Step 1: The Internet Is Not Always the Best Place to Start
Should you start this research project by using the Internet?
Many schools offer access to remarkable databases that may help you find the credible information you need more quickly than any search engine will, even if they are a little harder to use.
Furthermore, when you do use the Internet, a search engine may not be the best place to start. The best researchers have favorite websites that they either navigate to directly or click on when they see them in a search. Here is how you can develop a list of favorite sites of your own:
Step 2: When Using Search Engines, Always Use More Than One
Use several search engines on every search. Although major commercial search engines often return similar results, they work differently enough that you should use several search engines for every research project to help you uncover different resources.
You should also start with the search engine that makes the most sense for your search; this isn’t always Google or Bing. If you find yourself “addicted” to a single search engine that you use exclusively, you are not learning what you need to become an expert Web researcher. Even within Google itself, you should know how and when to use Google News, Books, Scholar, and other resources.
Take a “time out”—for two weeks, don’t use your favorite search engine at all. This will force you to learn to use the full toolkit of resources available to you.
Our own search engine, SweetSearch, A Search Engine for Students, searches websites that our expert research staff has evaluated and approved. We know it is very often the best search engine a student can start with. But not even we use it 100% of the time in our work; for every research project, we use a number of search engines, databases and often directly navigate to our favorite websites.
Step 3: When Looking at Search Results, Dig Deep!
The best search results are often not at the top—or even on the first page.
Some Web sites are very good at making their content rank high in search engines for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of their content.
Thus, results near the top of a search results page may not be useful, while the great sites that make your paper standout may be buried several pages deep. Often, there is just one article on the Web that furnishes critical information; find it, and it makes it much easier both to write your paper, and get a top grade.
So look beyond the first few results, and even the first page. Dig deep!
Step 4: Think Before You Search!
When we surveyed high school and middle school students, more than half of them told us they begin their research by typing a question. Often, the question was simply lifted from the homework assignment. Students read the assignment, didn’t understand it, and hoped that a search engine would magically transform the question into information they understand.
This usually doesn’t happen.
As Yogi Berra says, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up somewhere else.”
So rewrite every assignment in your own words before you begin your research. This will force you to understand it, and make it much more likely that you’ll be able to identify what is helpful when you see it. If you need help, ask your teacher, librarian, parent or classmate for help.
Then, brainstorm and make a list of key search terms, using mostly nouns, rather than verbs. Create a series of terms that you can search in combinations of two, three or more.
When you find a good search result, look at the most important words in it, and add them to your keyword list. Try a series of keyword combinations.
Also, keep track of the sources you review. Web-based bookmarking tools, such as Symbaloo, OneNote, and Google Keep, can help you. Keeping track of sources will help you avoid repeatedly visiting the same bad sources, and will also help properly cite every source you use.
Step 5: Use Special Search Functions to Make the Search Engines Work for You
If your assignment is to explain how bald eagles were saved from extinction, and you search “eagles,” you’ll find a lot of information about a football team from Philadelphia, an aging rock band from California and other types of eagles. You’ll also find articles about bald eagles that have nothing to do with extinction.
So if you just type a single word or a question into a search box, you are not using the full power of the search engine to find information.
Studies show that successful researchers use more words in their search than unsuccessful ones. So use combinations of several keywords.
Quotation marks are an excellent tool when you are looking for an exact phrase, particularly if one of the words is commonly used.
One very powerful, but undocumented, search tool, which works on both SweetSearch and Google, is the AROUND function. If you wanted to research Barack Obama’s interactions with Australia, you could simply include both terms in a search, but you’d find thousands of articles in which these two terms may appear many paragraphs apart, and bear no relation to one another. But if instead you search “obama” AROUND(10) “australia” then the first results will be one in which Obama appears within ten words of Australia. NOTE: for this to work, both search terms must be in quotes, AROUND must be capitalized, and the number must be in parentheses.
On most search engines, you can narrow your search by using common words like AND, OR, NOT. However, note that most search engines presume you mean “AND” when you put two words in a search; and “OR” can generate way too many irrelevant results if not used precisely.
If you search (“bald eagles” AND extinction NOT football), you probably won’t get any search results about a football team, a rock band or golden eagles.
Also, many search engines have advanced features or special usage tips that are generally the best way to narrow search results. Read these links for advanced search tips from the most popular search engines:
Step 6: Don’t Believe Everything You Read!
Searching for information on the Internet is like detective work. You have to be skeptical. You want to find the best information you can, rather than the first thing that “looks good” or “sounds good.”
Anyone can publish anything on the Internet, cheaply and quickly. Many search results you get will be either not credible or not entirely relevant.
No one thing will tell you if a Web site can be trusted. You must examine every aspect of a site to see if the information is credible, authoritative, objective, accurate and up-to-date.
A good detective always verifies critical information by confirming it with multiple sources. If you find a few unrelated, credible Web sites in agreement on an issue, your research may be done. This is not the case if you read something just once.
Step 7: Are You Looking at Primary Sources? Why Not?
The best research sources you can find online will be primary sources, such as newspaper and magazine accounts, letters, diaries, films, photographs and other documents written or recorded at the time of the event. A detective would think of them as “eyewitness accounts.” With primary sources, you won’t have to worry about information getting distorted from one interpretation to another.
Here are some tips for finding primary source material.
And, since not all of your material will be primary source material, use these tips to help you find out if you are looking at the original publisher of an article or an online copycat.
Step 8: Who Created the Website and Writes its Article?
A good detective knows that information is only as good as its source. A good Web researcher never decides to use information without considering who gave it to him. You would never trust a book without knowing its author and publisher; why would you trust a Web site without the same information?
When you find an article on a Web site, visit the home page and the About Us page to determine what the site is really about. If the site doesn’t list the name of the publisher and its management team—and this is often the case—then leave and and visit another site.
Also look for information about the publisher or author by searching their names in a search engine. Any credible publisher or author should be mentioned on other reputable Web sites.
Many Web tutorials instruct you to look at the “top level domain,” the letters at the end of a Web address, such as .com, .edu, .gov and .org. In the early days of the Internet, sites with endings such as .edu, .org or .gov could generally be considered trustworthy. But to understand why this is no longer true, read “Top Level Domains Not As Useful a Clue As Commonly Believed.”
One “red flag” that we have spotted in our work is that Web sites who names describe their product often cannot be trusted. Many of these Website names were purchased long ago by enterprising sales people whose primary interest in operating their Web site is to sell you products, not to provide credible information. So be extra careful when evaluating a Web site that has words such as “free/discount/best/your/4You/Web” in its name.
When you find content on Wikipedia, do you know who wrote it? No, you don’t. Wikipedia’s contributors are anonymous; you do not know anything about them or their credentials. It may be a place to do your “pre-research” to find keywords to search on, but before you use it for more, read “Top 10 Reasons Why Students Cannot Cite or Rely on Wikipedia.”
For more on finding out who publishes a Web site and writes its articles, read “Question Number One: Who Wrote This?”
Step 9: Why Did They Write This?
As a police detective would tell you, once you figure out who, next you have to figure out their motive. Is the site trying to sell you something? Does the site appear to have any social or political biases? Any of these factors can impact what information the site does and does not provide and whether that information contains an unfair bias or a well-rounded overview of a topic.
From an early age you were told to write with the reader in mind; similarly, you must read with the writer in mind. So always ask, “Who created this Web site, and who is the author of the content I’m reading?”
For example, many Web search tutorials tell you that a .gov site is trustworthy. But why does WhiteHouse.gov exist? To celebrate the U.S. presidents, not to critically examine their legacy in a fair and balanced way. With this in mind, you may not wish to cite WhiteHouse.gov for anything but basic biographical data.
In our research, we’ve uncovered hundreds of Web sites that appear to offer valid information but in fact were created for another purpose.
When asking “why,” also consider the advertisements on the site. If they are overwhelming and mixed in with the site content, you may find that the content is not trustworthy. Just as an infomercial on television is an advertisement disguised as information, some Websites create content that is only intended to sell a product.
For more information, including some terrific examples of sites that pretend to be one thing but really are another, read “Question Number Two: Why Did They Write This?”
UC Berkeley Library offers a slightly more advanced guide to evaluating Web sites.
Step 10: When Was the Information Written or Last Revised?
As events unfold over hours, days or weeks, the stories often change a great deal. What a source says about a scientific discovery, about a living person, a war, a new technology or a lot of other things can quickly become untrue.
For example, in the spring of 2009, medical authorities feared the H1N1 virus would be a devastating epidemic. So far, it has fallen far short of that. If you relied primarily on a 2009 news account or report on H1N1, it is likely your paper would receive a very poor grade.
So always check the dates of your sources. If you can’t tell when a source was written, then keep looking until you find a good source about the topic that does have a recent date, so you can see if anything has changed. Always use a news search engine to see if there are any new developments, do a Web search with the current year as one of the search terms, and use advanced search options to find recent results.
On the other hand, if you are writing about a historical topic, you should make sure to include primary source documents, such as newspaper and magazine accounts written at the time of the event. If an event occurred in July 1950, then sources written that month may offer a more accurate account of what occurred than a source written today, 60 years later.
For more, read “Question Number Three: When Did They Write This?”
]]>Born in 1847, in Makó, Hungary, Joseph Pulitzer was the son of a successful grain dealer. In 1864, the 17-year-old emigrated to the United States and was sent to fight for the Union in the Civil War. At the end of the war, he moved west, eventually settling in St. Louis.
In St. Louis, Pulitzer worked various jobs, including waiting tables, until he landed a position as a reporter for a German-language newspaper. During this time he began to cultivate an interest in politics and law. He studied and practiced in the field, and was elected to the Missouri Legislature in 1869.
In 1871, he attained partial ownership of the newspaper he had worked on. Three years later, Pulitzer was accepted into the bar in Washington, D.C., and began working as a writer for the New York Sun. In 1878, he became owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, officially launching his publishing career.
In 1883, Pulitzer bought the magazine The New York World, according to the Pulitzer Web site. The purchase turned out to be the right one, as “sensationalized features” on “public and private corruption” caused the magazine’s audience to steadily grow. Within a decade from his purchase, circulation for the paper climbed to 600,000 copies, making it the largest in the country, and making Pulitzer even wealthier than he had been.
Elected to Congress in 1885, Pulitzer resigned a few months after taking office. Two years later, he founded the Evening World; however, by this period in his life, Pulitzer was trying to limit his managing of publications. That same year, the 40-year-old publisher lost his sight, but continued to oversee his companies for two more years.
In the 1890s, Pulitzer was involved in a feud with a main competitor: William Randolph Hearst. The companies were locked in battle to see who could attract the larger audience. This competition would last well into the 19th century.
Pulitzer died from heart disease on October 29, 1911. In his will, the publisher left money for the establishment of the Columbia School of Journalism, according to a 1911 New York Times article, which was written after his death. Funding was also left for creation of the annual Pulitzer Prize, celebrating excellence in literature, journalism, music and drama.
Although the criteria for the awards have changed since their conception, the Pulitzer Prize continues to be one of the most sought after recognitions in the literary world.
]]>Oleg Loiewski Cassini was born in Paris, France, in 1913. His family, living in Copenhagen, Denmark at the time, was one of “impoverished nobility,” according to Cassini’s obituary in The New York Times. His father, Alexander, was a Russian diplomat and his mother, Marguerite, was an Italian countess. Cassini spent his childhood moving between Europe and Russia with his family until they finally settled in Florence, Italy, following the Russian Revolution.
There, a young Cassini made his entrance into the fashion world by aiding his mother, who designed hats for Florence’s Countess Fabricotti. Mrs. Cassini “developed a formula for success in the fashion business,” writes The Times. She would travel to Paris twice a year and bring back sketches to Italy, where the designs would be created much more cheaply, the Times adds. At this time, her son became passionate about sketching.
Cassini himself began traveling to Paris to sketch. During the 1920s, he studied art at the Academia Belle Arte in Florence with the painter Giorgio de Chirico. In 1934, he won five first prizes at a fashion competition in Turin, Italy.
In 1936, Cassini moved to the United States with his brother, Igor, first to New York City, then to Hollywood, and took a job designing wardrobes for Paramount Pictures. In the 1940s, Cassini designed for 20th Century Fox, dressing such fashion icons as Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly, to whom he was briefly engaged.
But it was in 1960 that Cassini began the most well-known chapter of his career: He became the official wardrobe designer for First Lady Jaqueline Kennedy, creating dresses and other outfits that helped make Kennedy “a fashion icon,” writes the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Together Cassini and Kennedy “created a uniquely American high fashion at a time when style was dictated by the fashion houses of Europe,” recalls Bob Jamieson for ABC News. “It built on simple things, like A-line dresses, the black sheath, the pillbox hat—all steeped in American fashion tradition. But there was elegance, especially in the gowns Jacqueline Kennedy wore to White House dinners and on state visits.”
Many of these designs were exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years,” curated by Vogue editor Hamish Bowles.
Cassini loved women, and his designs aimed to accentuate what was innately feminine in women’s bodies. He wrote on this topic in his 1987 autobiography, “In My Own Fashion.” As fellow designer Diane von Furstenberg told The New York Times, “He was a true playboy, in the Hollywood sense. Well into his 90’s, he was a flirt.”
Cassini was married three times, notably to the actress Gene Tierney. Tierney, along with Grace Kelly, would serve as a muse to Cassini, as well as a connection to the Hollywood A-list. For a time he was known as Mr. Gene Tierney, the Times adds. Cassini even had a cameo in a film, “Where the Sidewalk Ends,” with Tierney.
Although Cassini would continue to design into his ninth decade, the work he produced during his time with Kennedy arguably overshadowed the rest of his career. The designer focused his final creations on a successful bridal line. He also launched a line of sports clothing in 2001.
Cassini passed away at the age of 92 on March 17, 2006, on Long Island, New York. He was survived by his third wife, Marianne.
]]>Beverly Cleary was born Beverly Bunn on April 12, 1916, and spent her early years on a farm in Yamhill, Oregon. The town had no library until her mother arranged to have books sent from the state library and acted as librarian.
Cleary’s family moved to Portland, Oregon, around the time Beverly was ready to start school. She spent her first few years of schooling as a struggling reader, but once she was able to overcome her difficulty, she became an avid reader and grew up to be a librarian in Yakima, Washington.
As a librarian, Cleary met children who were either struggling with reading (like she had) or who were bored with the types of books available to them. She was inspired to begin writing books about kids, for kids.
Cleary’s first book, “Henry Huggins,” was published in 1950 and documented the lives of the children living on Klickitat Street in Portland, Oregon, near the very same neighborhood where Cleary grew up. From the “Henry Huggins” series came new characters and new books about life on Klickitat, perhaps the most famous being the series based on Ramona Quimby, a neighbor of Henry Huggins.
The Ralph S. Mouse series was written because her own son was “disillusioned with school and reading.” Cleary was inspired by watching him play with a toy motorcycle and the sight of a small mouse who was “just the right size to ride that [toy] motorcycle.”
Cleary has received many awards for her body of work, including the American Library Association’s 1975 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award and the Library of Congress’ Living Legend Award. Her book “Dear Mr. Henshaw” received the 1984 Newbery Medal, and “Ramona and Her Father” and “Ramona Quimby, Age 8” were both named Newbery Honor Books.
During the more than 30 years of her career, Cleary answered her fan mail personally. Often she would hear that a child had learned to love reading through one of her stories, and it was through mail from children with parents who were divorced that she was inspired to write the book “Dear Mr. Henshaw.”
Cleary has written two books about her own life: “A Girl From Yamhill” documents her early years, and “On My Own Two Feet” recalls her early adulthood leading up to the publishing of “Henry Huggins.”
In Portland, Oregon where many of her stories took place, Cleary’s works are quite well loved. The Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden depicts some of her most famous characters and was installed just blocks away from Klickitat Street, where the characters were said to have lived. A neighborhood school was also named after Cleary.
When asked how she has been able to keep writing stories that connect with children over so many decades, Cleary responded, “Deep down inside children are all the same, they want two loving parents and…a neighborhood they can play in, they want teachers that they can like. I don’t think children themselves have changed that much, it’s the world that has changed.”
In 2016, Cleary celebrated her 100th birthday.
This article was originally written by Haley A. Lovett; it was updated March 8, 2017.
]]>Butch Cassidy was born Robert Leroy Parker on April 13, 1866, in Beaver, Utah. The first of 13 children born to Maximillian Parker and Ann Gillies, two Mormon immigrants from Britain, Roy grew up working on his family’s ranch.
He had his first brush with the law as a teenager when he broke into a closed clothing store, took a pair of jeans, and left an IOU note; he was arrested, but served no prison time.
When his father lost his land, Roy began working for rancher Mike Cassidy, who taught Roy to rustle cattle and use guns. In 1884, the 18-year-old Roy Parker, who had already begun rustling cattle, left Utah for Telluride, Colorado, where he would begin his life as an outlaw.
For the next few years Parker was a migrant cowboy and small-time outlaw who had several run-ins with the law for cattle rustling. During this time he took the name “Butch Cassidy,” likely in honor of Mike Cassidy.
Cassidy’s first major crime is believed to have occurred on June 24, 1889, when he and two other men robbed over $20,000 from a Telluride bank. Cassidy would gain a reputation as a “Robin Hood” of the West, stealing from banks, trains and large cattle companies.
He was “an outlaw fighting for ‘settlers rights, as citizens of the united States of America against the old time cattle baron (sic)’ as written in a mysterious manuscript now believed to be Roy Parker’s memoir,” according to Utah.com.
Cassidy’s gangs had several hideouts along the Outlaw Trail, including Robbers’ Roost, a secluded area in southeastern Utah, and the Hole-in-the-Wall, a canyon in Wyoming accessible only through a narrow pass.
The podcast “Stuff You Missed In History Class” has an episode on Robbers’ Roost.
After spending a year and a half in prison for cattle rustling, Cassidy formed a gang known as Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch, which included Elza Lay, News Carver, Tall Texan, Kid Curry and Harry Longabaugh, better known as the “The Sundance Kid.” The Wild Bunch robbed many banks and trains over the next three years until Lay was arrested and imprisoned for killing a sheriff.
Having lost his right-hand man, Cassidy sought clemency for his crimes, insisting that he had never killed a man and had targeted companies rather than individuals. However, he was unable to reach a deal with either the governor of Utah or the Union Pacific railroad.
He returned to train robbing, this time with the Sundance Kid as his main accomplice. With each successive heist, the authorities closed in on Cassidy and Sundance; they, along with Sundance’s common-law wife, decided to leave the country for Argentina in 1902, ending Cassidy’s career as the West’s most famous outlaw.
After several years working as ranchers, Cassidy and the Sundance Kid began robbing banks in South America. In November 1908, after robbing a courier, the two were traced to a small house in San Vincente by local authorities and attacked during the night.
The following morning, the two were found dead. “From the positions of the bodies and the locations of the fatal wounds, the witnesses apparently concluded that Butch had put his partner out of his misery, then turned the gun on himself,” wrote Anne Meadows and Daniel Buck in Wild West magazine.
Town authorities were unsure of who the two men were and buried them in a local cemetery. They were never reliably identified and there are many legends that Butch Cassidy was not killed in Bolivia, but in fact returned to America years later. Lula Parker Betenson, Butch’s youngest sister, insisted that Cassidy had returned and visited the family.
Cassidy was immortalized in the 1969 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” starring Paul Newman as Cassidy and Robert Redford as the Sundance Kid.
This article was originally written by Denis Cummings; it was updated March 8, 2017.
]]>Charles Spencer Chaplin was born April 16, 1889, in London, England. His father was a vocalist and actor, and his mother, whose stage name was Lily Harley, was a singer and actress.
Chaplin spent his early life living in an orphanage, state poorhouses and other poor rooms. At the age of 5 he was already on the stage. By age 10, he and a brother were left to fend for themselves after their father died and their mother developed an illness. They capitalized on the talents passed on to them by their parents and considered the theater a good career opportunity.
Charlie built a reputation as an excellent tap dancer in The Eight Lancashire Lads group. The poverty of his youth became a quality Chaplin would draw on to create the “Tramp” character that popularized his film career.
A mixture of “extraordinary athleticism, expressive grace, impeccable timing, endless inventiveness” and a willingness to work gave Chaplin the edge he needed to see his career take off, write Ann Douglas in Time.
In 1912, Mack Sennet signed Chaplin to Keystone Studios. He completed 35 films at Keystone, and then transferred to Essanay Studios, where he received an exceptional $10,000 signing bonus.
Chaplin’s reputation continued to build from his early years. In 1916, he received a $150,000 signing bonus for joining Mutual. He became the first actor to earn a $1 million fee in 1917. A national “Chaplinitis” followed, coming with songs, dances, dolls and comic books commemorating the actor.
For more than a decade, Chaplin opposed talking films like “The Jazz Singer.” “The Great Dictator,” Chaplin’s first talkie, hit the screens in the 1940s. “The Gold Rush” was Chaplin’s last silent film before the “talkie” movies began eclipsing the older medium. His role in this film departed from what he had done in the past, dealing with darker subjects like cannibalism and murder. Still, the film went on to become his most famous.
Among his many achievements, Chaplin, with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and David Wark Griffith, founded United Artists Studios. He received two honorary Oscars, along with an Oscar for “Best Music, Original Dramatic Score,” for the 1952 film “Limelight.”
Chaplin lived through several dramatic twists in his private life. He was the subject of considerable FBI scrutiny over whether he had ever belonged to the Communist Party. He also had a few romantic entanglements, marrying three times, twice to girls who were 16. His third wife, Oona O’Neill, was 18 when they married. A public, drawn-out paternity suit in 1943 eventually led to a boycott of his films.
Chaplin was 88 years old when he died on Christmas Day in 1977. The following year, his grave, located near the Chaplin home in Corsier, Switzerland, was robbed. His body and casket were missing for 11 weeks until they were found on May 17.
When the Chaplins began receiving ransom demands for the return of Charlie’s body, police tapped their home and many other phone kiosks. Their efforts led to the arrest of two men, who confessed to stealing and reburying the actor’s body. Chaplin’s widow, Lady Oona Chaplin, had said she wouldn’t pay, noting, “Charlie would have thought it ridiculous.”
This article was originally written by Lindsey Chapman, it was updated March 9, 2017.
]]>Karen Christence Dinesen was born April 17, 1885, in Rungsted, Denmark, located about 25 miles north of Copenhagen.
As a child, she liked “to write fairy tales, stories and plays, the latter being performed at her home with her sisters and friends,” according to the Karen Blixen Museum in Rungsted. “The notebooks in which she wrote are also full of drawings of trolls and landscapes, portraits of women and illustrations of her favourite reading at the time.”
In 1913, she married her cousin, Swedish Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, and soon moved with him to Kenya, where they ran a coffee plantation. Though she divorced the baron in 1921, she remained at the plantation for another 10 years until financial difficulties forced her to return to Denmark.
With the financial downfall of her plantation, Blixen was broke and unsure of what to do with her life. She considered becoming a cook, but decided to become a serious writer instead; “I have begun to do what we brothers and sisters do when we don’t know what else to resort to,—I have started to write a book,” she wrote to her brother.
Writing in English, she wrote a collection of stories that was published in 1934 under the title “Seven Gothic Tales.” She also adopted a pen name: Isak (meaning “laughter” in Hebrew) Dinesen (her maiden name). The book became a hit in America, prompting her to write a Danish version and begin work on her memoirs of her time in Africa.
Her memoirs, written simultaneously in English and Danish, were completed in 1937 and published as “Out of Africa.” The book revealed “an almost mystical love of Africa and its people,” writes Encyclopedia Britannica. “The book is a poetic reminiscence of her triumphs and her sorrows on the loss of her farm, the death of her companion, the English hunter Denys Finch Hatton, and the disappearance of the simple African way of life she admired.”
“Out of Africa” would become Dinesen’s most successful and famous work, and would be made into an Oscar-winning film in 1985. Dinesen continued writing collections of old tales, including “Winter’s Tales” and “Last Tales.”
“I write about characters who together are the tale,” she told the Paris Review in a 1956 interview. “I begin, you see, with a flavor of the tale. Then I find the characters, and they take over. They make the design, I simply permit them their liberty.”
She wrote only one novel in her career, “The Angelic Avengers,” released under the pseudonym Pierre Andrezel. Blixen admitted that she wrote the book mostly for the money, telling the Paris Review that it was her “illegitimate child.”
Blixen suffered through several health problems in her later life, which may have been brought on by syphilis she contracted during her first marriage or by the subsequent mercury treatment for the disease. She had surgery for a stomach ulcer in 1955, which severely restricted the amount of food she could consume.
Though she was “virtually an invalid for the rest of her life,” according to the Blixen Museum, she continued writing tales before her death in 1962 of undernourishment.
]]>Eliot Ness was born in Chicago on April 19, 1903. His parents were Norwegian immigrants who ran a small bakery in Chicago. The Noir Factory Podcast describes him as “a bookish young man and a good student, with a reputation for a neat appearance as well as being a loner.” He also was interested in reading Sherlock Holmes stories as a child.
Ness attended the University of Chicago, where he studied law, political science and commerce. A brother-in-law who worked in the Justice Department influenced him to become an agent.
Ness became famous during the Prohibition Era, in which the sale of alcohol was forbidden in America. He worked in the U.S. Department of Treasury, which was given most of the responsibility for enforcing Prohibition rules.
After Prohibition started in 1920, Al Capone began to control Chicago’s underworld. He used bribery to help keep his bootlegging operations running. Ness was assigned to a Treasury Department unit tasked with bringing Capone down. The goal was to hurt Capone’s finances, and the dozen people hand-picked for Ness’ group destroyed the mobster’s alcohol distilleries.
“Within the first six months of operation, Ness and his crew seized 19 distilleries and six major breweries, denting Capone’s wallet by approximately $1,000,000,” according to Biography.com.
A Capone representative then offered Ness $2,000 a week to stop the raids. Ness threw the man out, and called a press conference to say that his team couldn’t be bribed. Following that 1930 press conference a Chicago reporter dubbed the group “The Untouchables.” Ness used the Chicago press to great effect in carrying out operations against Capone.
Capone and Ness’ war included attempts on the agent’s life and the killing of his close friend. Ness and his Untouchables continued to raid distilleries, and at one point, Ness paraded all of Capone’s vehicles seized in raids past the mobster’s home. The vehicles were then auctioned off.
Though Ness and the Untouchables damaged Capone’s operations, it was other agents in the Treasury Department who wound up getting him in jail. In 1931, Capone was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to 11 years in federal prison.
In 1934, as Prohibition was coming to an end, Ness went to Cleveland where he took charge of the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Prohibition for Ohio. He and his fellow investigators destroyed illegal stills. Ness, between Chicago and Cleveland, had a stint in Cincinnati, destroying illegal stills in that region.
He was appointed to be Cleveland’s public safety director, in charge of the police and fire departments. The police officers there, like those in Chicago, had a reputation for being corrupt.
Ness’ efforts to eliminate corruption forced 200 Cleveland officers to resign, and more than a dozen police officials went on trial. He also established a court to handle only traffic matters, and cut the city’s vehicle deaths by more than half by 1938, according to Biography.com.
But his success in Cleveland was limited. In 1934, someone started killing and dismembering people in grotesque murders that remain unsolved today. More than 5,000 people were interviewed in what the Cleveland Police Museum calls the city’s biggest police investigation.
In August 1938, Ness angered the press when he and 35 police officers converged on a shantytown where many homeless lived. They rounded up the occupants, searched the shantytown for clues, and then burned it, all on Ness’ orders. The torso, or Kingsbury Run murders, as they were known, suddenly stopped after the raid, and no one knows why. Ness’ critics, though, said that burning the shantytown wouldn’t help solve the murders, according to the museum.
The FBI has a large collection of declassified documents relating to Eliot Ness.
After resigning from the city of Cleveland, Ness worked in Washington, D.C., and then joined the safe manufacturer Diebold Inc. Ness unsuccessfully ran for the mayor of Cleveland in 1947, and in the same year left Diebold. Ness died of a heart attack on May 16, 1957.
Ness’ work with the Untouchables has lived on in several television shows and films. Two years after his death, ABC created the television show “The Untouchables” with Robert Stack as Ness. Another generation was introduced to Eliot Ness and his team in the 1987 film “The Untouchables” with Kevin Costner starring as Ness. Other series and movies depicting the team have also been produced over the last few decades.
]]>The Watergate Scandal
At 2:30 a.m. on June 17, 1972, five men were caught trying to bug the Democratic National Committee’s office at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. The men were found to have large amounts of cash and connections to President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign.
The FBI launched an investigation into their links to the presidency. Two Washington Post writers, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reported on the investigation, with help from a secret source: FBI official Mark Felt, who became known by the codename “Deep Throat.” The investigation revealed not only that the administration had orchestrated the Watergate break-in, but also that it had planned a spate of dirty tricks intended to discredit Democrats.
The Senate formed a committee to investigate Watergate in February 1973, and began hearings on May 17, 1973. The Watergate Hearings lasted nearly three months, with 319 hours covered on network television. The key witness was former White House Counsel John Dean, who revealed many key details of Nixon’s cover-up, calling it a “cancer on the presidency.”
Part of Dean’s testimony was that Nixon had secretly recorded many of his White House conversations. Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been appointed by Nixon, set out to find the tapes.
Nixon demanded that Cox be fired, but the U.S. attorney general and assistant attorney general refused to do so. In what would become known as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” Nixon forced them both to resign and appointed an attorney general who would fire Cox.
New Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski continued the investigation and forced Nixon to hand over transcripts of his tapes, which revealed the cover-up in greater detail. In late July, the House of Representatives began the impeachment process, charging him with obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress.
On Aug. 5, a recording from June 1972 was released, revealing that Nixon and White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman had conspired to thwart the FBI investigation by telling the CIA to shut it down. The so-called “Smoking Gun” cost Nixon any credibility he had left, leaving him with no other choice than to resign.
On Aug. 8, he made a nationally televised address from the Oval Office. “I have never been a quitter,” he said. “To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as president, I must put the interest of America first. America needs a full-time president and a full-time Congress, particularly at this time with problems we face at home and abroad. … Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as president at that hour in this office.”
Nixon Pardoned by Ford
A month after his resignation, Nixon received a full pardon from President Gerald Ford, freeing him from the possibility of indictment or prosecution for his role in the Watergate scandal.
Biography: Richard Milhous Nixon
Nixon rose from humble beginnings in Whittier, Calif., to graduate from Duke Law School and join the Navy. A tenacious, hard-working loner with a distaste for elites and intellectuals, he became a congressman in 1946 and senator in 1950.
He gained a reputation as a strong anti-communist, leading the investigation against alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss. In 1952, he was chosen to become Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president and would serve for two terms.
He ran for president in 1960, but lost a close and disputed election to John F. Kennedy. He returned to California and lost the 1962 gubernatorial election, after which he told reporters, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”
His political career appeared to be over, but, in typical Nixon fashion, he would return to politics and win the 1968 presidential election. “He kept losing it, tumbling to great depths, then grimly climbing back,” wrote Time in his obituary.
After resigning from the presidency, he spent his later life traveling, writing and speaking about foreign policy. He died on April 22, 1994, after suffering a stroke.
Nixon and Watergate Resources
The Richard Nixon Library features biographies for Nixon and his wife, resources on the Vietnam War, an index of books written by Nixon, and a description of the library archives.
The Nixon Presidential Library & Museum features a large collection of documents written and received by Nixon, as well as the Watergate Tapes.
The Gerald R. Ford Library & Museum describes the scandal in-depth, including key documents, biographies and film reels.
The Washington Post, which played a central role in the Watergate investigation, recaps the scandal with links to its coverage, a timeline, cartoons and a list of key players.
The University of Texas’ Harry Ransom Center profiles the role of Woodward and Bernstein in the investigation into Watergate. Its includes documents and notes written by the two for their Washington Post articles, as well their books “All the President’s Men” and “The Final Days.”
]]>Bodies of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney Found in Dam
In the summer of 1964, three major civil rights groups united to form the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), dedicated to promoting equality for blacks in America. COFO organized a project called Freedom Summer that aimed to help register blacks to vote in Mississippi, one of the most oppressive states for African-Americans.
Hundreds of civil rights activists, black and white, traveled to Mississippi to take part in the project. Thousands of blacks registered to vote with great enthusiasm, while local whites reacted with anti-black violence across the state. Local police and Ku Klux Klan members harassed civil rights activists, trying to quell their determination.
On June 21, 1964, three Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) activists went missing: 24-year-old Michael Schwerner and 20-year-old Andrew Goodman, both Jewish volunteers from New York, and 21-year-old James Chaney, an African-American from Meridian, Miss. The three men had been arrested for speeding by Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, who detained them until 10:30 p.m. and then ordered them to leave the county.
Their disappearance became national news. The CORE campaign suspected foul play and the FBI launched an investigation. It searched the area and found at least eight bodies of blacks who had been lynched, but no white bodies. It finally got a break in the case when it received a tip from a local white who was motivated by the FBI’s $25,000 for information.
On Aug. 4, the FBI discovered the bodies of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney buried deep inside an earthen well. Schwerner and Goodman had each been shot in the heart. Chaney had been badly beaten and shot three times; “I have never witnessed bones so severely shattered,” said a doctor who examined Chaney’s body.
The story horrified the American public and alerted it to the level of oppression that existed in the South. The civil rights movement received greater media coverage and support in the wake of the murders.
“My husband, Michael Schwerner, did not die in vain,” said Rita Schwerner. “If he and Andrew Goodman had been Negroes, the world would have taken little notice of their deaths. After all, the slaying of a Negro in Mississippi is not news. It is only because my husband and Andrew Goodman were white that the national alarm has been sounded.”
How the Murders Were Carried Out
Schwerner, who was one of the most active organizers in creating “Freedom Schools,” had become a target for the Klan and local authorities, who called him “Jew Boy.” He worked closely with Chaney, who served as a local guide and drove Schwerner in a blue station wagon that became familiar to the Klan.
On June 16, 1964, Klansman waited outside Mount Zion Church in Longdale, Neshoba County, which Schwerner had established as a Freedom School. When the Klansmen found that Schwerner, who had left for Oxford, Ohio, to attend COFO training sessions, was not inside, they beat churchgoers and burned down the church.
Schwerner heard about the arson and decided to return to Mississippi to help the locals file complaints with the Department of Justice. He, Chaney and Goodman, a student who had just joined the movement, drove down to Mississippi and were on their way to Longdale on June 21, when Price pulled them over and arrested them.
The three men were detained and told that they could not make phone calls. Price contacted local preacher Edgar Ray Killen, who rounded up a group of Klansmen. The three activists were released, but their car was followed by Price and a gang of Klansmen. They were pulled over and taken to an unmarked dirt road, where they were shot at point-blank range by a former Marine named Wayne Roberts.
The “Mississippi Burning” Trial
Price, Rainey, Killen, Roberts and 14 others would go on trial beginning Oct. 7, 1967, on charges of conspiracy to deprive Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman of their civil rights. James Jordan, one of the Klansmen involved in the murders, agreed to testify for the prosecution, offering a detailed description of the night of June 21.
On Oct. 20, the all-white jury convicted seven men, including Price and Roberts. Rainey and six others were acquitted, and one man had the charges dropped before the verdict. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the three others, including Killen.
Judge William Harold Cox gave the seven guilty men sentences ranging from four years to ten years. “They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man—I gave them all what I thought they deserved,” he said.
In 2005, nearly 40 years after avoiding conviction, Killen was found guilty of manslaughter for recruiting the gang that killed Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman. The 80-year-old Killen was given three consecutive 20-year sentences, a sentence that was upheld by the Mississippi Supreme Court in 2007.
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