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May 4, 2021
May 4th, 2021

Quiz: Why is Delaware named Delaware?

Yesterday’s Question Answered Below: Who were the Bobbsey Twins?
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History for 5/4/2021
Birthdays: Bartolomeo Christofori'-inventor of the piano, Alice Liddel 1852- the inspiration of Alice in Wonderland, Audrey Hepburn –real name Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Rusten, Roberta Peters, Maynard Ferguson, Pia Zadora is 68, Howard Da Silva ,Tammy Wynette, Randy Travis, Hosni Mubarak, George Will, Richard Jenkins

11BC- Dedication of the theater of Marcellinus in the Campus Martius.

1471-"Now are the Winter of our discontentment made glorious Summer by this Son of York"... TEWKESBURY, the deciding battle of the War of the Roses. Edward IV with his brothers Clarence and Richard the Hunchback defeat Lancastrian King Henry VI. The white rose vanquished the red.

1493- the Papal Bull Inter-Contrera and the Treaty of Tordesillas was announced. Pope Alexander VI Borgia divided up the entire world between Portugal and Spain- Spain could conquer everything west of the Cape Verde Islands like the Americas, and Portugal could have everything east like Africa and India.
Damned sporting of him! Columbus knew of this impending treaty when he sailed. So he may have deliberately falsified coordinates in his ship's logs to hide the fact he was violating Portuguese territorial waters to catch the current he counted on getting him across the Atlantic.

1521- Martin Luther had been invited under a safe passport by Emperor Charles V to come to the Imperial Court at Wurms and explain himself. This was still very dangerous. A generation ago Czech reformer Jan Hus was similarly invited, then burned at the stake. Shortly after Luther openly defied both Pope and Emperor, he was kidnapped and disappeared. Liberals like Erasmus and Albrecht Durer were shocked, but it was all turned out to be a charade. Luther’s protector Frederick the Wise of Saxony was concerned Luther would be arrested, so he arranged to spirit him away into hiding at the Wartburg Castle in Eisenbach until things cooled down. Martin Luther changed out of his monks clothes, grew a beard and called himself Junker Karl.

1626- Peter Minuit arrived at the settlement of New Amsterdam to be its first governor.

1715- A French inventor Jean Marius demonstrated the first lightweight folding umbrella. Parasols and sunshades go back to the Egyptians and Romans, but this was one of the earliest types of modern folding umbrella.

1776- Jumping ahead of the independence debate in the Continental Congress, the colonial assembly of Rhode Island renounced their allegiance to the Crown of England.

1776-While marching up the California coast, Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portola came upon a Chumash Indian village on the shore of a big bay. It being Saint Monica's Day, he named the bay Santa Monica. St. Monica was famous for crying, she had a wicked son, who later reformed and became a Saint himself, Augustine. Portola was looking for water that dry year, and Tongva locals took him to a spring, still there, on the campus of Uni High. He named the area for her life giving tears, on her day.
A little further up the coast he found a little beach and lagoon the Indians called “ place where the surf is loud”, in Chumash- Malibu

1788 - Catherine the Great's chancellor Prince Potemkin appointed as Rear Admiral of the Russian Navy, Pavel Ivanovich Jones, or as we know him, John Paul Jones. Jones had gone to Russia to organize the Black Sea Fleet,

1799- The Assault on Seringhapatam- In India, the British army stormed the fortress of Sultan Tipoo Sahib the 'Tiger of Mysore' . Commanding General John Baird leapt up on the parapet and shouted over the scream of rockets, cannon and roaring elephants:" Up my brave lads, and show the world you are worthy of the title- British Soldiers!" Present at the battle was a young colonel named Arthur Wellesley who 16 years later would gain fame as the Duke of Wellington.
Tipoo Sahib was England's chief enemy in India and had been defeated a decade earlier by Lord Cornwallis, who made up for his loss to George Washington at Yorktown. After the battle among the plunder they found the Sultan's favorite toy- a life-size mechanical tiger clawing a man. The tiger had a set of organ keys that played a medley of roars and screams for Tipoo's amusement. It's in the Victoria and Albert Museum today.

1863-Final day of the Battle of Chancellorsville.- The day after Stonewall Jackson was shot made the Southern soldiers fight with all the fury of revenge. One Confederate officer wrote how he paused to attend to a young boy shot and dying. The boy said” Go tell my buddies that though the Yankees have killed me, they have not conquered me!” Union commander Fighting Joe Hooker was stunned when a shell struck a pillar he was leaning against. When he came to his nerves snapped and all he could think of was retreat. Robert E. Lee had been surrounded and outnumbered and had to fight both in front and rear. But he turned the tables on his enemy and won. Chancellorsville was Lee’s greatest tactical victory.

1876- THE ARREST OF GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER- General Custer almost didn't make his fateful ride to the Little Big Horn. He had gotten in big trouble with the Grant administration when he testified to Congress about waste and corruption in the War Department. He even implicated President Grant's own brother-in-law Orville as leading a graft ring and his testimony helped impeach Secretary of War William Belknap.

On May 4th when Custer stepped off a train in Chicago, he was met by two officers who told him he was under arrest, and should remain there to await orders. He defied this order and continued on to Fort Lincoln, where he tearfully begged Generals Terry and Sheridan to intercede for him to get his beloved Seventh Cavalry back. Terry's written pleas to Grant and Sherman worked. Custer was allowed to resume his command. Terry had drawn up a contingency plan for a Colonel Hazen to lead the Seventh to the Little Big Horn. So we almost had Hazen's Last Stand.

1886-The HAYMARKET RIOT. A defining incident in U.S. labor history. Striking workers demonstrating in Chicago for an eight hour workday confronted mass police and militia. Suddenly a bomb exploded among the police, who immediately opened fire on the crowd. The culprits are never identified, but authorities blamed the union leaders- The Haymarket Eight - who were all arrested. Despite an international outcry from celebrities like George Bernard Shaw and William Morris they were all convicted and hanged.
The Haymarket incident was considered damaging to the prestige of the union movement at the time but the union organizers hanged on circumstantial evidence became martyrs to the average working person. As the defiant Albert Parsons dropped from the gallows door he shouted: "Oh America, Let the voice of the People be heard!" A decade later a Chicago mayor re-examined the evidence and concluded they had executed innocent men. He lost his reelection. In 1968, a monument erected to the slain policemen was blown up by hippy radicals.

1891 –THE DEATH OF SHERLOCK HOLMES According to Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, this was the day Sherlock Holmes perished at the Reichenbach Falls grappling with sinister Prof. Moriarity- The Napoleon of Crime. Conan Doyle had tired of his eccentric detective and wanted to get on to other types of novels. But readers were horrified he had killed off the great sleuth. Conan-Doyle couldn’t take a walk down the street without someone stopping him:” Sir, How could you?!” When touring the U.S. he wanted to lecture about historical subjects and spiritualism, but people only wanted know about Holmes & Watson. Finally after a decade, Arthur Conan-Doyle gave in and began a new series called the Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

1897- GREATER NEW YORK- Governor Frank Black signed the act unifying the City of Brooklyn and the counties of Queens and Richmond (Staten Island) to New York creating the City of Greater New York, the five boroughs. The mayors of New York and Brooklyn immediately tried to veto the act, but the State legislature overrode them.

1897- In Paris during a charity cinematograph show the nitrate film catches fire and 200 die. Movie film before the 1940’s was made from a very unstable Nitrate mixture and could explode from the slightest contact with flame.

1927- The Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences formed. Studio heads Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer originally conceived the Academy as an arbiter where studio artists could air grievances without fear of retaliation, thereby sidetracking the call for union representation. It didn't work. After the stock market crash the Academy supported the studio heads enforced employee salary cuts. Soon all pretense as an ombudsman was abandoned and AMPAS focused instead on being the arbiter of artistic achievement.
Writer Dorothy Parker commented: "Going to the Academy with your problems is like trying to get laid in your mother's house. Someone's always peeking through the curtains"

1940- The last British troops withdrew from Norway, leaving it to Nazis occupation.

1947- Paul Rafaelson, the only Jew ever convicted of Nazi war crimes was tried and hanged in Prague. As a concentration camp trustee he aided the Nazis in committing atrocities on the inmates of his own faith.

1948- Norman Mailor's first novel published: "the Naked and the Dead".

1953 - Pulitzer prize awarded to Ernest Hemingway for The Old Man & The Sea.

1957 - Alan Freed hosts "Rock n' Roll Show" 1st prime-time network rock music show.

1963- Nelson Rockefeller married Margaret Fitzler-Murphy, called Happy Rockefeller.

1967- The Big Mac hamburger is invented by Jim Delligatti at his MacDonalds franchise restaurant in Pittsburgh. Steelworkers weren’t eating at his McDonald’s. They often ate one big meal a day after double shifts and the tiny burgers at McDonald’s weren’t going to cut it. They preferred the hearty burgers and meal sizes sandwiched at eat’n park or Primanti Bro’s. So the only way he could compete was to double his burgers! 

1970- KENT STATE. Two days after Vice President Spiro Agnew told law enforcement associations that, “You should treat the student anti-war protesters as you would have treated the brown shirted stormtroopers" Ohio National Guard units opened fire on college demonstrators at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine. Two weren't even protesting but had just paused to watch.
Troops also fired on students at Jackson State a week later. These incidents and the fatal bombing of a science lab by militants at Wisconsin caused the public to recoil from increasingly militant rhetoric over Vietnam. Shortly afterward one friend recalled seeing President Nixon at an appearance in Akron mutter something to the effect that he wished more students had been gunned down at Kent State. President Nixon had called the anti-war protesters "bumbs". The grieving father of one of the slain students wrote him: "Mr President, my daughter was not a bumb!"

1975- Moe Howard died, the last of the original Three Stooges.

1991- Bing Crosby’s son Dennis Crosby put a shotgun to his head and ended his life. In 1989 his younger brother Lindsay had committed suicide in a similar fashion.

1999- Goldman-Sachs, a 130 year old Wall Street investment bank that had once sparred with J.P. Morgan, becomes the last great bank on Wall St. to go public. In 2008 it’s shady dealings helped bring about The Great Recession, but soon most of it’s former execs scored jobs in the federal gov’t.

2000- The Love Bug Computer virus ravaged the worlds commerce through Microsoft Outlook causing $10 billion dollars in damage and shutting down temporarily the e-commerce of large firms like Reebok. It was launched by a Philippine grad student as part of his thesis.

2001- Bonnie Lee Blakely, the wife of actor Robert Blake, was found in her car dead of a gunshot wound to the head outside of Vitello’s Restaurant in Studio City, Ca. They had just had dinner, and Mr. Blake had returned into the restaurant to retrieve a gun he had left at his table. In 2005 the actor was acquitted of his wife’s murder, but lost a wrongful death suit to Blakely’s family. No other suspect has ever been identified.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Who were the Bobbsey Twins?

Answer: The Bobbsey Twins were the main characters in a series of children's novels, begun in the early 1904 and continuing for decades. They were penned by several authors under the common pseudonym Laurel Lee Hope. The stories featured two sets of fraternal twins from the same family, who have adventures and solved mysteries.


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