Word: brooklyn
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Born in the urban tropics of Accra, Ghana's capital, Ashong moved to the United States when he was three. He lived in Cambridge while his father earned a master's degree at the Harvard School of Public Health and in Brooklyn, in a one-bedroom apartment on Lenox Road, close to Kings County Hospital...
However, Ashong makes it very clear that despite his various travels, he is neither international nor American. Though his earliest memories are of Brooklyn, he is African. His baritone hardens when he says this, as if he's pounding his voice on the table in front of him. "I feel very much more at home in Ghana than in America," he says. "I don't feel like America fully accepts me, but I have somewhere I am better accepted, so why would I want to be an American...
...with President Franklin Roosevelt, Sengstacke arranged for the hiring of the first black White House correspondent. After World War II, President Harry Truman appointed Sengstacke, a vocal critic of discrimination in the military, to the committee charged with eradicating race barriers in the armed forces. Sengstacke also pushed the Brooklyn Dodgers to sign Jackie Robinson. Sengstacke was considered close to Chicago's Democratic mayors, but refused Mayor Richard J. Daley's entreaties that he help prevent violence during the riots of the summer of 1967. At the time, he told Daley he'd been "giving you suggestions for two years...
...true that I grew up in Georgia, moved north one summer 30 years ago, and haven't lived anywhere south of Brooklyn since. A few years ago I did spend July in Atlanta, where I found to my ethnic chagrin that at temperatures over 90[degrees] I could no longer digest hush puppies. You might accuse me of having some kind of compensatory agenda, like an ex-communist swung drastically to the right...
...master image of America's industrial potential, however, was the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883. Designed by John Roebling and his son Washington Roebling, built by thousands of workers laboring under perilous and sacrificial conditions on the high cables or underwater in the caissons, it was the greatest engineering feat of 19th century America and, with a central span of 1,595 ft., by far the longest suspension bridge in the world. Its soaring Gothic-arched towers also predicted the vertical city, whose chief element--the high, steel-framed palazzo block--had been adumbrated by Badger but reached its first...