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July 7, 2019
July 7th, 2019

Quiz: What was the Vitruvian Man?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Why is a salute where we touch the extended fingertips of the right hand to our brow?
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History for 7/7/2019
Birthdays: Joseph Jacquard- of the Jacquard Loom 1752, Gustav Mahler, Satchel Page, Ringo Starr is 79, Doc Severinsen, Robert Heinlein, William Kuntsler, Gian Carlo Menotti, Ken Harris, Shelley Duval is 70, Ted Cassidy-Lurch in the Adams Family, Michelle Kwan, David McCullough, Pierre Cardin, and according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle this is the birthday of Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick Dr. John Watson.

750 BC- 391AD This was the Roman Feast of Quirinus, then day when Romulus the founder of Rome was taken up to heaven and took his place beside the Gods as the deified Quirinus.

175AD- The future Roman Emperor Commodus attained manhood. There was a special celebration when a Roman boy grew his first beard. He made a ceremony of putting off his boys cloak-tunica, and donning the man’s toga.

1569- Sir Francis Drake boldly sailed into the harbor of Cartagena (in modern Columbia), the largest port on the Spanish Main, and looted a treasure galleon.

1607- The English anthem God Save the King first sung in honor of King James I.

1666- King Charles II and his court quit London because of the Great Plague.

1735- King Stanislas Lescynski lost the throne of Poland to a boyfriend of Russian Empress Catherine the Great. Stan was the father-in-law of king Louis XV of France fortunately, so Louis gave him the Duchy of Lorraine to live in. In the town square of Nancy there is a statue of Stanislas pointing east. Some say he's pointing home to Poland, others say towards the red light district of Nancy, where he spent much of his time.

1754- Kings College in New York founded. After the American Revolution the name was changed to Columbia University.

1777- During the Revolution, the British invasion force of General Burgoyne captured the New York fortress of Ticonderoga back from the American rebels.

1814- Sir Walter Scott published his first novel Waverly. He wrote it under a pseudonym because he worried it would damage his reputation as a poet.

1821- The Latin American liberation army of Jose San Martin captured Lima Peru.

1839-The First European Railroad link opened between Vienna and Prague, thanks to the investment of Meyer Rothschild, of the bank of The House of Rothschild. Even though the English invented the locomotive years earlier, European development moved much slower than in America, where vast distances needed to be connected. There was medical concern about people being moved at such high speeds as 35 miles an hour! A Viennese doctor wrote then that if the human body moved faster than 15 mph (24k), blood would squirt out of your eyes and ears. Men would go mad and women sex-crazed.

1865- Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators were all hanged Lewis Payne, George Atzenrodt and David Herold. Even weeping old Mary Surrat, who's involvement is still debatable. She may have known of some kind of plot but all they could prove was she the landlady of the boardinghouse where the plotters met. Everyone expected that a last minute amnesty would come from President Johnson, but the President stayed silent and she was hanged with the others. Mary Surrat was the first woman executed in the U.S.. Big Lewis Payne’s neck didn’t break at first and he kicked and danced in the air for five minutes before he choked. General Dan Sickles said afterward, "We do not want to know their names anymore." The large gallows was then broken up and the splinters sold off as souvenirs to tourists.

1894-The Pullman Strike-U.S. troops battle 5,000 Chicago area railroad workers and their families in the streets. Dozens are killed. Troops were called for after marshals and detectives refused to shoot at unarmed working people. Other unions go out in sympathy with the Pullman workers and make the strike nationwide. Union president Eugene Debs is arrested for sedition and treason but acquitted by three grand juries. He later runs for president on the socialist ticket in 1912. President Cleveland before crushing the strike with regular army troops had just set the date for the first Labor Day.

1895-THE FIRST SUNDAY COMICS - The first modern comic strip, Hogan’s Alley featuring "The Yellow Kid" by Richard Felton Outcault, debuts in the Sunday edition of Josef Pulitzer's New York World. The strip was so popular it gave the name "Yellow Journalism" to the sensationalist tabloid press. Comic strips at this time became the mass media of the day. For people who couldn’t afford a theater ticket and couldn’t yet speak English, the little characters in the penny papers were extremely popular and made celebrities out of cartoonists like Outcault, Bud Selig, George McManus, and Winsor McCay. Richard Outcault later invented the backend deal, when he asked for a percentage of all sales from his new comic strip "Buster Brown and his dog Tige"

1898-Congress votes to annex the Kingdom of Hawaii.

1900- Warren Earp, the youngest brother of Wyatt Earp, was killed in a gunfight. He had gotten into an argument in a saloon in Wilcox Arizona. Warren Earp was not at the OK Corral in 1881 but he did help his brothers hunt down the killers of Morgan Earp.

1911- THE AGADIR INCIDENT, also called, "The Panther's Leap'. In the tense international climate just before the Great War, Germany sparked a major international incident by making moves to take southern Morocco from France. They sent the battle cruiser Panther to te Bay of Agadir to "protect endangered German citizens", There were no Europeans in that part of Morocco, so the German ministry cabled a Herr Weiland to rush overland by train to meet the warship. He was nicknamed "The Endangered German". After a lot of diplomatic threats between Paris, Berlin, London and St. Petersburg, Germany eventually backed down. One Berlin newspaper said:" To think we almost went to war with Britain & France over a country that can only provide sand for our canary cages!"
An angry German minister said:" The incident had the same effect as viewing a dead squid. First shock, then amusement, then revulsion."

1925- Afrikaans is recognized as one of the official languages of South Africa, along with English and Dutch.

1930-Work began on Hoover Dam.

1941- The US military took over British bases on Iceland that protected trans-Atlantic convoys. This act was considered by Nazis Germany a further provocation of Neutral America towards joining the war on the Allied side. Earlier President Roosevelt had frozen German assets in the US and expelled their diplomats.

1942- SS chief Heinrich Himmler gave the go-ahead for forced sterilization experiments at Auschwitz.

1943- BANZAI- Climax of the Battle of Saipan- 4,300 Japanese troops streamed out of the jungle in a massed Banzai charge on U.S. Marine positions. Fighting devolved into hand-to-hand combat with Samurai swords and bayonets, more like our Civil War a century earlier than World War II. One of the Marines wounded in the attack was future movie star Lee Marvin, nicknamed Captain Marvel by his buddies for his gung-ho attitude. Almost all the Japanese were killed.
Later in a cave the Marines found the bodies of General Saito and Admiral Nagumo, the fleet commander at the Pearl Harbor attack. They had committed hari kari when the attack had failed. This event also caused Prime Minister Hideki Tojo's government to fall, since Tojo had pledged the U.S. could not take Saipan, an island which placed Japan within range of US long range bombers.

1946- Mother Cabrini made the first American Saint. She was an immigrant from Italy. Later St. Elizabeth Ann Seton became the first native born American saint.

1947- THE ROSWELL INCIDENT- An official news report from the USAF 509th bomber command -the same unit that dropped the Hiroshima bomb- stated they had recovered the wreckage of a UFO in the New Mexico desert near Roswell and were examining it. The next day the commanding general of the 8th Air Force arrived in Roswell. He announced to the press that the earlier report was an error, and it was only a downed weather balloon. The wreckage was removed under heavy-armed guard.

Complete secrecy was then imposed. The communications officer Major Jesse Marcey, who posed for an official photo showing him with the balloon wreckage, later told his son it was faked. Marcey, who died in 1967 and his adjutant Lt. Haut still stick to the original version of their story. Lt. Haut also claimed the base commander Col. William Blanchard thought it was UFO debris. This report coming only two weeks after the first modern sighting of "flying saucers" over Mt. Reynier in Oregon sparked the Flying Saucer craze that gripped America throughout the 1950’s.

1949-"I’m Friday"- The program Dragnet first debuted on radio. Jack Webb conceived, wrote, directed and starred in the show. His hardest job was urging actors "not to act" but to speak the lines normally like the average person does.

1957- Former MGM animation directors Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera filed papers to incorporate their new company, Hanna & Barbera Enterprises, Inc.

1958- Al and Jerry Lapin opened the first International House of Pancakes (IHOP) restaurant in Toluca Lake California.

1960- First demonstration of a practical laser beam. In Russia it had been theorized since 1951. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation, or LASER.

1967- Vivien Leigh, the actress who played Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, died in a mental institution at age 53.

1967 - Beatles' "All You Need is Love" is released. Queen Elizabeth II said it was one of her favorite songs.

1967 – The Doors' "Light My Fire" hits #1.

1976- First women cadets enroll at West Point Military Academy.

1981- Judge Sandra Day O’Connor becomes the first woman nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court.

1982- A drunken lunatic named Michael Fagin with a bleeding left hand broke into Buckingham Palace, got past all the security, and startled Queen Elizabeth in her bed. Her personal bodyguard was out walking the royal corgis. The Queen kept the man engaged in conversation at the foot of her bed until guards dragged him away.

2005-THE 7-7 ATTACK- Four Al Qaeda terrorist bombs exploded in the London subway Tube and a double decker bus, killing 50 and injuring one thousand.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Yesterday’s Quiz: Why is a salute where we touch the extended fingertips of the right hand to our brow?

Answer: It is a holdover from the Middle Ages, when a knight would signal the end of a duel by using his sword arm to lift his visor and reveal his identity to his opponent. Lifting the visor was a sign of greeting and respect. When helmets were replaced by hats with chin straps, the greeting became purely symbolic.


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