July 4, 2023 July 4th, 2023 |
Quiz: Who said, “Fire when you see the whites of their eyes”..?
Yesterday’s question answered below: Experts expected Russia to blitzkrieg Ukraine. What is a blitzkrieg?
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History for 7/4/2023 U.S. Independence Day
Birthdays: Jean Pierre Blanchard the balloonist-1753, George M. Cohan, Stephen Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Calvin Coolidge, Rube Goldberg, Louis Armstrong*, Edward Walker the inventor of the Lava Lamp, Mayer Lansky, Tokyo Rose, Louis B. Mayer, George Murphy, Emerson Boozer, Neil Simon, Mitch Miller, Gina Lollobrigida, George Steinbrenner, Ann Landers, Ron Kovic, Geraldo Rivera, Victoria Abril is 64, Pam Shriver, Rene Laloux, Gloria Stuart, Malia Obama, Eva Marie Saint is 99
• Louis Armstrong always claimed his birthday was July 4th 1900, although records show his birth was August 4th 1901.
1054- A supernova in the constellation Taurus created a star visible in the sky for 23 days. The residue of the blast is visible today as the Crab Nebula.
1187- BATTLE OF THE HORNS OF HATTIN- Sultan Saladin lured the Christian Crusader army out into the desert, far away from water. The Saracens started a brush fire to confuse the Crusader formations with choking smoke. Old Duke Raymond of Tripoli realized what was happening but was helpless to stop it. When he saw his knights turning to fight, he cried out:" We're lost! We are already dead men!"
In one big battle the entire hierarchy of Crusader Palestine or Outremer as they called it, was dead or taken. Saladin also captured Christian holy relics like the wood of the True Cross and Holy Lance. He sent them to the Caliph in Baghdad.
While on the pilgrimage to Mecca, Saladin’s sister was captured and raped by a crusader named Raymond du Chatillion. Chatillion bragged that he planned next to march on Mecca and “piss on the grave of that lying old mule trader Mohammad!” Raymond was taken alive, so Saladin spent that evening torturing him to death. Hattin was the battle that decided that the Holy Land would not be part of Christian Europe. Raymond of Tripoli escaped back to his castle, to die of old age.
1630- Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus landed in Germany to help the Protestant side in the Thirty Years War. Nobody remembers now, but back then little Sweden was a butt-kicking berserk military power. She always had the problem of a small population of 4 million while she took on nations like France and Russia with tens of millions.
1636- The town of Providence Rhode Island founded.
1653- THE BAREBONES PARLIAMENT- Puritan General Oliver Cromwell had beheaded King Charles I and dispensed with Parliament. This day he tried a semblance of legality by naming a new parliament but with no royalists, Catholics or Presbyterians, in fact they were all his handpicked Puritan followers. It was nicknamed the Barebones Parliament because one its leaders was an itinerant Puritan preacher named PraiseGod Barebones. After a few months Cromwell dispensed with even this rubber stamp Parliament, and ruled directly as a dictator.
1712- A slave uprising in colonial New York City killed 9.
1744- Representatives of the Crown Colony of Pennsylvania negotiate a peace accord with the Iroquois Confederacy of the 5 Nations. The great Onondaga chief Canasatego lectured the white men : "Our wise forefathers established union and amity between the five tribes, it has made us formidable. We are a powerful confederacy and by following the same methods you too can acquire great power." A secretary present named Benjamin Franklin took his advice to heart. Their symbol, five arrows tied together is still held in the claws of the eagle in the Great Seal of the United States.
247 Years Ago 1776- U.S. INDEPENDENCE DAY- The actual vote for independence was on July 2nd, two days were required for rewrites, but the 4th was the day of the vote to approve the amended Declaration and the official announcement. After 46 revisions and deletions Tom Jefferson showed the finished document to Ben Franklin, he smiled: ”Now we may proceed.” The 56 men who signed the document knew that this was their death warrant as they were committing high treason. Many of them had their personal fortunes ruined as a result.
1776- It took two months for the news to cross the Atlantic. In London King George III wrote in his diary for July 4th, 1776:" Nothing important happened today..."
1802-The Hudson River fortress of West Point is inaugurated as a military academy.
1804- Already pledged to fight a duel in a week, Vice President Aaron Burr and former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton have to sit next to each other at an Independence Day dinner in New York City.
1826- John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Adams last words were: "Jefferson...Jefferson still lives...” . Jefferson breathed his last at 1:30PM at Monticello Virginia, Adams at 6:00PM at his home in Quincy Massachusetts. Adams left holdings amounting to $100,000, Jefferson left debts amounting to $100,000. Jefferson freed only six out of 200 slaves, all of the Hemmings Family but not Sally Hemmings his mistress for 38 years. Jefferson’s daughter clandestinely freed her with a pension for her old age.
1831- former President James Monroe, veteran of Washington’s Army and called the Last Founding Father, also died on the 4th of July.
1848- The Communist Manifesto published by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels.
1850- President Zachary Taylor "Old Rough and Ready" gets sick from eating too many raw cherries and raw milk at a ceremony laying the cornerstone of the Washington Monument. He died 5 days later. Modern historians wondered if he was poisoned, being a Southern statesman who openly opposed slavery, but an examination of his exhumed remains in 1993 proved natural causes.
1855- Henry Davis Thoreau moved to Walden Pond. He was the first U.S. writer to describe nature as a thing of beauty instead of a mortal enemy to be conquered. This date is considered the birth of the American Conservation Movement.
1855- Walt Whitman published his quarto of poems The Leaves of Grass. Many people were shocked at its frank description of sexual desire. Whitman’s mother said: ”Walt is a good boy, but strange.”
1862- Oxford mathematics professor Charles Dodgson rowed ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her sister up the Thames in a small punt. The little girls called him Dodo. They begged him for a story, so Dodgson made up fantastic tales of March Hares, Mad Hatters and the Queen of Hearts.
Dodgson later wrote them down and published them in 1865 as Alice in Wonderland. He used the pen name Lewis Carroll, which was a joke on the fact that Renaissance scholars adopted big stuffy Latin names like Ludovicus Carolus Magnus.
1863- The day after the Battle of Gettysburg both armies sat motionless while a torrential rains pour down. Lee had no more reserves and was practically out of cannonballs, U.S. General Meade still had a third of his army untouched and ready to go. But Meade infuriated Lincoln because he refused to resume the attack.
1863-VICKSBURG- The Confederate fortress-city of Vicksburg surrendered to Union General Grant. Pennsylvania-born Confederate General James Pemberton led 29,000 men into captivity. He said: " In know the Northerners. We can get better terms if we give up on the 4th of July than any other day." Grant was so confident he would win that while the battle was still going on he telegraphed the town's main hotel and booked a room reservation for July 4th.
This completed the Yankee control of the Mississippi from the north down through Memphis to New Orleans. It severed the jugular of the Confederacy. Lincoln in his announcement said: "The Father of the Waters flows unvexed to the Sea." The citizens of Vicksburg would not celebrate the Fourth of July for eighty years, until 1945.
1863- In the far West, the town of Boise Idaho founded.
1879- Battle of Ulundi- After several Zulu victories earlier in the year, the full weight of the British Empire is brought in to conquer the Zulu people. It was the first time the British used Canadian, Indian and Australian regiments outside of their own territories. A large Victorian monument to British dead in the battle was erected. Only in 1989 was a monument allowed to the native Zulu people who died defending their own homeland.
1883- Buffalo Bill staged his first Wild West Show in North Platte Nebraska. Bill and his partners took the show all over the US and played for the crowned heads of Europe until 1916.
1898- The US flag first raised over Wake Island in the Pacific.
1905- Los Angeles developer Abbott Kinney had broken with his partners over the Santa Monica Pleasure Pier. He moved down the coast to some marshy wetlands and built a new community with canals, lagoons and gondolas. The town of VENICE California was dedicated this day. In 1925, the City of LA got rid of most of the canals and gondolas. Venice went on to be a seaside mecca for Beatniks, Hippies and weightlifters like young Arnold Schwarzenegger.
1911- The first rollercoaster on the Pacific Coast opened on Santa Monica Pier.
1914- First day of filming on D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation.”
1915- Heavyweight Champion Jess Willard who had taken the championship from Jack Johnson was himself beaten by a new kid named Jack Dempsey, the Manassas Mauler. Dempsey chewed pine tar to make his jaw hard and washed his face in ocean brine to toughen his skin against cuts. Dempsey hit Willard so hard, he broke his jaw and knocked out six teeth by the fourth round. Jack Dempsey defended his title several more times and became a popular media figure by appearing with many Hollywood Movie stars. After he retired, he opened a bar-restaurant in NY Times Square called Dempseys, the first sports-bar.
1917- The US First Division paraded through Paris in advance of the main American armies still to come. General Blackjack Pershing laid a wreath on the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette and proclaimed:” Lafayette- nous voisci! Lafayette, we are here!” Jake Strauss the owner of Macy’s Department Store changed it to “Gallerie Lafayette, we are here!”
1917- The July Coup. Lenin and the Bolsheviks tried to overthrow the Russian Government early but were put down. They fled into exile, trying again in October.
1926- Hungarian film director Mano Mikhali Kertesz arrived in Hollywood. He changed his name to the more manageable Michael Curtiz and directed classic films like Captain Blood and Casablanca.
1927-Walt Disney’s Trolley Troubles with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit premiered.
1930- 1,300 delegates formed the National Unemployment Council. They agitate Washington to create national unemployment insurance.
1933- In San Francisco Bay, the work began on the Oakland Bay Bridge.
1943- Nazis panzer divisions began the Battle of KURSK. Thousands of tanks swirled around in the flat dusty Ukrainian steppe land and blew each other to pieces. The Russians considered Kursk the real turning point of World War II because they stopped a full-on Nazi blitzkrieg. For the first time the Nazis began a retreat in the summer.
1946- The Independence of the Philippines is declared.
1947- THE WILD ONES- 400 motorcyclists converge on a small California town called Hollister to party hard. The local police arrest 49 and call for State reinforcements. The national media sensationalized the wild bikers terrorizing a small town, calling them "Hell's Angels" three years before the first chapter was formed. Truth be told many residents remember the incident fondly and said it livened things up.
Many of the bikers weren’t teenage delinquents but World War II veterans who used motorcycles to recapture the thrill and camaraderie of action. The Life Magazine that dramatized the Hollister incident had a cover photo showing a depraved biker swilling beer. The shot was staged and the man in the photo was actually a Hollister local who never went near a Harley. The Marlon Brando film 'The Wild One" was based on the Hollister incident.
1954- Dr. Sam Shepard returned to his suburban Cleveland home to find his wife beaten to death and a man fleeing the scene. Dr. Shepard himself was convicted of his wife’s murder in a controversial trial. People still argue today whether he was guilty or not.
In 1998 Dr. Shepard’s son got DNA evidence to prove there was another man at the scene the night of the murder, and in 2000 the court threw out his wrongful imprisonment suit. The TV show and film The Fugitive was based on Dr. Shepard.
1956- MIT’s TX-1 Whirlwind computer added an adapted typewriter keyboard to enter data. The first computer keyboard.
1966- President Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act.
1968- “The Green Berets” premiered. John Wayne financed and produced this attempt to counter the antiwar sentiment sweeping America by creating a pro-war WWII style movie about the Vietnam conflict.
1969-“Give Peace a Chance.” released by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band.
1976- What’s Love Got to Do With It? Singer Tina Turner left Ike Turner.
1976- The Ramones first arrived in England for a tour. They greatly inspired future bands like the Clash and the Sex Pistols. When playing at the Palladium the Sex Pistols said they couldn’t get tickets to get in so the Ramones pulled them in through the men’s room window. Hey, Ho, Lets Go!
1981- UPA producer Steve Bosustow passed away.
1982- Jimmy Connors defeated John McEnroe for his final Wimbledon Championship.
1982- Ozzie Ozbourne married Sharon Ozbourne.
1984- First Lady Nancy Reagan began the campaign to combat drugs among kids by saying “Just Say No”. Two of her Secret Service bodyguards were later caught doing cocaine.
1990- 2 Live Crew released the song Banned in the USA.
1997- NASA landed Pathfinder on Mars and deployed Sojourner, the first ever autonomous robotic rover. Expected to function for only two months, the rover collected data on the Red Planet for the next ten years.
2003- Pres. George W. Bush rashly bragged to the Iraqi insurgents “Bring it on!” Insurgent attacks on American forces immediately went up 300%.
2011- The London Guardian newspaper reported that reporters from Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid newspaper News of the World had hacked into the private phone records of Milly Dowler, a 13 year old girl who was raped and murdered in 2002.
The outrage against the Murdoch journalists shook Fox NewsCorp to its roots. One whistle blower committed suicide, The 166 year old newspaper News of the World was shut down, and the chiefs of London Police quit in disgrace.
2012- The Higgs-Boson is a subatomic particle. It existed only in theory until in
this day, the CERN Large Hadron Collider announced they had observed one.
2022- Kazuki Takahashi, the millionaire creator of the manga craze Yu-Gi-Oh, drowned off the coast of Okinawa while trying to rescue a young American girl swimmer caught in a rip current. He heroically saved the girl, when a freak wave took him. He was 60.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Experts expected Russia to blitzkrieg Ukraine. What is a blitzkrieg?
Answer: Blitzkrieg means “Lightning War”. Fast moving mechanized units backed with close air support would blast through enemy lines and go around resistance. These tactics enabled the WW2 German army to defeat Poland and France much faster than WW1. Many expected Russia to be in Kyiv in a week of the war starting. Their failure says much about the state of their army.