This day in history.....

[SouthernN'Proud]

1969: In what turned into one of America's most heinous as well as memorable crimes, Charles Manson and some of his followers, calling themselves The Family, kill a Los Angeles couple in their home, ending a two-night murder spree.

 

[Mare]

1841: Fugitive slave Frederick Douglass, soon to be a well-known orator, speaks before a mostly white abolitionist meeting for the first time on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket.


1952: Sixteen-year-old Hussein ibn Talal is proclaimed king of Jordan after his father is declared unfit to rule. King Hussein I remains on the throne until his death in 1999.


1956: Abstract painter Jackson Pollock dies at the age of 44 in an automobile accident on Long Island, New York.


1965: Black anger over discrimination and unemployment erupts in the first of six days of rioting in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.


1992: The largest mall in the United States, the Mall of America, opens in Bloomington, a suburb of Minneapolis, Minnesota.


1997: Bill Clinton is the first U.S. president to use the line-item veto (a power granted by Congress to the president in April 1996 but ruled unconstutional by the Supreme Court in 1998).

 

[SouthernN'Proud]

1965: Black anger over discrimination and unemployment erupts in the first of six days of rioting in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Never understood that logic. "This ain't fair, so we're gonna go tear up our neighborhood."

 

[Mare]

August 12th


1851: American inventor Isaac Singer receives a U.S. patent for his sewing machine. He is not the first to patent such a machine, but within a decade he is the world's largest sewing-machine manufacturer.


1867: U.S. president Andrew Johnson suspends Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, an ally of his Radical Republican opponents. Johnson's treatment of Stanton will lead to impeachment hearings against him in 1868.

1898: The United States formally annexes the islands of Hawaii, which become a U.S. territory two years later and a state in 1959.


1972: The last American ground combat troops are withdrawn from Vietnam.


1981: The International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) launches its first personal computer, which uses the Microsoft operating system MS-DOS.


1992: The United States, Canada, and Mexico agree on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), forming a free-trade zone among the three countries. The legislatures of the countries will ratify the pact in 1993.

 

[Mare]

August 16th


1819: In what becomes known as the Peterloo Massacre, 11 people die when government calvary troops attack a large crowd demonstrating for economic and political reform in Manchester, England.


1906: An earthquake measuring at 8.6 on the Richter scale virtually destroys the city of Valparaiso, Chile, killing thousands of people.


1948: Baseball slugger Babe Ruth dies at the age of 53 in New York City.

1960: The island of Cyprus, led by its newly elected president, Archbishop Makarios, declares its independence from Britain.


1977: Singer Elvis Presley, age 42, is found dead at his Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tennessee.


1981: American swimmer Mary T. Meagher sets a world record of 57.93 sec for the 100-meter butterfly, three days after setting the world 200-meter butterfly mark.

 

[Mare]

August 17th


1790: The federal capital of the United States moves from New York City to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where it will remain until it moves again to Washington, D.C., in 1800.


1896: Gold is discovered in Bonanza Creek in the Klondike region of Canada's Yukon Territory. A gold rush in the Klondike and nearby Alaska will begin the following year when news of the strike spreads.


1947: Indonesian nationalist leader Sukarno proclaims the country's independence from the Netherlands and becomes its first president.


1962: Peter Fechter, an 18-year-old East German attempting to escape to the West over the Berlin Wall, is shot and killed by East German guards, setting off mass demonstrations in West Berlin.


1969: Hurricane Camille batters Louisiana and Mississippi, killing over 250 people.

1998: President Bill Clinton gives videotaped testimony to a grand jury investigating his relationship with former intern Monica Lewinsky. Later that day, he acknowledges the relationship in a televised speech.

My son Matthew's 5th B-day!

 

[Mare]

August 18th


1227: Genghis Khan dies in the district of Qingshui, China, leaving behind a Mongol Empire that he had extended across the Asian continent.


1587: Virginia Dare, the first English child to be born in North America, is born to members of the Roanoke Colony on the Virginia coast, whose inhabitants will disappear three years later.

1896: Publisher Arthur Ochs takes over the failing New York Times, which he will build into the leading newspaper in the United States.

1958: Published first in a banned French edition three years earlier, Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita makes its first U.S. appearance. The book sells 100,000 copies in its first three weeks.


1963: James Meredith, after braving riots to enroll as the first African American at the University of Mississippi the year before, graduates with a degree in government.


1977: South African black leader Stephen Biko is arrested for his antiapartheid activities. Within a month, he will die from a police beating while in custody.

 

[Mare]

August 19th


14: Augustus, the heir of Julius Caesar and the first emperor of Rome, dies.


1791: African American astronomer and mathematician Benjamin Banneker sends a copy of his first almanac to Thomas Jefferson to disprove Jefferson's belief that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites.

1953: Royalist forces acting on behalf of Reza Shah Pahlavi, with the aid of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, overthrow Iranian premier Mohammad Mossadegh.

1973: Georgios Papadopoulos, leader of the Greek ruling junta since a 1967 coup, abolishes the monarchy and declares Greece a presidential republic. Papadopolous is overthrown later in the year.


1977: Comedian Groucho Marx, the best known of the Marx Brothers, dies in Los Angeles, California.


1991: Communist hard-liners attempt a coup in the Soviet Union, putting Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev under house arrest and declaring a state of emergency. The coup fails two days later.


2003: A suicide bomber destroys the United Nations compound in Baghdād, Iraq, killing 23 people including a high UN official.

 

[Mare]

August 20th


1794: At the Battle of Fallen Timbers on the Ohio frontier, General Anthony Wayne shatters an army of recalcitrant Native Americans, thereby clearing the way for settlement of the Old Northwest.


1940: Exiled Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky is assassinated in Mexico City by a Spanish Communist, under the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.


1968: In response to the reforms in Czechoslavakia known as Prague Spring, Warsaw Pact forces led by the Soviet Union invade Czechoslavakia to reestablish a state loyal to the Soviets.

1977: The United States launches the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which will explore the outer planets before leaving the solar system, carrying with it a phonograph record of human civilization.

1980: Austrian Reinhold Messner becomes the first solo climber to reach the summit of Mount Everest.


1988: Iran and Iraq agree to an United Nations-sponsored cease fire, ending their eight-year war.

 

[Mare]

August 21st


1831: Virginia slave Nat Turner begins a slave rebellion in Southampton County in which over 50 whites are killed. Turner is captured six weeks later after the rebellion has ended.


1858: Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas meet in the first of their series of debates on the subject of slavery during the Illinois senatorial race.

1911: The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci is stolen from the Louvre museum, Paris, France. It is recovered in 1913.


1959: Hawaii becomes the 50th state in the Union.


1961: Kenyan nationalist Jomo Kenyatta is released from prison by British colonial authorities in Kenya. He had been imprisoned in 1952 following the Mau-Mau Rebellion.


1983: Philippine opposition leader Benigno Aquino is assassinated by allies of President Ferdinand Marcos as he steps off a plane in Manila to end his three-year exile from the Philippines.

 

[Mare]

August 22


1642: The English Civil War begins, as King Charles I organizes his army to fight against the Puritan forces of Parliament.


1791: Slaves in Haiti rebel against French plantation owners, beginning the 13-year revolutionary war that will lead to Haitian independence.

1812: In present-day Jordan, Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt discovers the ancient city of Petra, capital of an Arab kingdom.

1864: Twelve nations sign the Geneva Convention, which establishes rules for the treatment of wounded and the protection of medical personnel in wartime and chooses a red cross on a white background as a symbol.


1922: Irish revolutionary Michael Collins, who signed the treaty with Britain that created the Irish Free State the previous year, is assassinated by Irish nationalists opposed to the treaty.


1992: In the second day of the Ruby Ridge incident in Idaho, an FBI sharpshooter kills Vicki Weaver, the wife of white separatist Randy Weaver.

 

[SouthernN'Proud]

August 20th


1794: At the Battle of Fallen Timbers on the Ohio frontier, General Anthony Wayne shatters an army of recalcitrant Native Americans, thereby clearing the way for settlement of the Old Northwest.

re·cal·ci·trant ( P ) Pronunciation Key (r-kls-trnt)
adj.
Marked by stubborn resistance to and defiance of authority or guidance.

On whose authority should the natives have surrendered their homeland?

And people want to say slavery was our most shameful moment. Shameful as it was, the way we treated the Native Americans is even worse IMO. Funny though...I haven't seen any headlines lately about how we are going to make it all up to them. Guess they'll have to wait their turn.

 

[Mare]

August 23rd


1305: Scottish nationalist William Wallace is executed in London as a traitor against King Edward I of England. He is tried in Westminster Hall, London, and promptly hanged and quartered.


1821: Following a decade-long rebellion against Spanish colonists, Mexico receives its independence in the Treaty of Córdoba.

1902: American cooking authority Fannie Farmer opens her School of Cookery in Boston, Massachusetts. The school is designed to train housewives rather than professional chefs.


1926: Silent film idol Rudolph Valentino dies unexpectedly at the age of 31, sending hundreds of thousands of his fans into public mourning.


1927: Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants and anarchists, are executed for murder in a case that aroused international protests of their innocence.


1939: Foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov of the Soviet Union sign a nonaggression pact between the two countries,

 

[Gato_Solo]

And people want to say slavery was our most shameful moment. Shameful as it was, the way we treated the Native Americans is even worse IMO. Funny though...I haven't seen any headlines lately about how we are going to make it all up to them. Guess they'll have to wait their turn.

I believe that there is a town in New York that would disagree. I can't find a source, but I saw on the news a couple years back, a story about a town that had a 100 year lease with a group of Native Americans. The lease was up and, contrary to popular opinion, the natives didn't die off, or get killed off, and they wanted their land back, much to the surprise of the population of the town. I'll see if I can find something, but I doubt it......Aha...I think this is it...or at least part of it.

 

[SouthernN'Proud]

One isolated instance does not a statement make.

Both the institution of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans in this country are beyond reprehensible. I want that stated up front.

I still say that if reparations are due to any group of people for the deeds of our ancestors for the suffering of their ancestors, they need to begin with Native Americans. It makes me ashamed to call myself an American when I ponder what was done to them.

 

[Gato_Solo]

One isolated instance does not a statement make.

Both the institution of slavery and the treatment of Native Americans in this country are beyond reprehensible. I want that stated up front.

I still say that if reparations are due to any group of people for the deeds of our ancestors for the suffering of their ancestors, they need to begin with Native Americans. It makes me ashamed to call myself an American when I ponder what was done to them.

Perhaps...but I found it quite refreshing to see this type of treatment brought to light. I still can't find anything dealing with the aftermath, so I'll assume that the Native Americans got screwed again, and the press swept it under the rug. I still think it's strange not to hear something about it since then. Guess the American public doesn't like justice after all.

 

[Professur]

August 23rd


1305: Scottish nationalist William Wallace is executed in London as a traitor against King Edward I of England. He is tried in Westminster Hall, London, and promptly hanged and quartered.

Betrayed by his own countrymen.

 

[Mare]

August 24th


1572: King Charles IX of France, under the influence of his mother, Catherine de Médicis, orders the mass killing of Huguenots, as the Protestants in France were known, in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.


1814: In the last months of the War of 1812, British forces invade Washington, D.C., where they set fire to the Capitol and the White House.


1940: Australian-born British pathologist Howard Florey and German-born British biochemist Ernst Chain announce in The Lancet that they have developed penicillin for general clinical use as an antibiotic.


1989: Baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti suspends Cincinnati Reds manager and former star player Pete Rose for life for gambling on baseball.


1992: Hurricane Andrew devastates southern Florida, causing $20 billion of property damage and killing 41 people.


79: Italian volcano Mount Vesuvius erupts, burying the cities of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabaie in ashes and mud.

 

[Mare]

August 25th


1718: French colonists in Louisiana establish a settlement named for the Duc d'Orléans, regent of France, which will become the city of New Orleans.


1825: Uruguay declares itself independent of Brazil.


1900: Ten years after suffering a mental breakdown from which he never recovered, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche dies in Weimar, Germany, at the age of 55.


1944: American troops, along with Free French and French Resistance forces, liberate Paris from German occupation.


1964: Members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party are refused in their attempt to be seated at the Democratic National Convention in place of their state's all-white delegation.


325: The first Council of Nicaea ends, at which leaders of the Christian church adopted the Nicaean Creed, affirming the Holy Trinity, and fixed the schedule of the yearly celebration of Easter.

 

[SouthernN'Proud]

1964: Members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party are refused in their attempt to be seated at the Democratic National Convention in place of their state's all-white delegation.

But...but...but I thought the Democrats were the ones jumping through their assholes to protect civil rights? Could it be that selective historical recording is real??!




Nah...I'm just a fanatic.