History
The family founded what would become Basin City during Gold Rush, when a Roark ancestor brought with him a large number of foreign prostitutes to the gold mining camp. The prostitutes were immediately popular, turning a small camp into a thriving city. Over the years, the prostitutes themselves eventually split from the family and formed their own district reserved specifically for prostitution. This red light district would later be known as Old Town.
In the time period of the comics, the Roark dynasty is currently thriving, with family members in the United States Senate, an Attorney General and a Cardinal.
Read more about this topic: Roark Family
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)