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June 1, 2013 sat
June 1st, 2013

Quiz: What is a Pyrrhic Victory?

Yesterday’s Quiz: According to ancient Greek myth, Hercules was a demigod and an immortal, but he did die. How did it happen?
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History for 6/1/2013
Welcome to June, from Iunius, the month of Juno, queen of the Roman gods.

Birthdays: Brigham Young, Marilyn Monroe would be 87, Pat Boone, Mikhail Glinka, Red Grooms, Karl Von Clausewitz, Andy Griffith, Morgan Freeman is 76, Nelson Riddle, Lisa Hartman, Cleavon Little, Frederica Von Stade, Powers Booth, Rene Aubergjenois, Lisa Hartman, Brian Cox is 67, Heidi Klum is 40, Josef Pujol *

*Pujol was famous throughout late Victorian Europe as Le Petomane- The Fartiste- who could fart musical melodies and snuff candles at great distances. He performed concerts for crowned heads that he would finish by farting La Marseillaise.

193 AD- Roman General Septimius Severus defeated his rival for the Empire Pescennius Niger “Black Pescennius”, massacred his family, and carried his head around on a spear. Septimius used the body of another rival as a doormat to wipe his feet on.

1098- Antioch near Beirut captured by the warriors of the First Crusade.

1660- Boston Puritans had passed a law that preaching any religion other than that accepted by the Massachusetts Bay Puritan group was heresy and forbidden. When Quaker Mary Dyer refused to cease, leave or recant her views she was hanged this day. Her death and that of another Quaker Anne Hutchinson shocked the colonies so that soon after the King Charles II of England issued an order forbidding execution for heretical preaching.

1792- Kentucky Statehood. The lands of Kentucky were claimed at one point to be part of Virginia, claimed by Spain and groups of leathershirts (frontiersmen) even talked of founding an independent state called the Kingdom of Yazoo.

1795- The Glorious First of June. The British Channel fleet under Admiral Black Dick Howe attacked a French grain convoy in the Atlantic. They defeated the French escort fleet, but the grain transports got away safely.

1813- In battle with a British warship, HMS Leopard, dying Captain Lawrence, of the U.S.S. Chesapeake, cried:" Don't Give Up the Ship!" They don't, but he died anyway.

1815 - Marshal Louis Berthier was Napoleon's chief of staff and an organizational genius. This day in Hamburg while watching Russian troops ride towards a new invasion of France, he fell out of a window. Strange way for a general who was in constant battle for over twenty years to die. The fall may have been an accident or maybe a foreign agent decided he should be kept out of the coming campaign. The Duke of Wellington paid tribute to his abilities by noticing how many mistakes later plagued the French due to confused orders and missed communications: "The Battle of Waterloo was decided when Berthier fell out that window."

1847- Utopian evangelist John Humphrey Noyes inaugurated a Free-Love commune at Putney, Vermont. It later moved to Oneida New York. Gimme that Old Time Religion!

1862- When Gen. Joe Johnston gets wounded, Jeff Davis gives over command of the Army of Northern Virginia to his military adviser- Robert E. Lee. Lee's career begins. Johnston later magnanimously stated in his memoirs: "My getting shot was the best thing that could have happened for the Confederacy". At first the rebel soldiers weren't impressed by Mr. Lee. They nicknamed him Old Granny and the King of Spades for his making them dig trenches, but by the Civil Wars’ end his genius had achieved fame on both sides.

1876- Eighteen-year old Milton Hershey opened his first candy store. Hershey's goes on to become the largest candy maker in the U.S. The Hershey’s chocolate kiss is so named because the machine that creates the candy looks like it is kissing the conveyor belt.

1880 - 1st pay telephone installed; this one in a bank.

1879-After falling from the French throne in 1870 the Emperor Louis Napoleon III and his family lived in England. Young Louis Napoleon IV, only son of Napoleon III and Eugenie, went with the British Army to South Africa to fight Zulus. While waving his granduncle's sword around on patrol he falls off his horse during a skirmish and is speared to death by 17 Zulu’s. The direct Bonaparte family line disappeared.

1909- The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, formed. W.E.B. Dubois edited their newsletter The Crisis.

1931- 48 year old Swiss artist Albert Hurter joined the Disney staff, giving the look of cartoons like Snow White a more Germanic storybook look. His hiring created a new type of job at the studio, an Inspirational Sketch Artist, what we call today a Vis-Dev artist.

1933 - Charlie Chaplin wed actress Paulette Goddard

1936 - "Lux Radio Theater" moved from NYC to Hollywood.

1939- SUPERMAN- Joe Seigel and Jerry Shuster, two aspiring cartoonists in High School create a character called “Superman”. Jewish kids, they had read about the Nazis racial concept of the Aryan Superman. They wanted to show a Superman could be on the American side. On this day they sell all the rights to their characters to Detective Comics (D.C.) for $130. When the first megabudget Superman movie was being made in the 1976, the National Cartoonist's Society pointed out that Seigel and Schuster were now poverty stricken. They never shared a nickel of the multi-millions their creation had generated. Seigel was blind and Schuster delivered sandwiches from a local deli. The publicity forced Warner Bros and DC Comics to award them and their families pensions for life.

1942- British actor Leslie Howard, who played Ashley in" Gone with the Wind "was killed. The movie star was doing diplomacy in Spain, but on the flight home his commercial DC-3 airliner was shot down by German JU-88s over the Bay of Biscay. He was such an effective propagandist that when German agents learned his schedule, they sent the interceptors just to get him.

1961 - FM multiplex stereo broadcasting 1st heard.

1966 - George Harrison is impressed by Ravi Shankar's concert in London.

1967 –Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the US and it immediately goes gold.

1968 - Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" hits #1

1979- Gannett News Services began USA Today, called by some critic's- 'MacPaper'.

1980- Ted Turner started CNN news channel.

2001- In Katmandu, Nepal Crown Prince Dipendra quarreled so much with his mother and father, the King Birenda and Queen Aiswarya, about his upcoming marriage that he came to dinner and shot them to death. He also killed four other members of the royal family and then himself. This was the largest massacre of a royal family since Czar Nicholas II’s family was executed in 1918. Next day, a Nepalese government spokesman labeled the incident an “accident”. Dipendra was in a coma for several days before dying and in those few days a government council declared him king anyway. In 2008 the Nepalese Monarchy was officially deposed.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: According to ancient Greek myth, Hercules was a demigod and an immortal, but he did die. How did it happen?

Answer: Hercules enemies sent him a robe that was poisoned. Because he was immortal the robe didn’t kill him, but he was in constant intense pain. So he ordered a huge funeral pyre built and climbed on to be burnt up. When he got to Mt Olympus, the gods kept him immortal.


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