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Feb 4, 2014 tues.
February 4th, 2014

Question: George Gershwin once wrote a musical about happy bootleggers during Prohibition. What was it?

Answer to yesterday’s question below: In the TV series “24”, we saw a fictional black president. But he was not the first. Who was the first to write a character of a Black American President?
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History for 2/4/2014
Birthdays: Francois Rabelais, Big Bill Haywood, Fernand Leger', Charles Lindbergh, the Agha Khan, Betty Friedan, Rosa Parks, Erich Liensdorf, Alice Cooper is 65, Dan Quayle, Ida Lupino, Conrad Bain, McKinlay Kantor, George Romero, Lisa Eichhorn, boxer Oscar De La Hoya, Clyde Tumbaugh amateur astronomer who discovered the Pluto in 1930. Janet Waldo the voice of Judy in the Jetsons

211 AD Roman Emperor Septimius Severus died, despite praying every night to a line of statues that included Zeus, Apollo, Mithras, Moses and Jesus. This guy wasn’t taking any chances!

1536- Henry VIII’s Parliament was presented with a Black Book cataloging all the supposed abuses and corruption of England’s monasteries and convents. They voted the Kings wish to close the monasteries and appropriate all Church wealth to the crown.

1703- THE 47 RONIN- A Japanese story that has inspired hundreds of play novels and films.The Lord of Ako, Asano Nagori quarreled with Kiru, the chief of protocol for the Shogun, and struck at him with his sword. To attack a representative of the Shogun was an insult no matter how justified, so Nagori was ordered to commit suicide (seppuku) and his samurai declared Ronin, or discharged freelancers.

The Ronin banded together to plan their revenge. They ambushed Kiru, and placed his severed head on the grave of their master. Then they sat in his house to quietly await judgement. After consulting several Shinto bishops, the Shogun could see no dishonor in what they did. So instead of executing them as criminals, on this day they were allowed to commit suicide, which they did unquestioningly. Today their gravesite is a popular shrine in Japan as a model of total dedication to duty.

1775- MR. PITT’S PLAN- Legendary British statesman William Pitt the Elder, was Prime Minister during the French and Indian War (the Seven Years War) and called "the Architect of the British Empire" . Today he came out of retirement to try to solve the American Crisis before violence could break out. With the support of Whigs like Lord Shelburne, Edmund Burke, Rockingham and Charles Fox and with his friend Benjamin Franklin attending, Mr. Pitt proposed in the House of Lords that Britain legitimize the American Congress and give it seats in Parliament. He stated “The Britons in America are only doing what we Britons in Britain should be doing, namely, demanding our rights.”

But Mr. Pitts’ plan was voted down by Lord North and the government party, who passed a bill instead allocating more money to hire German mercenary troops to crush the malcontents. Ministers now placed bets on how soon they would burn Boston.
It’s intriguing to think how history would have changed had Pitt's solution been adopted, for at this time most Americans like George Washington were not yet interested in a complete break from Mother England. The hard core radicals like John and Sam Adams worried that if America did win Parliamentary seats, that the momentum for independence would be lost.

1776- General Washington took the cannon captured from Ft. Ticonderoga and had his men drag them up Dorchester Heights overlooking British occupied Boston. The British were taken unawares because it was done in a terrible winter snowstorm. Staring up into the mouths of these large guns they knew they had been outmaneuvered by these amateur soldiers. They soon evacuate the city by sea.

1783- Britain declared a formal cease fire with it's former colonies the United States,
ending the American Revolution.

1826- James Fenimore Cooper’s novel “The Last of the Mohicans” was published. The character of wild frontiersman Natty Bumpo called Hawkeye has been referred to as the first American superhero.

1861- Delegates of the several Southern states meet in Montgomery Alabama to declare themselves the Confederate States of America. They decide to move the rebel capitol to Richmond, Virginia to insure that the Old Dominion State will join their cause.

1861- At the same moment in Washington D.C. a group of Virginia politicians led by old former President John Tyler arranged a covert peace conference between the slave states and free states in one final attempt at compromise. Despite long talks in a backroom of Willards Hotel they emerged more divided than before.

1861- The Apache Wars began. The U.S. Army arrested Apache chief Cochise for raiding his neighbors. Cochise escaped and declared war on the white man. The conflict would rage off and on for over 25 years and involved all the various Apache tribes as well as their cousins the Navajo.

1871- Ms. Victoria Woodhull testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the subject of women's voting rights. She was the first woman to testify before Congress, the first woman to run for President and the first woman to own a stock brokerage on Wall Street. Yet she is not as well known a figure as Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cadie Stanton. The mainstream suffragette movement was shocked of her open advocacy of Free Love, Spiritualism and Socialism. Thomas Nast caricatured her as Mrs. Satan, Harriet Beecher Stowe lampooned her as Mrs. Avaricious Dangereyes.

1894- Dr. Richard Weatherill discovered the first signs of the Basket Maker culture.

1938- After being in first run houses since Dec 21st, today Disneys Snow White and the Seven Dwarves opened in general release across the US.

1940- Soviet dictator Josef Stalin had Nicholai Yezhov, the Commissar of Internal Affairs and leader of the NKVD, the secret police, arrested and shot. Nikita Khruschev said Yezhov was an alcoholic drug addict who got what he deserved.”

1945-YALTA- Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin meet to map the postwar world. In an unguarded moment Roosevelt told Stalin that America only intended to stay in Europe two more years.
Later in the month a courier plane flying over Germany to Russia is shot down. Maps showing the agreed occupation zones of postwar Germany fall into the hands of the Nazis. Knowing how much mercy they could expect from Stalin most of the top officials of the Third Reich arrange to be captured in the American Zone. Albert Speer had Wilhelm Furtvangler and the entire Berlin Philharmonic shipped by train to an American sector after one more Wagner concert. They played "Twilight of the Gods" from Gotterdammerung as the bombs rained down.

1961- United Artists released the Misfits, the last film of stars Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift. John Huston directed and Arthur Miller wrote the screenplay. The film flopped in its initial run but has since gained classic status.

1966- Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, Disney’s first Winnie the Pooh film came out with the live action film The Ugly Dachshund.

1968- Old beatnik Neal Cassady was found dead in Mexico. Cassady was not an intellectual but his wild non-conformist lifestyle was the inspiration for his companion author Jack Kerouac to write his greatest novel " On the Road'. While Kerouac disliked hippies, Cassady drove the first Hippie Bus filled with LSD advocates like Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters.

1983- Pop singer Karen Carpenter died of anorexia-nervosa. She was 32 and weighed only 77 pounds. Her death brought to national prominence how the societal pressure to stay thin could lead to this deadly condition.

2004-Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, and Chris Hughes launch the social networking site called Facebook. Today there are enough people on Facebook to make it the third largest country in the world.
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Question: Quiz: In the TV series “24”, we saw a fictional black president. But he was not the first. Who was the first to write a character of a Black American President?

Answer: Rod Serling’s last screenplay in 1972 was called The Man, based on a 1964 novel of the same name by Irving Wallace. It was about a black Senate leader Douglas Dillman, who becomes president when the President, and Speaker are killed in an accident while the VP office was temporarily vacant. James Earl Jones played the lead in the film.


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