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The New York House of Detention for Women -- aka the House of D -- had a number of star visitors, including Angela Davis.  NOTE: I do not own this image.

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W. R. Burnett isn't quite as well known as other crime writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but the titles of several of his novels and films – Little Caesar, High Sierra, The Asphalt Jungle -- everybody knows.

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Greenwich Village enjoyed its last great flowering as the bohemian capital of America from the years following World War 2 through the 1970s. It still drew pilgrims and exiles from around the world. Among them were a bounty of creative geniuses who made the neighborhood a whirring dynamo of culture. 

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By the 1910s the whole world seemed to know that Greenwich Village was the Left Bank of America. It was familiar enough that P.G. Wodehouse could poke fun at it in a Broadway musical. Its crooked streets and romantic garrets drew the likes of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, Djuna Barnes, Hart Crane, Eugene O'Neill, E. E. Cummings, Buckminster Fuller, Edgar Varese. Even Kahlil Gibran, who wrote The Prophet there. 

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Greenwich Village was a Mecca for misfits and refuge for outsiders for a very long time. Blacks, Italians and Irish, artists across the genres, anarchists and communists, gays and lesbians, intellectuals, eccentrics, visionaries and life's adventurers were all drawn there. An astonishing Who's Who of world culture made the Village at least a temporary home in the 20th century. Some came as refugees, but most were self-exiles who came because this tiny speck of real estate, a neighborhood they could stroll through in twenty minutes, was the one place in America where they were not only allowed but encouraged to live and express themselves freely.

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Country singer-songwriter Roger Miller was best known for his do-wacka-do hits, but like other novelty stars, he had hidden depths.

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In the 1930s, Laura Ingalls was a stunt and race pilot about as famous as Amelia Earhart. But she became best known for something else -- her championing of Adolf Hitler.

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On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito went on Japanese radio, announcing the end of the war in the Pacific. An 86-year-old retired general, Shiba Goro, decided to commit seppuku, ritual suicide. That in itself isn’t especially noteworthy. Hundreds of Japanese officers at the time were deciding to follow the old samurai way of choosing honorable suicide over living in disgrace and defeat. But General Shiba wasn’t just following the old samurai ways. He actually was an old samurai, born and bred in a samurai household, possibly the last man in Japan about whom that could be said. For him, suicide was a family tradition. 

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In August 1934, Dorothy Thompson was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, on Hitler’s direct order. She was on her way to being one of the most widely read, discussed, and argued about journalists of the era.

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Before dawn on April 26, 1865, a detachment of the 16th New York Volunteer Cavalry found John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln's assassin, holed up in a Virginia tobacco barn. They were under strict orders from the Secretary of War to take Booth alive. But one man who rode with the 16th answered to a higher authority: Sergeant Thomas “Boston” Corbett.