Quiz: Which animated character was NOT based on an existing comic character? Popeye, Superman, Betty Boop, Little Lulu.

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered Below: What is a nom de plume?
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History for 6/25/2019
Birthday: George Orwell, Marc Charpentier, Lord Louis Mountbatten, General Hap Arnold, Cajun musician Clifton Chenier, Sidney Lumet, Walter Brennan, Willis Reed, George Abbott, Carly Simon, June Lockhart, Alex Toth, Peyo (the creator of the Smurfs), Jimmy Dyne-o-Mite Walker, George Michaels, Mike Myers is 56, Ricky Gervais is 58.

841- Charlemagne had made all Europe from Spain to Hungary the Frankish Empire. But the grandchildren of Charlemagne divided the empire according to Frankish custom. Instead of the eldest son inheriting everything (primogeniture), all the sons got an equal share. This ensured civil wars to reunite and consolidate power. After knocking off their brother Lothar, Charles the Bald & Louis the German fixed the borders for a final division of their kingdoms. These would become France and Germany.

1630 – The Fork was introduced to American dining by Plymouth Gov Winthrop.

1673- The Dutch open their dykes and flood the land around Amsterdam to stop an invading French army.

1744- The first Methodist conference convened, in London.

1789- This day representatives from the Revolutionary National Assembly went to Paris city hall and told King Louis’ royal administrators to get lost. They would now run Paris.

1815- After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, now it that it was safe, King Louis XVIII returned to France. He was the younger brother of the Louis XVI guillotined in the Revolution. The slow, rotund Louis XVIII, called Dix-Huit -Deez-Hweet in French, was nicknamed "Louis Biscuit" by the British because he rode into to Paris with the supply wagons of Wellington’s Army. The French called him Louis Dix-Huitres meaning Louis Ten Oysters. One British officer called him "A French Falstaff, a Fat Disgrace."

1835- Antoine Baron Gros was a celebrated painter under Napoleon and a friend of David and Ingres. But politics and tastes change. In a royalist postwar France dominated by Delacroix and Gericault, Baron Gros lived on forgotten and melancholy. This day the 64 year old artist drowned himself in the Seine.

1857- Writer Gustav Flaubert went on trial for pornography for his first novel Madame Bovary. He was acquitted, and went on to write his next book Salambo the Carthaginian princess who strangled herself with her own hair. Don’t try this at home ladies!

1863- During the Civil War siege of Vicksburg, Yankee engineers dug a tunnel under the rebel lines and filled it with explosives. The huge blast accomplished little, but blew a black cook named Abraham up through the air and over into Union lines. Abraham was badly frightened by his strange flight to freedom, but miraculously unhurt . Soldiers of an Iowa regiment immediately put him in a tent and charged people five cents to come look at him.

1867 - 1st barbed wire patented by Lucien B Smith of Ohio. It was considered the perfect tool to protect crops from free-range cattle and other marauders. During the Boer War in 1898 South Africa the Boers got the novel idea of stringing the stuff in front of the attacking British regiments. It’s been used as a tool to herd humans ever since,

1876- CUSTER'S LAST STAND called by the Sioux the Battle of the Greasy Grass- George Armstrong Custer and 300 of his 7th Cavalry are wiped out by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and the combined Sioux, Cheyenne nations (approximately 1,700 warriors).

There had been defeats of the whites like this before: Fetterman's Massacre, The Little Rosebud Battle, but nothing captures the imagination like the Little Big Horn. And for Native-Americans it marks the last coming together of the tribes and the last great victory .The Ogalala Sioux, Hunkpapa, Miniconjou, Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne all united to resist the violation of their sacred Black Hills. No U.S. Army commander ever expected so many different tribes could unite and field thousands of warriors at once.

Custer trusted in his audacity. "Custer's Luck". The boy general –just 23 years old in the Civil War, he was always at the head of his men in costly, reckless attacks yet personally suffered nothing more severe than the flu. Now at age 36 his luck ran out.

Accounts by natives were sketchy and no one is sure just how Custer died. The last white soldier who saw him alive was a courier sent away with a message " Benteen, come up quick. Big Village. Bring packs". The courier was an Italian immigrant named Giusepppi Martini who couldn’t speak English. The famous image of Custer standing to the last with Old Glory in hand was made up by an artist named Paxton for an Anheuser-Busch beer advertisement in 1877. One Crow Indian scout who escaped said Custer was the first casualty and that his being shot down panicked the troopers. Others say the last they saw of Custer he was crawling on all fours with blood trickling down his mouth. He was found in a pile of bodies with a bullet wound in the left side and one in the temple. The Indians didn’t even know they had killed Yellow Hair until told days later.

The tribes afterwards dispersed and headed for Canada. The only 7th Cavalry survivor was Commanche, Capt. Mile’s Keough's horse. He was treated with honor by the army and fed a bucket of beer every payday for the rest of his life. Custer was hallowed with martyrdom. Ulysses Grant was quiet about the affair but privately thought it a badly botched operation. Sitting Bull was more blunt- "The soldiers were fools, they rode to their deaths."

Mrs. Libby Custer lived until 1933 and met FDR. The last living eyewitness of the battle, Mrs. Kate Bighead of the Cheyenne who was taken on the battlefield by her mother as a young child, died in 1959.

1870- Toi Yo ta Ho! Richard Wagner's opera Die Walkure premiered in Munich.

1906- Famed New York architect Stanford White was having dinner at Madison Square Garden (back when it was still a garden, still on Madison Ave. and still square) when he was shot to death by millionaire Harry Thaw, the husband of his mistress Evelyn Nesbitt. The eccentric Thaw was obsessed by White, hiring detectives to follow the artist, and report his amorous pursuits. He would only date women who had dated White first. Thaw’s defense attorney’s got him acquitted of murder by reason of temporary insanity.

So instead of the electric chair, Harry Thaw spent a few years in a mental home living on squab and champagne. The crowd cheered him when he was freed. The key defense witness was 22 year old Mrs. Evelyn Nesbitt-Thaw, one of the beautiful "Gibson Girls’. She gave juicy details of her kinky relationship with White, like the red velvet swing she would ride in the nude over the admiring architect’s head. After Thaw was released they divorced. Before Evelyn Nesbitt died of old age in 1967, she admitted Stanford White was the only man she ever really loved. The incident was the basis for I.L. Doctorow's novel and movie "Ragtime".

1910- First performance of Stravinsky's ballet "Firebird" by Diagheilev and his Ballet Russe. Stravinsky used to refer to the dancers as "A bunch of knock-kneed Lolitas".

1910- Congress passed the Mann Act, sometimes called the White Slave Trafficking Act. It stated you couldn’t coerce a woman across state borders for immoral purposes. Penalties are doubled for legal minors, but the law says nothing about boys.

1934- Milt Kahl's first day at the Walt Disney Studios. It was said he was the first artist to ever show Walt a real portfolio of drawings to get hired.

1940- Young actor, and liberal labor activist Ronald Reagan married his first wife, actress Jane Wyman.

1942- A staff officer named Dwight Eisenhower was named by General George Marshall to overall command of all US forces in Europe. Picked over 400 other officers Eisenhower was chosen for his organizational skills, although up until then he had never actually led troops in combat.

1944- Three weeks after the D-Day landings with 650,000 Allied troops now in France, German Western Front army commander Von Rundstedt still believed the main allied invasion hadn’t arrived yet.

1945- President Truman wrote in his diary about how to end the war with Japan ” Should I invade, or bomb, and blockade? This is the hardest decision I ever had to make...” Truman knew about the atomic bomb, but didn’t know if it would work until July 16th.

1949- Chuck Jones Bugs Bunny short “ Longhaired Hare” premiered.

1951- After losing a power struggle to Dory Schary, Louis B. Mayer announced he was stepping down as head of MGM. Mayer in his time was the most powerful man in Hollywood. He kept an all white office modeled after Mussolini’s in Rome.

1951 - 1st color TV broadcast-CBS' Arthur Godfrey from NYC to 4 cities.

1953- The film Robot Monster premiered. It has attained cult film status as being one of the worst motion pictures ever made.

1956- The last Packard automobile was produced.

1967- The "Our World" Beatles concert, the first television event to attempt a worldwide satellite linkup. They sing and record "All You Need is Love" live in front of an audience of 400.

1968- Pierre Elliot Trudeau elected Prime Minister of Canada. For the next twenty-five years he and his flower-child wife Margaret will be one of Canada’s most colorful leaders.

1973- White House counsel John Dean testifies to the Congressional Watergate Committee "There is a Cancer on the Presidency." For the first time one of President Nixon's closest advisers hinted publicly that the President himself was personally involved in the Watergate scandal.

1978- The Rainbow Flag, symbolizing LGBT rights first flown.

1981- Bill Gates and Paul Allen file papers to incorporate their company Microsoft.

1982- Ridley Scott’s sci-fi film Blade Runner opened.

1991-The Fifth Balkan War- also called the Yugoslav Civil Wars began. After the death of aged Communist dictator Josef Tito, the union of South Slavs called Yugoslavia started to come apart. This day Slovenia & Croatia declared their independence. Serbia had allocated to itself the bulk of the armaments of the former Yugoslav army and attacked them with it.
During these wars it was almost impossible to tell Serbs, Bosnian-Moslems or Croats apart. At times they killed each other based on what their automobile license plate read.

1980- Disney’s film Herbie Goes Bananas, premiered.

1997- Disney's animated film Hercules opened in theaters.

2009- Michael Jackson, called the King of Pop, died after his personal physician Dr. Conrad Murray administered a powerful sedative named Propofol to help him sleep and it stopped his heart instead. He was 50, and been performing on stage since the age of 5.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What is a nom de plume?

Answer: Your Pen Name, or writing under an alias. The most famous being Sam Clemens who wrote as Mark Twain. Or Amantine Lucile Dupin who wrote under the name George Sand. Interestingly, the term despite being French, it was invented by an Englishman, Emerson Bennett

Quiz: What is a nom de plume?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered Below: Trump talked about ending the Korean War. When did the Korean War end?
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History for 6/24/2019
Birthdays: Earl Kitchener, the Sirdar of Omdurman, Roy O. Disney, E.I. Dupont, Ambrose Bierce, Jack Dempsey, John Ciardi, Mick Fleetwood, Phil Harris- singer and voice of Baloo in Disney’s Jungle Book, Billy Casper, Michelle Lee, Claude Chabrol, Chief Dan George, Pete Hamill, Peter Weller, Sherry Springfield

Happy St. John the Baptist or St. Jean Baptiste’s Day.

1203- The armies and fleets of the Fourth Crusade arrive before the Walls of Constantinople. The knights of Europe had signed on to fight Moslems for the Holy City of Jerusalem but Venetian Doge Enrico Dandolo convinced them to help him destroy the Byzantine Greeks first. This was a purely economic act because the Byzantine Greeks were Venice’s chief competition for Mediterranean trade.

1219- Pope Innocent III set today as the deadline for deadbeat knights who volunteered to go on Crusade to get off their ironclad butts and get going. Knights had an economic incentive to taking the Crusading vow: no one could collect a bad debt from you and you couldn't be imprisoned for owing money. So some knights would take the vow to Crusade, but then stalled making the dangerous trip to the Middle East, where two out of three never returned.

1324- THE BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN- Scottish King Robert the Bruce defeated the invading army of King Edward II of England and secured the crown of Scotland for the next 300 years. The Bruce fought in the midst of his troops, hacking down Sir Hugh de Bohun in single combat with his battle-axe. Edward’s father, Edwards Longshanks, had developed winning tactics of using Welsh archers to shoot up an enemy before the mounted knights charged. But Edward II’s bad generalship bungled the system. Knights and footmen scrabbled to get at the Scots not allowing the bowmen a clear target.

1374- In the French town of Aix la Chapelle was the first recorded outbreak of St. John’s Dance. Groups of people frothing at the mouth danced madly around uncontrollably until they fell over dead from exhaustion.

1441- Eton College created by King Henry VI of England.

1488-The PIED PIPER OF HAMLIN-The story is a romantic fairy tale but on this day one version of the story has the real man doing something more like Jeffrey Dahmer. Because the town fathers refused to pay his salary he spirited a hundred children out of Hamelin and they all disappeared. People later found young body parts. These fairy tales, like Red Riding Hood and others were for peasants more warnings of peril than amusements.

1497-English explorer John Cabot discovered Canada -Eh!

1534- The great medical pioneer Paracelsus led a mass burning of medical textbooks at Basel University. The eccentric scholar took frequent sips of laudanum (a heavy opiate he developed) from a container in the hollow handle of his sword. He pioneered the use of minerals in medicine and invented the term Tartar for teeth.

He also practiced Astrology and would never give an enema during the full moon. With this book-burning stunt Paracelsus claimed that all medical text before him was quackery and mumbo-jumbo. Burning in St. John’s Fire was the least it deserved. Truth be told he was right. His middle name Bombast became a synonym for bragging.

1535- The Anabaptists, a radical religious sect, had driven out the Bishop of the German city of Munster and established a commune like city-state they called the New Jerusalem. This day after a long siege, a spy opened a gate to the German Imperial soldiers and the city was captured with a horrible massacre.

The Anabaptist leader John of Leyden, who had lived like an Old Testament King with a harem of wives, was tied to a stake and clawed with red-hot pincers. His tongue was torn out with pliers. Finally, when they couldn’t think of any more ways to torture him a dagger was pounded into his heart and his body burned. The Anabaptist sect was suppressed in Cologne, Trier, Amsterdam and Leyden.

1675- King Phillips War began. The Massachusetts Pilgrims repay the hospitality of the Wampanoag Indians with whom they spent the first Thanksgiving by wiping them out. King Phillip was the Christian name of the chief who was the son of Massacoit, the Wampanoag who welcomed the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock.

1571- Spanish conquistador Miguel Lopez de Lagazpi founded the city of Manila. The town already existed for centuries, he just told them they were now part of Spain, whether they liked it or not. The name is from the Filipino word for city- Maynila.

1668- Margaret Brent entered the legislature of the colony of Maryland and demanded the right to vote. She was chased out of the building.

1812- NAPOLEON INVADES RUSSIA with the largest army then yet assembled.
Around 600,000. By December, barely 30,000 came out alive. This day while inspecting the troops Napoleon’s horse stepped in a rabbit hole and threw him on his butt. This was taken as a bad omen.

1853- Joaquin Murietta was an outlaw who ranged up and down the California midlands. Called the Terror of the Stanislaus. He and his friend Three-Fingered Jack were finally hunted down and killed in a shootout by Marshal Harry Love. This day Murietta’s head and Jack’s three-fingered hand in a jar of spirits went on display in front of the Stockton Cal jailhouse.

1876- CUSTER APPROACHES THE LITTLE BIG HORN- General Custer's scouts reported a large Indian camp at the Little Big Horn River. Custer decides to attack tomorrow without waiting for the other armies to catch up. Through his interpreter Mitch Boyer, he tells his Indian scouts that after he has destroyed the Sioux, he will go back east and become the Great White Father. The Republican presidential nominating convention was next month.
The Crow and Mandan scouts were troubled by the signs and began to sing their death-songs. Embedded N.Y. Herald reporter Mark Kellogg made a final entry in his diary: "I go to ride with Custer and will be there at the death...”
In the dawn's light a survivor from Major Reno’s command overheard chief Mandan scout Bloody Knife tell Custer: " You and I are going Home today -but by a different path."

1889- The Bank of Telluride Colorado was robbed by a lapsed Mormon miner named Robert Parker, who now called himself Butch Cassidy.

1901- The first exhibit in a Paris salon on the Rue Lafitte of a Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso.

1924- As the Zionist Jews labored to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, disagreements arose between Ultra-Orthodox and more secular Jews. The orthodox objected to the founding of a Jewish State before the coming of the Mossiach or Messiah, they objected to the everyday use of Hebrew, which they considered a sacred tongue.
This day an Ultra Orthodox leader named Rabbi Israel Dehar was assassinated by the Hagannah, the Israeli underground. Rabbi Dehar had just had meetings with the Sheik of Trans-Jordan and had announced he was going to go to London to demand the British authorities create a separate protectorate for Orthodox Jews that would not be under the rule of the mainstream Jewish community.
Even though many Zionist leaders like Abba Eban felt the killing of a fellow Jew was wrong, they could not endure such a fracturing of the Jewish position. So Rabbi Dehar had to be stopped.

1930- The first test of radar to detect an airplane, this test over Anacostia flats near Washington DC.

1939- Pan-Am airlines began regular transatlantic passenger flights from New York to London.

1944- Three Jews escaped Auschwitz, traveled via Switzerland to bring evidence of the Holocaust to London and Washington. American and British Jewish leaders demand bombing the rail links to the concentration camps. A shocked Winston Churchill wrote RAF Air Marshal Tedder: "Get anything out of the air force you can." Strangely, nothing ever happened. The plans were always stalled in lower echelons.
Three times U.S. Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy wrote, "Kill this plan.” While massed Allied bombers were reducing German cities to ruins, there was never one single air attack ever upon a concentration camp. The gas chambers and crematoriums worked uninterrupted until they were finally overrun by the land armies. It's one of the war's more shameful mysteries.

1945- The Russian Victory Parade over the German Third Reich. Moscow rejoiced as thousands of Red Army troops marched in Red Square and tossed captured Nazi flags at the foot of Lenin’s tomb. This in imitation of their ancestors who tossed Napoleon’s battle flags in a heap on the steps of Saint Basil’s Cathedral. There next to Stalin stood future President Dwight Eisenhower representing the United States.

Top military genius Marshal Gyorgi Zhukov, the victor of Stalingrad and Berlin, was allowed to review the troops on a prancing white horse. This display aroused jealousy in Stalin who was suspicious of rivals and not anxious to share the credit. Within a year of the victory, Stalin had Zhukov disgraced and sent to Mongolia, and the heads of the Soviet Navy and Airforce demoted and tortured. Stalin then awarded all the top war medals to himself.

1945- Meet the Press debuted on radio. Two years later it moved to television and it remains TV’s longest running program.

1947-The Berlin Airlift- Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was furious when the western powers decided to unify their sections of defeated Germany back into an independent country and top Nazis supporters like industrialist Gottfried Krupp were being let out of jail and put back into positions of power. He decided to strike back at isolated Berlin.
When Stalin ordered all land routes to West Berlin sealed off hoping to starve the city into submission, U.S. President Truman ordered the city supplied by round the clock air flights. The planes brought 4 thousand tons of supplies a day. A plane landed every three minutes. The Germans called them "candy-bombers" because they dropped candy on the children from above.

1947- THE FIRST MODERN UFO SIGHTING. A commercial airline pilot flying out of Seattle notices 6 silver disc shaped objects hovering over Mt. Reynier near Seattle. They then shot off at terrific speed. They are never identified nor explained. The pilot, Kenneth Arnold had impeccable credentials as an ex-combat Marine pilot and chamber of commerce member. The government response was to hit him with an IRS audit. The "flying-saucer" craze, with allegorical overtones to postwar atomic paranoia, sweeps the American imagination throughout the 1950’s.

1949 - "Hopalong Cassidy" becomes the1st network western on television-NBC.

1950- THE KOREAN WAR BEGAN- June 25th in some records because of the International Date Line- 30 North Korea divisions armed with heavy Soviet tanks and artillery crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. The attack was a complete surprise and most South Korean officers were at a party dedicating a new Officer’s Club. The US had deliberately kept the Korean Army lightly armed to diffuse Cold War tension. Mao and Stalin were equally surprised by Kim Il Sung’s offensive. Declassified wire messages between Bejing and Moscow read “ Did you tell him to do that?” I thought you did…?”

That previous January, Secretary of State Acheson had said during a conference that the US "was not interested in the Korean Peninsula." But when President Harry Truman was informed of the invasion he responded in typical Truman fashion:" We gotta stop those Sons of Bitches!" At this time there were only 500 US troops in Korea called KMAG, for Korean Military Advisory Group, which one Yank changed to Kiss My Ass Goodbye! This is considered the first war fought by the United Nations, since Truman pushed through a resolution sending troops under the UN banner. The Russians were boycotting the Security Council over its refusal to seat Red China, so they were not there to veto the resolution.

1963 - 1st demonstration of a home video recorder, at BBC Studios, London

1970 – The movie "Catch 22" opened in movie theaters.

1973- Eamon de Valera resigned as President of the Irish Republic at age ninety. The American-born Irish patriot had been a guerrilla in the 1916 Easter Sunday Uprising and was president since 1932.

1997- Brian Keith, actor (Family Affair, The Parent Trap), shot himself at 75. He was suffering from incurable emphysema and lung cancer and tired of fighting the disease.

2004- On the Senate floor during a routine Congressional group photo, the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney, told the Democratic Senate Minority leader, Patrick Leahy, “Go F**k Yourself!” Republican Majority Leader, Senator Tom Delay, said the Vice President “was having a hard day”. The Vice President never apologized for this vulgar breach of etiquette, like he has never really apologized for anything.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Trump talked about ending the Korean War. When did the Korean War end?

Answer: It didn't In the 1953 Treaty of Panmunjom, the belligerents agreed to a ceasefire, and The U.S., United Nations forces and Chinese pulled back. But North and South Korea were not included in the talks, and so have never officially made peace. So technically, on paper, the Korean War never ended.

Quiz: When did the Korean War end?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: What is a voivode?
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History for 6/23/2019
Birthdays: Roman Emperor Augustus, Josephine Bonaparte, Alan Turing, Bob Fosse, James Levine, Dan Ogilvy of Ogilvy & Mather, Joss Whedon, Dr. Alfred Kinsey the sex researcher, Edward VIII, aka the Duke of Windsor, Selma Blair, Justice Clarence Thomas, Frances MacDormand is 62

1565- Siege of Malta -the fortress of St. Elmo fell to Turkish assaults. Sultan Sulieman the Magnificent was shocked at how many good troops he lost to reduce the smaller of two forts defending Valetta, the capital of Malta. He could imagine the cost to take the larger fort, St. George. So Sulieman gave up the siege. The victorious Knights of St. John Hospitaller, looking for a home since the Crusades, would now be the Knights of Malta. Their emblem, the Maltese Cross, is four barbed arrowheads forming a cross.

1611- In Hudson’s Bay, Canada, Henry Hudson's crew mutinied and set him and his son adrift in a rowboat. They were never seen again. When back in Holland the mutineers were never charged because they claimed to have discovered the Northwest Passage to the Indies, which luckily for them they never had to actually prove.

1683- William Penn signed a treaty with the Lenni-Lenapi Indians at Shackamaxon under the Treaty Elm to start his new Quaker colony called Pennsylvania. Penn wrote of the Indians: "Their language is narrow, yet lofty like the Hebrew…one word suffices in place of three."

1757- Battle of Plassey- Sir Robert Clive with 900 English and 1300 Indians defeated an army of 50,000 under Siraj-ud-Daula, the Nawab of Bengal who perpetrated the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta. Daula was killed, and the victory assured the British domination of India for the next two hundred years.

1789- Since June 20th, when the French Estates General had adjourned to a Tennis Court and declared itself the National Assembly, everyone wondered what King Louis XVI would do. This day the King held a Royal Levee with the legislators and court to announce his decision.
From his golden throne Louis said that while he agreed to most of their political reforms, but the idea that a regularly sitting Parliament of common people could overrule royal authority he declared was "illegal and void". He would stay an absolute monarch, answerable only to God, thank you.

After the King ended the meeting, his Royal Herald called upon the legislators in his tennis court to go home. The orator Mirabeau cried" We shall not leave this hall except by the power of the bayonet!" When told this, the King sighed "Oh... to the Devil with them. Let them stay." The stand off persisted until July 14th when the attack on the Bastille started the French Revolution.

1793- During the French Revolution, Josephine De Beauharnais is condemned to be guillotined. In a prison filled with nobles and intellectuals she found her first husband Alexandre the Vicomte du Beauharnais. They had been estranged for years and she had become quite a scandalous woman. When the jailer read out the names to go to the blade that day he read: "DeBeauharnais!" without specifying which of them was to go. The husband stepped forward and said: "Madame, just this once allow me to go first." When the Reign of Terror was overthrown she was released and she became the great love of Napoleon.

1810- The Pacific Fur Company was set up by John Jacob Astor, a German immigrant merchant. His ambition was to set up a string of fur trading posts along the route traveled by Lewis & Clark. It is the beginning of the great Astor fortune.

1815 –A week after his defeat at Waterloo. Napoleon abdicated for good. He abdicated to his son 4-year-old Napoleon II then being held in Austria, but everyone ignored that wish.

1859- Battle of Solferino- Garabaldi and Napoleon III defeated the Austrian army. This victory and the next battle of Magenta freed Milan and the Po Valley. All Italy is united for the first time since the Roman Empire. The completion of the unification process Italians called The Irredenta. In return, Italy gave France the city of Nice.
After the carnage of the battle the suffering of the wounded was so pitiable that a Swiss volunteer doctor named Dr. Henry Dunant was inspired to found the International Society of the Red Cross. He was soon bankrupt and forgotten but his organization was taken up at the first Geneva Convention in 1864 and made international law.

1865- Partially as a result of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Secret Service was set up.

1865- Two months after Lee surrendered to Grant, at Fort Towson in Indian Territory, General Stand Watiee, aka De-Ga-Ta-Ga, surrendered his Cherokees. This is the last Confederate force in the Civil War. Confederate Jo Shelby rather than give up, rode his Iron Legion of rebel cavalry across the Rio Grande into Mexico. After two years exile he returned and accepted the Yankee amnesty.

1868- Christopher Latham Scholes patents the typewriter. In 1873, he sold his patent to the Remington Company who had made rifles. In 1874 Mark Twain secretly admitted to a friend that he enjoyed writing on the newfangled technology.

1940- HITLER THE TOURIST. After the defeat of France, Adolph Hitler made his one vacation trip out of Germany. A plane flew him to Paris in the early morning and he was driven around to see the sites. While his Mercedes was waiting at a traffic light, a newsboy, not realizing who he was, thrust a morning newspaper under his nose yelling "le Matin! Le Matin!” Hitler was back in Berlin that evening.

1944- Franklin Roosevelt's last fireside chat on the radio.

1953- Prime Minister Winston Churchill suffered a stroke during a dinner for the Italian Prime Minister. By agreement with the Fleet St press barons it was all kept secret from the nation and the world. The 81 year old Churchill recovered quickly, and was back wheeling and dealing by the end of the summer.

1963- In Disneyland the Enchanted Tiki Room opened with the first animatronics (the birds).

1971- Three Soyuz 11 cosmonauts were found dead in their space capsule upon landing. The capsule must have had a pressure leak upon re-entry. Soviet accidents in space were kept secret until after the fall of communism in 1990.

1972- Title IX passed by the US Government. It called for women’s collegiate sports to be funded equally as the men’s sports.

1976- Work completed on Toronto’s CN Tower. Called then the world’s tallest free-standing structure.

1979- The Knack released the single My Sharona.

1989- Tim Burton’s film " Batman" opened.

1989- Disney’s Honey I Shrank the Kids opened with the Roger Rabbit short Tummy Trouble.

1992- Head of the New York Mafia John Gotti was sentenced to life in prison for murder and racketeering. It had been so hard to pin anything on Gotti that he was nicknamed the Teflon Don. Finally, city prosecutor Rudy Giuliani secured the testimony of the Dons top henchman Sammy ‘the Bull’ Gravano. For turning informant, Sammy dodged any penalties himself, despite admitting killing 32 people, including his own brother in law, whose body parts he buried in his backyard. John Gotti died in prison in 2002. Gotti’s personal attorney was Roy Cohn, who was Donald Trump’s mentor.

1993- Lorena Bobbit had tired of her abusive husband John Wayne Bobbit. So this night while he was drunk, she severed his penis and drove off, casually tossing it into a nearby field. Doctors recovered the free willy and reattached it, starting a media sensation. They divorced and John Bobbitt for a while became a porn star.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What is a voivode?

Answer: A voivode is a title of nobility in Eastern Europe. White Russia, or Ruthenia was ruled by a voivode.

Quiz: Britain’s Prince Phillip was not born British. What was his original nationality?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: What was Josef Stalin’s real name?
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History for 6/10/2019
Birthdays: Charles James Stuart the Old Pretender, Yamaoka Tesshu (1832- Japanese swordsman), Saul Bellow, Judy Garland, Hattie McDaniel, Frederick Loew (of Lerner & Loew), Howlin’ Wolf, Maurice Sendak, Gina Gershon is 57, Leilee Sobieski is 36, Jean Triplehorn is 56, Jurgen Prochnow, Elizabeth Hurley is 53, Britain’s Prince Phillip is 98!
1190- Emperor Frederick III Barbarossa (red-beard) died. Barbarossa (not to be confused with the Algerian-Barbary pirate Nur Al Din of the same name in the 1700's) was the great Hohenstaufen German Emperor who decided to go on Crusade at the same time as Richard Lionheart and Phillip Augustus of France. Frederick was very old but insisted he make the trip. This day while crossing a stream in Turkey, Frederick Barbarossa had a fatal heart attack and fell into the water. His men, never being that thrilled about the whole thing and taking their king's death as the clincher, turned around and went home.

1682- English colonists in Connecticut observed a unique weather phenomenon, a dark windstorm taking the form of a funnel. The first recorded Tornado in America.

1688- THE BABY IN THE WARMING PAN- King James II of England has a son born named Charles James Stuart. The anger of English society that their King and head of the reformed Anglican Church, namely James, was a Catholic, was pushed past the point of endurance by his having a son who would become in all probability be another Catholic king. The lords of England began to openly plot to bring James' protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange over to overthrow the King. A rumor created to support this effort was that James' child was born dead and switched with a baby smuggled in a warming pan.
1720 - Mrs Clements of England markets the 1st paste-style mustard.

1750- Francois Voltaire accepted the invitation of King Frederick the Great of Prussia to come live at his court. French King Louis XV laughed: “ Now there will be one less nut in Versailles and one more nut in Berlin.” The friendship between Frederick and Voltaire is fascinating- night after night over dinner, the enlightened gay despot matched wits with the commoner who was the greatest philosophical mind of his time. When Voltaire argued that the world would be better off with no religion or belief in God, King Frederick retorted:” But my dear Voltaire, if you did away with God, then common people would raise statues to you and pray to them.” At times Voltaire’s arguments would get Frederick so angry that the Frenchman would flee fearing for his life. Frederick ordered the borders closed and sent a troop of cavalry to drag him back, so they could finish their argument.
1752- BEN FRANKLIN FLIES HIS KITE- The wizard of Philadelphia was not the actual discoverer of electricity, Leyden Jars and Volta's experiments predate him. He did make the connection between lightning and electric currents and created the lightning rod and the first electric battery. He didn't tell anyone about the kite experiment until 15 years later for fear people would think him a silly fellow. There’s a famous painting of Ben with his kite being assisted by his young child William. In actuality William was about thirty at the time. During the American Revolution, William became a royalist and couldn’t stand his old man.

1776- The great English actor David Garrick went on stage for the last time, playing in a benefit for the Decayed Actor’s Fund. Hmm, I wonder if we could start a Decayed Animator’s Fund….

1776- The Continental Congress appointed a committee of Ben Franklin, John Adams ,William Rutledge and Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence. Most of the hard work devolved upon Jefferson. Franklin glibly noted:` It has been my practice to avoid being the author of any paper which would be reviewed by a public body. Tom Jefferson borrowed much from enlightened European writers like Burke and Montesqiou. There were 46 revisions before the final draft was voted on, including taking out any references to outlawing the slave trade. Yet Jefferson’s great prose put it perfectly “All Men are Created Equal, endowed by their Creator with certain Inalienable Rights, among them Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Ever since these words were thrown at tyrants and inspired leaders as diverse as Ho Chi Minh and Fidel Castro.

1782- John Adams negotiated a huge loan from Holland to get the rebellious American colonies out of bankruptcy.
1801- The Barbary Pirates of Tripoli declared war on the little nation called the United States. These Mediterranean buccaneers would extort tribute money from countries whose ships passed through their waters. So long as Yankee shipping was protected by the British Navy this wasn't a problem, but America was on its own now and the Dey of Algiers demanded payment. One senator's famous cry was Millions for Defense, but not one cent for Tribute!

1847 –The Chicago Tribune begins publishing

1854- First graduating class at Annapolis Naval Academy. The first commandant of the Academy Captain Brown later joined the Confederacy and became the commander of the rebel ironclad Arkansas in the Civil War.
1860- The Comstock Lode- Near Virginia City Nevada Two grubstake miners, one named Old Pancake McGaughlin hit a vein of silver so big and pure that it will eventually yield $300 million dollars worth of ore and make millionaires of men like William Randolph Hearst's father.
1865- Wagners opera Tristan und Isolde premiered in Munich. To meet the demands of Wagner’s music the orchestra needed to be so much larger than usual that they had to take out the first two rows of seats to enlarge the orchestra pit. Conductor Franz Von Bulow, whose wife Cosima was busy schtupping Maestro Wagner at the time, committed a brilliant blunder when he announced within earshot of reporters:" Take out the seats! One or two extra schweinhunds won't matter!" Not the way to get good reviews..

1865- Surrendered Confederate leader Robert E. Lee was indicted for treason by the United States district court in Norfolk Virginia. Ulysses Grant was told and immediately sent a note threatening to resign from the army and start a public scandal if Lee’s indictment wasn't dropped. Once Grant had considered all rebels to be traitors, but he had promised Lee in his surrender terms at Appomattox that no one would be subject to further penalties from federal authorities. The indictment was put aside but never formally dropped, and Lee’s request for his restoration of full U.S. citizenship was never granted. In 1995 Senate leader Trent Lot tried unsuccessfully to get Robert E. Lee’s citizenship restored.
1892- Republican Benjamin Harrison nominated for President. When Harrison was in office the White House was wired for Electric Lights. However Harrison and the First Lady were so terrified of electrocution that if a butler neglected to shut them off at bedtime, the Harrisons would quiver in bed all night rather than touch the switch.

1902 - Patent for the window envelope granted to H F Callahan.

1905- Japan and Russia accept the offer of peace talks to be mediated by American President Teddy Roosevelt. For helping end the Russo-Japanese War Roosevelt received the first Nobel Peace Prize. 1910- The first Krazy Kat comic strip- Cartoonist George Herriman was doing a strip for Hearst called "The Family Upstairs". He was amused at the idea of a friendship between a cat and a mouse. So Herriman put them in the corner playing marbles while the family quarreled. First an office boy and later editor Arthur Brisbane suggested they have their own strip. The immortality of the denizens of Coconino County follows, loved by the likes of H.L. Mencken, e.e.cummings, and Jacques Kerouac. Krazy herself explains:" It's wot's behind me that I am."

1921- Babe Ruth became top HR champ with #120 runs passing then champ Gavvy Cravath. But the Bambino was just getting started.

1924- Italian Socialist leader Giacomo Mateotti was kidnapped and murdered by Mussolini's fascists.

1926- Artist Antonio Gaudi was run over by a streetcar while crossing in front of his famous cathedral in Barcelona. Construction begun in 1886, The Cathedral Sacreda Familia is still scheduled for completion- in the year 2035. 1935- A New York stockbroker Bill W., and an Ohio physician Dr. Bob S, both recovered alcoholics, invented a twelve step recovery program called Alcoholic's Anonymous. This day was their first meeting.

1939 - Barney Bear, cartoon character, by MGM, debuts

1940-With Hitler’s Blitz of France almost complete and English armies escaped across the channel to Dunkirk, Mussolini decided the time was right and declared war on England and France. Italian forces crossed the border and occupied Nice.

1942- LIDICE- In occupied Czechoslovakia the Czech underground scored a big victory when they assassinated the Nazis occupation Gauleiter or governor Richard Heydrich, a personal friend of Hitler. Hitler ordered in revenge a Czech village selected at random and destroyed. The SS surrounded the village of Lidice and shot the whole population of 1,300, then burned and tore down the buildings.

1944- A USO troop was entertaining soldiers in Normandy from the back of a truck but they lacked a piano player. They called out to the G.I. audience if anyone could play. A shy cattle rancher’s son from Modesto California came up and played. He did so well his colonel ordered him out of the line and told him to form his own G.I. band.
Dave Brubeck’s jazz career began.

1945- General Eisenhower was given a massive ticker tape parade down Broadway in New York City. Looking down on Ike from an office building 20 floors up, was a rumpled Navy Reserve Second Lieutenant named Richard Nixon.

1947- Sweden’s Saab motorcar company introduced its first model car. Saab in neutral Sweden had made planes and tanks for World War Two, but after the war was over they recognized that combat was not a growth industry and they switched to autos.

1948- THE JOHNSON CITY WINDMILL- Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson was trying to win a senate seat from Texas but he was lagging far behind a popular ex-governor named Coke Stevenson. So he hit upon a novel way of campaigning. He hired a helicopter and barnstormed the rural towns and districts of the Texas hill country. People came out just to see the newfangled flying machine land and take off, and this gave Johnson a captive audience. They nicknamed it the Johnson City Flying Windmill. Johnson also mounted a massive outlay of posters and pamphlets. He told his staff:” Ah don’t want a voter to wipe his ass with a piece of paper that ain’t got my face on it!” He pulled even to Stevenson and with a little extra ballot box skullduggery won the election.

1957- “Tom Terrific and Manfred the Wonder Dog” cartoon debuted on the Captain Kangaroo show. 1967-The Arab-Israeli Six Day War ends. Israel defeated five Arab countries at once and occupied all of Jerusalem, the West Bank, Sinai, Gaza and the Golan Heights.

1980- Comedian Richard Pryor had been doing so much cocaine even his dealers were worried about him. This day, while trying to freebase he exploded, and ran screaming down his street on fire. Another version of the story said he tried to commit suicide by pouring tequila on himself and setting it alight. During his long recovery in the Sherman Oaks burn unit, his nurse once put on the news and he watched CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite report his death. `He thought to himself: "If Walter Cronkite said I died, it must be true! Ahhh!" He recovered, but suffered from Muscular Dystrophy until he died in 2005.

1995-110,000 people jam Central Park in New York to see Disney's Pocahontas, the largest audience ever to attend an animated movie premiere.

2014- A radical new Sunni Muslim group captured the key Iraqi city of Mosul and declared a new Caliphate. They called themselves ISIS, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. They take advantage of the chaos of war torn Iraq and Syria to amass power and property and eclipse Al Qaeda as the West’s number one threat for several years. By 2018, they were pretty much gone.
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Yesterday’s Question: What was Josef Stalin’s real name?

Answer: Josef Djugashvili.

Question: What was Josef Stalin’s real name?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered Below: Who said,” Killing one person is a crime, killing millions is a statistic” ….?
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History for 6/9/2019
Birthdays: Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Cole Porter, John Bartlett of Bartletts Familiar Quotations, Boy George O’Dowd, Les Paul, Burl Ives, Lash LaRue, Happy Rockefeller, Robert MacNamara, Major Bowes, Carl Neilsen, Jerzy Kosinski, Pierre Salinger, Steffy Graff, Marvin Kalb, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, physicist who formulated Coulomb's Law, Dr. Alois Alzheimer, Michael J. Fox is 58, Johnny Depp is 56, Natalie Portman is 38

Today is the Roman festival Vestalia, when the Vestal Virgins made a special cake.

53BC- Battle of Caarhae- Roman consul Marcus Licinius Crassus was defeated in Persia by the Parthian leader the Grand Surena. Crassus was an extremely rich man, and legend has it the Parthian King killed him by having his jaws held open, and having molten gold poured down his throat.

Today is the Feast Day of St Columba, and St. Maximian of Syracuse.

68 AD- Roman Emperor Nero commits suicide. Nero saw the jig was up when the Roman people welcomed the Spanish Legions of Servius Galba into the city, shouting "Death to the Incendiary! Death to RedBeard!” a nickname implying his fatherhood may not have been pure Roman. He took his life on the anniversary of the murder of his wife, whom he had kicked to death while she was pregnant. He had his servant Epaphroditus push a knife into his throat. Nero died saying "Oh, what an artist dies in me!” Nero was descended from Augustus on his father’s side, and on the other side from Marc Anthony. His death ended the direct bloodline of Julius Caesar's family. For the next few months four generals would turn their legions homeward to fight for power. The Roman called this period "The Long Year".

1358- The Massacre of Meaux. In a France already ravaged by the Black Death and the Hundred Years War, a violent peasant revolt broke out called the Jacquerie -Poor Jacques. On this day two top knights, one from the English side and one from the French- Gaston Phoebus and the Captal De Buch, took time out from their war to join forces and chop up rebellious peasants in the town of Meaux. Gaston Phoebus later became a character in Hugo's novel the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

1732- James Oglethorpe, a British MP, was granted a charter by King George II to found a new colony south of the Carolinas. He would call it Georgia in honor of the king. Oglethorpe lived into his 90s and saw the American Revolution. He lived long enough to congratulate John Adams and wish the new American nation well.

1798- Napoleon's fleet, on the way to Egypt, stops to attack the strategic island of Malta. The keepers of the Island fortress, the once valiant Knights of Malta, had become so stodgy and decrepit that the French easily burst in. When Napoleon inspected the massive defense works, capable of holding off attackers for months, he said: " This conquest is embarrassing." After the Napoleonic Wars, Britain took over Malta until the 1950's. The Knights went from an order of warrior-monks, to a jet-set club, with members like Prince Rainier and Sir Frank Sinatra and charity work like Saint John's Ambulance.

1817- A defective boiler destroyed the experimental riverboat Washington. Despite this unfortunate occurrence, the S.S. Washington was the prototype of Mississippi riverboats- a flat bottomed side wheeler with the engine machinery above the waterline instead of down in a deep hold like Robert Fulton’s model.

1834 – Brass helmet deep-sea diving suit was patented by African-American inventor Leonard Norcross of Dixfield, Maine. The design remained unchanged for 100 years.

1834 - Sandpaper patented by Isaac Fischer Jr., Springfield, Vermont

1839 – The first Henley Regatta held

1847 - Robert von Bunsen invents the Bunsen burner.

1860- DIME NOVELS & PULP FICTION. Mr. Erastus Beadle (don’t you love 19th century names?) published the first dime novel, Maleska, Indian Wife of the White Hunter by Anna Stephens. Sometimes called the Penny Dreadfulls, pocket-sized stories printed on cheap pulp paper became popular reading. They fantasized the West, extolling two-gun chivalry and virtuous maidens, roaring desperadoes and wild savages. This early form of mass media made celebrities out of characters like Buffalo Bill, Wild Bill Hickok, Black Bart, Billy the Kid and Belle Starr.

1863- BRANDY STATION-The largest cavalry battle of the Civil War- Union cavalry caught Jeb Stuart's reb cavalry in camp. Stuart's horses and men were spent because they had spent the previous day holding a pageant showing off for the ladies. A huge confused swirl of horseflesh, sabers and guns ensued. The rebs eventually drove off the Yankees, but Stuart looked pretty dumb being surprised so badly. Yankee cavalry finally proved that under tough new leadership like Sheridan and Custer they could hold their own with the Southern gentlemen horsemen.

1902- Woodrow Wilson was named President of Princeton University. One of the Board of Trustees that selected the future US President, was the former US President, Grover Cleveland.

1918- Louella Parsons began her Hollywood Gossip column. Louella became one of the most powerful and widely read columnists in Hollywood’s golden age. Stories say Louella got as much pull as she did in the Hearst newspaper empire for helping cover up the killing of director Thomas Ince and also trying to stifle the release of Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane.

1920- King George V dedicated the new Imperial War Museum, comprising artifacts from the recently concluded Great War. In 1936, the War museum moved to its present home in the former building of the infamous mental asylum, Bedlam.

1930- Chicago Tribune reporter Jack Lingle was shot and killed by Al Capone’s hoods. The hit was done right in broad daylight on Michigan Ave and Randolph St at the Illinois Central underpass at the height of rush hour. It was first thought that Lingle was going to do some kind of courageous crusading journalist expose, but Big Al had him rubbed out because he welched on a $100,000 gambling debt.

1934- Happy Birthday Donald Duck! Walt Disney's short cartoon "The Little Wise Hen".

1934- The film The Thin Man with William Powell. Myrna Loy and Asta the dog went into general release.

1938 - Chlorophyll isolated by Benjamin Grushkin

1938 - Dorothy Lathrop wins the 1st Caldecott Medal for outstanding children’s books.

1941- First day shooting on the film, the Maltese Falcon. It was John Huston’s first directorial effort. The story had already been made into a movie twice before, so nobody had high hopes for it. The studio budget was so low, Humphrey Bogart had to wear his own suits on camera.

1942 - The1st bazooka- shoulder held rocket launcher, produced in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The name Bazooka was from a Fred Allen and Allen’s Alley radio show name for a home-made musical instrument made from a stove pipe. Bazookas became vital in the US infantry’s ability to stop tanks and other obstacles.

1942- LBJ in the USN- Young Texas Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson spent 1941 loudly declaring if war came, he’d be the first in the trenches. After Pearl Harbor, he joined the US Naval Reserve and was made a lieutenant-commander. He spent the next few months inspecting naval facilities in Hollywood and Squaw Valley, Idaho while partying hard. Friends warned he better go to the battlefront before too much talk hurt him politically.

Lyndon Johnson flew as an observer on one mission of B-26 bombers over the Japanese held island of Leii, New Guinea. To his credit, he reacted coolly as Japanese Zeroes attacked. The original plane he was supposed to be on, got shot down over shark-infested waters. After the mission, General MacArthur gave him a Silver Star, whose ribbon he wore proudly for the rest of his life. After 13 minutes in actual combat, the next day he was on a plane Stateside. By July 18th he had resigned his commission (by Presidential Order he added), and was back at his desk in Washington. Presidential aide Harry Hopkins quipped:” Lyndon Johnson is back from his politically expedient dip in the Pacific.”

1942 - Anne Frank began her diary.

1943- The Internal Revenue Service introduced the Pay-As-You-Go system of tax collection, or today we know it as tax withholding from your paycheck.

1950- After all appeals fail the first of the Hollywood Ten, screenwriters Dalton Trumbo, Philip Dunne, Alvah Bessie, Waldo Salt, Edward Dymytrk, David Ogden Stewart, Ring Lardner and John Howard Lawson are sentenced to prison. In the L.A. Municipal Jail one felon greeted the leftist writers with a smile and said: "Hi Ya, Hollywood Kids!”

1953 - Elvis Presley graduates from L.C. Humes High School in Memphis, Tennessee.

1972- Rapid City, South Dakota destroyed by a flash flood. 280 died.

1973- The thoroughbred horse Secretariat ridden by Ron Turcott won the Belmont Stakes, taking the first Triple Crown since Citation did it in 1948. He won it by an amazing 31 lengths! Secretariat was sired by Bold Ruler, the 1957 Preakness winner. The Triple Crown is three high stakes races. The Kentucky Derby is a mile and 1/4 (called by horseman "the classic distance"), the Preakness is slightly shorter at a mile and 3/16ths, and the Belmont, as reported, is a mile and 1/2. So the second race is actually shorter than the first. The big deal is that they all take place in only five weeks, which is asking a great deal of three-year-old colts.

1976 – Chuck Barris’ the" Gong Show" premiered. Where’s Jean-Jean the Dancing Machine?

1989 - Queen Elizabeth II knighted Ronald Reagan.

2002 –The Canadian Supreme Court lifted the ban on Gay marriages as unconstitutional; the first couple in Ontario was legally married.

2006- Pixar film Cars released.

2160 - Montgomery Edward Scott, called Scotty or Mr. Scott, born in Aberdeen, Scotland, the engineer of the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek. “ Cap’n, Ah dunno know how much more the engines can take!”
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Who said,” Killing one person is a crime, killing millions is a statistic” ….?

Answer: Russian dictator Josef Stalin