More than a century before Roger Federer and Andre Agassi faced off in the U.S Open tennis finals in New York, players were donning fancier attire and taking to the courts of Newport to compete in championship matches. The earliest incarnation of the tournament, then known as the U.S. National Champ[...]
Archive for the ‘America’ Category
June 5th, 2010 - 1:43 pm § in America, Amusements
Rhode Island exhibit focuses on Newport’s ties to tennis
The Black Elite in America
Washington D.C. was both the capitol of the United States, but also the black elite. It was in this city, which was built with the labor of thousands of African-Americans, to which the beacon lights of the nation drew like moths to a flame. The “colored elite” of the capitol centered aro[...]
Your Huddled Masses Yearning to Breathe Free: Ellis Island
Gilded Age America saw not only a boom in millionaires, but a boom in immigration. During this era, approximately 10 million immigrants entered the United States, hungry for religious freedom and greater prosperity. The most striking of these immigrants were Eastern European Jews fleeing the bruta[...]
July 29th, 2009 - 6:00 am § in America, Amusements
American Resorts: Newport
Newport, known as the Queen of Resorts, or as Elizabeth Drexel Lehr stated ironically in her memoirs: “the very Holy and Holies, the playground of the great ones of the earth from which all intruders were ruthlessly excluded,” was transformed each summer for the sole and very conspicuous[...]
The Edwardian Publishing Industry
Much as today, the publishing industry of the Edwardian era wrestled with such familiar issues as distribution, declining interest in reading, literary fiction versus “trash” for the masses, competition for bookstores from cheap editions & used book sales, and the eternal assumption [...]
The Cakewalk
The Cakewalk had its origins in slavery. Peering through the windows at the spectacles hosted by white planters, enslaved blacks would then prance and preen in imitation of whites at their own dances, using exaggerated movements, curtsys and bows to and adopting “high-toned” clothing to [...]
January 23rd, 2009 - 12:05 am § in African American, America, Heads of State, Men, Scandal, Washington D.C.
The Man Who Came to Dinner
“Booker T. Washington, the well known negro educator and President of the Tuskegee, Ala. institute , was a guest of President Roosevelt and Mrs. Roosevelt at dinner at the white house tonight.” It was a day like any other when the White House Social Calendar, a regular column in the news[...]
Social Washington
The issue of “society” created much embarrassment in the formative years of the Government. America had been founded as a democracy, yet to operate smoothly, there existed social and official rankings between Americans and foreign diplomats. Having no cabinet to whom he could turn for ad[...]
