Carousel is the second musical by the team of Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II. The 1945 work was adapted from Ferenc Molnár's 1909 play Liliom, transplanting its Budapest setting to the Maine coastline. The story revolves around carousel barker Billy Bigelow, whose romance with millworker Julie Jordan comes at the price of both their jobs. He participates in a robbery to provide for Julie and their unborn child; after it goes tragically wrong, he is given a chance to make things right. A secondary plot line deals with millworker Carrie Pipperidge and her romance with ambitious fisherman Enoch Snow. The show includes the well-known songs "If I Loved You", "June Is Bustin' Out All Over" and "You'll Never Walk Alone". Richard Rodgers later wrote that Carousel was his favorite of all his musicals.
Richard Charles Rodgers was an American composer who worked primarily in musical theater. With 43 Broadway musicals and over 900 songs to his credit, Rodgers was one of the most well-known American composers of the 20th century, and his compositions had a significant influence on popular music.
The King and I is the fifth musical by the team of Rodgers and Hammerstein. It is based on Margaret Landon's novel Anna and the King of Siam (1944), which is in turn derived from the memoirs of Anna Leonowens, governess to the children of King Mongkut of Siam in the early 1860s. The musical's plot relates the experiences of Anna, a British schoolteacher who is hired as part of the King's drive to modernize his country. The relationship between the King and Anna is marked by conflict through much of the piece, as well as by a love to which neither can admit. The musical premiered on March 29, 1951, at Broadway's St. James Theatre. It ran for nearly three years, making it the fourth-longest-running Broadway musical in history at the time, and has had many tours and revivals.
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrant anarchists who were controversially accused of murdering Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick Parmenter, a guard and a paymaster, during the April 15, 1920, armed robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts, United States. Seven years later, they were executed in the electric chair at Charlestown State Prison.
FredericDan Huntington was an American clergyman and the first Protestant Episcopal bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York.
William Lorenzo Patterson was an African-American leader in the Communist Party USA and head of the International Labor Defense, a group that offered legal representation to communists, trade unionists, and African Americans in cases involving issues of political or racial persecution.
Ruth Hale was an American journalist who worked for women's rights in New York City during the era before and after World War I. She was married to journalist Heywood Broun and was an associate of the Algonquin Round Table.
Alvan Tufts Fuller was an American businessman, politician, art collector, and philanthropist from Massachusetts. He opened one of the first automobile dealerships in Massachusetts, which in 1920 was recognized as "the world's most successful auto dealership", and made him one of the state's wealthiest men. Politically a Progressive Republican, he was elected a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1916, and served as a United States representative from 1917 to 1921.
Calvin Hooker Goddard was a forensic scientist, army officer, academic, researcher and a pioneer in forensic ballistics. He examined the bullet casings in the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre and showed that the guns used were not police issued weapons, leading the investigators to conclude it was a mob hit.
Boston is a novel by Upton Sinclair. It is a "documentary novel" that combines the facts of the case with journalistic depictions of actual participants and fictional characters and events. Sinclair indicted the American system of justice by setting his characters in the context of the prosecution and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.
The Porter–Phelps–Huntington House is a historic house museum at 130 River Drive in Hadley, Massachusetts. It is open seasonally, from May to October. The house contains the collection of one extended family, with objects dating from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. It was occupied from its construction in 1752 until the 1940s, when a member of the eighth generation of the family in the house turned it into a museum. Its collection is entirely derived from the family, and the extensive archives, including the original diary of Elizabeth Porter Phelps, are held at Amherst College. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.
Theresa Helburn was an American playwright and theatrical producer best known for her work as a co-founder and producer of New York's Theatre Guild from 1919 to the 1950s.
Florence Hope Luscomb was an American architect and women's suffrage activist in Massachusetts. She was one of the first ten women graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her degrees were in architecture. Luscomb became a partner in an early woman-owned architecture firm before work in the field became scarce during World War I. She then dedicated herself fully to activism in the women's suffrage movement, becoming a prominent leader of Massachusetts suffragists.
Elizabeth Porter Phelps (1747–1817) was a member of the eighteenth-century rural gentry in western Massachusetts; she is also recognized as an important diarist from late 18th century and early 19th century in Hadley, Massachusetts (USA).
Ellen Amanda Hayes was an American mathematician and astronomer. She was a controversial figure, not only because of being a female college professor, but also for embracing many radical causes.
Michael Murray is an American stage director, producer and educator. He is one of the early leaders of the Regional Theatre Movement. Murray was co-founder of the Charles Playhouse in Boston, MA. and served as its Artistic Director for eleven years (1957–1968). Murray was the Artistic Director of the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park (1975–1985). In addition, he directed productions Off-Broadway in New York and at many regional theaters, including the Hartford Stage Company, Center Stage Baltimore, the Philadelphia Drama Guild, and the Huntington Theatre Company. He held the position of Chair of the Theatre Arts Department of Brandeis University (1986–2003).
Sara R. Ehrmann was a Boston civic leader who fought against capital punishment both city- and nationwide. Best known for her work establishing the 1951 "Mercy Law" in Massachusetts, which allowed juries to opt out of the death penalty on first-degree murder cases, Ehrmann was an influential leader of the Massachusetts Council for the Abolition of the Death Penalty (1928–1969) and the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment (1949–1969). She launched her career as a direct response to the internationally controversial Sacco and Vanzetti case, which her husband worked on as an assistant defense councilman.
Clementina Poto Langone (1896–1964) was a civic leader from the North End of Boston who is remembered for her service to the Italian-American community. During the Great Depression she was known as a "Good Samaritan" who distributed food and clothing to the poor and advocated for them politically. As a member of the Massachusetts Board of Immigration and Americanization, she helped hundreds of Italian immigrants assimilate and obtain U.S. citizenship. She served as vice chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic State Committee and as an alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention.
Arria Sargent Huntington was the author of Under a Colonial Roof-Tree: Fireside Chronicles of Early New England which details daily life and family stories from early days of Hadley, Massachusetts.
Ruth Gregson Huntington Sessions was an American writer, known for her 1936 memoir, Sixty Odd: A Personal History.
