History

Several graves in a cemetery near Anna, Illinois, hold Cherokee who died during their forced migration on the Trail of Tears in the 1830s. Thanks to local efforts, the cemetery now is on the National Register of Historic Places. Campground Cemetery itself is the site on the National Register, according to the application, with the existing Campground Cumberland Presbyterian Church, built in 1850, listed as a noncontributing element of the site...

MOSCOW -- Relics of Saint Nicholas, one of the Russian Orthodox Church's most revered figures, arrived in Moscow on Sunday from an Italian church where they have lain for 930 years. Intense media coverage accompanied the arrival, underlining the church's influence in post-Soviet Russia...

OAKLAND, Calif. -- Dorothea Lange was driving by a pea pickers' camp on the California coast when she stumbled across a weary mother and her many children huddled in a lean-to. It was 1936, during the throes of the Great Depression, and Lange took out her camera...

NEW YORK -- Roger Ailes, the communications maestro who transformed TV news by creating Fox News Channel, only to be ousted from his media empire at the height of his reign for alleged sexual harassment, died Thursday, according to his wife, Elizabeth Ailes. He was 77...

WASHINGTON -- Kennedy Center leaders are trying to reemphasize an overlooked aspect of Washington's top performing arts venue: its designation as a "living memorial" to President John F. Kennedy. The center is hosting a series of events honoring Kennedy leading up to the 100th anniversary of the slain president's birth on May 29. And they're looking at more permanent ways to put Kennedy back into the Kennedy Center...

LOS ANGELES -- Tomorrowland originally was going to be called World of Tomorrow. Frontierland was Frontier Country. Lilliputian Land never became a reality at Disneyland. And no one could have foreseen a "Star Wars" land opening in 2019. Walt Disney spent a marathon weekend in 1953 brainstorming ideas for the new family amusement park he envisioned called Disneyland...

NEW ORLEANS -- A last-ditch effort to block the removal of a monument to a Confederate general in New Orleans was rejected Wednesday by a Louisiana judge who turned away arguments the city doesn't own the statue or the land on which it sits. "This has gone on an inordinate amount of time," Judge Kern Reese said as he outlined reasons for his refusal to grant an injunction protecting the statue of Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard...

ST. LOUIS -- St. Louis is planning to convert Chuck Berry's one-time home into a museum and to create a cultural district around it honoring the rock 'n' roll legend and other prominent African-Americans who have lived in that part of the city. The city Monday solicited bids for the project, which will be centered around the home at 3137 Whittier St. ...

The demolition schedule of “Old A” is unaffected by Monday night’s Jackson School Board meeting. Laura Stroder, Jason Sides and other residents spoke to the school board and a standing-room-only crowd of more than 30 people in an effort to slow the planned demolition of the old high school, which was approved by voters as a provision of Proposition J in April...

VICKSBURG, Miss. -- A monument to Missouri's Civil War troops will be rededicated this month at the Vicksburg National Military Park after a $380,000 repair job to fix broken bronze work and cracks in the granite. The May 27 rededication comes months before the 100th anniversary of the monument's October 1917 unveiling at the Mississippi military park, which commemorates the 47-day Siege of Vicksburg in 1863. ...

NEW YORK -- A new report asserts the first known Americans arrived much, much earlier than scientists thought -- more than 100,000 years ago -- and maybe they were Neanderthals. If true, the finding would far surpass the widely accepted date of about 15,000 years ago...

Everyone asks about the Taylor Twins. Cassi Bock Holcomb, owner of Cassi Bock Landscaping, said that's the question she gets most often about the garden at the corner of West Main and North Missouri streets in Jackson that will be dedicated at a 1 p.m. ceremony Saturday...

The first public tour of Elmwood Manor allowed 35 people to appreciate the historic home's architecture and its collections Saturday, as part of a tour with five total stops in and west of Cape Girardeau Saturday. The History Mystery Tour offered through Continuing Education at Southeast Missouri State University made five stops in Cape Girardeau Saturday...

BLACKSBURG, Va. -- Ten years after a mentally ill student fatally shot 32 people at Virginia Tech, survivors and families of the slain returned to campus to honor the lives that were lost that day. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, known as Virginia Tech, held a series of events Sunday to mark the anniversary of the campus shooting April 16, 2007...

NEW YORK -- Fossils of a four-legged, meat-eating reptile are helping paint a more complicated picture of the ancestry of dinosaurs than scientists had understood. The creature was not a direct ancestor, but was more like a cousin. It lived about 245 million years ago, roughly 10 million years before dinosaurs appeared. ...

PARIS -- More than 20,000 people, most of them Canadians, attended a solemn ceremony Sunday to commemorate a World War I battle in northern France that remains indelibly etched on Canada's national identity 100 years after it happened. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and members of the British royal family were among the dignitaries who gathered at Vimy Ridge for the centenary of the day that outnumbered Canadian troops succeeded in taking the strategic position from the Germans...

ST. LOUIS -- Family, friends and fans paid their final respects to rock 'n' roll legend Chuck Berry on Sunday, celebrating the life and career of a man who inspired countless guitarists and bands. The celebration began with a public viewing at The Pageant, a music club in Berry's hometown of St. Louis where he played. Hundreds of fans filed past Berry, whose beloved cherry-red Gibson guitar was bolted to the inside of his coffin's lid...

In 2011, as Cape Girardeau Central High School was preparing to celebrate its centennial anniversary, high-school librarian Julia Howes Jorgensen wrote a brief history of public education in Cape Girardeau. After highlighting the most recent achievements — a then-new Career and Technology Center and new high-school building — she wrote of “keep[ing] courageous commitments for the kids of our community for the new century.”...

A free preservation workshop will be offered Thursday at Southeast Missouri State University. "What's in Your Attic? Decoding the Past through Cultural Artifacts" will be held at 7 p.m. at Sadie's Place in Kent Library. No registration is required for the workshop, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, according to a university news release...

MEMPHIS, Tenn. -- Activists claiming an imbalance in economic and social equality rallied at a Memphis church Tuesday, the 49th anniversary of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. More than 200 people gathered at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church to hear guest speakers talk about the legacy of King, who was shot down by a sniper's bullet at a Memphis hotel April 4, 1968. ...

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Crossing a glass walkway that spans a field of 9,000 poppies, visitors to the official U.S. memorial to World War I are transported to a time when tanks and air warfare were new and the hopeful flowers sprang up on the barren, trench-dotted battlefields where hundreds of thousands of soldiers died...

LONDON -- The annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race proceeded as planned Sunday after police removed an unexploded World War II-era bomb found near the start of the race on the River Thames. The bomb was discovered by a member of the public near Putney Bridge in southwest London, just yards from the starting line of the famous race between rowers from Oxford and Cambridge universities...

FLORENCE, Italy -- Leonardo da Vinci's unfinished masterpiece "Adoration of the Magi" has emerged from a six-year restoration cleaner, brighter and with a depth that hasn't been seen for centuries. Officials at Florence's Uffizi Gallery unveiled the restored work at a ceremony Monday that began a special exhibit that will run through September, displaying Leonardo's work alongside the "Adoration" of Filippo Lippi...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- President James K. Polk did big things for America, dramatically expanding its borders by annexing Texas and seizing California and the Southwest in a war with Mexico. Achieving undisturbed eternal rest has proved more difficult...

WASHINGTON -- Tyrannosaurus Rex and his buddies could be on the move as a new study proposes a massive shake-up of the dinosaur family tree. Scientists who took a deeper look at dinosaur fossils suggest a different evolutionary history for dinosaurs, moving theropods such as T. Rex to a new branch of the family tree and hinting at an earlier and more northern origin for dinosaurs...

NEW YORK -- David Rockefeller was the last of his generation in a famous American family that taught its children wealth brings great responsibility. Even as children, he and his siblings had to set aside portions of their allowances for charitable giving...

PARIS -- World donors pledged more than $75 million Monday to an historic UNESCO-backed alliance to protect cultural-heritage sites threatened by war and the wave of ideologically driven destruction carried out by Islamic State group militants. French President Francois Hollande, speaking at a donors' conference in Paris' Louvre Museum, called on more countries to contribute to the newly created heritage alliance and help push it past its "ambitious" $100 million goal...

Gospel music has proven influential across genres, and Altha Robinson will give a presentation Saturday to begin the Cape River Heritage Museum's 2017 speaker series. Robinson, a Cape Girardeau native, teaches music in Sikeston, Missouri. Her talk will focus on the history of gospel music and its development, influence and importance...

The city of Cape Girardeau will unveil its fourth public outdoor sculptures exhibition April 6 with a kickoff celebration at 6 p.m. at the Vasterling Suites Courtyard along Broadway. The reception will be open to the public and include free beer tasting hosted by Minglewood Brewery, organizers said in a news release...

Clad in a dark dress with a black head scarf and starched white apron, Marlene Rivero incorporated song, props and stories to tell about the life of Ann Stokes, a nurse on Civil War hospital ship USS Red Rover built in Cape Girardeau. Hanover Lutheran Church in Cape Girardeau offered the program as part of their Cape Girardeau Civil War Roundtable, which meets the third Sunday of every month...

Chuck Berry, rock 'n' roll's founding guitar hero and storyteller who defined the music's joy and rebellion in such classics as "Johnny B. Goode," "Sweet Little Sixteen" and "Roll Over Beethoven," died Saturday at his home in an unincorporated area west of St. Louis. He was 90...

LOS ANGELES -- It would seem all but impossible to sum up one of the most distinguished careers in photojournalism in only four words, but that's what Nick Ut does when he says, "From hell to Hollywood." And the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, who is retiring this month after 51 years with The Associated Press, has the pictures to prove it, the most famous being a black-and-white image from the Vietnam War that's come to be known as "Napalm Girl."...

SOUTHBOROUGH, Mass. -- A 200-year-old tavern was moved in its entirety from Massachusetts to Connecticut. Hundreds of pieces of the nine-room Woodbury Tavern that had been stored in a barn behind Paul Bourdon's Southborough home were trucked about 100 miles to Guilford, Connecticut, on Saturday. The building dates to 1808. In 2006, Bourdon bought and dismantled it, hoping to rebuild it for use as a home. But the project proved too costly and time-consuming...

Author Carl Armstrong didn't set out to write a book on local history and family legacies in Cape Girardeau. But as pieces fell into place, he kept putting them together. Armstrong's book, "Elmwood's 1,000 Year Dalhousie Castle Legacy," started as a brochure on Elmwood Manor in Cape Girardeau, but Armstrong said he found so much information on the family who built the house and the connections to other structures and history, the project grew...

CATSKILL, N.Y. -- Not only did Thomas Cole paint the lush mountain landscapes that inspired the Hudson River School art movement of the 19th century, but he also painted on the walls of his home. Lost beneath layers of paint for more than a century, the patterned borders below the ceilings were rediscovered several years ago and now are revealed in their semi-faded glory...

PHILADELPHIA -- Construction crews working on an apartment building in Philadelphia's historic district got a shock last month when their backhoes started hitting coffins and unearthing fully intact human remains. Now, forensic scientists and students at Rutgers University-Camden are working to recover as many of the 18th-century remains as they can, to analyze them and find out who these people were, said Kimberlee Moran, an associate professor and director of forensics at the university...

WASHINGTON -- Eating like a caveman meant chowing down on woolly rhinos and sheep in Belgium but munching on mushrooms, pine nuts and moss in Spain. It all depended on where they lived, new research shows. Scientists got a sneak peek into the kitchen of three Neanderthals by scraping off the plaque stuck on their teeth and examining the DNA. ...

MOSUL, Iraq -- The antiquities museum in the Iraqi city of Mosul is in ruins. Piles of rubble fill exhibition halls, and a massive fire in the building's basement has reduced hundreds of rare books and manuscripts to ankle-deep drifts of ash. Associated Press reporters were granted rare access to the museum Wednesday after Iraqi forces retook it from the Islamic State group the day before...

SELMA, Ala. -- Throngs of people converged in the city of Selma for the annual re-enactment of a key event in the civil-rights movement. Sunday marks the 52nd anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River in Selma. On March 7, 1965, African-Americans seeking voting rights launched a march across the bridge en route to Montgomery but were attacked by police...

Desert Storm, Vietnam, Korean War, World War II, action in Afghanistan and Iraq -- for 75 years, if there was a military action, the Seabees were there. For the 75th anniversary, a formal ball was held at Cape Girardeau VFW Post 3838 to honor the Seabees and their rich history...

Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus turns 10 years old this year. But opening the visual and performing-arts campus took almost as long. The $50 million project was beset by funding difficulties and lawsuits. But none of that deterred the vision of now-retired Cape Girardeau lawyer Don Dickerson...

Over the past 10 years, Southeast Missouri State University's River Campus has gone to great lengths to foster artistic growth and expression, not only in education but in the Cape Girardeau community as well. Each arm of the River Campus has proven capable of attracting top-tier talent...

Total performances: 1,088 Total attendance: 310,967 Top-selling show: Southeast's student production of "Grease," which sold more than 4,000 tickets Majors offered: roughly 175 Full-time professional faculty and staff: 16 Summer Arts Festival attendance, inaugural year (2014): roughly 1,000...

Mark Twain paid St. Vincent's College and Seminary high compliments in 1883 when writing Life on the Mississippi. The school, he said, was known to have "as high a reputation for thoroughness as any similar institution in Missouri." The historic seminary is in for more high praise Tuesday as part of Southeast Missouri State University's 10th-anniversary celebration of their River Campus, as subject of a specially composed symphony...

Cape Girardeau community leaders, Southeast Missouri State University officials, state political leaders and major donors all played key roles in the creation of the River Campus. Among them: n Don Dickerson -- As then-president of the university's Board of Regents, Dickerson came up with the idea of turning the former Catholic seminary overlooking the Mississippi River into a visual and performing-arts school,...

LOS ANGELES -- Bill Paxton, a prolific and charismatic actor who had memorable roles in such blockbusters as "Apollo 13" and "Twister" while also cherishing his work in "One False Move" and other low-budget movies and in the HBO series "Big Love," has died from complications due to surgery. He was 61...