White City featured several roller coasters, a chute-the-chutes, two ballrooms, inexpensive food, and its landmark Electric Tower. Partly due to a large fire in the late 1920s, and partly due to the economic hardship of the Depression, much of White City’s amusements had been shut down by the mid-1930s. Stiff competition from the growing Cottage Grove entertainment district, particularly the new Trianon Ballroom, also drew entertainment-seekers away from the park. In 1937, only one dance hall, the roller rink, the basketball courts, and the bowling alleys remained in operation. White City closed for good in the 1950s.

Located in Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side, the 1893 Exposition was known as “the White City” for its gleaming white, Beaux-Arts style buildings designed by famed architect Daniel Burnham, famous for designing the Flatiron Building in New York, among many others, and the renowned firm of McKim, Mead & White, famous for the now-lost Pennsylvania Station in New York among many others. The buildings of the so-called White City dotted a lagoon reminiscent of Venice.  Only two of the buildings from the World’s Fair survive to this day in their original location: the Palace of Fine Arts, which is now the Museum of Science and Industry; and the World’s Congress Auxiliary Building, which is now the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Stepping off the cable car that had brought him from the Loop, he stood on the Hyde Park prairie Paul Cornell had plated and drained, between Olmsted’s Washington and Jackson Parks, gazing with disappointment at the ‘unfinished gray stone buildings scattered loosely over the immense campus which was nothing more than a quagmire with a frog pond at the south end.’  Just a few blocks east of this chaotic construction scene, he could see the vastly larger building site of the great fair Chicago would host.  They stood next to each other, connected by Olmsted’s Midway Plaisance, two miniature cities in the making, Burnham’s White City and Harper’s Gray City, both of them planned by ‘ardent, ambitious businessmen eager to change the city’s image from one of barbarous materialism to one of refinement and culture.’”—Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America. (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 394.

The Exposition drew more than 27 million visitors from all over the world, including abolitionist Frederick Douglass, social reformer Jane Addams, writer Paul Laurence Dunbar, writer Henry Blake Fuller, and composer Scott Joplin.

The Dodecanese are a chain of islands in the Aegean Sea just off the western coast of Turkey. The name “Dodecanese” means “twelve islands” in Greek.  While there are over 150 islands in the chain only a couple of dozen are inhabited.  The name for the chain comes from the twelve largest of these islands.

From the 1500′s to 1912, the chain was controlled by the Ottoman Turks, but were seized by the Italians in that year. After World War II, the Greeks regained control of the Dodecanese.

The most famous of the islands in the Dodecanese is probably Rhodes with the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, in ancient times, and the Knights Hospitaller (later the Knights of Malta after they lost the Siege of Rhodes in 1480) operating from their base on the island during the Middle Ages. In a famous incident in Ancient Roman times, recounted in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Julius Caesar was kidnapped in his youth by pirates off the Dodecanese.

“Almost heaven, West Virginia,
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River.
Life is old there, older than the trees,
Younger than the mountains, growin’ like a breeze.
Country roads, take me home,
To the place I belong:
West Virginia, mountain momma,
Take me home, country roads.”

—John Denver, Bill Danoff, and Taffy Nivert, “Take Me Home, Country Roads“

The U.S. Navy has a ship named for the Blue Ridge Mountains, the U.S.S. Blue Ridge, which is the command ship of the U.S. Seventh Fleet.