History
The bridge was named for Kentucky's longest serving congressman at the time, Brent Spence, who served in the U.S. Congress for over thirty years before retiring in 1962. The bridge, which opened a year after his retirement, was named in his honor by then Kentucky governor Bert T. Combs. Spence did not feel that he deserved the honor, and lobbied for the Bridge to be named for President Kennedy (who had been assassinated only three days before the bridge was supposed to open). Combs, however, resisted this effort at modesty by Spence and kept the name. Also, at the same time, Combs did name the John F. Kennedy Memorial Bridge in Louisville, Kentucky after the late president just days after Kennedy's assassination.
The approach from the Brent Spence Bridge, with the picture of the downtown Cincinnati skyline, was featured on the daytime soap The Edge of Night from 1967 to 1980.
Read more about this topic: Brent Spence Bridge
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“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”
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“History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.... It is not “history” which uses men as a means of achieving—as if it were an individual person—its own ends. History is nothing but the activity of men in pursuit of their ends.”
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