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Oct. 29, 2014
October 29th, 2014

Question: Which medieval monarch was called The Great Spider?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: What was the only nation to be invaded by Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, The Arabs, Tamerlane, The Turks, the British, the Russians and the United States?
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History for 10/29/2014
Birthdays: James Boswell, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Keats, Sir Edmund Halley, Louis Blanc, Fanny Brice, Joseph Goebbels, Richard Dreyfus, Zoot Sims, Winona Ryder, Jesse Barfield, Kate Jackson, Bill Maudlin, Akim Tamiroff, Ralph Bakshi is 76, Denis Potvin, Neal Hefti-composer of the theme song for TV shows like Batman and the Odd Couple.

1618- Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded on his birthday. Raleigh was once Queen Elizabeth’s favorite, but by now he was getting on King James nerves, by opposing the Kings peace overtures to Spain. Also Raleigh was implicated in a plot to keep James from attaining the throne. The king had him dangling on a commuted death sentence for treason for 15 years. Finally when Raleigh attacked Spanish settlements in Brazil against his direct orders not to, that was enough. Off with his head! On the scaffold Raleigh thumbed the axeman’s blade. He joked:" This is sharp medicine, but it cures all ills." The man credited with introducing tobacco to Northern Europe, he puffed his pipe for one last time before putting his head on the block. His wife kept the severed head in a cabinet for the rest of her life.

1762- Battle of Freiburg. Frederick the Great’s brother Prince Henry defeated the Austrians in the final major battle of the Seven Years War.

1764-The Hartford Current debuts. The U.S.'s oldest continuously running newspaper.

1776- During the American retreat from the British across New Jersey, General George Washington is accidentally handed a letter from one of his officers to another. He read it and it accused him of incompetence: "The only thing worse than a Blundering Commander is an Indecisive one!" Up till then Washington had thought that the writer, Thomas Mifflin, was a friend he could count on. Washington passed on the note without any comment other than an apology for having opened it.

1787- Wolfgang Amadeus’s opera DON GIOVANNI premiered in Prague. Mozart had partied the night before and after midnight sat down and wrote the overture. As the musicians were sitting down he ran from stand to stand handing out the music. Goethe and Schiller loved it . Giacomo Rossini called it “the Greatest of All Operas”. After Don Giovanni his lyricist Lorenzo da Ponte left Europe for America and settled down in New Jersey. His niece had an affair with the son of Francis Scott Key and married a general who fought at Gettysburg.

1795- NAPOLEON MET JOSEPHINE- After quelling anti-government riots in Paris Napoleon ordered the citizens to turn in all weapons. Beautiful socialite Josephine de Beauharnais came this day to thank the young General for allowing her son to keep his slain fathers sword. Napoleon was at once twitterpated and their love became a legend. He would write her letters from the battlefield like “Don’t send your kisses, they burn my blood!” And “ I shall be home in a week, please don’t bathe until then, I want to smell you!”

1796- The SS Otter out of Boston under Captain Ebeneezer Dorr entered Monterrey Bay, the first American visitor to Spanish Alta-California.

1825- In Dublin British Marquis de Wellesley married American socialite Miss Margaret Patterson. What makes this society wedding memorable was Miss Patterson's sister Betsy was married to Napoleon's younger brother Lucien Bonaparte. The Marquis of Wellesley was the older brother of the Duke of Wellington. Napoleon had died in 1821 but had he still been alive he would have had his Waterloo nemesis Wellington for a brother-in-law ! It would have made for some interesting family gatherings.....

1836- The young nephew of Napoleon, Louis Napoleon, tries again to overthrow the French Government the way his famous uncle did. Instead of cheering, people chased him through the streets of Strasbourg yelling :"Shut Up you Blockhead!" He will eventually become Emperor Napoleon III.

1936- The resolutions of the First Geneva Convention announced. It attempted to regulate the treatment of civilians and prisoners in wartime. It was set up by Henry Dunant, who also helped found the International Red Cross. More Geneva Conventions would be signed by nations in 1925 and 1949.

1901- Leon Czogolsz was electrocuted for the assassination of President William McKinley. Immigrant anarchist Czogolsz had a nervous breakdown, and became so crazy, that even other anarchists avoided him.

1904--Mayor MacClellan opens the New York City Subway System. For 5 cents you could go 722 miles of tunnel under 30 square miles, the largest system in the world. The Mayor was given a solid silver ceremonial throttle, took controls of the first train and drove it around himself. When asked to hand the controls back he refused “Go away, I’m running this train now.” He went full throttle from Bleecker St to 146th. Later that day after the VIP’s concluded the party the subway was opened for the first commuters.

1923-General Mustapha Kemal abolishes the Ottoman Sultans and declared Turkey a secular Republic. For this he is named Ataturk, or "Father of the Turks". To this day Islamic fundamentalism has had a hard time in Turkey, where the example of Ataturk is respected as much as George Washington here. It is a federal crime to even criticize Ataturk.

1923- The musical Running Wild opened on Broadway, introducing the dance craze the Charleston.

1929- BLACK TUESDAY-THE STOCK MARKET CRASH AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION BEGINS. The falling stock crisis which had been gaining momentum since early September finally culminates in the greatest one day collapse of the U.S. Economy. Millions of people who weren't ruined by last Thursday’s crash were ruined today. One third of all U. S. banks failed- 2,500. Eyewitnesses to that day all remember the strange low roar echoing through the glass canyons of Wall Street, it was the continuous moans of thousands of investors being simultaneously ruined. Businessmen jumped to their deaths from windows. Two executives held hands as they jumped because they had a joint account. The chairman of General Motors William Durant finished his life managing a bowling alley in Chicago.

The Union Club wallpapered it's bar with worthless stock certificates. Venerable firms like Morgan and Lehman Brothers allowed 'apple-breaks' for their brokers to go out on the street and supplement their incomes by selling apples. By years end all U.S. industry was working at 17% of capacity and unemployment would soon soar to 55% in many major cities. The newly built Empire State Building was nicknamed the "Empty State Building".

The Hoover Administration, which espoused the traditional hands-off attitude towards Wall Street, watched in horror as every trick known to financial wizards like Rockefeller and Lamont failed to stop the slide. People questioned whether capitalism itself was now a failure. Hoover's Vice President Charles Curtis, (for whom the nickname "Goodtime Charlie" was invented) continued to party while things collapsed. He responded to hungry, unemployed people protesting during his speech that they were all "Too damn dumb" to understand economics. His sister socialite Dolly Curtis said that she felt that the Depression, such as it was, maybe was already ending. This prompted one newspaper to run the headline:' DOLLY CALLS IT OFF!"

1936- Ella Crawford-Smith was a real estate magnate whose first husband was killed in a gangland hit. She had the Hollywood bungalow where the murder occurred torn down, and brought in Arte-Moderne architect Robert Derrah to create something unique. Today the project, Cross Roads of the World, was dedicated. It was an early form of open-air mall, designed to look like an ocean liner coming into port. It’s still there today.

1938-"SALUD CAMERADE !"The Farewell Parade in Barcelona of the International Brigade. 40,000 men-young intellectuals, German and French anti-fascists groups all united to help in the Spanish Civil War. The losing Spanish Republic had gambled that if they sent the International fighters home Franco would remove his Nazis and Italian allies . It didn't work. Their story was glamorized by writers like Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. Ironically many Americans who fought in the Lincoln Brigade were denied advancement in the U.S. Armed forces when World War II began. The army labeled them "Premature Anti-fascists".

1956-SUEZ WAR-Britain and France were mad at Egypt over the nationalizing of the Suez Canal. They hatched a plan with Israel to start a war with Egypt then reoccupy the canal. This day the first phase went into effect when Israeli forces rolled into Sinai, preceded by a daring stunt. A flight of six Israeli P-51 Mustang fighters flew a top speed barely 12 feet off the ground slicing Egyptian telephone wires with their propellers.

1957- A lunatic tossed a hand grenade into the Israeli Knesset, wounding Prime Minister David Ben Gurion.

1957- Louis B. Mayer dies. His last words were: "Nothing Matters..." The head of MGM Studios lorded over Hollywood like a monarch, made and broke moviestars, ordered Judy Garland fed a steady stream of narcotics and had his office redesigned all white to resemble Mussolini, whom he admired. Humphrey Bogart was at his funeral. When asked if he was close to Mayer, Bogie replied: Nah, I'm just here to make sure he's dead!

1969- THE BIRTH OF THE INTERNET- After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Defense Department asked the Rand Corporation to create a communication system that could survive Russian atomic bombs. They conceived of a “net” of computers all in communication with another around the world. Because there was no center, a bomb could not knock out the entire system.

In the basement of UCLA’s Boelter Hall, Lick Licklider, Vincent Cerf, Robert Kahn, Lawrence Roberts and Bob Taylor set up the first call to Stanford. “ We typed the “L” and we asked on the phone “ Did you see the “L”? “Yes, we see the “L,” was the response. Then we typed O and asked Did you see the O?” Yes, we see the O” was the response. Then we typed G, and then the system crashed!” But when they rebooted, and the system sprung to life again. The people at UCLA were able to type in LOG, to which the Stanford folks replied IN.

They called it ARPANET- Advanced Research Projects Agency-NET, a few years later Internet. By 1978 the Defense Department didn’t want to run the thing anymore so they offered to turn over the entire Internet to ATT for free. AT&T said no thanks, we just don’t see the value in it. In 1992 the US government made the Internet public and the rush was on.

1975- Years of bad management had brought New York City close to bankruptcy. This day President Gerald Ford announced that the United States Treasury would not help New York City out of it’s fiscal problems with any special loans. Although he reversed his position soon afterwards New Yorkers remembered his attitude. The New York DAILY NEWS paper’s headline “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD!” remained in people’s minds as they voted overwhelmingly for Jimmy Carter.

1992- An examination of Soviet KGB Archives reveal that State Dept. official Alger Hiss never was a spy after all. The revelation in 1947 that top government biggies like Hiss may have been pawns of Moscow drove the nation Commie-paranoid and launched the careers of Joseph McCarthy, Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

1994- An emotionally disturbed Colorado upholsterer named Francisco Duran fired a Chinese AK-47 machine gun at the White House. He told authorities a multi-colored Alien told him to kill President Clinton in order to disperse a cosmic mist that had been over the White House for a thousand years. Pretty amazing mist, since the White House is only 200 years old. Bill Clinton was oblivious, watching football on TV.

2012- Hurricane Sandy –a late season hurricane the size of Europe collided with a storm front coming from the west and a cold front from Canada and slammed into the mid Atlantic coastline. 110 killed, 6 million without power and the Wall St area flooded, The Atlantic City boardwalk, Asbury Park and Jersey Shore destroyed.
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Yesterday’s Question: What was the only nation to be invaded by Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, The Arabs, Tamerlane, The Turks, the British, the Russians and the United States?

Answer: Afghanistan.


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