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.
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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 Wallace House 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. Wallace House , 219 North Delaware Street, Independence, Missouri, would be the home of Harry S Truman, after his marriage to Bess Wallace, on 28 June 1919 until his death on 26 December 1972. Bess Truman's maternal grandfather, George Porterfield Gates, built the house over a period of years from 1867 to 1895. 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, both of them moving in with Madge's parents. Also in 1919, Harry was putting all of his money into the men's clothing store of Truman & Jacobson open at 104 West 12 St. in downtown Kansas City, so living at the Wallace home made good financial sense.
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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, necessary to allow river traffic to have uninterrupted navigation on the river. 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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Scott Joplin was an American composer and pianist. He achieved fame for his unique ragtime compositions, and was dubbed the "King of Ragtime." During his brief career, Joplin wrote 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first pieces, the Maple Leaf Rag, became... ragtime's first and most influential hit, and has been recognized as the archetypal rag. He was born into a musical African-American family of laborers in eastern Texas, and developed his musical knowledge with the help of local teachers. During the late 1880s he traveled around the American South as an itinerant musician, and went to Chicago for the World's Fair of 1893 which played a major part in making ragtime a national craze by 1897. His composition in 1899 of the Maple Leaf Rag brought him fame, and had a profound influence on subsequent writers of ragtime. It also brought the composer a steady income for life with royalties of one cent per sale, equivalent to 26 cents per sale in current value.
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Thomas Stearns Eliot OM was an American-born English poet, playwright, and literary critic, arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. 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, and was followed by 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. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Harvard, Eliot studied philosophy at the Sorbonne for a year, then won a scholarship to Oxford in 1914, becoming a British citizen when he was 39. "[M]y poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England," he said of his nationality and its role in his work.
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William Seward Burroughs II – August 2, 1997; pronounced /ˈbəroʊz/, also known by his pen name William Lee was an American novelist, poet, essayist, painter and spoken word performer. Burroughs was a major figure of the Beat Generation and a postmodernist author who affected... popular culture as well as literature. He is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the twentieth century." Burroughs wrote eighteen novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. Burroughs 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 William Seward Burroughs, the founder of Burroughs Corporation. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. After leaving home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, he became enamored with contemporary counterculture, and fascinated by the underground society of drug addiction.
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James Mercer Langston Hughes, was an American poet, novelist, playwright, short story writer, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best-known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the Harlem... Renaissance saying that "Harlem was in vogue." Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, the second child of school teacher Carrie Mercer Langston and her husband James Nathaniel Hughes . Both parents were mixed-race, and Langston Hughes was of African American, European American and Native American descent. He grew up in a series of Midwestern small towns. Both his paternal and maternal great-grandmothers were African American, and both his paternal and maternal great-grandfathers were white: one of Scottish and one of Jewish descent. Hughes was named after both his father and his grand-uncle, John Mercer Langston who, in 1888, became the first black to be elected to the United States Congress from Virginia. Hughes' maternal grandmother Mary Patterson was of African American, French, English and Native American descent.
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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 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." Historically, the area was home to large numbers of nomadic Native Americans who hunted bison. It 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. Thus, the area was a hotbed of violence and chaos in its early days as these forces collided, and was known as Bleeding Kansas. The abolitionists eventually prevailed and on January 29, 1861, Kansas entered the Union as a free state.
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Nebraska is a state located on the Great Plains of the Midwestern United States. The state's capital is Lincoln and its largest city is Omaha. Once... considered part of the Great American Desert , Nebraska is now a leading farming and ranching state. Nebraska is the only U.S. state with a unicameral legislature. Nebraska probably gets its name from the archaic Otoe words Ñí Brásge, pronounced [ˌɲĩˈbɾaskɛ] , or the Omaha Ní Btháska, pronounced [ˌnĩˈbɫᶞaska], meaning "flat water", after the Platte River that flows through the state. Native American tribes in Nebraska have included the Omaha, Missouria, Ponca, Pawnee, Otoe, and various branches of the Sioux. Long before the Lewis and Clark Expedition, French-Canadian explorers traversed the territory of Nebraska, including the Mallet brothers in 1739, on their way to trade in Santa Fe. European-American settlement did not begin in any number until after 1848 and the California Gold Rush. On May 30, 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act created the Kansas Territory and the Nebraska Territory, divided by the Parallel 40° North.
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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 mid and late 20th century, Iowa's agricultural economy transitioned to a diversified economy of advanced manufacturing, processing, financial services, biotechnology, and green energy production. Iowa has been listed as one of the safest states in which to live. Des Moines is Iowa's capital and largest city. 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. The southern border is the Des Moines River and a line along approximately 40 degrees 35 minutes north, as decided by the U.S.
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Arkansas is a state located in the southern region of the United States. Its name is an Algonquin name of the Quapaw Indians. Arkansas shares a... border with six states, with its eastern border 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. 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 Kansas 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". The pronunciation of Arkansas was made official by an act of the state legislature in 1881, after a dispute between the two U.S. Senators from Arkansas.
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