Mabel and Fatty viewing the World's Fair at San Francisco, Cal. /

USS Oregon (BB-3) was a pre-dreadnought Indiana-class battleship of the United States Navy. Her construction was authorized on 30 June 1890, was awarded to Union Iron Works of San Francisco and launched on 26 October 1893, sponsored by Miss Daisy Ainsworth (daughter of Oregon steamboat magnate John C. Ainsworth), and commissioned on 15 July 1896. While a voyage around South America to the East Coast in March 1898 in preparation for war with Spain, she made a journey of 14,000 nautical miles (26,000 km; 16,000 mi) - a remarkable achievement at the time. The journey popularized the ship with the American public and demonstrated the need for a shorter route, which led to a construction of the Panama Canal. She took part in the Battle of Santiago de Cuba, where she and the cruiser Brooklyn were the only ships fast enough to chase down the Spanish cruiser Cristóbal Colón, forcing its surrender and received the nickname "Bulldog of the Navy". Oregon was recommissioned in August 1911 but after the United States joined World War I in 1917, Oregon acted as one of the escorts for transport ships during the Siberian Intervention. In October 1919, she was decommissioned for the final time. In June 1925 she was loaned to the State of Oregon, who used her as a floating monument and museum in Portland, but due to the outbreak of World War II it was decided that the scrap value of the ship was more important than her historical value, so she was sold and, after a decade, scrapped.

By 1908 there were 10,000 permanent movie theaters in the U.S. alone. For the first thirty years, movies were silent, accompanied by live musicians, sound effects, and narration. Until World War I, movie screens were dominated by French and Italian studios. During Great War, the American movie industry center, "Hollywood," became the number one in the world. By the 1920s, the U.S. was producing an average of 800 feature films annually, or 82% of the global total. Hollywood's system and its publicity method, the glamourous star system provided models for all movie industries. Efficient production organization enabled mass movie production and technical sophistication but not artistic expression. In 1915, in France, a group of filmmakers began experimenting with optical and pictorial effects as well as rhythmic editing which became known as French Impressionist Cinema. In Germany, dark, hallucinatory German Expressionism put internal states of mind onscreen and influenced the emerging horror genre. The Soviet cinema was the most radically innovative. In Spain, Luis Buñuel embraced abstract surrealism and pure aestheticism. And, just like that, at about its peak time, the silent cinema era ended in 1926-1928.