Norma Miller
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Norma Miller
Norma Adele Miller (December 2, 1919 – May 5, 2019) was an American Lindy hop dancer, choreographer, actress, author, and comedian known as the "Queen of Swing". Early life Miller was born in 1919 in Harlem, New York City to mother Alma, a charwoman, and father Norman, a shipyard worker, both from Bridgetown, Barbados. Norma was named after her father, who died from pneumonia a month before her birth. She had an older sister, Dot. Even though her mother struggled to pay the rent, Norma was enrolled in dance classes from a very young age. At the age of five, she was performing at amateur nights in theaters. Miller knew she wanted to be a dancer very early on:"Black girls didn't have many outlets. You had laundry. You had hairdresser. Or teacher. Now, I didn't qualify for none of those. I could dance, I just could just do it naturally." When the Great Depression began in 1929, Miller and her family moved to a cramped and noisy tenement apartment on 140th street that overlooked ...
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Harlem
Harlem is a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is bounded roughly by the Hudson River on the west; the Harlem River and 155th Street (Manhattan), 155th Street on the north; Fifth Avenue on the east; and 110th Street (Manhattan), Central Park North on the south. The greater Harlem area encompasses several other neighborhoods and extends west and north to 155th Street, east to the East River, and south to Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard (Manhattan), Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Central Park, and 96th Street (Manhattan), East 96th Street. Originally a Netherlands, Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands. Harlem's history has been defined by a series of economic boom-and-bust cycles, with significant population shifts accompanying each cycle. Harlem was predominantly occupied by Jewish American, Jewish and Italian American, Italian Americans in the 19th century, but African-American residents began to ...
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Black Bottom (dance)
The black bottom is a dance which became popular during 1920s amid the Jazz Age. It was danced solo or by couples. Originating among African Americans in the Deep South, rural South, the black bottom eventually spread to mainstream American culture and became a Novelty and fad dances, national craze in the 1920s. The dance was most famously performed by Ann Pennington (actress), Ann Pennington, a star of the Ziegfeld Follies, who performed it in a Broadway show, Broadway revue staged by Ziegfeld's rival George White (producer), George White in 1926. Origins The dance originated in New Orleans in the first decade of the 20th century. Jazz pianist and composer Jelly Roll Morton wrote the tune "Black Bottom Stomp", its title referring to the Black Bottom, Detroit, Black Bottom area of Detroit, Michigan, Detroit. Sheet music from the mid-20s identifies the composers as Gus Horsley and Perry Bradford and claims the dance was introduced by the African-American dancer and choreographer ...
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Ethel Waters
Ethel Waters (October 31, 1896 – September 1, 1977) was an American singer and actress. Waters frequently performed jazz, swing, and pop music on the Broadway stage and in concerts. She began her career in the 1920s singing blues. Her notable recordings include "Dinah", " Stormy Weather", "Taking a Chance on Love", "Heat Wave", "Supper Time", " Am I Blue?", " Cabin in the Sky", "I'm Coming Virginia", and her version of "His Eye Is on the Sparrow". Waters was the second African American to be nominated for an Academy Award, the first African American to star on her own television show, and the first African-American woman to be nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award. Early life Waters was born in Chester, Pennsylvania on October 31, 1896 (some sources incorrectly state her birth year as 1900) as a result of the rape of her teenaged African-American mother, Louise Anderson (1881–1962), by 17 year old John Wesley (or Wesley John) Waters (1878–1901), a pianist and family acq ...
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Madison Square Garden
Madison Square Garden, colloquially known as The Garden or by its initials MSG, is a multi-purpose indoor arena in New York City. It is located in Midtown Manhattan between Seventh and Eighth avenues from 31st to 33rd Street, above Pennsylvania Station. It is the fourth venue to bear the name "Madison Square Garden"; the first two ( 1879 and 1890) were located on Madison Square, on East 26th Street and Madison Avenue, with the third Madison Square Garden (1925) farther uptown at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street. The Garden is used for professional ice hockey and basketball, as well as boxing, mixed martial arts, concerts, ice shows, circuses, professional wrestling and other forms of sports and entertainment. It is close to other midtown Manhattan landmarks, including the Empire State Building, Koreatown, and Macy's at Herald Square. It is home to the New York Rangers of the National Hockey League (NHL), the New York Knicks of the National Basketball Association (NBA), and wa ...
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Whitey's Lindy Hoppers
Whitey's Lindy Hoppers was a professional performing group of exceptional swing dancers that was first organized in the late 1920s by Herbert "Whitey" White in the Savoy Ballroom and disbanded in 1942 after its male members were drafted into World War II. The group took on many different forms and had several different names and sub-groups, including Whitey's Hopping Maniacs, Harlem Congeroo Dancers, and The Hot Chocolates. In addition to touring nationally and internationally, the group appeared in several films and Broadway theatre productions. Dorothy Dandridge and Sammy Davis Jr. were among the group's celebrity regulars. History Beginning in the late 1920s, White, a bouncer at the Savoy Ballroom and former dancing waiter, began organizing exceptional dancers, first under the aegis of George Snowden and then under White himself. Although many members felt mistreated by White, many admired his promotion of the dance. In 1934, at the age of 14, Norma Miller became the youngest me ...
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Apollo Theater
The Apollo Theater is a music hall at 253 West 125th Street between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (Seventh Avenue) and Frederick Douglass Boulevard (Eighth Avenue) in the Harlem neighborhood of Upper Manhattan in New York City. It is a noted venue for African-American performers, and is the home of ''Showtime at the Apollo'', a nationally syndicated television variety show which showcased new talent, from 1987 to 2008, encompassing 1,093 episodes; the show was rebooted in 2018. The theater, which has a capacity of 1,506, opened in 1913 as Hurtig & Seamon's Music Hall. It was designed by George Keister in the neo-Classical style. Alterations were made that year for showing movies, and it was renamed the Apollo Theater. (It was often referred to as the "125th Street Apollo" to distinguish it from the legitimate Apollo on 42nd Street). In 1924, the Minsky brothers leased the theater for burlesque shows. In 1934, it became a venue for black performers and was opened to black ...
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Renaissance Ballroom & Casino
The Renaissance Ballroom & Casino was originally, when built in 1921, a New York City complex that included a casino, ballroom, 900-seat theater, six retail stores, and a basketball arena. It was located in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan at 2341–2349 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, on the east-side of the boulevard between 137th and 138th Streets. The 7th Avenue frontage spanned the entire block. History The Renaissance Theatre Building, as it was originally named, opened January 1921. It was built and owned, until 1931, by African Americans. It was known as the "Rennie" and was an upscale reception hall. The "Renny" held prize fights, dance marathons, film screenings, concerts, and stage acts. It was also a meeting place for social clubs and political organizations in Harlem. They gathered to dance the popular dances at the time, the Charleston, Lindy Hop, and Black Bottom, to live music performed by well known jazz musicians. Jazz artists such as Louis Armstro ...
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The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large national audience. Daily broadsheet editions are printed for D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. The ''Post'' was founded in 1877. In its early years, it went through several owners and struggled both financially and editorially. Financier Eugene Meyer purchased it out of bankruptcy in 1933 and revived its health and reputation, work continued by his successors Katharine and Phil Graham (Meyer's daughter and son-in-law), who bought out several rival publications. The ''Post'' 1971 printing of the Pentagon Papers helped spur opposition to the Vietnam War. Subsequently, in the best-known episode in the newspaper's history, reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led the American press's investigation into what became known as the Watergate scandal ...
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Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola, or Coke, is a carbonated soft drink manufactured by the Coca-Cola Company. Originally marketed as a temperance drink and intended as a patent medicine, it was invented in the late 19th century by John Stith Pemberton in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1888, Pemberton sold Coca-Cola's ownership rights to Asa Griggs Candler, a businessman, whose marketing tactics led Coca-Cola to its dominance of the global soft-drink market throughout the 20th and 21st century. The drink's name refers to two of its original ingredients: coca leaves and kola nuts (a source of caffeine). The current formula of Coca-Cola remains a closely guarded trade secret; however, a variety of reported recipes and experimental recreations have been published. The secrecy around the formula has been used by Coca-Cola in its marketing as only a handful of anonymous employees know the formula. The drink has inspired imitators and created a whole classification of soft drink: colas. The Coca-Cola Company p ...
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Temple University Press
Temple University Press is a university press founded in 1969 that is part of Temple University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). It is one of thirteen publishers to participate in the Knowledge Unlatched pilot, a global library consortium approach to funding open access books. The organization's mission at the time of its founding, according to Gerald J. Mangone, Temple University's then-provost, was to "broaden the outlet for the best volumes of an increasinbly productive faculty," by enabling those academics "to publish significant research that will increase knowledge in the humanities, social and natural sciences." History Maurice English was appointed as the first director of the organization. An honors graduate of Harvard University who had been awarded a Fulbright creative writing fellowship in recognition of the publication of his book, ''Midnight in the Century'', English was a recipient of the Ferguson Prize for Poetry in 1965, bureau chief for Voice of America, and a se ...
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Philadelphia
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Since 1854, the city has been coextensive with Philadelphia County, the most populous county in Pennsylvania and the urban core of the Delaware Valley, the nation's seventh-largest and one of world's largest metropolitan regions, with 6.245 million residents . The city's population at the 2020 census was 1,603,797, and over 56 million people live within of Philadelphia. Philadelphia was founded in 1682 by William Penn, an English Quaker. The city served as capital of the Pennsylvania Colony during the British colonial era and went on to play a historic and vital role as the central meeting place for the nation's founding fathers whose plans and actions in Philadelphia ultimately inspired the American Revolution and the nation's inde ...
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Easter
Easter,Traditional names for the feast in English are "Easter Day", as in the '' Book of Common Prayer''; "Easter Sunday", used by James Ussher''The Whole Works of the Most Rev. James Ussher, Volume 4'') and Samuel Pepys''The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Volume 2'') as well as the single word "Easter" in books printed i157515841586 also called Pascha (Aramaic, Greek, Latin) or Resurrection Sunday, is a Christian festival and cultural holiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, described in the New Testament as having occurred on the third day of his burial following his crucifixion by the Romans at Calvary . It is the culmination of the Passion of Jesus Christ, preceded by Lent (or Great Lent), a 40-day period of fasting, prayer, and penance. Easter-observing Christians commonly refer to the week before Easter as Holy Week, which in Western Christianity begins on Palm Sunday (marking the entrance of Jesus in Jerusalem), includes Spy Wednesday (on whic ...
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