BACK to Blog Posts

Oct 13, 2018
October 13th, 2018

Question: What do these lines all have in common? “ Shoot if you must, this old grey head,” “On the shore of Gitche Gume, of the shining big sea water” , Come listen, my children and you shall hear, of the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, ““ And there was Sheridan, twenty miles away.”

Yesterday’s Question answered below: 1n 1336, the French and English began the Hundred Years War. Who won?
----------------------------------------------------------
History for 10/13/2018
Birthdays: Revolutionary War heroine Mary Ludwig nicknamed Molly Pitcher, Lily Langtry-the Jersey Lilly, Lenny Bruce, Larraine Day, Nipsy Russell, Cornel Wilde, Margaret Thatcher, Herblock, Yves Montand, Nancy Kerrigan, Sammy Hagar, Marie Osmond, Kelly Preston, Chris Carter, Paul Simon is 78, Sascha Baron-Cohen is 47

539BC- The Persian armies of Cyrus the Great captured the city of Babylon, beginning the great Persian Empire, which would last for a thousand years. Cyrus also permitted the Israelites to return home, ending their Babylonian Captivity.

54AD- Elderly Roman Emperor Claudius died from eating poisoned mushrooms served to him by his wife Agrippina. Another account has him vomiting the mushrooms but Agrippina administered to him an herbal enema which she also poisoned. This way she ensured her boy Nero would be emperor before Claudius could come to his senses about making that fat little maniac his heir. Later as emperor Nero, had his mom killed.

Robert Graves wrote that Claudius feigned simple-mindedness but many Romans felt it wasn’t an act. It was the custom when a Roman emperor died to deify him, make him a god. The writer Seneca thought it would be embarrassing for the gods to have an idiot like Claudius in their company. He wrote an epic poem on the subject called the 'Pumpkinification of Claudius". 1269-Henry III's rebuilding of Westminster Abbey completed, the bones of St. Edward the Confessor were re-interred.

1307- MASSACRE of the TEMPLARS- The Knights Templar were a holy order of warrior monks named for their Crusader base at he site of the Temple of Herod in Jerusalem. After the Crusades while the Knights of St John continued to fight Muslims in Greece and Malta, the Templars settled back in Europe and went into banking. They amassed great wealth all tax-free because it was Church property. This annoyed kings like Britain’s Edward I and France’s Phillip the Fair.

So this day Phillip bribed the Pope to declare the entire Templar Order heretics and burned at the stake. Myths abound about the Templars having bizarre rituals and the secrets like the location of the Holy Grail, but most of it was made up by the Inquisitors to frame them. But one neat idea they brought back from the Middle East was the personal check. This way a Templar Knight could cross international borders without carrying heavy bags of gold, then go to the nearest Templar castle and redeem a note with his signet on it for money. I wonder if their notes had pretty sunsets painted on them...

1590- Chief Powhatan, head of a confederation of Algonguian tribes in the Cheasapeake Bay area, wiped out a Spanish Jesuit colony attempting to set up on his beach. He had heard from the Seminoles in Florida what these metal clad palefaces were capable of. Nineteen years later in 1607 another annoying bunch of English palefaces landed on his beach, but this time Powhatan was curious about these ones, especially when one started dating his daughter Pocahontas.

1670- The Virginia Colony passed a law that Negroes brought from Africa who proved to be Christians could not be kept as slaves. The law was repealed just a few years later.

1685- French King Henry IV had ended a long period of religious wars by granting freedom of worship with the Edict of Nantes. Later King Louis XIV decided Henry was a knucklehead and all Frenchmen should be Catholic, so this day he revoked the Edict of Nantes. This drove many French Protestants (Huguenots) to Canada, England, and America. In Ireland at the Battle of the Boyne 1690, there were as many expatriate French Protestants and Catholics shooting each other as Irish and Brits.

1768- THE BIRTH OF YANKEE DOODLE- The first written evidence of the song being played, this day by a British army band at a harvest festival in the Hudson Valley. The song means Yankee Doodle -Stupid American... “ stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni" A macaroni was English slang then for someone dressed in the latest Italian fashions, hence a dandy. That just because the Yankee sticks a feather in his hat he thinks he is a gentleman.
Later in the Revolution the song meant to lampoon Americans was adopted by the rebels and played at the British while they were laying down their arms at Yorktown and Saratoga.

1792- Cornerstone of the White House set. First called the President’s Palace, later the Executive Mansion, it was modeled by James Hoban after the Irish estate house of the Duke of Leinster. Instead of a chaplain President George Washington had Masters of the Masonic Rite sanctify the building with their secret rituals. The mansion took 8 years to build. Constant problems halted construction like when the workers went on strike when the government closed down their on-site whore house. A compromise was made to move it off site.
When President John Adams moved in in 1800 it still wasn't finished, plus Washington took all the furniture with him. Abigail Adams hung her wash in the East Room because of the nice breeze. It wasn't until after the British torched the place in 1814 did it receive it's first coat of whitewash. The Oval Office wasn't built until Truman's time in 1947.

1813- Battle of Queenstown Heights. It costs the life of the brilliant young British General Issac Brock, but he defeated the enemy and saved Canada from the clutches of the invading United States.

1815- Joachim Murat shot by firing squad. Marshal Murat was France's bravest cavalry leader. A wild bon-vivant, he would "ride to the sound of the guns" dressed in peacock feathers and gaudy uniforms, but amazingly was never harmed. Trying to regain the throne Napoleon gave him in Naples, his luck finally gave out when the Neapolitans put him up against the wall. His last words were:" AIM FOR THE HEART! DON'T TOUCH MY FACE!!"

1843- Bnai’ Brith, the oldest Jewish benevolent organization, was founded in New York by Henry Jones. It means “Sons of the Covenant”. 1845- Texans vote to accept annexation into the United States.

1857- Wall Street has yet another financial panic and crash.

1903- Victor Herbert’s operetta Babes in Toyland premiered.

1904- Sigmund Freud's book 'The Interpretation of Dreams" first published.

1918- BATTLE OF THE COTES DU CHATILLON- During the American offensive to break the German lines in World War I, the Cotes Du Chatillon was a hilltop studded with fortifications, machine guns and barbed wire fields up to 25 feet wide. General Pershing called his cocky young “Boy Colonel” Douglas MacArthur and said “MacArthur! Take the Cotes Du Chatillon or hand me a list of 5,000 casualties!” MacArthur replied:” I’ll take the hill or my name shall top the list!”
This day, MacArthur personally led his Rainbow Division over the top without a gun or helmet, just a riding crop and his West Point varsity sweater. His doughboys captured the hill, but at such a frightful cost that MacArthur for years could not speak of it without tears. In his campaigns in World War II he became much better at outmaneuvering enemy strong points to avoid high casualties.

1938- RKO Pictures was having a salary dispute with their singing cowboy Gene Autry. So they cast around for another handsome cowpoke. Today they signed a dentist from a vocal group called the Sons of the Pioneers named Leonard Slye. He became a star with the film “Under Western Skies” under his new name- Roy Rogers.

1947- Kukla, Fran & Ollie debuted on television. Burt Tillstrom was the creator and puppeteer and Fran was his wife.

1964- Mary Pinchot Mayer was a Washington DC socialite, artist, and the sister-in-law to Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee. On this day she was killed while strolling a Georgetown footpath at noon. A black vagrant was accused of the murder but later acquitted. Her sister took her diary to the CIA office of counter-intelligence. It was said her diary admitted a long affair with President John F. Kennedy, and claimed that on two occasions she and JFK smoked marijuana in the White House.
At this time Robert Kennedy was still Attorney General. The diary was never seen again. Was it an FBI, CIA hit? Many women claimed President Kennedy as a lover. Judith Cambell-Exner claimed to be schtupping the Prez and the head of the Chicago Mafia at the same time, yet she lived to a ripe old age. Mary Pinchot Mayer’s killer has never been found.

1970- Black activist Angela Davis was arrested on suspicion she smuggled guns to a Black Panther group so they could stage a shootout with California police. The evidence was thin and it was more about the Berkeley professor’s radical political philosophy that got her arrested. Back you need more than just suspicion to lock somebody up in the Good Old US of A, so Angela Davis was acquitted after a long, very public trial.

1973- During the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Egypt, this day saw the largest mass tank battle since World War II. While Egyptian SAM anti-aircraft missiles kept away the Israeli air force, two thousand tanks, more than was at the Battle of the Bulge, twisted, turned, and blasted each other in the Sinai Desert. They didn’t have to aim, they could look out their gun barrel and see their adversary as close as 100 yards apart. Today, urban warfare and improved shoulder-held rockets have made tanks mostly irrelevant.

1978- Mickey Mouse gets his star on Hollywood Blvd Walk of Fame.

1982- The computer spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3 introduced.

1988- Scientists declared the Shroud of Turin a high quality medieval forgery. Even the Vatican was curious whether the thing was real or not. In 2010 another study also concluded it was a forgery. But many persist in the belief that the Shroud is the real burial cloth of Jesus, with an imprint of his body left by the heat of the Resurrection, like some kind of miraculous Xerox copy.

2016 – Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
======================================================
Yesterday’s Question: 1n 1336, the French and English began the Hundred Years War. Who won?

Answer: The English won most of the battles, but the French ultimately won the war. As it was the stated goal of the English king to be king of France as well. France recovered all of their territory, keeping the English on their island. The closest they got was after Agincourt King Henry V married the French king’s daughter and was designated his heir. But Henry died young of dysentery with just an infant as successor, so the peace deal fell apart.


RSS