July 20, 2023 July 20th, 2023 |
Quiz: What movie was NOT directed by Sergio Leone? The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Duck you Sucker!, Hang em High. Once Upon a Time in America.
Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: What part of a medieval castle was the keep?
--------------------------------------------------------------------
History for 7/20/2023
Birthdays: Petrarch, Sir Edmund Hilary, Lord Elgin, Quaker Anne Hutchinson, Natalie Wood, Theda Bara the Vamp, Diana Rigg, Dick Lucas, Carlos Santana, Lord Reith- the first Director General of the BBC. Carlos Alarzaqui, Giselle Bunchen is 43, Sandra Oh is 52, Harrison Ellenshaw is 78
1402- Near Ankara (Angora), the armies of the Ottoman Sultan of Turkey were destroyed by a Tartar invasion led by Tamerlane.
1420- Czech leader John Ziska led the Hussite rebels to defeat the German Emperor Sigmund at Witkowo Hill, freeing his besieged capital Prague. Ziska led armies in battle despite losing both eyes in fighting. When he finally died, he left instructions to have his body skinned, and the hide dried, and stretched onto a war drum.
1773-The Vatican outlaws the Society of Jesus, aka the Jesuits. The pope had gotten tired of all their intrigues and foreign entanglements. They went into hiding until they re-emerged reformed in 1820.
1804- Sir Richard Owen born. He was the British scientist who coined the term Dinosaur for all the big fossils being dug up. Yet he came to oppose Darwin’s theories of evolution. He believed dinosaurs were the creatures from Noah’s Flood who for some reason missed the boat.
1858 – Admission first charged to see a baseball game, 50 cents. NY beat Brooklyn 22-18.
1868 - 1st use of tax stamps on cigarettes.
1869- Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad and in the Holy Land first published. If you ever wondered what was the most popular book in America during the 19th Century, it was not Moby Dick, War & Peace, Jane Eyre or David Copperfield. The all time best selling book in America during the Victorian Era was a sappy travel diary" Tent Life in the Holy Land "by a forgotten author William Prime. Twain had taken The Grand Tour abroad that was fashionable with the American wealthy classes and thought he’d have some fun recounting his own trip” To cross the Sea of Galilee by boat, a big local Arab demanded eight dollars for use of his miserable conveyance. No wonder Christ preferred to walk.”
1877- Russians besieged Turkish held Plevna in Bosnia.
1879- Joel Chandler Harris published in the Atlanta Constitution "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus". The first Uncle Remus stories. In Georgia Harris collected the stories from interviewing African American storytellers in the slave quarters. They felt comfortable speaking with him because he was the illegitimate son of an Irish immigrant. Pres. Teddy Roosevelt said, "Presidents may come and presidents may go, but Uncle Remus stays put. Georgia has done a great many things for the Union, but she has never done more than when she gave Mr. Joel Chandler Harris to American literature."
1881- Sitting Bull returned to U.S. territory and surrendered. He and his people had been residing in Canada since the Little Big Horn. When Canadian officials first challenged them being in Canada, Bull produced out of his medicine bag old treaty medals stamped with King George III on them. He said, "We also are the children of the Great Redcoat Mother."
1919- Pancho Villa assassinated while driving in his new Dodge. Even with 16 bullets in him he still managed to kill one of his attackers. He was 45. Three years later someone broke into his grave and stole his head.
1920- On the last day of testimony at the Scopes Monkey Trial defense attorney Clarence Darrow surprised everyone by calling prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan to the witness stand. In a dramatic all day debate Darrow and Bryan grappled over the validity of the Bible vs, Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution. Darrow ultimately lost the case, but this debate made Bryan look foolish. The confrontation was dramatized in the 1955 stage play “Inherit the Wind”, later made into a famous movie by Stanley Kramer.
1944- THE GENERALS PLOT- German generals try to assassinate Adolf Hitler, take over the Third Reich and declare a ceasefire with the Allies. During a conference at Hitler’s strategic HQ at Rastenberg Prussia, one-eyed Count von Stauffenburg planted a suitcase-bomb next to Hitler's feet and excused himself. But someone bumped against it and moved it out of the way. After watching the massive explosion Stauffenburg then relayed the code word "Valkyrie". This meant the plotters could begin to arrest key Nazis, disarm the SS and form a provisional government with Field Marshal Rommel as President.
In the explosion many were killed but amazingly Hitler only suffered a punctured eardrum and a stiff left arm. That night he went on nationwide radio to announce he was all right, and even read the weather in that day's newspaper to prove he was not pre-recorded. The coup plotters were rounded up and executed, some hung slowly with piano wire. Their deaths were filmed for Hitler's amusement at home. Rommel was forced to commit suicide. After 5000 arrests the purge was halted only when an allied bombing hit the courtroom and blew up the judge.
1946-Bob Clampett's cartoon"the Great Piggy Bank Robbery" with Daffy Duck as Duck Tracy. "I'm gonna rrrrrrrrrrrubbb ya out, see!"
1951- King Abdallah of Jordan was shot and killed at the Al Acqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by a Palestinian. He was attending a memorial service for the Prime Minister of Lebanon who had also been assassinated. He was an enemy of the Palestinian leader the Grand Mufti and resisted the Mufti’s attempts to declare a Palestinian state after Israel’s War of Independence. King Abdallah claimed all Palestinian lands not part of Israel should be part of Jordan. Abdallah then angered the Palestinians further by wanting to make peace with Israel and declaring that the Jews had every right to worship at their holy places like the Wailing Wall, then under Jordanian control. Watching his grandfather killed was young future King Hussein, who was never that fond of Palestinians afterwards. He drove them out of Jordan in 1972 spawning the Black September Movement.
1954- As part of the settlement brokered by the United Nations for the French to leave colonial Indochina, the country was divided in half at the 17th parallel, with the Communists in North Vietnam and the non-Communists in the South. This set the stage for the next twenty years of war that would go on until unification in 1975.
1963- Lt. Colonel John Paul Vann, acknowledged one of the finest combat field commanders in the service, scheduled a meeting with the Joint Chiefs in Washington. He planned to tell them that further American military involvement in Vietnam was pointless. The generals already knew his purpose and refused to meet with him. Afterward, he was slowly pushed out of the army for having a bad attitude. He died as a civilian adviser when his helicopter went down near Da Nang in 1972.
1964 –The first surfing record to go #1-Jan & Dean's "Surf City"
1968 - Iron Butterfly's "In a-Gadda-da-Vida", reached #4 in the pop charts. Then it was called Psychedelic Rock, today it is considered the first Metal hit. The song was written as “In the Garden of Eden” but singer Doug Ingle was so drunk and stoned, In a Gadda Da Vida was all he could mumble out.
1969- Tranquility Base- The Eagle has Landed. Apollo11’s Lunar Module the LEM first landed humans on the Moon. The astronauts stepped out onto the surface 8 hours later (The 21st)
1973- Bruce Lee died of cerebral edema one month before his last film Enter the Dragon premiered. The handsome Hong Kong movie star single-handedly made Chinese martial arts a worldwide craze, and the Chop-Socky genre film a standard genre in world movie theaters. He was buried in his Enter The Dragon costume. Bruce Lee was 33.
1974- Turkey invaded the island of Cyprus, after a Greek coup toppled the coalition gov’t of Archbishop Makarios.
1976-Warner\Lambert, makers of Trident sugarless gum, comes out with their famous slogan "Sugarless gum is recommended by four out of five dentists who chew gum". When people asked what gum the fifth dentist recommended, they were brushed.
1976- The Viking I probe successfully landed on Mars.
1984 - Jim Fixx, creator of the Jogging craze through his hit book Running, died at 52 of a heart attack. Apologists for a health advocate dying so young, say Fixx would have died even younger without his physical routine. The creator of PowerBars also died in his fifties.
1994 - OJ Simpson offers $500,000 reward for evidence of ex-wife Nicole’s killer. No clues or suspects other than himself have ever been found. As David Letterman said" OJ began to vigorously search for the real killer on all the major golf courses of the nation.”
2001- Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away premiered in Japan. The first Japanese anime film to win an Oscar.
====================================================
Yesterday’s Quiz: What part of a medieval castle was the keep?
Answer: The Keep was the central part of the castle, the stronghold, that was protected by the outer walls and turrets. It was the place for a last stand.