Boston

The Mapparium is a three-story tall glass globe of stained glass that is viewed from a 30-foot-long bridge through its interior. It is a unique... exhibit at the Christian Science Plaza in Boston, Massachusetts. Located with a few other exhibits in The Mary Baker Eddy Library for the Betterment of Humanity, a non-religious public museum and library, the globe is illuminated from the exterior so that the details of its construction can be easily seen. Built in 1935 and based upon Rand McNally political maps published the previous year, the Mapparium shows the political world as it was at that time, including such long-disused labels as Italian East Africa and Siam, as well as more-recently defunct political entities such as the Soviet Union. In 1939, 1958, and 1966 the Church considered updating the map, but rejected it on the basis of cost and the special interest it holds as an historical artifact. In the 1930s the Christian Science Monitor was a successful newspaper and Christian Science Church officials wanted a suitably impressive addition to the new Christian Science Publishing Company headquarters.
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The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum or Fenway Court, as the museum was known during Isabella Stewart Gardner's lifetime, is a museum in the... Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, located within walking distance of the Museum of Fine Arts and near the Back Bay Fens. The museum houses an art collection of world importance, including significant examples of European, Asian, and American art, from paintings and sculpture to tapestries and decorative arts. It is the only private art collection in which the building, collection, and installations are the creation of one individual. Today, the museum hosts exhibitions of historic and contemporary art, as well as concerts, lectures, family and community programs, and changing courtyard displays. In honor of its founder, the museum offers free admission and occasional special events for anyone named Isabella. And as of January 1, 2009, everyone receives free admission to the museum on his or her birthday. The museum was established in 1903 by Isabella Stewart Gardner , an American art collector, philanthropist, and patron of the arts.
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The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, is one of the largest museums in the United States, attracting over one million visitors a year. It... contains over 450,000 works of art, making it one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas. It is also the 54th most visited art museum in the world, as of 2010. The museum was founded in 1870 and its current location dates to 1909. In addition to its curatorial undertakings, the museum is affiliated with an art academy, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and a sister museum, the Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in Nagoya, Japan. The current director of the museum is Malcolm Rogers. The Museum was founded in 1870 and opened in 1876, with a large portion of its collection taken from the Boston Athenaeum Art Gallery. Francis Davis Millet was instrumental in starting the Art School attached to the Museum and getting Emil Otto Grundmann appointed as its first director. Originally located in a highly ornamented brick Gothic Revival building designed by John Hubbard Sturgis and Charles Brigham, located on Copley Square in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston.
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USS Cassin Young , a Fletcher-class destroyer, was a ship of the United States Navy named for Captain Cassin Young , who was awarded the Medal of... Honor for his heroism at Pearl Harbor and killed in the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal. Cassin Young was launched 12 September 1943 by Bethlehem Steel Corp., San Pedro, California; sponsored by Mrs. C. Young; and commissioned 31 December 1943, Commander E. T. Schrieber in command. After serving in World War II, including the Battle of Leyte and the Battle of Okinawa, Cassin Young continued in active service until 1960. She is preserved today as a memorial ship, berthed at Boston Navy Yard in Boston, Massachusetts, across from the USS Constitution. Cassin Young arrived at Pearl Harbor 19 March 1944 to complete her training before sailing on to Manus, where she joined the massive Fast Carrier Task Force .
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The Old State House is a historic government building located at the intersection of Washington and State Streets in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.... Built in 1713, it is the oldest surviving public building in Boston, and the seat of the state's legislature until 1798. It is now a history museum operated by the Bostonian Society, a nonprofit whose primary focus is the museum. It is one of many historic landmarks that can be visited along the Freedom Trail. Today's brick Old State House was built in 1712–13, possibly designed by Robert Twelves; the previous building, the wooden Town House of 1657, had burned in the fire of 1711. One notable feature of the building was the pair of seven-foot tall wooden figures depicting a lion and a unicorn; The Lion and the Unicorn are symbols of the British monarchy. The building housed a Merchant's Exchange on the first floor and warehouses in the basement. On the second floor, the east side contained the Council Chamber of the Royal Governor while the west end of the second floor contained chambers for the Courts of Suffolk County and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
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Virgil Thomson was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music. He has been... described as a modernist, a neoclassicist, a composer of "an Olympian blend of humanity and detachment" whose, "expressive voice was always carefully muted," until his late opera Lord Byron which, in contrast to all his previous work, exhibited an emotional content that rises to, "moments of real passion", and a neoromantic. Virgil Thomson was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He displayed an extraordinary intelligence at an early age. As a child, he befriended Alice Smith, great-granddaughter of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon faith. After World War I, he entered Harvard University thanks to a loan from Dr. Fred M. Smith, the president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and father of Alice Smith. His tours of Europe with the Harvard Glee Club helped nurture his desire to return there. At Harvard, Thomson focused his studies on the piano work of Erik Satie. He studied in Paris on fellowship for a year, and after graduating, lived in Paris from 1925–1940.
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Lorna Thayer was an American character actress. Thayer was born in Boston, the daughter of silent screen actress Louise Gibney. She appeared often... in theatre and on television. In 1955 she played in The Beast with a Million Eyes with Paul Birch. She played minor roles in the films The Lusty Men, Texas City and Frankie and Johnny. It was her role in the iconic 1970 film Five Easy Pieces as the waitress who refuses to allow Jack Nicholson's character to order a side of wheat toast that she is most likely to be remembered for and identified with. The scene has come to be known as the "chicken salad scene". Thayer died at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Retirement Home in Woodland Hills, California aged 86, after battling Alzheimer's disease for five years.
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Peter Gerety is an American actor. Gerety began acting while a student at Boston University, participating in productions at the Charles Playhouse.... In 1965, he joined the Trinity Square Repertory Company, a resident theater company in Providence, Rhode Island where he appeared in over 125 productions. Gerety is a veteran of stage, screen and television. In early 1992, he performed to critical acclaim on Broadway in Conversations with My Father, starring Judd Hirsch, and in Harold Pinter's The Hothouse. He has since performed in many more plays both on and off-broadway, most recently in Martin McDonagh's " The Lieutenant of Inishmore". In the late 1990s, he joined the cast of the Barry Levinson produced NBC police drama Homicide: Life on the Street. Gerety has also been a regular guest star on Law & Order and HBO’s The Wire as Judge Daniel Phelan. He also played FBI Agent Franklin Morgan in the short-lived American television series Life on Mars. In the final season of Brotherhood , he played the corrupt land developer, Martin Kilpatrick. Most recently , Peter has been seen recurring on both Mercy and Brothers and Sisters.
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Ben Foster is an American actor. His film roles include The Laramie Project, Liberty Heights, Get Over It, Hostage, X-Men: The Last Stand, Alpha... Dog, 30 Days of Night, The Messenger, Bang Bang You're Dead and Pandorum. He received best supporting actor nominations from both the Saturn and Satellite Awards for his 2007 role in the film 3:10 to Yuma. Foster was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of restaurant owners Gillian Kirwan and Steven Foster. He has described his parents as "free-spirited, Vietnam-protesting hippies". He has a younger brother, Jon, who is also an actor. When Foster was four years old, his family relocated to Fairfield, Iowa, after their Boston home was burgled while they were present. Foster was raised in his father's Jewish religion. His paternal grandmother emigrated from Russia to escape pogroms in 1923. Foster has practiced Transcendental Meditation since he was four years old and, while living in Fairfield, attended the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment, which included Transcendental Meditation in its curriculum. Foster began working as an actor when he was sixteen years old.
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Raymond Griffith was one of the great silent movie comedians. Griffith was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He lost his voice at an early age, causing... him to speak for the rest of his life in a hoarse whisper. Griffith claimed that it was the result of his having to scream at the top of his lungs every night in a stage melodrama as a child actor—others have stated that a childhood disease was more likely the cause. Although a few comedy films of his are considered classics he is almost totally forgotten today. His film debut was for the L-KO Kompany. Many of his starring feature films have long since been lost, but probably the best known of his films today is Hands Up!, a 1926 Civil War comedy feature directed by Clarence G. Badger, and co-starring Mack Swain, which was entered into the National Film Registry in 2005. Also considered a classic is Badger's Paths to Paradise, a caper film that is in all circulating prints missing its final reel. Like many silent comedians, he had a traditional costume; his was a top hat, white tie and tails, often augmented by a cape and/or walking stick.
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John Enos III is an American actor, known for the role of Bobby Marsino in the soap opera The Young and the Restless from 2003 to 2005. Enos' other... screen credits include guest roles on NYPD Blue, Sex and the City , Melrose Place and Murder, She Wrote. He was a fashion model briefly in the 1990s modeling for Boss Models and a friend of supermodel Cindy Crawford. He is currently married to Jennie Lee.
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Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of... science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and a University Professor at Tufts University. Dennett is a firm atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement. Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism," along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut. When he was five, his mother took him back to Massachusetts after his father died in an unexplained plane crash. His sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.
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Uma Karuna Thurman is an American actress and model. She has performed in leading roles in a variety of films, ranging from romantic comedies and... dramas to science fiction and action movies. Among her best-known roles are those in the Quentin Tarantino films Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill. In 2002 she won a Golden Globe Award for her performance in Hysterical Blindness. Thurman was born in Boston to Nena von Schlebrügge and Robert Thurman, and grew up mostly in Amherst, Massachusetts and Woodstock, New York. Her father gave his children a Buddhist upbringing, and she is named after an Dbuma Chenpo . Regarding religion, she now calls herself agnostic. She has three brothers, Ganden , Dechen , and Mipam , and a half-sister named Taya , from her father's previous marriage. She and her siblings spent time in Almora, Uttarakhand, India, during childhood, and the Dalai Lama sometimes visited their home.
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Becky DelosSantos is an American model and actress. She was chosen as Playboy's Playmate of the Month in April, 1994 and has appeared in several Playboy videos.

Albert Sacco, Jr. is an American chemical engineer who flew as a Payload Specialist on the Space Shuttle Columbia on shuttle mission STS-73 in 1995.... Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Sacco completed a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from Northeastern University in Boston in 1973, and then a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. He then joined the faculty of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, becoming a full professor and rising to department head in 1989. Sacco accepted the position of Dean of the Edward E. Whitacre Jr. College of Engineering at Texas Tech University, effective January 1, 2011. He currently serves in this role. He formerly was the George A. Snell Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Northeastern University. He is was Director of the Center for Advanced Microgravity Materials Processing. Sacco flew as a payload specialist on STS-73, which launched on October 20, 1995, and landed at the Kennedy Space Center on November 5, 1995.
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Christa McAuliffe was an American teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, and was one of the seven crew members killed in the Space Shuttle Challenger... disaster. She received her bachelor's degree in education and history from Framingham State College in 1970, and also a Master of Arts from Bowie State University in 1978. She took a teaching post as a social studies teacher at Concord High School in New Hampshire in 1982. In 1985, McAuliffe was selected from more than 11,000 applicants to participate in the NASA Teacher in Space Project and was scheduled to become the first teacher in space. As a member of mission STS-51-L, she was planning to conduct experiments and teach two lessons from Space Shuttle Challenger. On January 28, 1986, the spacecraft disintegrated 73 seconds after launch. After her death, schools and scholarships were named in her honor, and also in 2004 she was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor.
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Michelle Thomas was an American actress. She was best known for her roles as Justine Phillips on the NBC sitcom The Cosby Show, and as Myra... Monkhouse on the ABC/CBS sitcom Family Matters. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Thomas grew up in Montclair, New Jersey and was an alumna of West Essex High School. She was the daughter of Phynjuar Thomas, a stage actress, and Dennis Thomas a member of music group Kool & the Gang. In 1984, Thomas was crowned Miss Talented Teen New Jersey in Hal Jackson's Talented Teen Competition. The following year, she competed in the international pageant and won the title of International Queen. In 1988, Thomas played Justine Phillips, the girlfriend of Theo Huxtable on The Cosby Show. She later appeared on various television programs during the late 1980s and 1990s including A Man Called Hawk and Thea. She had a role on the TV movie, Dream Date in 1989. In 1991, Thomas had a small role in comedy Hangin' with the Homeboys. Thomas also appeared in music videos for Mint Condition, Dru Hill and Chubb Rock.
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