1.
Evansville, Indiana
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Evansville is a city in and the county seat of Vanderburgh County, Indiana, United States. The population was 117,429 at the 2010 census, the 38th parallel crosses the north side of the city and is marked on Interstate 69. Situated on an oxbow in the Ohio River, the city is referred to as the Crescent Valley or River City. As testament to the Ohios grandeur, early French explorers named it La Belle Riviere, the area has been inhabited by various cultures for millennia, dating back at least 10,000 years. Angel Mounds was a permanent settlement of the Mississippian culture from 1000 AD to around 1400 AD, the city itself was founded in 1812. The broad economic base of the region has helped build an economy which is known for its stability, diversity, Four NYSE companies are headquartered in Evansville, along with the global operations center for NYSE company Mead Johnson. Three other companies traded on the NASDAQ are also headquartered in Evansville, the city is home to public and private enterprise in many areas, as Evansville serves as the economic hub of the region. The city has well known educational institutions. Other local educational institutions have also garnered praise and attention, including nationally ranked Signature School, in 2008, Evansville was voted the best city in the country in which to live, work, and play by the readers of Kiplinger, and in 2009 the 11th best. See main article, History of Evansville, Indiana, there was a continuous human presence in the area that became Evansville from at least 8,000 BC by Paleo-Indians. Following the abandonment of Angel Mounds between the years 1400 and 1450, tribes of Miami, Shawnee, Piankeshaw, Wyandot, Delaware, the land encompassing Evansville was formally relinquished by the Delaware in 1805 to General William Henry Harrison, then governor of the Indiana Territory. French hunters and trappers were among the first Europeans to come to the area, on March 27,1812, Hugh McGary Jr. purchased about 441 acres and named it McGarys Landing. In 1814, to more people, McGary renamed his village Evansville in honor of Colonel Robert Morgan Evans. Evansville incorporated in 1817 and became a county seat on January 7,1818, the county was named for Henry Vanderburgh, a deceased chief judge of the Indiana territorial supreme court. Evansville soon became a commercial town with an extensive river trade. The west side of Evansville was for many years cut off from the part of the city by Pigeon Creek. The land comprising the town of Lamasco was platted in 1837 and was ultimately annexed in 1870. The project was intended to open Indiana to commerce and improve transportation from New Orleans to New York City, unfortunately the project bankrupted the state and was so poorly engineered that it would not hold water
2.
Indiana
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Indiana /ɪndiˈænə/ is a U. S. state located in the midwestern and Great Lakes regions of North America. Indiana is the 38th largest by area and the 16th most populous of the 50 United States and its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th U. S. state on December 11,1816, before becoming a territory, varying cultures of indigenous peoples and historic Native Americans inhabited Indiana for thousands of years. Indiana has an economy with a gross state product of $298 billion in 2012. Indiana has several areas with populations greater than 100,000. The states name means Land of the Indians, or simply Indian Land and it also stems from Indianas territorial history. On May 7,1800, the United States Congress passed legislation to divide the Northwest Territory into two areas and named the section the Indiana Territory. In 1816, when Congress passed an Enabling Act to begin the process of establishing statehood for Indiana, a resident of Indiana is officially known as a Hoosier. The first inhabitants in what is now Indiana were the Paleo-Indians, divided into small groups, the Paleo-Indians were nomads who hunted large game such as mastodons. They created stone tools made out of chert by chipping, knapping and flaking, the Archaic period, which began between 5000 and 4000 BC, covered the next phase of indigenous culture. The people developed new tools as well as techniques to cook food, such new tools included different types of spear points and knives, with various forms of notches. They made ground-stone tools such as axes, woodworking tools. During the latter part of the period, they built mounds and middens. The Archaic period ended at about 1500 BC, although some Archaic people lived until 700 BC, afterward, the Woodland period took place in Indiana, where various new cultural attributes appeared. During this period, the people created ceramics and pottery, an early Woodland period group named the Adena people had elegant burial rituals, featuring log tombs beneath earth mounds. In the middle portion of the Woodland period, the Hopewell people began developing long-range trade of goods, nearing the end of the stage, the people developed highly productive cultivation and adaptation of agriculture, growing such crops as corn and squash. The Woodland period ended around 1000 AD, the Mississippian culture emerged, lasting from 1000 until the 15th century, shortly before the arrival of Europeans. During this stage, the people created large urban settlements designed according to their cosmology, with mounds and plazas defining ceremonial
3.
Woodland Hills, Los Angeles
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Woodland Hills is a neighborhood bordering the Santa Monica Mountains in the San Fernando Valley region of the city of Los Angeles, California. Woodland Hills is an affluent neighborhood in the region of the San Fernando Valley which is located east of Calabasas. On the north it is bordered by West Hills, Canoga Park, and Winnetka, some neighborhoods are in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains. Running east–west through the community are U. S. Route 101 and Ventura Boulevard, the first Europeans to enter the San Fernando Valley were the Portola Expedition in 1769, exploring Alta California for Spanish missions and settlements locations. Seeing it from present-day Sepulveda Pass, the oak savanna inspired them to call the area El Valle de Santa Catalina de Bononia de Los Encinos, the Mission San Fernando Rey de España was established in 1797 and controlled the Valleys land, including future Woodland Hills. Ownership of the half of the valley, south of present-day Roscoe Boulevard from Toluca Lake to Woodland Hills. Moses Sherman and others in 1910, victor Girard Kleinberger bought 2,886 acres in the area from Chandlers group and founded the town of Girard in 1922. He sought to attract residents and businesses by developing an infrastructure, advertising in newspapers and his 300 pepper trees formed a canopy over Canoga Ave. between Ventura Boulevard and Saltillo St. became Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #93 in 1972. The community of Girard was eventually incorporated into Los Angeles, Woodland Hills has a firmly subtropical mediterranean climate. Within the San Fernando Valley, Woodland Hills generally experiences some of the extreme temperature changes season to season than other regions. During the summer, temperatures are very hot, while during the winter. On July 22,2006, Woodland Hills recorded the highest temperature ever in Los Angeles County, the climate is classified as a Csa in the Köppen climate classification, which is characterized by mild, rainy winters and hot, dry summers. This climate is referred to as mediterranean. Precipitation in Woodland Hills averages much the same as most other regions of the west San Fernando Valley, in 2008 the population of Woodland Hills was approximately 63,000. The median age in 2000 was 40, considered old when compared to city and county jurisdictions. As of the 2000 census, and according to the Los Angeles Almanac, there were 67,006 people and 29,119 households residing in Woodland Hills. The racial makeup of the neighborhood was 79. 90% White,6. 97% Asian,0. 13% Pacific Islander,3. 34% African American,0. 33% Native American,4. 80% from other races, and 4. 52% from two or more races. 11. 94% of the population were Hispanic of any race, in population, it is one of the least dense neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and the percentage of white people is high for the county
4.
California
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California is the most populous state in the United States and the third most extensive by area. Located on the western coast of the U. S, California is bordered by the other U. S. states of Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona and shares an international border with the Mexican state of Baja California. Los Angeles is Californias most populous city, and the second largest after New York City. The Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nations second- and fifth-most populous urban regions, California also has the nations most populous county, Los Angeles County, and its largest county by area, San Bernardino County. The Central Valley, an agricultural area, dominates the states center. What is now California was first settled by various Native American tribes before being explored by a number of European expeditions during the 16th and 17th centuries, the Spanish Empire then claimed it as part of Alta California in their New Spain colony. The area became a part of Mexico in 1821 following its war for independence. The western portion of Alta California then was organized as the State of California, the California Gold Rush starting in 1848 led to dramatic social and demographic changes, with large-scale emigration from the east and abroad with an accompanying economic boom. If it were a country, California would be the 6th largest economy in the world, fifty-eight percent of the states economy is centered on finance, government, real estate services, technology, and professional, scientific and technical business services. Although it accounts for only 1.5 percent of the states economy, the story of Calafia is recorded in a 1510 work The Adventures of Esplandián, written as a sequel to Amadis de Gaula by Spanish adventure writer Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. The kingdom of Queen Calafia, according to Montalvo, was said to be a land inhabited by griffins and other strange beasts. This conventional wisdom that California was an island, with maps drawn to reflect this belief, shortened forms of the states name include CA, Cal. Calif. and US-CA. Settled by successive waves of arrivals during the last 10,000 years, various estimates of the native population range from 100,000 to 300,000. The Indigenous peoples of California included more than 70 distinct groups of Native Americans, ranging from large, settled populations living on the coast to groups in the interior. California groups also were diverse in their organization with bands, tribes, villages. Trade, intermarriage and military alliances fostered many social and economic relationships among the diverse groups, the first European effort to explore the coast as far north as the Russian River was a Spanish sailing expedition, led by Portuguese captain Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, in 1542. Some 37 years later English explorer Francis Drake also explored and claimed a portion of the California coast in 1579. Spanish traders made unintended visits with the Manila galleons on their trips from the Philippines beginning in 1565
5.
Jack Norworth
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Jack Norworth was a U. S. songwriter, singer and vaudeville performer. Norworth is credited as co-writer of a number of Tin Pan Alley hits and he wrote the lyrics to Take Me Out to the Ball Game in 1908, his most long lasting hit. It wasnt until 1940 that he witnessed a Major League Baseball game and his Shine On, Harvest Moon was a bigger hit at the time. There is some disagreement about his involvement in its creation, another possibility for the music could lie with George Gershwin, who was also a piano player for this vaudeville troup. Albert Koch, of Wisconsin, also a songwriter, claims to have written the song himself. Turn Off Your Light, Mr. Moon Man is a sequel to Shine on, born John Godfrey Knauff in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Theodore Christian Knauff and Louise H. Knauff, he changed his name to Jack Norworth when he went into show business. His father was a builder and also a choir director at St. The theater was not a career in that time especially coming from a religious family. Following a few years at sea, he landed in New York City at age 20 to embark on a business career. In 1908 he married Nora Bayes, with whom he performed in vaudeville, following the Ziegfeld Follies, Norworth appeared in a number of Broadway theater productions and was heard on early radio, such as his March 1928 guest appearance on Acousticon Hour. After Bayes, he was married to actress Louise Dresser and he appeared in early sound films with his third wife, Dorothy Adelphi. He was portrayed by Dennis Morgan in the 1944 musical film Shine On, Harvest Moon and by Ron Husmann in the 1978 Ziegfeld biopic Ziegfeld and he is a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Jack Norworth died of an attack in Laguna Beach, California and is interred at Melrose Abbey Memorial Park in Anaheim, California. On July 11,2010, a 3-foot-tall black granite monument, paid for by concerned fans, was installed about 100 feet from Jacks actual headstone
6.
Paul Dresser
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Paul Dresser was an American singer, songwriter, and comedic actor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to songwriting Dresser performed in traveling minstrel and medicine-wagon shows, Dresser sold his songs through sheet music publishers, especially the firms in New York Citys Tin Pan Alley, and became a partner in the music publishing business. Dresser grew up in a family and lived in Sullivan and Terre Haute. He had a childhood and spent several weeks in jail. Dresser left home at age sixteen to join a minstrel act. Dresser composed his first songs while working for Hamlin, Dresser settled in Evansville, Indiana, for several years, while as he continued to work as a traveling performer and musician. Eventually, he became a talent and traveled with a number of different acts, including The Two Johns, A Tin Soldier. Dresser wrote songs featured in shows, sold his songs to others acts. In 1893 Dresser joined Howley, Haviland and Company, a New York City sheet music publisher and he later became an active partner in other music publishing companies. At the height of his success, Dresser lived in New York City as an entertainer, successful songwriter. He was also known for his generosity, especially to family and friends, at the turn of the century Dresser fell into financial distress when his music fell out of style. In 1905 his music publishing business declared bankruptcy and Dressers health declined and he died penniless in New York City a year later. Although Dresser had no training in music composition, he wrote ballads that had wide popular appeal. During a career spanned nearly two decades, from 1886 to 1906, Dresser composed and published more than 150 songs. His biggest hit, On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away, became the second best-selling song, in terms of sheet music, following the success of Wabash, many newspapers compared Dresser to popular music composer Stephen Foster. On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away became the state song of Indiana in 1913. The Paul Dresser Birthplace in Terre Haute is designated as a state shrine, Dresser was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970. He was born Johann Paul Dreiser, Jr. on April 22,1858, in Terre Haute, Indiana, by the age of twenty he had changed his surname to Dresser
7.
Vaudeville
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Vaudeville is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment. It was especially popular in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s, a typical vaudeville performance is made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill. A vaudeville performer is often referred to as a vaudevillian, Vaudeville developed from many sources, including the concert saloon, minstrelsy, freak shows, dime museums, and literary American burlesque. Called the heart of American show business, vaudeville was one of the most popular types of entertainment in North America for several decades, the origin of this term is obscure, but is often explained as being derived from the French expression voix de ville. A second speculation is that it comes from the songs on satire by poet Olivier Basselin. Some, however, preferred the term variety to what manager Tony Pastor called its sissy. Thus, vaudeville was marketed as variety well into the 20th century, with its first subtle appearances within the early 1860s, vaudeville was not initially a common form of entertainment. The form gradually evolved from the saloon and variety hall into its mature form throughout the 1870s and 1880s. This more gentle form was known as Polite Vaudeville, in the years before the American Civil War, entertainment existed on a different scale. Certainly, variety theatre existed before 1860 in Europe and elsewhere, in the US, as early as the first decades of the 19th century, theatregoers could enjoy a performance consisting of Shakespeare plays, acrobatics, singing, dancing, and comedy. As the years progressed, people seeking diversified amusement found a number of ways to be entertained. Vaudeville was characterized by traveling companies touring through cities and towns, a significant influence also came from Dutch minstrels and comedians. Vaudeville incorporated these various itinerant amusements into a stable, institutionalized form centered in Americas growing urban hubs, pastors experiment proved successful, and other managers soon followed suit. B. F. Keith took the step, starting in Boston. Later, E. F. Albee, adoptive grandfather of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee, circuits such as those managed by Keith-Albee provided vaudevilles greatest economic innovation and the principal source of its industrial strength. They enabled a chain of allied vaudeville houses that remedied the chaos of the booking system by contracting acts for regional and national tours. These could easily be lengthened from a few weeks to two years, Albee also gave national prominence to vaudevilles trumpeting polite entertainment, a commitment to entertainment equally inoffensive to men, women and children. Acts that violated this ethos were admonished and threatened with expulsion from the remaining performances or were canceled altogether
8.
Elizabeth of Russia
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Elizabeth Petrovna, also known as Yelisaveta or Elizaveta, was the Empress of Russia from 1741 until her death. She led the country into the two major European conflicts of her time, the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War, on the eve of her death Russia spanned almost 16,200,000 square kilometres. Her domestic policies allowed the nobles to gain dominance in government while shortening their terms of service to the state. She encouraged Mikhail Lomonosovs establishment of the University of Moscow and Ivan Shuvalovs foundation of the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg and she also spent exorbitant sums of money on the grandiose baroque projects of her favourite architect, Bartolomeo Rastrelli, particularly in Peterhof and Tsarskoye Selo. The Winter Palace and the Smolny Cathedral in Saint Petersburg are among the monuments of her reign. She remains one of the most popular Russian monarchs due to her opposition to Prussian policies. Elizabeth was born at Kolomenskoye, near Moscow, on 18 December 1709, Peter valued Catherine and married her again at Saint Isaacs Cathedral in St. Petersburg on 9 February 1712. On this day his two surviving children by Catherine were legitimized by their father and this circumstance would later be used by Elizabeths political opponents to challenge her right to the throne on grounds of illegitimacy. Of the twelve children born to Peter and Catherine only two daughters, Anna and Elizabeth survived to adulthood, both of them were given the title of Tsarevna on 6 March 1711, and of Tsesarevna on 23 December 1721. They had one surviving sibling, crown prince Alexei Petrovich, who was their fathers son by his first wife Eudoxia Lopukhina. As a child Elizabeth was the favorite of her father. She resembled him both physically and temperamentally and she was a bright girl, if not brilliant, but received only an imperfect and desultory formal education. Even though he adored his daughter Peter did not devote time or attention to her education and he had a son from his first marriage to a noblewoman and did not anticipate that a daughter born to his second wife might one day inherit the throne. Indeed, no woman had ever sat upon the throne of Russia yet and it was therefore left to Catherine to raise the girls, but she was herself too uneducated to be able to superintend the formal education of her daughters. Elizabeth had a French governess and grew fluent in Italian, German and she was also an excellent dancer and rider. Like her father Elizabeth was physically active and loved riding, hunting, sledging, skating, from her earliest years she delighted everyone with her extraordinary beauty and vivacity, and was regarded as the leading beauty of the Russian Empire. The wife of the British minister described Elizabeth as fair, with brown hair, large sprightly blue eyes, fine teeth. She is inclinable to be fat, but is very genteel and she speaks German, French and Italian, is extremely gay and talks to everyone
9.
Paramount Pictures
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Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film studio based in Hollywood, California, that has been a subsidiary of the American media conglomerate Viacom since 1994. In 1916, film producer Adolph Zukor contracted 22 actors and actresses and these fortunate few would become the first movie stars. Paramount Pictures is a member of the Motion Picture Association of America, in 2014, Paramount Pictures became the first major Hollywood studio to distribute all of its films in digital form only. Paramount is the fifth oldest surviving studio in the world after the French studios Gaumont Film Company and Pathé, followed by the Nordisk Film company. It is the last major film studio headquartered in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles. Paramount Pictures dates its existence from the 1912 founding date of the Famous Players Film Company, hungarian-born founder, Adolph Zukor, who had been an early investor in nickelodeons, saw that movies appealed mainly to working-class immigrants. With partners Daniel Frohman and Charles Frohman he planned to offer feature-length films that would appeal to the class by featuring the leading theatrical players of the time. By mid-1913, Famous Players had completed five films, and Zukor was on his way to success and its first film was Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth, which starred Sarah Bernhardt. That same year, another aspiring producer, Jesse L. Lasky, opened his Lasky Feature Play Company with money borrowed from his brother-in-law, Samuel Goldfish, the Lasky company hired as their first employee a stage director with virtually no film experience, Cecil B. DeMille, who would find a site in Hollywood, near Los Angeles, for his first feature film. Hodkinson and actor, director, producer Hobart Bosworth had started production of a series of Jack London movies, Paramount was the first successful nationwide distributor, until this time, films were sold on a statewide or regional basis which had proved costly to film producers. Also, Famous Players and Lasky were privately owned while Paramount was a corporation, in 1916, Zukor maneuvered a three-way merger of his Famous Players, the Lasky Company, and Paramount. Zukor and Lasky bought Hodkinson out of Paramount, and merged the three companies into one, with only the exhibitor-owned First National as a rival, Famous Players-Lasky and its Paramount Pictures soon dominated the business. It was this system that gave Paramount a leading position in the 1920s and 1930s, the driving force behind Paramounts rise was Zukor. In 1926, Zukor hired independent producer B. P. Schulberg and they purchased the Robert Brunton Studios, a 26-acre facility at 5451 Marathon Street for US$1 million. In 1927, Famous Players-Lasky took the name Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation, three years later, because of the importance of the Publix Theatres, it became Paramount Publix Corporation. In 1928, Paramount began releasing Inkwell Imps, animated cartoons produced by Max, the Fleischers, veterans in the animation industry, were among the few animation producers capable of challenging the prominence of Walt Disney. The Paramount newsreel series Paramount News ran from 1927 to 1957, Paramount was also one of the first Hollywood studios to release what were known at that time as talkies, and in 1929, released their first musical, Innocents of Paris
10.
The Scarlet Empress
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The Scarlet Empress is a 1934 American historical drama film made by Paramount Pictures about the life of Catherine the Great. It was directed and produced by Josef von Sternberg from a screenplay by Eleanor McGeary, the film stars Marlene Dietrich as Catherine, supported by John Davis Lodge, Sam Jaffe, Louise Dresser, and C. Dietrichs daughter Maria Riva plays Catherine as a child, sophia Frederica is the daughter of a minor German prince and an ambitious mother. She is brought to Russia by Count Alexei at the behest of Empress Elizabeth to marry her nephew, the overbearing Elizabeth renames her Catherine and reinforces the demand the new bride issue an heir to the throne. Unhappy in her marriage, Catherine finds solace with the womanizing Alexei, rebuffed at this discovery, she takes lovers among the Russian Army to court its favor. When the old Empress dies seventeen years into their marriage, Peter ascends to the Russian throne, soon Catherine plots and exercises a coup, beginning a reign as Empress that will leave her known to history as Catherine the Great. The film is notable for its lighting and the expressionist art design von Sternberg creates for the Russian palace. The film is filled with images and motifs. It is viewed more positively by modern critics
