Missouri

The Centennial Bridge is a through arch bridge road bridge over the Missouri River connecting Leavenworth, Kansas and Platte County, Missouri.... Constructed in 1955, it was initially a toll bridge. The bridge opened in 1955, a year after Leavenworth celebrated its centennial as the first city incorporated in Kansas. It is a two-span arch bridge connecting K-92 and Missouri Route 92. Its main span is 419.8 feet with a total length of 2,571.2 feet. During the construction a spur of Route 45 called the "Leavenworth cutoff" was built to speed traffic to Kansas City, Missouri. The two-mile spur is still maintained by the city of Leavenworth even though the highway is in Missouri. Resurface construction began on May 2, 2011 which allowed for one-lane-at-a-time crossing of the bridge. Construction was expected to extend until early December, 2011 at a cost to MoDOT of approximatley $4 million and includes some structural member replacement, resurfacing and re-painting. However, on July 1, 2011, the construction was suspended indefinitely in reaction to increased traffic congestion in the area due the 2011 Missouri River floods.
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The Fox Theatre, a former movie palace, is a performing arts center located at 527 N. Grand Blvd. in St. Louis, Missouri. Also known as "The Fabulous... Fox", it is situated in the arts district of the Grand Center area in Midtown St. Louis, one block north of Saint Louis University. It opened in 1929 and was completely restored in 1982. The Fox was built in 1929 by movie pioneer William Fox as a showcase for the films of the Fox Film Corporation and elaborate stage shows. It was one of a group of five spectacular Fox Theatres built by Fox in the late 1920s. When the theater opened on January 31, 1929 it was reportedly the second-largest theater in the United States, with 5,060 seats. It was one of St. Louis's leading movie theaters through the 1960s and has survived to become a versatile performing arts venue. The Fox was designed by an architect specializing in theaters, C. Howard Crane, in an eclectic blend of Asian decorative motifs sometimes called Siamese Byzantine. The interior is the architectural twin of another Fox Theatre built in Detroit in 1928.
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The Harry S Truman National Historic Site preserves both the family farm and the longtime home of Harry S. Truman , 33rd President of the United... States. The Truman Home is in Independence, Missouri, and the Truman Farm Home in Grandview, Missouri: both are within the Kansas City, Missouri, metropolitan area and are approximately 15 miles apart. Truman Home , 219 North Delaware Street, Independence, Missouri, would be the home of Harry S Truman, after his marriage to Bess Wallace, on June 28, 1919 until his death on December 26, 1972. Bess Truman's maternal grandfather, George Porterfield Gates, built the house over a period of years from 1867 to 1885. Bess's mother, Madge Gates Wallace, wanted the couple to live there with her. Bess had lived with her mother after Bess's father, David Willock Wallace, committed suicide in 1903. Bess and her mother initially moved into the house with Bess's grandparents, George and Elizabeth Gates. Also in 1919, Harry was putting all of his money into the men's clothing store of Truman & Jacobson open at 104 West 12th St.
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The Chain of Rocks Bridge spans the Mississippi River on the north edge of St. Louis, Missouri. The eastern end of the bridge is on Chouteau Island,... , while the western end is on the Missouri shoreline. The bridge was for a time the route used by U.S. Route 66 to cross over the Mississippi. Its most notable feature is a 22-degree bend occurring at the middle of the crossing. Originally a motor route, the bridge now carries walking and biking trails over the river. The bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006. The bridge's name comes from a large shoal, or rocky rapids, called the Chain of Rocks, which made that stretch of the Mississippi extremely dangerous to navigate. Because of a low-water dam built by the Corps of Engineers in the 1960s, little of the Chain of Rocks is visible today except during extreme low water conditions. After 1940, only a single impediment prevented the maintenance of a safe and reliable 9-foot navigation channel on the Mississippi River from St. Paul, Minnesota, to New Orleans.
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Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and an important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39. The poem that made his name, The Love... Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is regarded as a masterpiece of the modernist movement. He followed this with what have become some of the best-known poems in the English language, including Gerontion , The Waste Land , The Hollow Men , Ash Wednesday , and Four Quartets . He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral . He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot was born into the Eliot family, a middle class family originally from New England, who had moved to St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Henry Ware Eliot , was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis.
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William Seward Burroughs II – August 2, 1997 was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative... artists of the 20th century." His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films. He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the inventor and founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence.
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James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that... "Harlem was in vogue." Both of Hughes' paternal and maternal great-grandmothers were African-American, his maternal great-grandfather was white and of Scottish descent. A paternal great-grandfather was of European Jewish descent. Hughes's maternal grandmother Mary Patterson was of African-American, French, English and Native American descent. One of the first women to attend Oberlin College, she first married Lewis Sheridan Leary, also of mixed race. Lewis Sheridan Leary subsequently joined John Brown's Raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859 and died from his wounds. In 1869 the widow Mary Patterson Leary married again, into the elite, politically active Langston family. Her second husband was Charles Henry Langston, of African American, Native American, and Euro-American ancestry.
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Joan Crawford , born Lucille Fay LeSueur, was an American actress in film, television and theatre. Starting as a dancer in traveling theatrical companies before debuting on Broadway, Crawford was signed to a motion picture contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925. Initially frustrated by the size... and quality of her parts, Crawford began a campaign of self-publicity and became nationally known as a flapper by the end of the 1920s. In the 1930s, Crawford's fame rivaled MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. Crawford often played hardworking young women who find romance and financial success. These "rags-to-riches" stories were well-received by Depression-era audiences and were popular with women. Crawford became one of Hollywood's most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States, but her films began losing money and by the end of the 1930s she was labeled "box office poison". After an absence of nearly two years from the screen, Crawford staged a comeback by starring in Mildred Pierce , for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
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Kansas is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. It is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named... after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area. The tribe's name is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south wind," although this was probably not the term's original meaning. Residents of Kansas are called "Kansans." For thousands of years what is now Kansas was home to numerous and diverse Native American tribes. Tribes in the Eastern part of the state generally lived in villages along the river valleys. Tribes in the Western part of the state were semi-nomadic and hunted large herds of bison. Kansas was first settled by European Americans in the 1830s, but the pace of settlement accelerated in the 1850s, in the midst of political wars over the slavery issue. When officially opened to settlement by the U.S. government in 1854, abolitionist Free-Staters from New England and pro-slavery settlers from neighboring Missouri rushed to the territory to determine if Kansas would become a free state or a slave state.
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Nebraska is a state on the Great Plains of the Midwestern United States. Nebraska is the 16th most extensive, the 38th most populous, and the 8th... least densely populated of the 50 United States. The state's capital is Lincoln and its largest city is Omaha, on the Missouri River. Once considered part of the Great American Desert, Nebraska is now a leading farming and ranching state. Nebraska gets its name from the archaic Otoe words Ñí Brásge, pronounced [ɲĩbɾasꜜkɛ] , or the Omaha Ní Btháska, pronounced [nĩbɫᶞasꜜka], meaning "flat water", after the Platte River that flows through the state. Varying cultures of indigenous peoples lived in the region along the rivers for thousands of years before European exploration. Historical Native American tribes living in Nebraska have included the Omaha, Missouria, Ponca, Pawnee, Otoe, and various branches of the Lakota . Long before the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804–1806, French-Canadian explorers traversed the territory of Nebraska on their way to trade in Santa Fe, then claimed by Spain.
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Iowa is a state located in the Midwestern United States, an area often referred to as the "American Heartland". It derives its name from the Ioway... people, one of the many American Indian tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. Iowa was a part of the French colony of New France. After the Louisiana Purchase, settlers laid the foundation for an agriculture-based economy in the heart of the Corn Belt. Iowa is often known as the "Food Capital of the World". However, Iowa's economy, culture, and landscape are diverse. In the latter half of the 20th century, Iowa's agricultural economy transitioned to a diversified economy of advanced manufacturing, processing, financial services, biotechnology, and green energy production. Iowa is the 26th most extensive and the 30th most populous of the 50 United States. Its capital and largest city is Des Moines. Iowa has been listed as one of the safest states to live in. Iowa is bordered by the Mississippi River on the east; the Missouri River and the Big Sioux River on the west; the northern boundary is a line along 43 degrees, 30 minutes north latitude.
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Arkansas is a state located in the southern region of the United States. Its name is an Algonquian name of the Quapaw Indians. Arkansas shares... borders with six states , and its eastern border is largely defined by the Mississippi River. Its diverse geography ranges from the mountainous regions of the Ozarks and the Ouachita Mountains, which make up the U.S. Interior Highlands, to the eastern lowlands along the Mississippi River. Arkansas is the 29th most extensive and the 32nd most populous of the 50 United States. The capital and most populous city is Little Rock, located in the central portion of the state. The name “Arkansas” derives from the same root as the name for the state of Kansas. The Kansa tribe of Native Americans are closely associated with the Sioux tribes of the Great Plains. The word “Arkansas” itself is a French pronunciation of a Quapaw word, akakaze, meaning “land of downriver people” or the Sioux word akakaze meaning “people of the south wind”.
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