DICK VAN DYKE Date of Birth: December 13, 1925 In 1955 Dick Van Dyke hosted The CBS Morning Show in New York, with Walter Cronkite as news anchor and Barbara Walters as news copywriter. Concurrently, he landed a spot in a Broadway revue called The Boys Against the Girls. Director/choreographer Gower Champion saw the show and signed Van Dyke to play a lead in Bye Bye Birdie, for which he won a Tony award. Not long after, Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard chose Van Dyke to star in a comedy series that became The Dick Van Dyke Show. Premiering in 1961 and co-starring Mary Tyler Moore, the show was a…

Ornamental jasmine growing in Daxing, on the rural fringe of Beijing. Prices have collapsed since the police issued a jasmine ban. By ANDREW JACOBS and JONATHAN ANSFIELD Published: May 10, 2011

Y MICHAEL D. SHEAR May 11, 2011 Newt Gingrich is in.

Civil War Background In the mid-19th century, while the United States was experiencing an era of tremendous growth, a fundamental economic difference existed between the country’s northern and southern regions. While in the North, manufacturing and industry was well established, and agriculture was mostly limited to small-scale farms, the South’s economy was based on a system of large-scale farming that depended on the labor of black slaves to grow certain crops, especially cotton and tobacco. Growing abolitionist sentiment in the North after the 1830s and northern opposition to slavery’s extension into the new western territories led many southerners to fear that the existence of slavery in america–and thus the backbone…