The Miss America Pageant

It began in 1921 as a gimmick to attract tourists to Atlantic City, New Jersey, at the end of the summer season. 

Today, it is a national institution.  Millions watch on television each year as the judges’ decision is announced, a winner is crowned, and a tearful but radiant young woman walks down the runway to the strains of a familiar song, “Here she is, Miss America…”

The first Miss America, Margaret Gorman was just 16 years old when she won the contest in 1921.  In the early  days, the contestants often represented cities rather than states.  Not until 1959 was there a contestant from each state.  Originally just a swimsuit contest, the pageant later added a talent contest and interviews designed to reveal  the personalities and opinions of the women.

Beginning in 1945, winners received college scholarships along with other prizes.  The pageant became a truly national even in 1954, when television first beamed the show across the country. 

The Miss America Pageant has been criticized by people who feel that beauty contest are insulting to  women.   But supporters point out that the contest stresses intelligence and talent as well as beauty.  And the pageant  has survived the criticisims to win a lasting place in American popular culture.

The use of live animals in the Miss America talent competition was banned in 1940, afer Miss Montana and her horse almost fell off the stage.

Board Games

Whether they are set up on the kitchen table or spread out on the living-room floor, board games bring friends and families together. Although games like chess and checkers go back to ancient times, board games have only been around since the mid-1800s. that was when many Americans first began to have leisure time, and they looked for ways to fill it.


The first board game manufactured in the US was the “Mansion of Happiness,” an instant hit in 1843. Like many other board games of the 1800s, it taught a moral lesson: Landing on spaces representing good behavior sped players toward the finish line. iN the 1860s, Milton Bradley introduced a series of popular board games, including the “Checkered Game of Life” and a set of pocket games for Civil War soldiers.

Parcheesi, based on ancient Indian game, was America’s favorite from 1900 to 1930. The word game, Scrabble, introduced in the 1940s, is still popular today. But the most successful board game of all time remains Monopoly. It came out in 1935, during the Great Depression. Americans love this fantasy game, in which players buy and develop property while trying to force their opponents into bankruptcy.

Monopoly was based on a handmade board game designed by Lizzie Magie of Virginia in 1904. Pennsylvanian Charles Darrow adapted it in 1933. He became a millionaire when his version was later published by Parker Brothers.

P.T. Barnum

If you wanted to see a mermaid, a giant, or a bearded lady, P.T. Barnum would gladly grant your wish. During the 1800s, Barnum was one of America’s best-known showmen. He prided himself on being a master of the art of “humbug,” or fooling people.

Barnum’s show-business career began in New York City in 1835, when he exhibited an old woman whom he said was George Washington’s nurse. He claimed that she was 161 years old. Though Barnum’s story was false, people flocked to see the old woman anyway.

Later, Barnum opened his American Museum, where he displayed a variety of heavily publicized attractions, some real and many fake. Among the most popular attractions were Chang and Eng, Siamese twins joined at the waist, and a dancing midget who became famous as General Tom Thumb.

Barnum also presented genuinely talented performers, such as Jenny Lind, the Swedish singer. He sent her around the country on a successful concert tour. In 1871, Barnum launched a traveling circus that later featured Jumbo, which he claimed to be the world’s largest elephant.

Barnum’s circus merged with others owned by J.A.Bailey and the Ringling Brothers to form today’s Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, “the greatest show on earth.”

P.T. Barnum was elected to the Connecticut state legislature and also served a term as mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

M*A*S*H

On February 28, 1983, the biggest audience in television history watched the final episode of a beloved comedy series. That series was M*A*S*H, which ran for 11 years on CBS and is still seen in reruns around the world. All together there are 255 episodes of the show.

M*A*S*H tells the story of the doctors and nurses of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War. In many episodes, helicopters bring wounded soldiers to the M*A*S*H unit, where the surgeons and nurses care for them. To keep their sanity under grim circumstances, the M*A*S*H personnel break military rules and engage in a a constant stream of wisecracks, pranks, and loony activities. The show’s underlying message is that war is cruel and inhuman, but the human spirit cannot be extinguished. The fact that a real war was raging in Vietnam at the time of M*A*S*H’s debut made its message especially meaningful.

Among the shows memorable characters are Corporal Kinger, who wears women’s clothes in the hope that he will be sent home; “Hot Lips” Houlihan, the head nurse; and “Radar” O’Reilly, the farm boy who serves as the company clerk.

The heart of M*A*S*H is “Hawkeye” Pierce, a surgeon played by Alan Alda. His brash manner and practical jokes, combined with his compassion for people and hatred of war, are the center of a unique show that touches the heart while provoking laughter.

The Early Movies

In the early 1900s, all you needed was a projector, a sheet to use as a screen, some chairs, and an empty storefront. Then you could open up a “nickelodeon” and collect five cents apiece from all the people who wanted to see the newest form of popular entertainment, the movies.

The first movies, just a few minutes long, showed everyday scenes: a sneeze, a kiss, a train. But then the “flickers” began to tell stories. In 1903, crowds flocked to see the Great Train Robbery, which tells, in 12 minutes, the story of a gang of outlaws who rob a train and are then chased and gunned down by a posse. By 1908, there were more than 10,000 nickelodeons in the U.S. alone, serving more than 25 million customers each week. Movies grew longer and more ambitious. And ornate theaters called “picture palaces” were built to show the expensive dramatic epics created by D.W. Griffith and others.

People went to the movies for thrills and laughter. Audiences especially loved the slapstick comedies produced by Mack Sennett at the Keystone Studios in Hollywood beginning in 1912. Those films featured the wacky “Keystone Kops,” and always included a wild chase during which everything that could go wrong did. Audiences didn’t care that the films were silent; they often laughed too loud to hear dialogue.

Charlie Chaplin, the great comedian began his career in Sennett’s Keystone comedies.

Roots

When Alex Haley was a child, his grandmother told him wondrous stories about his family. The stories had been passed down orally from generation to generation for almost 200 years. The “furtherest-back-person” in those stories was Toby, “the African,”, whose real name was “Kin-tay.”

Many years later, Haley began a quest to trace his family’s history back to its African beginnings. Roots, the 1976 book about what he found, was a best-seller. And the following first part of the book made television history. It was watched by more than half of all Americans, many of whom came to understand for the first time the heroic struggle of African-Americans to regain their freedom.

Roots begins in 1750 in Gambia in West Africa. There Haley’s ancestor, Kunta Kinte---Toby, the African, in Haley’s grandmother’s stories---is captured by slave traders and shipped to America in chains. The miniseries then follows seven generations of the Haley family through a century of slavery. It concludes with their emacipation after the Civil War.

Roots won nine Emmy Awards. Its final episode was the highest-rated television program up to that time. And it inspired many Americans of all ethnic backgrounds to search for their own roots.

A second miniseries, Roots, the Next Generation, was aired in 1979. Based on the second half of Haley’s book, it continued the Haley family saga through the 1960s.

Irving Berlin

In an amazing life that stretched for 101 years, Irving Berlin wrote some 1,500 songs. His melodies, sometimes simple and sentimental, other times stirring and swinging, had a profound effect on 20th-century American music. Many of his songs---White Christmas, and God Bless America to name just two---have become American standards.

Born Israel Balin, Berlin was the youngest of eight children. He and his family moved to New York City from Russia when he was five years old. Not long after the move, young Irving left school to earn money by singing on street corners and in saloons. As a teenager, Irving Berlin earned a dollar a day as a singing waiter. At the age of 20, he was hired as a songwriter in a vaudeville theater. Three days later, he wrote his first hit, Alexander’s Ragtime Band.
During World War I, while serving as an infantryman, Berlin wrote the rousing God Bless America. During World War II his armed-services show, This Is the Army, became a hit movie, earned him the Medal of Merit, and forever associated him with patriotic music.

Berlin also made an everlasting mark on America’s holiday traditions with songs like White Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Easter Parade. His numerous stage musicals include the Broadway hit Annie Get Your Gun.

A Chorus Line

In the words of one of its songs A Chorus Line caused "one singular sensation" when it opened on Broadway in 1975. Critics hailed it as one of the American musical theater's supreme achievements, and audiences agreed. The show ran for 15 years and 6,137 performances, making it the longest running show in Broadway history.


A Chorus Line was created by director and choreographer Michael Bennett, who was inspired by true-life stories told him by a group of Broadway dancers. Bennett developed the show at New York's nonprofit Public Theater, and then took it to Broadway.


A Chorus Line revolves around an audition at which 17 dancers compete for eight spots in the chorus line of a new musical. Through song and dance, the dancers tell about their lives, their dreams, and their deepest fears.


The show had no stars. The scenery consisted only of a mirrored rear wall, and the cast was dressed in work clothes for most of the show. Even though the production was simple, the emotional impact was tremendous. At the end of the show, eight dancers win jobs. They are overjoyed, as is the audience.


A Chorus Line earned more than $250 million during its 15-year run. It won the Pulitzer Prize and nine Tony Awards.

Charlie Chaplin

Baggy pants, a tight coat, and huge shoes covered his small, agile body. He wore a toothbrush mustache on his upper lip. A derby hat perched jauntily atop his head, and he twirled a bamboo cane. This was Charlie Chaplin, playing the "Little Tramp", the comic yet tragic hero of dozens of silent films. He was, as Chaplin described him, "a tramp, a gentleman. a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure," but "not above picking up cigarette butts or robbing a baby of its candy."

Born in England, where he bacame a successful music-hall performer, Chaplin began his film career in Hollywood in 1913. He introduced the Little Tramp in his second short movie. By 1917, Chaplin had become so popular around the world that he was offered the then huge sum of $1 million to make eight films. He went on to cofound his own studio, making feature films that won wide acclaim. In fact, Charlie Chaplin wrote, directed, produced, and acted in his feature films. He even wrote the music for some of them.

One memorable scene in The Gold Rush, made in 1925, is a good example of Chaplin's genius. The Little Tramp is starving, and no food is available. So he cooks his shoes and eats them as as if they are a delicious dinner, twirling the shoelaces with his fork like spaghetti. The scene is hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time.

Mark Twain

Mark Twain once defined a classic as “a book that people praise but don’t read.” But he was wrong where his own works were concerned. Although undeniably classics, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are read by generation after generation of delighted readers.

Twain’s books about boyhood on the Mississippi River were written in part from his own experience. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, he grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and later worked as a riverboat pilot. He chose “Mark Twain” as his pen name because that was the phrase rivermen yelled out to indicate that the river was two fathoms deep---deep enough for riverboats.

Before he took the pen name of Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens used such other names as Sergeant Fathom, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, and W. Epaminandos Adrastus Blab.

After working as a miner and a journalist in the West, Twain turned full-time to writing and lecturing. No one else wrote with such a sharp ear for American speech or with such wonderful humor. His many books---including A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Pudd’nhead Wilson, and Roughing It---added to his fame and wealth. He later lost his money in bad business ventures, but managed to repay his debts. His reputation as a uniquely American genius has grown brighter with time.

Fisk Jubilee Singers

“The magic of their song kept thrilling hearts,” the African-American leader W.E.B. Du Bois said of the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University.

The “Jubilees” were the first choral group to perform slave spirituals such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” for white audiences. Their thrilling concerts made them world famous in the 1870s.

The first “Jubilees” were nine students at Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee. Fisk had been founded in 1866 to educate former slaves, and in 1871, George L. White, Fisk’s treasurer, organized the choral group. The Jubilees’ concerts were so popular in Nashville that White thought they might help the school with the financial troubles that plagued its early years. He took the Jubilees on a national tour, which was a great success. Mark Twain, the famous author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, said, “I think that in the Jubliees and their songs America has produced most perfect flower of the ages.” The chorus toured American and Europe for several years and raised $150,000, an enormous sum in those days.

England’s Queen Victoria was so delighted by the Jubilee Singers that she commissioned a painting of the choral group.

The Fisk Jubliee Singers still rank among the nation’s top choral groups. The university invites all students to audition for the group. But it cautions that “only the finest voices on campus are chosen.”

You can learn more here.

The Murder of Selena

She was only 23, and on the verge of superstardom. But in March, 1995, the Mexican-American singing star known as Selena was murdered by the former president of her fan club. Thousands of shocked fans mourned the death of the talented young performer who had popularized Tejano music, a fast-paced blend of Mexican folk music and American pop.

Selena, whose full name was Selena Quintanilla Perez, was by far the biggest Tejano star. Her Selena Live recording won a 1994 Grammy Award as best Mexican-American albulm. And at the beginning of 1995, she seemed close to achieving her goal of reaching a wider audience. She had recorded her first English-language albulm just before her death.

Yolanda Saldivar, the woman who killed Selena, had managed a clothing boutique owned by Selena’s family, but she was fired after being suspected of taking money from the store. On March 31, 1995, she arranged to meet Selena at a motel in Corpus Christi, Texas. When the singer arrived, Saldivar pulled out a gun and shot her. Saldivar claimed that the gun went off accidentally, but she was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Selena’s album Dreaming of You was released after her death. It became the first albulm by a Latin artist to top the popular-music chart.

Ocean Liners

You spend the day soaking up the sun, swimming in the pool, and playing shuffleboard. Then you join friends in the “Garden Lounge,” where tea is served among the towering palm trees and Greek statues. After changing into formal clothes in your stateroom, you make your way along the thickly carpeted corridors to the main dining room, where you have been invited to be a guest at the captain’s table. After a superb dinner, you dance to the romantic music of the ship’s orchestra.


No form of transportation has ever been more glamorous than the ocean liners that carried passengers between the U.S. and Europe. They heyday of those “floating palaces” was from 1900 to 1940. Aboard such ships as the Aquitania (which carried 4,000 passengers), the Normandie (pictured here), and the Queen Elizabeth, those who could afford the passage were treated like royalty. In 1912, the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank, killing 1,500 people. But on most crossings, seasickness was the only peril. During World War II many of the huge liners were used as troop transports. After the war, new ships like the United States kept transatlantic service alive. But gradually jet aircraft, which were faster and cheaper, replaced the queens of the sea. Today, ocean liners are used mainly for pleasure cruises.


In 1952, the United States won an award for the fastest ocean crossing: 3 days, 10 hours, and 40 minutes from New York to England.

The Merger of Disney and ABC

Suddenly, TV personalities such as Roseanne and Barbara Walters were members of the same family as America’s favorite cartoon characters. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. It happened in July, 1995, when the Walt Disney Company announced it would buy Capital Cities/ABC. This merger would make Disney the world’s largest entertainment company. And the price Disney would pay---$19 billion---would make the deal the second-biggest corporate takeover in U.S. history.


A change in federal rules in 1995 had opened the way for the two companies to merge. Before then, the government had permitted companies either to produce TV programs or to broadcast them---not both. The ideas to keep any one company or person from having too much control over TV and radio. Disney had been mainly a producer of movies and TV shows, though it also owned theme parks and a cable TV channel. Capital Cities had been mainly a broadcaster. It owned ABC, the TV network, as well as a number of TV and radio stations.


Some people were concerned that, with control of ABC, Disney would load the airwaves with its own shows. But to business leaders, the two companies seemed to be a perfect match. Investors agreed: Prices of both companies’stock shot way up with the news of the merger.


A day after the Disney-ABC deal, Westinghouse Electric Corporation announced that it would buy CBS TV network for $5.4 billion.