July 26, 2023 July 26th, 2023 |
Question: Which movie came out first? Gulliver’s Travels, The Wizard of Oz or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?
Yesterday’s Question: Was George Washington the first president to sit in the Oval Office?
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History for 7/26/2023
Birthdays: Salvador Allende, Serge Koussevitzky, George Bernard Shaw, Gracie Allen,
Carl Jung, Stanley Kubrick, Blake Edwards, George Grosz, Pearl Buck, Jason Robards Jr, Aldous Huxley, Jean Shepard, Ken Muse, Vivian Vance, Emil Jannings, Ken Muse, Sandra Bullock is 59, Kevin Spacey, Kate Beckinsdale, Helen Mirren is 78, Jason Statham, Mick Jagger is 80
1533- Atahualpa, Emperor of the Incas, was executed by Francisco Pizarro. The Great Inca was captured by ambush at Cajamarca and forced to fill a large room with gold and two more rooms with silver to get his release. This was accomplished, but Pizarro decided to kill him anyway. Atahualpa accepted baptism out of fear of being burned alive, the Inca mummified their kings and carried their remains around like saints’ relics, being burned denied you access into the next world. So, he was garroted-strangled with a twisting stick behind the rope. The Spaniards then burned his body anyway.
The Inca people didn't completely submit but withdrew deeper into the Andes and fought on for 70 more years. Pizarro became first governor of Peru and lived in Lima where he was run through with a sword during a feud with another Spanish noble family.
1656– Rembrandt van Rijn declared bankruptcy.
1694- The Bank of England opened on London's Threadneedle Street. It issued the first bank checks.
1757- Battle of Hastenbeck- The Duke of Cumberland, the bastard son of King George II who had defeated Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden, took over a Hanoverian army in the Netherlands. The British general was so badly beaten that he signed a treaty of his own at Klosterzeven with the French pledging not to militarily intervene anymore in Central Europe and even giving up Hanover, King George’s family homeland. In London, Prime Minister Pitt called Cumberland “a Coward and Traitor!”
1758- Admiral Boscowen’s fleet with the aid of New England militia captured the French fortress of Louisbourg on the mouth of the Saint Lawrence. This was the first step in the British conquest of Canada.
1775- U.S. Postal System began. Ben Franklin was first postmaster general. The year before Franklin had been fired by the Kings Privy Council in London from his post as postmaster of the Colonies. Interesting enough the only time a US postal system ever operated at a profit was the Confederate Postal System ran by a man named John Regan.
1781- During the Revolution, James Armistead was a runaway black slave who served British Lord Cornwallis as a cook. He was also a spy planted by Lafayette. Today he brought news to George Washington in his camp in Connecticut that Lord Cornwallis was fortifying his encampment at Yorktown Virginia, and intended to stay put. His information proved vital in the ultimate victory that won the American Revolution.
1790- The Funding Bill passed in Congress that was the first step in the master plan of Alexander Hamilton to start the US economy. He struck a deal with states rights politicians like Thomas Jefferson that allowed the US government to assume all the outstanding debt the individual states accrued during the Revolution. This act bound all the loose knit states more firmly under the Federal Government’s leadership. In return Hamilton proposed moving the site of the American Capitol from Philadelphia to a more southern site, like some area in Maryland near George Washington’s Virginia home.
This site for the Federal City would eventually be Washington DC. Of course all of this create a huge federal budget deficit, but in Hamilton’s thinking big deficits were good for a country, they implied solidity.
1815- THE WHITE TERROR- It was said after the French Revolution that the Royal Bourbon family had learned nothing, but remembered everything. After the Battle of Waterloo smashed Napoleon's power forever, restored King Louis XVIII issued his Royal Ordinances, lists of Bonaparte supporters to be arrested. Some like Marshal Ney and General Labedouyere were shot, some jailed, Marshal Brune was lynched, many fled to America where Napoleon’s brother Joseph had resettled the Bonaparte family in Philadelphia.
Others fled to New Orleans, where for years they defiantly waved the Tricolor flag at arriving French merchant ships. When Andrew Jackson fought British troops at New Orleans, over the roar of the guns French volunteers sang Le Marseillaise at the bagpiping Highlanders, A group of Napoleon’s veterans tried to found a colony on an island off Galveston Texas, but were driven away by a hurricane. One of the exiles, a 17 year old veteran named Michel Bouvier, was set up in the cabinet making business by Joseph Bonaparte. Michel Bouvier was the ancestor of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy.
1822- The Liberators meet. Simon Bolivar met Jose San Martin at Guayaqui, Equador.
1826- In Valencia, school teacher Cayetano Ripoll became the last person executed for heresy by the Spanish Inquisition, which had been raging since 1492. Napoleon had suspended their activities when he occupied the country in 1808, but they restarted after Spain was liberated. Cayetano Ripoll had fought Napoleon’s occupation, but as a school teacher he was arrested by the Inquisition for teaching “deist principles” and hanged. The Spanish Inquisition was official ended in 1834. The Alhambra Decree that expelled the Jews in 1492 was not rescinded until 1968!
1835 - 1st sugar cane plantation started in Hawaii.
1847- The Republic of Liberia was declared, the first democratic republic in Africa. Joseph Jenkins-Roberts elected first president. When the US government finally outlawed the African slave trade in 1825 one problem was what to do with all the boatloads of slaves still at sea completing the Middle Passage and all the unsold slaves in harbor depots? It was decided to send all these people to a specific beach on the West African Coast. The freed slaves called themselves Liberia and named their capitol Monrovia in honor of James Monroe, who was US president at the time of their liberation.
1861- Mark Twain left St. Jo Missouri to go west and sit out the Civil War. He went with his brother Oren Clemens who had been appointed to administer the Nevada territory.
1887 - 1st Esperanto book published.
1903 –FIRST TRANSCONTINENTAL AUTO TRIP- Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson, mechanic Sewell J. Crocker, and Bud the Wonderdog, in their Winton Touring Car rode into New York City at 4:30AM, having left San Francisco sixty-three days before. They are the first to cross the United States by automobile. They did it to win a $50 bet that you could cross the country by auto in 90 days. Jackson won the bet but spent $8,000 of his own money to do it. And he never collected his winnings. He was hailed as the Great Automobilist and his car was put on display. At the time, there were only 250 miles of paved roads in the United States, all in major cities.
1917- The last two-horse street car made it’s final run, down Broadway. There were now more automobiles than horses on the streets of American cities.
1918- During WWI, at a testimonial dinner in London, U.S. Under-Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt first met First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. The friendship made there would mean a lot when they fought WW2 together twenty years later.
1925- Exhausted by his verbal battle with Clarence Darrow in the just concluded Scopes Monkey Trial, famed statesman William Jennings Bryan died in his sleep.
1926 - National Bar Association incorporates.
1941- Angered by Japan's refusal to stop its invasion of China and now Indochina, President Roosevelt ordered Japan's overseas assets frozen and embargoes oil and steel.
Since the U.S. was then the world's leading producer of oil and steel this meant Japan's imports were cut by 90%, and her industry would soon dry up. Japan had a strategic oil reserve that could last only three years. FDR also closed the Panama Canal to all Japanese shipping. The generals in Japan now felt war with America was inevitable.
1943- The Birth of L.A. Smog! A newspaper headline from this date mentions a 'gas-attack' of exhaust and haze that reduced visibility to three short blocks. Besides leaded gasoline, many suburban homes had little backyard ovens to burn their garbage.
1945-The Potsdam Declaration-Truman and Churchill called upon Japan one more time to surrender unconditionally. By now all the leaders now knew the Americans had the Atomic Bomb. With a tentative schedule of dropping it the first week of August, they wanted to give Japan one more chance. The Japanese cabinet chose to ignore the Potsdam Declaration and hoped to use a diplomatic route to Stalin to force negotiations. They were unaware that Stalin was planning to attack Japan also.
1945- While the Big Three Potsdam conferences were going on, at home a British general election turned Winston Churchill out of office. He had to embarrassingly leave the conference and was superseded by Labor candidate Clement Atlee, who assumed a junior role in the talks. Churchill used to refer to Atlee as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing”
1947- HAPPY BIRTHDAY CIA! Pres. Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the CIA, the NSC, The Joint Chiefs and all those other groups that draw un-scrutinized federal budgets.
1948- President Truman issued Exec Order # 9981 to the U.S. military to ban all segregation. At the time the US Army was more segregated than it had been in 1865 or 1776.
1951- Charlie Chaplin driven into exile by red-baiters. Chaplin never was a communist or any other radical movement. He was just outspoken in his views, and in Commie-Paranoid America that was enough. He was on a holiday to Britain when he learned his visa had been revoked by the U.S. government. He didn't return until 1972. Despite his immense achievements in Hollywood History, when the Hollywood Walk of Fame was dedicated later that year, Chaplin’s name was deliberately excluded.
1951- Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland had its world premiere in London’s Leicester Square Theatre. It opened in the U.S. two days later.
1952- Evita Peron the beautiful First Lady of Argentina died at age 33.
1953- Fulgensio Batista had suppressed the evolution of democracy in Cuba and ruled as a dictator. This day a 25 year old lawyer and part time left handed baseball pitcher named Fidel Castro with a few followers tried to start a revolt by raiding the impregnable Morcado Barracks. The pathetic assault was immediately crushed and the survivors including Castro jailed. But the event was seen by the people and the world that Cubans would not submit quietly. When Castro was released in 1956 and started his more organized guerrilla campaign he called his group the July 26th Movement.
1956- The Suez Crisis. Egypt's Gamal Nasser, on the anniversary of the exit of King Farouk I (1952) and the declaration of the Republic, nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been run by an Anglo-French cooperative. Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt, but the war was stopped by the intervention of the US and USSR.
1958- Top US test pilot Ivan Kinchilo was killed in a plane crash. His F-104 malfunctioned only 800 feet off the ground and he ejected, but couldn’t prevent his parachute from delivering him into the fireball of wreckage. Kinchilo has been called the First Spaceman, since in 1956 piloted a Bell-X test plane to the edge of the stratosphere. A friend of Neil Armstrong and the Gemini astronauts. Many say had Kinchilo lived, he would have been an important figure in the NASA Space Program.
1959- KPFK, Los Angeles progressive radio of The Pacifica Network, starts up.
1970- Oh, Calcutta! Play opened in London. Oh, Calcutta had nothing at all to do with a city in India, the show was a series of unrelated, but sex-dominated sketches featuring a totally nude cast, both male and female. Sketches were written by John Lennon, Sam Shephard and Jules Feiffer. The title came from a 1946 Dadaist painting by Clovis Trouille. It was a pun on the French “O quel cul t’as” meaning “what a nice ass you have”. The fun turned dark in 1988 when the show’s producer Norman Kean went mad, stabbed his wife then committed suicide.
1979- Alvin Texas recorded 43 inches of rain in one day.
1984- Edward Gein died peacefully in a prison for the criminally insane. Gein was arrested in 1957 and sentenced to life for mass murder. Police found his farm in Wisconsin decorated with human body parts, heads in the freezer and in the stove, and the dried cadaver of his mother Augustina. His story inspired "Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs".
1990- Pres. George H.W. Bush signed the Citizens with Disabilities Act into law.
1991 – Children’s comic Paul Reubens aka Pee Wee Herman was arrested in Florida for masturbating in an adult movie theater. The film was Naughty Nurse Nancy.
1995- After a year of investigation, the General Accounting Office noted that all documents pertaining to the Roswell UFO Incident of 1947 had disappeared or been destroyed. …Hmmm.
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Yesterday’s Question answered below: Was George Washington the first president to sit in the Oval Office?
Answer: No. The Oval Office was not built until the Twentieth Century. Washington served as president in New York City and Philadelphia.