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After Ann Forst, the Black Widow, was sentenced to serve time for pandering, one of her protégés, Brenda Allen (born Marie Mitchell and going under a number of aliases including Brenda Allen Burns, Marie Brooks, Marie Cash, Brenda Burris, and Marie Balanque) wasted no time in setting up her own prostitutio
And now, a bit of real life noir compliments of the photo collection of the Los Angeles Public Library and the real lives of two L.A. femme fatales – the Black Widow and the Vice Queen.
Memorial Day is officially observed on the last Monday of May, honoring the men and women who lost their lives while serving in the U.S. military. It was originally known as Decoration Day because families would decorate the graves of those who had fallen in the Civil War.
At some point in 1889 the president and (later) chairman of the board of the Farmers and Merchants National Bank of Los Angeles, Jackson A. Graves, decided that his Alhambra residence simply wasn’t as relaxing for his family as he would like.
While attending the 1907 Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, ten-year-old Amelia Mary Earhart saw her first airplane. She was not impressed. She described it as “a thing of rusty wire and wood and not at all interesting” and asked her father, Edwin Earhart, to take her back to the merry-go-round.
Cinco de Mayo is a holiday commemorating just one event: The Battle of Puebla, which was a day of victory for the Mexican army against the French in 1862. Over 150 years later, people still mistake the holiday for Mexican Independence Day which is September 16.
In the spring of 1942, the City of Los Angeles experienced a population exodus triggered by a presidential executive order. Images in the Los Angeles Public Library's Herald Examiner Collection and Shades of L.A.
"It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper.
The best way to celebrate the National Park System in America is to stand on the hallowed ground of any one of them and just look around. They never fail to fill you with wonder and genuine pride in the treasures that exist in this country.
The Brontë sisters are some of the most famous siblings in literature.