1.
Chicago
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Chicago, officially the City of Chicago, is the third-most populous city in the United States. With over 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the state of Illinois, and it is the county seat of Cook County. In 2012, Chicago was listed as a global city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Chicago has the third-largest gross metropolitan product in the United States—about $640 billion according to 2015 estimates, the city has one of the worlds largest and most diversified economies with no single industry employing more than 14% of the workforce. In 2016, Chicago hosted over 54 million domestic and international visitors, landmarks in the city include Millennium Park, Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Campus, the Willis Tower, Museum of Science and Industry, and Lincoln Park Zoo. Chicagos culture includes the arts, novels, film, theater, especially improvisational comedy. Chicago also has sports teams in each of the major professional leagues. The city has many nicknames, the best-known being the Windy City, the name Chicago is derived from a French rendering of the Native American word shikaakwa, known to botanists as Allium tricoccum, from the Miami-Illinois language. The first known reference to the site of the current city of Chicago as Checagou was by Robert de LaSalle around 1679 in a memoir, henri Joutel, in his journal of 1688, noted that the wild garlic, called chicagoua, grew abundantly in the area. In the mid-18th century, the area was inhabited by a Native American tribe known as the Potawatomi, the first known non-indigenous permanent settler in Chicago was Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. Du Sable was of African and French descent and arrived in the 1780s and he is commonly known as the Founder of Chicago. In 1803, the United States Army built Fort Dearborn, which was destroyed in 1812 in the Battle of Fort Dearborn, the Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi tribes had ceded additional land to the United States in the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis. The Potawatomi were forcibly removed from their land after the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, on August 12,1833, the Town of Chicago was organized with a population of about 200. Within seven years it grew to more than 4,000 people, on June 15,1835, the first public land sales began with Edmund Dick Taylor as U. S. The City of Chicago was incorporated on Saturday, March 4,1837, as the site of the Chicago Portage, the city became an important transportation hub between the eastern and western United States. Chicagos first railway, Galena and Chicago Union Railroad, and the Illinois, the canal allowed steamboats and sailing ships on the Great Lakes to connect to the Mississippi River. A flourishing economy brought residents from rural communities and immigrants from abroad, manufacturing and retail and finance sectors became dominant, influencing the American economy. The Chicago Board of Trade listed the first ever standardized exchange traded forward contracts and these issues also helped propel another Illinoisan, Abraham Lincoln, to the national stage
2.
Jack London
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John Griffith Jack London was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. Some of his most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories To Build a Fire, An Odyssey of the North, and Love of Life. He also wrote about the South Pacific in stories such as The Pearls of Parlay and The Heathen, London was part of the radical literary group The Crowd in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers. He wrote several works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss. Jack Londons mother, Flora Wellman, was the fifth and youngest child of Pennsylvania Canal builder Marshall Wellman and his first wife, Marshall Wellman was descended from Thomas Wellman, an early Puritan settler in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Flora left Ohio and moved to the Pacific coast when her father remarried after her mother died, in San Francisco, Flora worked as a music teacher and spiritualist, claiming to channel the spirit of a Sauk chief, Black Hawk. Biographer Clarice Stasz and others believe Londons father was astrologer William Chaney, Flora Wellman was living with Chaney in San Francisco when she became pregnant. Whether Wellman and Chaney were legally married is unknown, most San Francisco civil records were destroyed by the extensive fires that followed the 1906 earthquake, nobody knows what name appeared on her sons birth certificate. Stasz notes that in his memoirs, Chaney refers to Londons mother Flora Wellman as having been his wife, according to Flora Wellmans account, as recorded in the San Francisco Chronicle of June 4,1875, Chaney demanded that she have an abortion. When she refused, he disclaimed responsibility for the child and she was not seriously wounded, but she was temporarily deranged. After giving birth, Flora turned the baby over for care to Virginia Prentiss and she was a major maternal figure throughout Londons life. Late in 1876, Flora Wellman married John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran, the family moved around the San Francisco Bay Area before settling in Oakland, where London completed public grade school. He wrote to William Chaney, then living in Chicago, Chaney concluded by saying that he was more to be pitied than London. London was devastated by his fathers letter, in the following, he quit school at Berkeley. London was born near Third and Brannan Streets in San Francisco, the house burned down in the fire after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the California Historical Society placed a plaque at the site in 1953. Although the family was working class, it was not as impoverished as Londons later accounts claimed, in 1885, London found and read Ouidas long Victorian novel Signa. He credited this as the seed of his literary success, in 1886, he went to the Oakland Public Library and found a sympathetic librarian, Ina Coolbrith, who encouraged his learning. In 1889, London began working 12 to 18 hours a day at Hickmotts Cannery, seeking a way out, he borrowed money from his foster mother Virginia Prentiss, bought the sloop Razzle-Dazzle from an oyster pirate named French Frank, and became an oyster pirate
3.
Sinclair Lewis
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Harry Sinclair Lewis was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American capitalism and materialism between the wars and he is also respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H. L. Mencken wrote of him, there was ever a novelist among us with a call to the trade. It is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds and he has been honored by the U. S. Postal Service with a postage stamp in the Great Americans series. Born February 7,1885, in the village of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Sinclair Lewis began reading books at a young age and he had two siblings, Fred and Claude. His father, Edwin J. Lewis, was a physician, Lewiss mother, Emma Kermott Lewis, died in 1891. The following year, Edwin Lewis married Isabel Warner, whose company young Lewis apparently enjoyed, throughout his lonely boyhood, the ungainly Lewis—tall, extremely thin, stricken with acne and somewhat pop-eyed—had trouble gaining friends and pined after various local girls. At the age of 13 he unsuccessfully ran away from home, Lewis was also nonreligious and an atheist. In late 1902 Lewis left home for a year at Oberlin Academy to qualify for acceptance by Yale University, while at Oberlin, he developed a religious enthusiasm that waxed and waned for much of his remaining teenage years. Lewiss unprepossessing looks, fresh country manners and seemingly self-important loquacity made it difficult for him to win and keep friends at Oberlin and he did initiate a few relatively long-lived friendships among students and professors, some of whom recognized his promise as a writer. Lewiss earliest published creative work—romantic poetry and short sketches—appeared in the Yale Courant, after graduation Lewis moved from job to job and from place to place in an effort to make ends meet, write fiction for publication and to chase away boredom. While working for newspapers and publishing houses, he developed a facility for turning out shallow and he also earned money by selling plots to Jack London, including one for the latters unfinished novel The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. Lewiss first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane, a Tom Swift-style potboiler that appeared in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham. Sinclair Lewiss first serious novel, Our Mr. Wrenn, The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man, appeared in 1914, followed by The Trail of the Hawk, A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life and The Job. That same year saw the publication of another potboiler, The Innocents, A Story for Lovers. Free Air, another refurbished serial story, was published in 1919, in 1914 Lewis married Grace Livingston Hegger, an editor at Vogue magazine. They had one son, Wells Lewis, named after British author H. G. Wells, Wells Lewis was killed in action while serving in the U. S. Army in World War II during the rescue of the Lost Battalion in the Forêt de Champ in France. On May 14,1928, he married Dorothy Thompson, a newspaper columnist
4.
Edith Wharton
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Edith Wharton was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927,1928 and 1930, Wharton combined her insiders view of Americas privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her eras other literary and public figures, Edith Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones to George Frederic Jones and Lucretia Stevens Rhinelander at their brownstone at 14 West Twenty-third Street in New York City. She had two older brothers, Frederic Rhinelander, who was sixteen, and Henry Edward, who was eleven. She was baptized April 20,1862, Easter Sunday, at Grace Church, to her friends and family she was known as Pussy Jones. The saying keeping up with the Joneses is said to refer to her fathers family and she was also related to the Rensselaer family, the most prestigious of the old patroon families. She had a lifelong friendship with her Rhinelander niece, landscape architect Beatrix Farrand of Reef Point in Bar Harbor. Edith was born during the Civil War, she was three years old when the South surrendered, after the war, the family traveled extensively in Europe. From 1866 to 1872, the Jones family visited France, Italy, Germany, during her travels, the young Edith became fluent in French, German, and Italian. At the age of ten, she suffered from typhoid fever while the family was at a spa in the Black Forest, after the family returned to the United States in 1872, they spent their winters in New York and their summers in Newport, Rhode Island. While in Europe, she was educated by tutors and governesses and she rejected the standards of fashion and etiquette that were expected of young girls at the time, intended to enable women to marry well and to be displayed at balls and parties. She thought these requirements were superficial and oppressive, Edith wanted more education than she received, so she read from her fathers library and from the libraries of her fathers friends. Her mother forbade her to read novels until she was married, Edith began writing poetry and fiction as a young girl. She attempted to write a novel at age eleven and her first publication was a translation of the German poem, Was die Steine Erzählen by Heinrich Karl Brugsch, which earned her $50. Her family did not wish her name to appear in print because the names of upper class women of the time appeared in print to announce birth, marriage. Consequently, the poem was published under the name of a friends father and he was a cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson and supported womens education. He played a role in Ediths efforts to educate herself. In 1877, at the age of 15, she wrote a 30,000 word novella Fast
5.
American frontier
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Frontier refers to a contrasting region at the edge of a European-American line of settlement. American historians cover multiple frontiers but the folklore is focused primarily on the 19th century west of the Mississippi River. As defined by Hine and Faragher, frontier history tells the story of the creation and defense of communities, the use of the land, the development of markets, and the formation of states. They explain, It is a tale of conquest, but also one of survival, persistence, thus, Turners Frontier Thesis proclaimed the westward frontier as the defining process of American history. As the American frontier passed into history, the myths of the West in fiction and film took firm hold in the imagination of Americans, America is exceptional in choosing its iconic self-image. David Murdoch has said, No other nation has taken a time and place from its past, the frontier line was the outer line of European-American settlement. It moved steadily westward from the 1630s to the 1880s, Turner favored the Census Bureau definition of the frontier line as a settlement density of two people per square mile. The West was the settled area near that boundary. Thus, parts of the Midwest and American South, though no longer considered western, have a frontier heritage along with the western states. In the 21st century, however, the term American West is most often used for the area west of the Mississippi River, in the colonial era, before 1776, the west was of high priority for settlers and politicians. The American frontier began when Jamestown, Virginia was settled by the English in 1607, English, French, Spanish and Dutch patterns of expansion and settlement were quite different. Although French fur traders ranged widely through the Great Lakes and mid-west region they settled down. French settlement was limited to a few small villages such as Kaskaskia. They created a rural settlement in upstate New York. Areas in the north that were in the stage by 1700 generally had poor transportation facilities. The wealthy speculator, if one was involved, usually remained at home, the class of landless poor was small. Few artisans settled on the frontier except for those who practiced a trade to supplement their primary occupation of farming, there might be a storekeeper, a minister, and perhaps a doctor, and there were a number of landless laborers. However frontier areas of 1700 that had good river connections were transformed into plantation agriculture
6.
American Civil War
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The American Civil War was an internal conflict fought in the United States from 1861 to 1865. The Union faced secessionists in eleven Southern states grouped together as the Confederate States of America, the Union won the war, which remains the bloodiest in U. S. history. Among the 34 U. S. states in February 1861, War broke out in April 1861 when Confederates attacked the U. S. fortress of Fort Sumter. The Confederacy grew to eleven states, it claimed two more states, the Indian Territory, and the southern portions of the western territories of Arizona. The Confederacy was never recognized by the United States government nor by any foreign country. The states that remained loyal, including border states where slavery was legal, were known as the Union or the North, the war ended with the surrender of all the Confederate armies and the dissolution of the Confederate government in the spring of 1865. The war had its origin in the issue of slavery. The Confederacy collapsed and 4 million slaves were freed, but before his inauguration, seven slave states with cotton-based economies formed the Confederacy. The first six to declare secession had the highest proportions of slaves in their populations, the first seven with state legislatures to resolve for secession included split majorities for unionists Douglas and Bell in Georgia with 51% and Louisiana with 55%. Alabama had voted 46% for those unionists, Mississippi with 40%, Florida with 38%, Texas with 25%, of these, only Texas held a referendum on secession. Eight remaining slave states continued to reject calls for secession, outgoing Democratic President James Buchanan and the incoming Republicans rejected secession as illegal. Lincolns March 4,1861 inaugural address declared that his administration would not initiate a civil war, speaking directly to the Southern States, he reaffirmed, I have no purpose, directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the United States where it exists. I believe I have no right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. After Confederate forces seized numerous federal forts within territory claimed by the Confederacy, efforts at compromise failed, the Confederates assumed that European countries were so dependent on King Cotton that they would intervene, but none did, and none recognized the new Confederate States of America. Hostilities began on April 12,1861, when Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter, while in the Western Theater the Union made significant permanent gains, in the Eastern Theater, the battle was inconclusive in 1861–62. The autumn 1862 Confederate campaigns into Maryland and Kentucky failed, dissuading British intervention, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which made ending slavery a war goal. To the west, by summer 1862 the Union destroyed the Confederate river navy, then much of their western armies, the 1863 Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River. In 1863, Robert E. Lees Confederate incursion north ended at the Battle of Gettysburg, Western successes led to Ulysses S. Grants command of all Union armies in 1864
7.
Cosmopolitan (magazine)
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Cosmopolitan is an international fashion magazine for women. Often referred to as Cosmo, its content as of 2011 includes articles on issues, relationships, sex, health, careers, self-improvement, celebrities, fashion. Published by Hearst Corporation, Cosmopolitan has 64 international editions, is printed in 35 languages, Cosmopolitan began as a family magazine, launched in 1886 by Schlicht & Field of New York as The Cosmopolitan. There was also a department for the members of the family. Cosmopolitans circulation reached 25,000 that year, but by November 1888, John Brisben Walker acquired the magazine in 1889. That same year, he dispatched Elizabeth Bisland on a race around the world against Nellie Bly to draw attention to his magazine. Under John Brisben Walkers ownership, E. D. Walker, formerly with Harpers Monthly, took over as the new editor, introducing colour illustrations, serials and book reviews. It became a market for fiction, featuring such authors as Annie Besant, Ambrose Bierce, Theodore Dreiser, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Willa Cather. The magazines circulation climbed to 75,000 by 1892, in 1897, Cosmopolitan announced plans for a free correspondence school, No charge of any kind will be made to the student. All expenses for the present will be borne by the Cosmopolitan, No conditions, except a pledge of a given number of hours of study. When 20,000 immediately signed up, Walker could not fund the school, also in 1897, H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds was serialized, as was his The First Men in the Moon. Olive Schreiner contributed an article about the Boer War. And Colorado - New Tricks in an Old Game, Jack Londons novella, The Red One, was published in the October 1918 issue, and a constant presence from 1910-18 was Arthur B. Reeve, with 82 stories featuring Craig Kennedy, the scientific detective, Magazine illustrators included Francis Attwood, Dean Cornwell, Harrison Fisher, and James Montgomery Flagg. Hearst formed Cosmopolitan Productions, a company based in New York City from 1918 to 1923, then Hollywood until 1938. Cosmopolitan magazine was titled as Hearsts International Combined with Cosmopolitan from 1925 until 1952. In 1911, Hearst had bought a middling monthly magazine called World To-Day, in June 1914 it was shortened to Hearsts and was ultimately titled Hearsts International in May 1922. In order to spare serious cutbacks at San Simeon, Hearst merged the magazine Hearsts International with Cosmopolitan effective March 1925, after Hearst died in 1951, the Hearsts International disappeared from the magazine cover altogether in April 1952
8.
Booth Tarkington
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Newton Booth Tarkington was an American novelist and dramatist best known for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons and Alice Adams. He is one of only three novelists to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, along with William Faulkner, Booth Tarkington was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of John S. Tarkington and Elizabeth Booth Tarkington. He was named after his maternal uncle Newton Booth, then the governor of California and he was also related to Chicago Mayor James Hutchinson Woodworth through Woodworths wife Almyra Booth Woodworth. Tarkington first attended Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, but completed his education at Phillips Exeter Academy. He attended Purdue University for two years, where he was a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity and the universitys Morley Eating Club and he later made substantial donations to Purdue for building an all-mens residence hall, which the university named Tarkington Hall in his honor. Purdue awarded him an honorary doctorate, some of his familys wealth returned after the Panic of 1873, and his mother transferred Booth from Purdue to Princeton University. At Princeton, Tarkington is said to have known as Tark among his fellow Eating Club members. He was active as a student-actor and served as president of Princetons Dramatic Association, according to Triangles official history, Tarkington made his first acting appearance in the clubs Shakespearean spoof Katherine. This was one of the first three productions in the Triangles history that was written and produced by Princeton students, Tarkington established this Triangle tradition for productions of students plays, and it remains to the present day. Tarkington returned to the Triangle stage as Cassius in the 1893 production The Honorable Julius Caesar and he gained prominence that year at Princeton as a co-author of the play. In addition to his role as a member of The Triangle Club, he was also among the earliest members of the Ivy Club. He edited the Princetons Nassau Literary Magazine, known more recently as The Nassau Lit, while an undergraduate, he is known to have socialized with Woodrow Wilson, an associate graduate member of the Ivy Club. Wilson returned to Princeton as a member of the science faculty shortly before Tarkington matriculated. Tarkington failed to earn his degree of A. B. because of missing a single course in the classics. Nevertheless, his place within campus society was determined. In his adult life, he was asked to return to Princeton for the conferral of honorary degrees, an A. M. in 1899. The conferral of more than one honorary degree on an alumnus of Princeton University remains a university record, while Tarkington never earned a college degree, he was accorded many awards recognizing and honoring his skills and accomplishments as an author. He won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction twice, in 1919 and 1922, for his novels The Magnificent Ambersons, in 1921 booksellers rated him the most significant contemporary American author in a poll conducted by Publishers Weekly
9.
Shirley Temple
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Shirley Temple Black was an American actress, singer, dancer, businesswoman and diplomat who was most notable as Hollywoods number one box-office star from 1935 to 1938. As an adult, she was named United States ambassador to Ghana and to Czechoslovakia, Shirley Temple began her film career in 1932 at age 3. In 1934, she found fame in Bright Eyes, a feature film designed specifically for her talents. Licensed merchandise that capitalized on her image included dolls, dishes. Her box-office popularity waned as she reached adolescence and she appeared in a few films of varying quality in her mid-to-late teens, and retired from films in 1950 at the age of 22. Temple returned to business in 1958 with a two-season television anthology series of fairy tale adaptations. She made guest appearances on shows in the early 1960s. She sat on the boards of corporations and organizations including The Walt Disney Company, Del Monte Foods, in 1988, she published her autobiography, Child Star. Temple was the recipient of awards and honors, including the Kennedy Center Honors. She is 18th on the American Film Institutes list of the greatest female American screen legends of Classic Hollywood cinema, Shirley Temple was born on April 23,1928, in Santa Monica, California. She was the child of Gertrude Amelia Temple, a homemaker, and George Francis Temple. The family was of English, German, and Dutch ancestry and she had two brothers, George Francis, Jr. and John Stanley. The family moved to Brentwood, Los Angeles and her mother supported her young daughters singing, dancing, and acting talents, and in September 1931, enrolled her in Meglins Dance School in Los Angeles. About this time, her mother began styling her daughters hair in ringlets, while at Meglins, she was spotted by Charles Lamont, a casting director for Educational Pictures. Although Shirley hid behind the piano while in the studio, Lamont took a shine to her, invited her to audition, Educational Pictures were about to launch their Baby Burlesks, multiple short films satirizing recent film and political events, using preschool children in every role. Baby Burlesks was a series of one-reelers, another series of two-reelers called Frolics of Youth followed, with Shirley playing Mary Lou Rogers, to underwrite production costs at Educational, she and her child co-stars modeled for breakfast cereals and other products. She was lent to Tower Productions for a role in her first feature film in 1932 and, in 1933, to Universal, Paramount. After Educational Pictures declared bankruptcy in 1933, her father purchased her contract for $25, while walking out of the viewing of her last Frolics of Youth picture, Fox Film songwriter Jay Gorney saw the little girl dancing in the movie theater lobby
10.
Eleanor Roosevelt
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Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was an American politician, diplomat, and activist. President Harry S. Truman later called her the First Lady of the World in tribute to her human rights achievements, Roosevelt was a member of the prominent American Roosevelt and Livingston families and a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt. She had a childhood, having suffered the deaths of both parents and one of her brothers at a young age. At 15, she attended Allenwood Academy in London and was influenced by its feminist headmistress Marie Souvestre. Returning to the U. S. she married her fifth cousin once removed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, though widely respected in her later years, Roosevelt was a controversial First Lady at the time for her outspokenness, particularly her stance on racial issues. On a few occasions, she disagreed with her husbands policies. She launched a community at Arthurdale, West Virginia, for the families of unemployed miners. She advocated for expanded roles for women in the workplace, the rights of African Americans and Asian Americans. Following her husbands death in 1945, Roosevelt remained active in politics for the remaining 17 years of her life and she pressed the United States to join and support the United Nations and became its first delegate. She served as the first chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights, later she chaired the John F. Kennedy administrations Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. By the time of her death, Roosevelt was regarded as one of the most esteemed women in the world, in 1999, she was ranked ninth in the top ten of Gallups List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in 1884 at 56 West 37th Street in Manhattan, New York City, to socialites Elliott Bulloch Roosevelt, from an early age, she preferred to be called by her middle name, Eleanor. Through her father, she was a niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, through her mother, she was a niece of tennis champions Valentine Gill Vallie Hall III and Edward Ludlow Hall. Her mother nicknamed her Granny because she acted in such a manner as a child. Her mother was somewhat ashamed of Eleanors plainness. Eleanor had two brothers, Elliott Jr. and Gracie Hall Roosevelt, usually called Hall. She also had a brother, Elliott Roosevelt Mann, through her fathers affair with Katy Mann. Roosevelt was born into a world of wealth and privilege
11.
Cornelius Vanderbilt
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Cornelius Vanderbilt, also known informally as Commodore Vanderbilt, was an American business magnate and philanthropist who built his wealth in railroads and shipping. He is best known for building the New York Central Railroad, as one of the richest Americans in history and wealthiest figures overall, Vanderbilt was the patriarch of a wealthy, influential family. He provided the gift to found Vanderbilt University in Nashville. According to historian H. Roger Grant, Contemporaries, too, while Vanderbilt could be a rascal, combative and cunning, he was much more a builder than a wrecker. The Dutch van der was eventually added to Aertsons village name to van der Bilt. This was eventually condensed to Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt was born in Staten Island, New York on May 27,1794 to Cornelius van Derbilt and Phebe Hand. He began working on his fathers ferry in New York Harbor as a boy, at the age of 16, Vanderbilt decided to start his own ferry service. According to one version of events, he borrowed $100 from his mother to purchase a periauger, however, according to the first account of his life, published in 1853, the periauger belonged to his father and the younger Vanderbilt received half the profit. He began his business by ferrying freight and passengers between Staten Island and Manhattan, such was his energy and eagerness in his trade that other captains nearby took to calling him The Commodore in jest - a nickname that stuck with him all his life. While many Vanderbilt family members had joined the Episcopal Church, Cornelius Vanderbilt remained a member of the Moravian Church to his death, in fact, he, along with other members of the Vanderbilt family, helped erect a local Moravian parish church in his city. On December 19,1813, at age 19 Vanderbilt married his first cousin, Sophia Johnson, daughter of Nathaniel Johnson and they moved into a boarding house on Broad Street in Manhattan. But on November 24,1817, an entrepreneur named Thomas Gibbons asked Vanderbilt to captain his steamboat between New Jersey and New York. Although Vanderbilt kept his own businesses running, he became Gibbonss business manager, though both Livingston and Fulton had died by the time Vanderbilt started working for Gibbons, the monopoly was held by Livingstons heirs. They had granted a license to Aaron Ogden to run a ferry between New York and New Jersey, Gibbons launched his steamboat venture because of a personal dispute with Ogden, whom he hoped to drive into bankruptcy. To accomplish this, he undercut prices and also brought a legal case – Gibbons v. Ogden – to the United States Supreme Court to overturn the monopoly. Working for Gibbons, Vanderbilt learned to operate a large and complicated business and he moved with his family to New Brunswick, New Jersey, a stop on Gibbons line between New York and Philadelphia. There his wife Sophia operated a very profitable inn, using the proceeds to feed, clothe, Vanderbilt also proved a quick study in legal matters, representing Gibbons in meetings with lawyers. He also went to Washington, D. C. to hire Daniel Webster to argue the case before the Supreme Court, Vanderbilt appealed his own case against the monopoly to the Supreme Court, which was next on the docket after Gibbons v. Ogden
