 |
 Al
Capone spent his teenage
years running with street gangs in his Brooklyn
neighborhood. He moved to Chicago in 1919, and
quickly built a criminal empire worth tens of
millions of dollars. Although he was implicated
in dozens of murders, it was a conviction for tax
evasion that ended his career. |
 Charles
Arthur "Pretty Boy" Floyd
began his criminal career in 1922, with a botched
robbery that netted him $3.50. By 1934 he had
racked up a long list of successful robberies and
was #1 on the FBI's Most Wanted List. He was
killed by law enforcement in 1935. |
 The word "Handcuffs" was once spelled
"handcops," and that spelling came from
the Old English word "cops," meaning
"chain or shackle." This is appropriate
since the earliest restraints used on criminals
were chains and shackles. Today's handcuffs
typically consist of two rings with ratchet
devices that lock each ring on its respective
wrist. |
 Marie
Besnard was accused of poisoning 11
people, including her husband, with arsenic.
Arrested on July 21, 1949, she went through three
trials before finally being acquitted on December
12, 1961. |
 Peter Cooper
made a fortune in a number of ventures, including
the world's first steam-powered locomotive and
the first transatlantic telegraph cable. In 1854, he established the Cooper Union
for the Advancement of Science and Art to provide
free courses in science, engineering, and art to
both men and women. |
 Clutter
Family Murders On November 16, 1959, Garden City
(Kansas) Police were called to a farm house in
Holcomb, where they discovered four members of
the Clutter Family had been murdered. The case
received national attention, and subsequently
became the plot of Truman Capote's novel In
Cold Blood. |
 The
National Woman's Christian Temperance Union
was founded on November 18, 1874, with a mission
to obtain pledges of total abstinence from
alcohol. It has since expanded its mission to
include divorce laws, abuse of women and
children, sexual crimes against women, and equal
rights for women in the workplace. |
 (Laura) Jane
Addams founded Hull House, the first
settlement house in America, in Chicago in 1889.
Over the subsequent years it has offered medical
care, child care, legal aid, and education to
immigrants from around the world. As the
settlement house movement grew, she then began
lobbying for legislation to protect immigrants,
children, women, and workers. |
 Jean Henri
Dunant After personally witnessing
the horrors of war, Dunant became devoted to
forming relief societies to provide care for
wartime wounded. That devotion resulted in the
Geneva Convention, and to formation of the Red
Cross movement. He was awarded the very first
Nobel Prize for Peace for his work. |
 Louis
Braille took a writing system
originally designed for the military and turned
it into a system of reading and writing for the
blind. Ironically, while the Braille System he
developed never gained popularity during his
lifetime and was actually banned at the school
for the blind which he attended, it has since
been adapted to almost every known language, from
Albanian to Zulu. |
 Carry Nation
took it upon herself to see to it that temperance
laws were enforced in Kansas. An eloquent
speaker, she also adamantly opposed tobacco and
immodesty in women's dress. |
