Founded in 1937, the Peenemünde Army Research Center was the military proving grounds for Nazi aeronautics. The location is widely considered the birthplace of modern rocketry and spaceflight. It also helped create the V-2 rockets that rained hellfire on London and Antwerp.

Legendary scientist Wernher von Braun was the technical director at the facility, before his team surrendered to the United States and worked for NASA.

Today, the location is home to the
Historisch-Technisches-Museum that traces:

"the path of the dreams of the first rocket pioneers of civilian space travel to the systematic development of the first major military rocket." (from the museum website).

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On December 11, 1965, the Velvet Underground played their first show- under the name "The Velvet Underground" and with drummer Maureen Tucker- in the auditorium of Summit High School. Tickets cost $2.50, and other bands included the headliners The Myddle Class, as well as The Forty Fingers.

The VU played three songs ("There She Goes Again," "Venus In Furs," and "Heroin"), then walked out with the new Wollensack tape recorder of journalist Al Aronowitz. Gotta buy them drugs somehow.

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Commissioner of Public Safety for the city of Birmingham, Alabama and über-racist, Eugene "Bull" Connor, liked to spend his mornings at the Molton Hotel, drinking shots of Ol' Grand-Dad bourbon at the bar.

When Martin Luther King and his entourage decided to bring the civil rights struggle to Birmingham, the plan was to get Bull Connor to "tip his hand" as a reaction to peaceful protests.

Bull Connor did. His troops responded to a walk-out of students with fire hoses and snarling German Shepherds. This was captured in photos that landed on the cover the major papers in America the next day. The civil rights movement gained support from the shocked moderates of the country, and within a year a series of civil rights laws were passed.

The Molton was torn down in 1979, replaced by the Financial Center which stands there today.

*source: David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell.

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The work scenes in Drinking Buddies, staring Olivia Wilde, Anna Kendrick, the guy from Office Space, Jason Sudeikis, some guy from a sitcom and horror director Ti West, were filmed here at Revolution Brewing in Chicago's Logan Square.

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Nazi rocket scientists had their work brought back to the United States after the fall of the Third Reich. The rockets were reverse engineered at the White Sands Proving Grounds (now called the White Sands Missile Range). Within months, the U.S. were testing rockets that traveled so far that they couldn't be tracked with conventional cameras, so they used anti-aircraft turrets mounted with lenses.

The U.S. troops scorched the Nazi rocket-making facilities so they wouldn't fall into other countries hands, but the Russians managed to get some of their own V-2 rockets. They followed the same process as their U.S. counterparts and the space race began...

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