New York Almanack

History, Natural History & the Arts

John F. Kennedy

Henry Cabot Lodge’s Bronze Hot Dog

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Henry Cabot Lodge Bronze Hot Dog (Massachusetts Historical Society)In the mid-20th century, Americans had a great enthusiasm for all manner of keepsakes and mementos cast in bronze. On October 17, 1960, the National Hot Dog Council presented a life-size hot dog cast in bronze on a marble base to Republican vice-presidential candidate Henry Cabot Lodge Jr (1902-1985).

In the blur of events during the hard-fought presidential campaign, Lodge came to mistakenly believe that he had received the unusual gift during a visit to Nathan’s, the famous hot dog emporium in New York City. [Read more…] about Henry Cabot Lodge’s Bronze Hot Dog

Franklin Williams: An Unsung Civil Rights Hero

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Franklin WilliamsLarger-than-life figures such as Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King and, going back further, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, functioned as the “celebrities” of the equal rights movement, the public face of the crusade for racial justice.

But outside the spotlight, “bridge figures” such as New Yorker Franklin H. Williams — men and woman unencumbered by the sometimes blinding “star quality” of the Kings and Marshalls while also shunning the divisive tactics of militants such as Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and Malcolm X — made enormous but often underappreciated contributions. [Read more…] about Franklin Williams: An Unsung Civil Rights Hero

The 60th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis

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Map of Aircraft Locations in Cuba courtesy National ArchivesAt the height of the Cold War, for two weeks in October 1962, the world teetered on the edge of thermonuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Earlier that fall, the Soviet Union, under orders from Premier Nikita Khrushchev, began to secretly deploy a nuclear strike force in Cuba, just 90 miles from the United States.

President John F. Kennedy said the missiles would not be tolerated and insisted on their removal. Khrushchev refused. [Read more…] about The 60th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis