Feb 17, 2024 February 17th, 2024 |
Quiz: Where is Sumatra?
Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: What modern country was once called Ceylon?
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History for 2/17/2024
Birthdays: Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, Montgomery Ward, Red Barber, Otto Englander, Marian Anderson, C'haim Potok, Jim Brown, Rene Russo, Michael Bay, Jerry O’Connell, Cybil Shepard, Huey Newton, Lou Diamond Phillips is 63, Denise Richards is 52, Paris Hilton is 43, Michael Jordan is 61, Hal Holbrook, Joseph Gordon Levitt is 55, Animator Aaron Blaise is 56.
3,201BC- According to Sumerian records, from today in the month of Hilu to the month of Eshil-March 30th occurred the GREAT FLOOD, that the story of the flood of Noah in the Bible was based on. Several ancient cultures have flood stories. In the 1920s, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle theorized that the Great Flood was the tidal backwash caused by the sinking of the lost continent of Atlantis.
364 AD- Valentinian I proclaimed Emperor of Rome. Just to show you could "Be-All That You Can Be.." in the Roman Army, Valentinian was born to an army family based in Pannonia (Hungary). He rose through the ranks and served in Africa (Tunisia), Persia (Iraq) and Gaul (France).
1673- MOLIERE DIED. The great playwright was suffering from tuberculosis and was in failing health, but he insisted on playing the lead in his final play "The Imaginary Illness". Tonight, when asked to rest instead he responded," There are fifty workman here who won’t get paid if we don’t play". He played Argan, a hypochondriac who imagined himself dying.
In the final act he uttered the word "Juro I swear," and was seized with a violent coughing fit. He covered with a joke and finished the play, but later was carried home where he died. The local priest refused to give him Last Rights because his play Tartuffe made fun of the clergy. Moliere was one of the greatest playwrights and poets of the age, and French people equate him with Shakespeare.
1765- Leopold Mozart with his two gifted children Nannal (Anna-Marie) and Wolfgang were touring in London, when Leopold became grievously ill with flu. While he was recovering, no noise, including music, was allowed in the house. So, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart decided to spend his time writing his first symphony. He was 8 years old. This day Mozart Symphony #1 premiered at the Haymarket Theatre.
1814- Battle of Villeneuve- Napoleon beat somebody else once again. France had been invaded by 5 armies simultaneously. When Napoleon beat one force, the four others kept marching towards Paris.
1817- Baltimore got the first city streets lit with gaslight.
1864-THE FIRST SUCCESSFUL SUBMARINE ATTACK-. The Confederate submarine Hunley, after testing that drowned 23 men including the inventor, sails, err, chugs it's way to Yankee ships blockading Charleston Harbor. It attached an underwater bomb called a david to the hull of the warship USS Housatonic. The david exploded sinking the Housatonic, but it also dragged down the Hunley to a watery grave when it could not detach itself.
In 1995 archaeologists raised the Hunley from the harbor. The found the submarine crew still seated at their stations uninterrupted. At first it was thought they drowned, but in 2017 scientists ascertained that the concussion from the blast killed them all instantly. The captain still had his lucky gold piece.
The first modern diesel/electric submarine was developed by John Holland of the Holland Electric Boat Company in 1894.
1865- Sherman burns Columbia, S.C. The POPULARITY OF THE CIGARETTE- Everyone knew the Civil War just about almost over yet try and reason with Uncle Billy. Sherman's army fresh from burning Georgia spread a wide path of destruction through the Carolinas. When Sherman's men reached the capitol of South Carolina they took special pleasure in destroying the city where the first vote to secede took place. Yankee's sang "Hail Columbia, Happy Land; If I don't burn you I'll be damned!"
Cigarettes were gaining popularity in Spain and Latin America while in the U.S. tobacco was used chiefly in cigars, pipes and chaw. A South Carolina planter in Durham had just finished developing the perfect mild blend of cigarette tobaccos, Bull Durham, when Sherman's bluecoats arrived to loot the factory. Instead of tragedy, things worked out well for the fellow. After the Civil War, the Yankees went home to towns from Maine to California and talked of the good smoke they had in South Carolina. Soon cigarette smoking was a national passion.
1876- The invention of canned sardines.
1877- THE SATSUMA REBELLION also called the Boshin War- Ever wonder whatever happed to all those samurai warriors in the movies? Part of the modernizing of Japanese society after the Mejii Restoration of 1868 was the phasing out of the samurai class. They were told to give up their swords and get a real job. Some moved into the officer corps of the new western trained Japanese army. Some, rather than bear the shame of being demoted to peasant, emigrated to Hawaii with the invitation of King David Kalakaua IV.
But other samurai didn't go quietly. Led by Takamori Saigo, this day the samurai revolted and had to be put down in several bloody battles, mowed down by modern artillery and Gatling guns. After losing the Battle of Shiroyama in Sept., Takamori committed suicide. There is a statue of him today in Hokkaido. The events were dramatized in the movie The Last Samurai, but most of the American advisors were on the government side. The Tom Cruise character was based on a French officer named Jules Brunet who fought alongside the samurai. After their defeat he escaped to a French ship in Tokyo harbor to continue his career back home..
1890- The Los Angeles City Council voted to change the name of their main street, called Fort Street because it led up to an old fort, to Broadway.
1906- In a White House wedding ceremony President Teddy Roosevelt saw his eldest daughter Alice married to Congressman Nicholas Longworth of Ohio. Alice was as free spirited as her father, Once, when confronted about her escapades, Teddy remarked " I can run the country or control Alice, but I cannot do both."
1911- General Motors installed in their Cadillacs the first automatic starters, replacing the hand crank. It was developed by Charles Kettering, the reason he did it was because a friend of his stopped to assist a young lady's who's engine had stalled. When he tried to get the engine started again using the hand crank, it kicked back and broke his jaw, causing gangrene, which eventually killed him.
Kettering spent many years at GM and started the Delco brand of auto parts. He also was responsible for fast drying paint which allowed a car to be painted in almost instantly on an assembly line instead of days. He sold the idea to an unbelieving client by having his car taken from the parking lot, painted and returned over a long lunch.
1912- THE NEW YORK ARMORY SHOW- Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein introduced the American public to modern art. The first showings of Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp and the Italian futurists in the USA. The show was denounced as a "chamber of horrors" and Matisse was burned in effigy in Chicago. Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" was described by an art critic as "an explosion in a shingle factory". Duchamp was highly amused.
1925- First issue of Harold Ross’s The New Yorker magazine.
1934- Pennsylvanian Amos Neyhardt started the first driver’s education course.
1936- The Phantom first appeared as a comic by Lee Falk.
1942- Ernst Lubitsch’s classic comedy "To Be, Or Not To Be" with Jack Benny debuted. Adolf Hitler enters a room and after everyone "Sieg Heil" salutes him, he responds "Heil Myself!" But the comedy flopped, in part because beautiful co star Carole Lombard had died tragically in a plane crash a few weeks before the film opened.
1945- Nazi scientists abandoned the Pennemunde, the V-2 rocket testing site as Allied armies overran the area.
1958 – Johnny Hart’s comic strip "BC" 1st appears
1960- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was arrested for leading the Alabama bus boycott.
1967 – The Beatles released "Penny Lane" & "Strawberry Fields".
1979- A Prairie Home Companion radio show starring Garrison Keilor was first broadcast nationally. It was a feature on Minnesota Public Radio since 1974. It ended when Garrison retired in 2016 because of Me-Too sexual abuse charges.
1979- Barely four years after finishing the twenty-five year war with the United States and France to unify the country, The Communist government of Vietnam declared war on Communist Cambodia and picked a fight with Communist China, who invaded them. China called it the Pedagogical War.
1987- Soviet premiere Mikhail Gorbachev revealed President Ronald Reagan's preoccupation with space aliens: "At our meeting in Geneva, the U.S. President said that if the earth faced an invasion by hostile extraterrestrials, the United States and Russia could join forces to repel such an invasion. I shall not dispute the hypothesis, though I think it's early yet to worry about such an intrusion..."
1989- "Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure" premiered, starring the most excellent Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. Whoah-Dude!
1992- Jeffrey Dahmer sentenced to life in prison without parole for drugging, torturing, murdering, cannibalizing 15 young men. Two years into his sentence, he was beaten to death in prison by another murderer who said God told him to.
2004- Walt Disney announced the deal to buy The Muppets from Jim Henson Ent.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What modern country was once called Ceylon?
Answer: Sri Lanka.