful alliance with Samuel Richards to achieve that goal, the actual building of the railroad, the experience of the first 600 riders, who "were chosen by Samuel Richards and Jonathan Pitney": After arriving in Atlantic City, a second train brought the visitors to the door of the resort's first public lodging, the United States Hotel.
The hotel was owned by the railroad. It was a sprawling, four-story structure built to house 2,000 guests, it opened while it was still under construction, with only one wing standing, that wasn't completed. By year's end, when it was constructed, the United States Hotel was not only the first hotel in Atlantic City but the largest in the nation, its rooms totaled more than 600, its grounds covered some 14 acres. The first boardwalk was built in 1870 along a portion of the beach in an effort to help hotel owners keep sand out of their lobbies. Businesses were restricted and the boardwalk was removed each year at the end of the peak season; because of its effectiveness and popularity, the boardwalk was expanded in length and width, modified several times in subsequent years. The historic length of the boardwalk, before the destructive 1944 Great Atlantic Hurricane, was about 7 miles and it extended from Atlantic City to Longport, through Ventnor and Margate; the first road connecting the city to the mainland at Pleasantville was completed in 1870 and charged a 30-cent toll.
Albany Avenue was the first road to the mainland available without a toll. By 1878, because of the growing popularity of the city, one railroad line could no longer keep up with demand. Soon, the Philadelphia and Atlantic City Railway was constructed to transport tourists to Atlantic City. At this point massive hotels like The United States and Surf House, as well as smaller rooming houses, had sprung up all over town; the United States Hotel took up a full city block between Atlantic, Pacific and Maryland Avenues. These hotels were not only impressive in size, but featured the most updated amenities, were considered quite luxurious for their time. In the early part of the 20th century, Atlantic City went through a radical building boom. Many of the modest boarding houses that dotted the boardwalk were replaced with large hotels. Two of the city's most distinctive hotels were the Marlborough-Blenheim Hotel and the Traymore Hotel. In 1903, Josiah White III bought a parcel of land near Ohio Avenue and the boardwalk and built the Queen Anne style Marlborough House.
The hotel was a success and, in 1905–06, he chose to expand the hotel and bought another parcel of land adjacent to his Marlborough House. In an effort to make his new hotel a source of conversation, White hired the architectural firm of Price and McLanahan; the firm made use of reinforced concrete, a new building material invented by Jean-Louis Lambot in 1848. The hotel's Spanish and Moorish themes, capped off with its signature dome and chimneys, represented a step forward from other hotels that had a classically designed influence. White merged the two hotels into the Marlborough-Blenheim. Bally's Atlantic City was constructed at this location; the Traymore Hotel was located at the corner of the boardwalk. Begun in 1879 as a small boarding house, the hotel grew through a series of uncoordinated expansions. By 1914, the hotel's owner, Daniel White, taking a hint from the Marlborough-Blenheim, commissioned the firm of Price and McLanahan to build an bigger hotel. Rising 16 stories, the tan brick and gold-capped hotel would become one of the city's best-known landmarks.
The hotel made use of ocean-facing hotel rooms by jutting its wings farther from the main portion of the hotel along Pacific Avenue. One by one, additional large hotels were constructed along the boardwalk, including the Brighton, Shelburne, Ritz Carlton, Madison House, the Breakers. The
Fannie Hurst
Fannie Hurst was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works were popular during the post-World War I era. Her work combined sentimental, romantic themes with social issues of the day, such as women's rights and race relations, she was one of the most read female authors of the 20th century, for a time in the 1920s she was one of the highest-paid American writers, along with Booth Tarkington. Hurst actively supported a number of social causes, including feminism, African American equality, New Deal programs. Although her novels, including Lummox, Back Street, Imitation of Life, lost popularity over time and were out-of-print as of the 2000s, they were bestsellers when first published and were translated into many languages, she published over 300 short stories during her lifetime. Hurst is known for the film adaptations of her works, including Imitation of Life, starring Claudette Colbert, Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, Warren William. Hurst was born on October 19, 1885, in Hamilton, Ohio, to shoe-factory owner Samuel Hurst and his wife Rose, who were assimilated Jewish emigrants from Bavaria.
A younger sister died of diphtheria at age three, leaving Hurst as her parents' only surviving child. She grew up at 5641 Cates Avenue in St. Louis and was a student at St. Louis's Central High School, she attended Washington University and graduated in 1909 at age 24. In her autobiography, she portrayed her family as comfortably middle-class, except for a two-year stint in a boarding house necessitated by a sudden financial downturn, which sparked her initial interest in the plight of the poor. However, this has been challenged by researchers, including her biographer Brooke Kroeger and literary historian Susan Koppelman. According to Koppelman, while Fannie Hurst was growing up, her father changed businesses four times, never achieved much financial success, failed in business at least once, the Hurst family lived at 11 different boarding houses before Fannie turned 16. Kroeger wrote that while Samuel and Rose Hurst did move to a house in a fashionable section of St. Louis, this did not occur until Fannie Hurst's third year of college, rather than during her childhood.
In her last term in college, Hurst wrote the book and lyrics for a comic opera, The Official Chaperon, given on the Washington University campus in June 1909. After her college graduation, Hurst worked in a shoe factory before moving to New York City in 1911 to pursue a writing career. Despite having published one story while in college, she received more than 35 rejections before she was able to sell a second story and establish herself as a published author. During her early years in New York she worked as a waitress at Childs and a sales clerk at Macy's and acted in bit parts on Broadway; as Hurst worked these jobs, under the name Rose Samuels, she observed her customers as well as employees. She began to take note of important social issues like unequal gender inequality. In her spare time, Hurst attended night court sessions and visited Ellis Island and the slums, becoming in her own words “passionately anxious to awake in others a general sensitiveness to small people,” and developing an awareness of “causes, including the lost and the threatened.”
In the years after World War I, Hurst became famous as an author of popular short stories and novels, many of which were made into films. Her popularity continued for several decades, only beginning to decline after World War II. Throughout her life, Hurst actively worked and spoke on behalf of social justice organizations and causes supporting feminism and African-American civil rights, supported other oppressed groups such as Jewish refugees and prisoners, she was appointed to several committees associated with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programs. In 1912, after numerous rejections, Hurst published a story in The Saturday Evening Post, which shortly thereafter requested exclusive release of her future writings, she went on to publish many more stories in the Post and in Cosmopolitan magazine earning as much as $5,000 per story. Her first collection of short stories, Just Around the Corner, was published in 1914, her first novel, Star-Dust: The Story of an American Girl, appeared in 1921.
By 1925, she had published five collections of short stories and two novels, become one of the most paid authors in the United States. It was said of Hurst that "no other living American woman has gone so far in fiction in so short a time." Her works were designed to appeal to a female audience, had working-class or middle-class female protagonists concerned with romantic relationships and economic need. Her work was described in 1928 as "overwhelmingly prodigal of both feeling and language...mix naked, realistic detail with simple unrestrained emotion." Hurst was influenced by the works of Edgar Lee Masters Spoon River Anthology, read the works of Charles Dickens, Upton Sinclair, Thomas Hardy. Hurst considered herself to be a serious writer, publicly disparaged the works of other popular authors such as Gene Stratton-Porter and Harold Bell Wright, dismissing Wright as a "sentimental" author whose works people read only for "relaxation". Early in Hurst's career, critics considered her a serious artist, admiring her sensitive portrayals of immigrant life and urban working girls
