The James Logan Courier

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

The Vegas strip in "Fallout: New Vegas" is minuscule compared to the vast Nevada wasteland that surrounds it, but because it's the only place in the whole region that sparkles like nuclear war never happened, it beams in the horizon for miles from any direction.

When you spot it for the first time in your travels, "Vegas" doesn't break from the action with a cutscene or make any fuss whatsoever. Like everything else in a "Fallout" game, it's just there, and players will spot it in ways and under circumstances that are organic and unique to the story they've spun for themselves up to then.

Henry Plummer Cheatham (1857–1935) was an African American Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from 1889 to 1893.

Born in slavery (with a white father) in what is now Vance County, North Carolina, Cheatham attended public school and graduated from Shaw University in 1883. After working as a school principal, Cheatham served as the elected Register of Deeds for Vance County (1884-1888). In 1884, he married Louisa (or Louise) Cherry, who taught music at the school where Cheatham was principal. In 1888, Cheatham was narrowly elected to Congress over incumbent Furnifold M. Simmons (who would later lead the White Supremacy campaigns that disfranchised North Carolina blacks). During the campaign, Cheatham allegedly told black voters that Simmons and President Grover Cleveland would re-enslave them. Other press outlets of the time later dismissed these allegations by the press as hyperbole or having misrepresented Cheatham's words.

Read an essay by Henry P. Cheatham, free from the Ohio Historical Society.