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 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 has a collection of over 2,500 works of European, Asian and American art, including paintings, sculpture, tapestries, and decorative arts. It frequently hosts exhibits of historic and contemporary art. In 1896, Isabella Stewart Gardner hired architect Willard T. Sears to design the museum. The museum was established in 1903 by Isabella Stewart Gardner , a wealthy patron of the arts. It is housed in a building designed to evoke the Venetian Palazzo Barbaro. It is a common misconception that the building was brought to America from Venice and reconstructed. It was built from the ground up in Boston out of new materials, incorporating numerous architectural fragments from European Gothic and Renaissance structures. The antique elements are seamlessly worked into the design of the turn-of-the-century building.
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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. 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. The Copley Square building was notable for its large-scale use of architectural terra cotta in the United States.
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The Old State House is a historic legislative 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 first elected legislature in the New World. It is now operated by the Bostonian Society, Boston's historical society. It is one of many historic landmarks that can be visited along the Freedom Trail. Today's brick Old State House was built in 1712-1713, possibly designed by Robert Twelves; the previous building, the wooden Town House of 1657, had burned in the fire of 1711. The building has been altered and restored several times. The interior was rebuilt in 1748, after fire in 1747 . Alterations in a Greek Revival style in 1830 by Isaiah Rogers adapted it for use by the city. The building was damaged by fire in 1832. In 1881-1882, restorations were conducted by George A. Clough. Since 1904, the subway has occupied part of the building's basement. Restoration occurred again in 1907, by Joseph Everett Chandler.
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Boston Athenæum is one of the oldest independent libraries in the United States. It is also one of only sixteen extant membership libraries,... meaning that patrons pay a yearly subscription fee to use the Athenaeum's services. The institution was founded in 1807 by the Anthology Club of Boston, Massachusetts. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “athenaeum” as: Just as a museum is a place for the muses who inspire art, so an athenaeum is a place for Athena, the goddess of wisdom who inspires intellectual pursuits. In 1803, a young Harvard graduate by the name of Phineas Adams established the magazine The Monthly Anthology, or Magazine of Polite Literature. Adams left the New England area in 1804, having insufficient funds to continue the periodical; however, the printers Munroe and Francis convinced other young men to contribute to and continue the magazine under the new title of The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review. By 1805, these young men founded the Anthology Society. The Boston Athenæum was founded in 1807 by members of the Anthology Society, literary individuals who began with a plan to have a reading room.
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Virgil Thomson was an American composer and critic from Kansas City, Missouri. 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 . Thomson displayed an extraordinary intelligence at an early age. As a child, he befriended Alice Smith, granddaughter of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon faith. He attended Harvard University, and his tours of Europe with the Harvard Glee Club helped nurture his desire to return there. He eventually studied with Nadia Boulanger and became a fixture of "Paris in the twenties." His most important friend from this period was Gertrude Stein, who was an artistic collaborator and mentor to him.
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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". She 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. 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.
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Ben Foster is an American actor. His film roles include Liberty Heights, Get Over It, Hostage, X-Men: The Last Stand, Alpha Dog, 30 Days of Night,... The Messenger 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 and Steven Foster. In an interview, Foster described his parents as "free-spirited, Vietnam-protesting hippies". Foster is Jewish, and his paternal grandmother emigrated from Russia to escape Pogroms in 1923. 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 burglarized while they were present. He has practiced Transcendental Meditation since he was four years old and while living in Fairfield Iowa, he 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. Foster dropped out of high school and moved to Los Angeles to pursue his career.
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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. 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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Uma Karuna Thurman is a U.S. actress. She has performed in leading roles in a variety of films, ranging from romantic comedies and dramas, to... science fiction and action movies. She is best known for her work under the direction of Quentin Tarantino. Her most popular films include Dangerous Liaisons , Pulp Fiction , Gattaca and Kill Bill . Thurman's mother, Nena von Schlebrügge, was a model born in Mexico City in 1941 to German Friedrich Karl Johannes von Schlebrügge, and Swedish Birgit Holmquist, from Trelleborg, who in 1930 modelled for a nude statue that overlooks the harbor of Smygehuk. Thurman's mother was introduced to LSD guru Timothy Leary by Salvador Dalí and became Leary's third wife in 1964. She wed Thurman's father Robert Alexander Farrar Thurman in 1967. He was born in New York City to Elizabeth Dean Farrar, a stage actress, and Beverly Reid Thurman, Jr., an Associated Press editor and United Nations translator. A professor at Columbia University of Tibetan Buddhism, he was the first Westerner to be ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk.
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Albert Sacco, Jr. is an American astronaut and chemical engineer who flew as the 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. He is currently the George A. Snell Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Northeastern University. He is also 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. The 16-day mission aboard Columbia focused on materials science, biotechnology, combustion science, and fluid mechanics contained within the pressurized Spacelab module.
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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 a 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. Thomas made her acting debut in 1988 as 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. 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. In 1993, she won the role of Myra Monkhouse on the long-running sitcom Family Matters.
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Allen Clayton Hoskins was an American child actor, most famous for portraying the character of Farina in the Our Gang short films from 1922 to 1931.... Born in Boston, Hoskins was just one year old when his tenure with Our Gang began. His character stayed in the series through the silent years and the transition to talking pictures, and left the series in 1931 at the age of eleven. With his pigtailed hair and patchy outfits, Farina resembled a pickaninny in the tradition of the character Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin, but as the character became more popular, and as Allen Hoskins got older, Farina developed his own personality separate from that of Topsy. The name "Farina", derived from a type of cereal, was chosen because its gender was ambiguous: as a toddler, Farina was portrayed as both a boy and a girl , much to the puzzlement of movie audiences. During his time in the gang, Farina became both the series' anchor and its most popular character. While he was not the first black child actor , Farina became arguably the first black child star.
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Madeline Kahn was a Massachusetts-born actress, known primarily for her comedic roles. Director Mel Brooks — who directed her in four films... — said of her: "She is one of the most talented people that ever lived I mean, either in stand-up comedy, or acting, or whatever you want, you can't beat Madeline Kahn." Kahn was born Madeline Gail Wolfson in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of Paula Kahn and Bernard Wolfson, who was a garment manufacturer. She was raised in a non-observant Jewish family. Her parents divorced when Kahn was two, and Kahn and her mother moved to New York City. Several years later, both of her parents remarried and gave Kahn two half-siblings: Jeffrey and Robyn . In 1948, Kahn was sent to a progressive boarding school in Pennsylvania and stayed there until 1952. During that time, her mother pursued her acting dream. Kahn soon began acting herself and performed in a number of school productions. In 1960, she graduated from Martin Van Buren High School in Queens, where she earned a drama scholarship to Hofstra University. At Hofstra, she studied drama, music, and speech therapy.
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Roland Winters was an American actor who portrayed Charlie Chan in six films. Born Roland Winternitz in Boston, Massachusetts on 22 December 1904,... Winters was the son of Felix Winternitz, a violinist and composer who was teaching at New England Conservatory of Music. In his teens he began appearing in productions from local theater groups around Boston and made his Broadway debut in 1924 in "The Firebrand." In 1931 he became the sports announcer for the Braves and Red Sox games on the radio station WNAC. He had a few uncredited film roles in the 1940s , but continued to work in radio until 1947. Sidney Toler, who took over the Charlie Chan role from Warner Oland, bought the screen rights to the Chan character and brought the series to Monogram Pictures. Toler died in 1947, practically in harness; despite terminal illness, he kept going in the series as long as he could. Monogram decided on Roland Winters as Toler's replacement.
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