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Nov 28, 2019
November 28th, 2019

Question: Which planet is larger? Mars or Earth?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Has a British Prime Minister ever been impeached?
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History for 11/28/2019
Birthdays: Jean Baptiste Lully, William Blake, Frederick Engels, Stefan Zweig, Ernst Roehm, Brooks Atkinson, Berry Gordy the founder of Motown Records, Anton Rubinstein, Gary Hart, Vern Den Herder, Paul Warfield, Hope Lange, Ed Harris is 69, Paul Schaefer, Joe Dante, Michael Ritchie, Anna Nicole-Smith, Randy Newman, John Stewart is 57

HAPPY THANKSGIVING Since the earliest times societies have had harvest festivals to give thanks to the appropriate deities that they're not going to starve that winter. A letter written in 1621 by pilgrim Edward Winslow described how Pilgrim Gov. Bradford and Miles Standish invited Massasoit and 90 of his Wampanoag Indians to a feast to celebrate their first successful harvest. The Indians brought several deer they killed. Gov. Bradford, who wrote a detailed history of the colony, does not mention the event. The custom of Thanksgiving was a New England custom for decades thereafter.
In 1789 George Washington had called for a thanksgiving celebration in late November to celebrate the new Constitution. But Thomas Jefferson thought Thanksgiving was a ridiculous idea and a violation of the separation of church and state. So did Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor.
In 1863 after the great union victory at Gettysburg, President Lincoln issued a decree that the last Thursday of November be set aside as a feast of national Thanksgiving. As blue clad troops chowed down on their turkey and chicken dinners, the Confederates withheld their fire in honor of the new Yankee holiday. Up until recently Thanksgiving was declared by Presidential decree, usually a notice buried in back of a newspaper.

885 A.D. est. date that the VIKINGS ATTACKED PARIS-Viking warchief Ragnar Lothbrock had attacked Paris a generation earlier. Now dragonships led by his sons Sigfred and Sinric rowed up the Seine to attack again. The Parisians under Duke Odo and Bishop Gozlin put up a stout resistance from the city walls until the summer, when the plague and an army Frankish King Charles the Fat, son of Charles the Bald, rescued the city.

1493- Christopher Columbus returned to San Salvador, to discover his first colony La Natividad, wiped out by angry local Indians.

1520- Having recovered and refitted from navigating the Straights of Magellan around the tip of South America, Fernan Magellan struck out across the Pacific.

1812-THE CROSSING OF THE BEREZINA- Napoleon' army on it's frozen Retreat from Moscow had to get across two rickety spans over an ice swollen river while Russian armies fire down on them from all sides. Napoleon said to his chief of staff Berthier, ” Well, how do we get out of this?”
Engineer General Eble, the artillery chief who called his cannon “my children” oversaw the maintaining of the bridges. He constantly waded into waist deep frigid water and with his men worked feverishly to keep patching up the rickety span. The bridges broke down frequently and the span of a wooden board was the difference between life and death. General Eble made it out of Russia, but soon died of pneumonia and exhaustion.

1815- After Waterloo and a prisoner on the island of St. Helena, Napoleon Bonaparte for the first time put away his uniform, and appeared in civilian clothes. It was his admission that after more than twenty-five years of politics and war, his career was indeed over.

1870- Painter Jean Bazille was shot and killed while serving in the French Army fighting the Prussians. He was only 29. He had been one of the leaders of the new Impressionists painters. Had he lived he might have produced many masterpieces and would’ve been as famous as Degas, Monet or Cezanne.

1895- The Chicago Times-Herald Race- the first American auto race. Two electric and four gas powered cars raced from Chicago to Evanston and back, 54 miles despite several inches of snow on the ground. The winner Car # 5 driven by inventor Charles Duryea reached a top speed of 7 miles an hour! Only one other car finished, the rest broke down. Duryea won $2,000, and caught a cold.

1905- The Sinn Fein political party founded in Dublin by Arthur Griffiths. Sinn Fein –pronounced “shinn-fain”is gaelic for “We ourselves alone”. Griffiths signed the Anglo-Irish treaty with Michael Collins the IRA chief. The subsequent outcry over giving up the six counties of Ulster hounded him into an early grave, Griffiths died of a heart attack and Collins was assassinated.

1907- 23 year old Russian-Canadian scrap metal dealer Lazar Meir, now renamed Louis B. Mayer, bought an old burlesque house in Haverhill Massachusetts to show the new moving picture shows. Originally called The Gem, it was such a dump locals called it The Germ. Mayer renamed it The Orpheum and on Thanksgiving Day opened with the film “ From the Manger to the Cross”. L.B. Mayer grew his film business to become MGM, and at the time of his death in 1950 was the most powerful man in Hollywood. The Motion Picture Academy was his idea.

1911- The Chevrolet Automobile Company founded by the brothers Chevrolet.

1919- Nancy Viscountess Astor became the first woman elected to the British Parliament. She succeeded her husband William Waldorf Astor as Conservative MP for Plymouth. Although a fellow Tory, Lady Astor was the political as well as verbal nemesis of Winston Churchill. She once said to him "Mr. Churchill, if I were your wife I'd put poison in your coffee!" To which Churchill replied:" Madame if I were your husband I would drink it!"

1922- The first skywriting display. Former RAF pilot Cyril Turner wrote HELLO USA , CALL VANDERBILT 7-200 in the skies above New York City. 47,000 people immediately telephoned the number.

1925- First radio broadcast from the Grand Ol' Opry in Nashville.

1926- California oil tycoon Edward Doheny went on trial for his role in the Teapot Dome scandal. That he and Harry Sinclair had bribed the Secretary of the Interior to lease them U.S. strategic oil reserves. And like most millionaires, he was acquitted.

1942- THE COCONUT GROVE FIRE-The U.S. public was distracted for awhile from war news by reports of a terrible disaster in Boston. A fire broke out at a popular nightclub called the Cocoanut Grove and killed 492 people in only twelve minutes. The clubs decorations caught fire and created carbon monoxide gas and there were only two exits. Among the dead was western movie star Buck Jones. The tragedy created the first mandatory laws requiring public buildings to have fire exits opening outwards and safety testing of decorative materials.

1947- Disney's cartoon "Chip and Dale".

1948- Hopalong Cassidy premiered on television.

1951-Truman held a crisis cabinet meeting over the War in Korea.
U.S and United Nations forces had been attacked by 180,000 Communist Chinese, lost the capitol Seoul and were being driven back down the Korean peninsula. Gen. Douglas MacArthur recommended dropping of ten atomic bombs on Chinese cities, spreading a belt of nuclear waste across the Sino-Korean border and inviting Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalist Chinese to attack China and restart the Chinese Civil War. This would mean Russia would step in with its nuclear weapons and World War III would result.
Truman made the decision to keep the Korean War a "limited war", and not let it expand, no matter how bad allied losses became.
Gen. MacArthur was horrified. He was told we are not at war with Communist China, even though thousands of Chinese soldiers were even now locked in deadly battle with his troops. At first, his call for nuclear weapons sound crazy, but his argument was it was crazy to fight wars to preserve a status-quo. If you go to the extreme of risking men's lives, do it to win or don’t go to war at all. In 1964 from his deathbed, MacArthur sent a note to Pres. Johnson begging him not to go into Vietnam.

1953- Frank Olson, a US government employee, jumped out a window of the New York Statler Hotel. In 1975 it was revealed Olson was given LSD by Dr Sidney Gottlieb, as part of a government “mind-control” experiment. At the time the gov’t thought LSD under controlled conditions could expand the human mind.

1953- Cartoonist & writer Milt Gross died.

1994 –At the Columbia State Penitentiary in Portage Wisconsin, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was cleaning the prison bathroom when he was attacked and beaten to death with a broomstick by inmate Christopher Scarver. Scarver told prosecutors God told him kill him. Dahmer’s brain was preserved in formaldehyde, but his mother ordered its destruction a year later.
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Yesterday’s Question answered below: Has a British Prime Minister ever been impeached?

Answer: No. British PMs as leaders of their party, leave office when their party loses control of Parliament. The first PM to be turned out was Lord North, after a vote of no-confidence due to his handling of the American Revolution in 1781


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