[...] This “topics page” provides thumbnail sketches and links to 14 baseball stories at this website, including in-depth profiles and photos of Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth, Sandy Koufax, Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Honus Wagner, Christie Mathewson, Lou Gehrig, and others [...]

[...] In the 1940s and 1950s, magazine ads from the John Hancock Life Insurance Co. used history and famous people from sports, business, politics & the arts to help burnish its reputation – such as this 1958 ad on baseball legend, Christy Mathewson… Story covers Mathewson’s career, accomplishments, product endorsements & “good guy” celebrity as well as some John Hancock history [...]

[...] Hollywood’s silent screen stars faced a new peril with the coming of “talking motion pictures” – their recorded voices… Norma Talmadge, featured in Photoplay’s December 1929 cover story, “The Microphone–The Terror of The Studios,” was one of the casualties… The Pop History Dig story here features famous actors and directors who recount the difficulties of the silent-to-sound era, the carnage it created, and which Hollywood studios became the big players in its aftermath [...]

Statue of a young Babe Ruth just outside the gates of Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Baltimore. Statue by Susan Luery; photo by Leo Cloutier, pbase.com. See other statue perspective, below.     In Baltimore, Maryland, at the Camden Yards baseball park, home of the Baltimore Oriole’s professional baseball team, there is a statue of Babe Ruth, [...]

…The movie industry of the early 1900s, during the silent film era, was not the star-centered commercial enterprise it is today. Most actors, in fact, labored in obscurity. And film makers liked it that way. The film studios then were out to produce a cheap, standardized product and part of the strategy was to keep actors anonymous and low paid. But that was about to change…

In early September 2007, a rare sports trading card depicting the famous Pittsburgh baseball player Honus Wagner was sold at auction to an anonymous private collector for a $2.8 million — a record sales price.

…Shown here on the April 1920 cover of “Photoplay” is Pearl White, a popular silent film star. …At least part of White’s notoriety in “The Perils of Pauline” series was due to a business battle in the newspaper industry. The premier of “The Perils…” film arrived in Chicago in the midst of local turf war between William Randolph Hearst and Rufus McCormick of the Chicago Tribune…

Anna Quirentia Nilsson, shown here on Photoplay’s November 1920 cover, became a star of the silent screen and was the first Swedish-born actress to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Nilsson’s story, however, is quite American in many ways [...]