History Spotlight, 1/3

The Brooklyn Bridge began construction today in 1870. When it opened on May 24, 1883 it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It stretches over a mile over the East River connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn. The bridge's designer was the German engineer John Roebling who had fled poverty in Europe in 1830. While working on a project to increase canal boat effeciency he developed a variety of wire rope that would make the portage of canal boats over the Allegheny Mountains. Previously, the boats had been pulled over the mountians on a system of railroads cars using hemp ropes up to nine inches thick. The hemp ropes were constantly wearing out, and when one snapped, the boat it was pulling didn't stop until it reached the bottom. Roebling's new wire rope put him into the cable business for good.

John Roebling

His first supspension bridge was built in 1845 over the Monongahela River in Pennsylvania.
In 1867, he started work on the Brooklyn Bridge although many people said it was impossible. At the time Manahttan was a booming town and Brooklyn was still quiet farm land so many developers had dollar signs in their eyes as they thought of all that cheap property. The problem is that the ferry service across the East River wasn't that safe or reliable. The General Slocum may not have been due to take over 1000 souls to the bottom of the East River for 37 years, but the currents and shoals were still treacherous. Also, bridges operate 24 hours a day, don't go on strike and don't get drunk on the duty.

With a number of other successfull bridges under his belt Roebling was the guy for the job. Tragically, while on an early surveying trip, he got his foot crushed between a ferry and the dock and subsequently died of gangrene. Fortunately, his son, Washington Roebling, was just as talented as his old man, and took over the job. Unfortunately, he got the bends while working on one of the underwater pressurized caissons that were being used to build the two support towers. He wound up so sick that he couldn't leave his bed, so he got at apartment right next to the work site in Manhattan supervised the site from bed while his wife Emily took over for him onsite. She went head-to-head against corrupt politicians, other engineering firms and the American Society of Civil Engineer in defense of what was, by this time, a Roebling Family project.

Washington Roebling

When the bridge opened on May 24, 1883, she was the first person across it. It's one of the most recognizable landmarks in New York, recognizable to even rubes like me and is an easy way for filmmakers to say "New York!" without having to come out and say it.

Here it is in a shot from Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals as the fearless photojournalist Emanuelle says a tearful farewell to her scumbag boyfriend down by the low-tide line. Nothing says romance like the East River at low tide.Here it is again in almost the exact same location in 1990: The Bronx Warriors as the plucky motorcycle gang tries to unite the gangs of New York in the dystopian future year of 1990. Note that the gang has their own drummer, which I think is the sign of a well-run gang.

History Spotlight, 1/2

Today in 1923, US Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall is forced to resign over the Teapot Dome scandal.

Albert Fall

Teapot Dome is a an oilfield in Wyoming named after the large granite outcropping that was supposed to be under the control of the US Navy. It seems odd that an individual branch of the military would have their own oil reserves, but that's to be the way it worked back then. In 1922, Fall sold the lease from the Navy to a independent oil wildcatter, Harry F. Sinclair in an under-the-table no-bid contract. This, along with a couple of other dicey transactions in California attracted the Senate's interest. They found that, not only had Fall received a $100,000 interest-free loan from the oil men (that's $1.2 million today), but that he was going to also going to get a series of low-interest "loans" (about $400,000) after he retired from the Interior.

Teapot Dome

In the criminal trial that followed, Fall was found guilty of conspiring to accept bribes and got a year in the joint and a $100,000 fine. Sinclair managed to get off, but was later sent to prison for contempt of Congress after it was discovered that he had hired detectives to dig up dirt (and rough up a little) the jurors in his trial. Albert Fall was the first presidential cabinet member to go to prison.

History Spotlight, 1/1

Hi folks-
I'm back after my hiatus and I hope that your holidays were as fun as mine. We'll start the new year with one of my favorite subjects, the British Raj.

Today in 1877, Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. It doesn't sound like a big deal at first - after all, what's the difference between and Empress and a Queen? But it all goes back to who was really running India at the time. What we tend to think of as the British Raj started at the Battle of Plassy on June 23, 1757 where ambitious party boy Robert Clive defeated the head of the state of Bengal and his French armies.

Clive at Plassey

It's important to note here that it wasn't the British Army that did it, but rather the British East India Company's army. Prior to this, the British East India Company was one of the smaller players on the Indian subcontinent. The French hadn't completely lost their will to fight at that point and the Muslim Mughal Empire's internal rot wasn't yet readily apparent. The Company was pretty happy to be the third rate power, maintaining its isolated trading posts and not causing too much trouble with the big boys.
Clive, whose ambitions ran to fighting, screwing and making gobs of money, saw his chance at Plassy and made fools out of both the French and the Mughals. Somebody in Company management said, "You know...I think we could do this," and they proceeded to kick the French out and subjugate the rest of the Mughal successor states. For about the next 100 years, the British East India Company was the power on the Indian subcontinent - not Parliament, not the monarch, just the Company. The Company reminds me of the Weyland-Yutani Company from the Alien movies: massive, powerful and quasi-governmental. Parliament did have some sway over the Company, as we'll see, but in day-to-day operations it was all being run by the Company.
Things went along like this for about the next 100 years and everybody seemed pretty happy. Unless you talked to the Indians, but nobody was. On May 10, 1857, what used to be called the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and now is more properly known as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 kicked off. The causes of this are complex, but, in short: busybodies back in Parliament kept getting on the Company's back about converting the natives to Christianity. Nobody in the Company gave a damn about the Indians' religion, as long as they kept making money. They especially didn't care about the religion of the sepoys, the highly-trained native army the Company used to keep the other natives down. The sepoys were even allowed to use Company-owned cannons and regimental banners in their religious ceremonies. Parliament not only put a stop to this, but also insisted that the attempt be made to convert the sepoys to Christianity. The straw that broke the camel's back is when the new bullets for the 1853 Enfield Rifle were issued. The bullets were kept in a little paper cartridge that was lubricated with grease and you opened it up by biting off the tip of the envelope and spitting it out. Trouble was that, in the days before synthetic lubricants, the bullets were greased with either pig fat, which the Muslim soldiers thought unclean or cow lard, which the Hindu soldiers considered sacred. You can imagine was it was like to have your job not only make you deny your religion but openly sin against it. It was only a matter of time before the sepoys noticed that there was a lot more of them then there was of British people and the Indian Rebellion got under way.

Late 19th-Century sepoy

Tens of thousands of people died, whole cities were held under siege, and the British had their weakness in the jewel of their empire bared for all to see. During the reorganization, the Company was stripped of its governing ability (a bit of an injustice, as they had been doing pretty well until Parliament butted in) and India was made an official territory of Britain and was run by by Parliament and the Queen, via the new Indian Office. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli suggested the title of Empress in order to give Victoria a benign, distant, goddess-like appearance to the Indians. He was also trying to shoehorn in some continuity with the Mughal Empire which had finally gasped its last shortly after the Rebellion was put down.

Today in History, 12/7

Hi Gang - Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of this blog. I'd like to thank everyone for reading it and giving me so much support. I've learned a lot just by writing it every day. I'm going to take a few weeks off (till Jan 1) and then come back with some new stuff. I'm going to retire the "Today in History" thing because I've gone through the year and there's not much else to say. (Fun fact: I called it "Today in History" rather than "This Day in History" because The History Channel already has a feature called that and I was concerned that Roger Mudd and Edward "Ed" Herrmann were going to show up at my door and kick the snot out of me.) In January, I'm going to start a "Spotlight on This Day in History" (hopefully I can think of a better name) where I do a little essay on a certain event from that day. Maybe some other stuff too.
Have a happy holiday and thanks for reading!

1545: Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, consort of Mary I of Scotland, is born.1696: Connecticut Route 108, one of the oldest highways in the U.S. is completed to Trumbull.
1776: Marquis de Lafayette attempts to enter the American military as a major general.
1787: Delaware becomes the first state to ratify the US Constitution.
1863: Richard Sears, American department store founder, is born.1915: Eli Wallach is born. He played Tuco in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but he's been in a ton of other stuff.

1917: The United States declares war on Austria-Hungary.
1923: Ted Knight is born.

1928: Noam Chomsky is born.1930: W1XAV in Boston, Massachusetts broadcasts video from the CBS radio orchestra program, The Fox Trappers. The broadcast also includes the first television commercial in the United States, an advertisement for I.J. Fox Furriers, who sponsored the radio show.
1941: The Imperial Japanese Navy attacks the US Pacific Fleet and its defending Army Air Forces and Marine air forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
1942: Harry Chapin is born.

1947: Johnny Bench is born.1949: Tom Waits is born.

1963: Videotaped instant replay is used for the first time in a live sports telecast as CBS re-showed a touchdown run during the Army-Navy football game.
1972: Apollo 17, the last Apollo moon mission, is launched. The crew takes the photograph known as "The Blue Marble" as they leave the Earth.

Click for larger image.

1982: In Texas, Charles Brooks, Jr. becomes the first person to be executed by lethal injection in the United States.
1988: Yasser Arafat recognizes the right of Israel to exist.

Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.

Today in History, 12/6

1240: During the Mongol invasion of Russia, Kiev falls to the Mongols under Batu Khan.
1608: George Monck is born. He's the English general who decided that, after the disastrous reign of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector, the Stuarts really needed to be restored to the throne.1648: Colonel Pride of the New Model Army purges the Long Parliament of MPs sympathetic to King Charles I of England, in order for the King's trial to go ahead.
1768: The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica is published.
1790: The U.S. Congress moves from New York City to Philadelphia.
1849: American abolitionist Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery.1865: The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, banning slavery.
1877: The first edition of the Washington Post is published.
1884: The Washington Monument is completed.
1896: Ira Gershwin is born.

1900: Agnes Moorehead is born. She is most famous for playing Endora on Bewitched but she was in tons of movies too.1907: The worst mining disaster in U.S. history occurrs as 362 men and boys die in a coal mine explosion in Monongah, W.Va.
1917: A munitions explosion kills more than 1900 people and destroys part of the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
1923: A presidential address is broadcast on radio for the first time as President Calvin Coolidge speaks to a joint session of Congress.
1924: Wally Cox is born.
1933: U.S. federal judge John M. Woolsey rules that the James Joyce's novel Ulysses is not obscene.
1941: Richard Speck, mass murderer, is born.
1953: Tom Hulce is born.

1955: Steven Wright is born.

1957: A launchpad explosion of Vanguard TV3 thwarts the first United States attempt to launch a satellite into Earth orbit.
1958: Nick Park, creator of Wallace & Gromit is born.

1962: Janine Turner is born. I worshiped the ground she walked upon on Northern Exposure. Hell, I still do. Here she is on Arsenio back in 1990.

1969: Meredith Hunter is killed by the Hells Angels during a The Rolling Stones's concert at the Altamont Speedway in California.

Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.

Today in History, 12/5

1360: The French Franc is created.
1484: Pope Innocent VIII issues the Summis desiderantes, a papal bull that deputizes Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger as inquisitors to root out alleged witchcraft in Germany and leads to one of the severest witch hunts in European history.
1766: In London, James Christie holds his first sale.
1775: At Fort Ticonderoga, Henry Knox begins his historic transport of artillery to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
1782: Martin Van Buren, 8th President of the United States is born.
1791: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart dies in Vienna at age 35.
1831: Former US President John Quincy Adams takes his seat in the House of Representatives.
1839: George Armstrong Custer is born.
1848: In a message before the U.S. Congress, US President James K. Polk confirms that large amounts of gold had been discovered in California.
1879: Clyde Cessna, airplane manufacturer, is born.
1890: Fritz Lang is born.
1901: Walt Disney is born.
1906: Otto Preminger is born.
1926: Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin premieres.
1932: Albert Einstein is granted an American visa.
1932: Little Richard is born.
1933: Prohibition in the United States ends as Utah becomes the 36th U.S. state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution, thus establishing the required 75% of states needed to enact the amendment (this overturned the 18th Amendment which had outlawed alcohol in the United States).
1941: In the Battle of Moscow Georgy Zhukov launches a massive Soviet counter-attack against the German army, with the biggest offensive launched against Army Group Centre.
1955: The American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merge and form the AFL-CIO.
1956: Brian Backer is born. He played the nebbishy Mark Ratner in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
1978: The Soviet Union signs a "friendship treaty" with the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.

Today in History, 12/4

771: Austrasian King Carloman dies, leaving his brother Charlemagne King of the now complete Frankish Kingdom.
1259: Kings Louis IX of France and Henry III of England agree to the Treaty of Paris, in which Henry renounces his claims to French-controlled territory on continental Europe (including Normandy) in exchange for Louis withdrawing his support for English rebels.
1585: John Cotton, American Puritan leader, is born.
1619: 38 colonists from Berkeley Parish in England disembark in Virginia and give thanks to God (this is considered by many to be the first Thanksgiving in the Americas).
1674: Father Jacques Marquette founds a mission on the shores of Lake Michigan to minister to the Illiniwek (the mission would later grow into the city of Chicago, Illinois).
1783: At Fraunces Tavern in New York City, US General George Washington formally bids his officers farewell.
1840: Crazy Horse, Oglala Sioux chief, is born.
1867: Former Minnesota farmer Oliver Hudson Kelley founds the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry (better known today as the Grange).
1872: The crewless American ship Mary Celeste is found by the British brig Dei Gratia (the ship was abandoned for 9 days but was only slightly damaged).
1875: Notorious New York City politician Boss Tweed escapes from prison and flees to Cuba, then Spain.
1912: Pappy Boyington is born.
1918: President Woodrow Wilson sails for the World War I peace talks in Versailles, becoming the first US president to travel to Europe while in office.
1921: The Virginia Rappe manslaughter trial against Roscoe 'Fatty' Arbuckle ends in a hung jury.
1943: President Franklin D. Roosevelt closes down the Works Progress Administration, because of the high levels of wartime employment in the United States.
1945: By a vote of 65 to 7, the United States Senate approves United States participation in the United Nations
1949: Jeff Bridges is born.

1952: Great Smog of 1952: A cold fog descends upon London, combining with air pollution and killing at least 12,000 in the weeks and months that follow.
1954: The first Burger King is opened in Miami, Florida.
1964: Marisa Tomei is born.

1969: Black Panther Party members Fred Hampton and Mark Clark are shot and killed in their sleep during a raid by 14 Chicago police officers.
1971: The Montreux Casino in Switzerland is set ablaze by someone wielding a flare gun during a Frank Zappa concert; the incident would be noted in the Deep Purple song "Smoke on the Water".
1973: Supermodel Tyra Banks is born.Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.

Today in History, 12/3

1805: The Lewis and Clark Expedition mark their explorations from the Missouri River overland to the Columbia River on a pine tree.
1818: Illinois becomes the 21st U.S. state.
1826: George B. McClellan, Civil War general, is born.1857: Joseph Conrad is born.1901: President Theodore Roosevelt delivers a 20,000-word speech to the House of Representatives asking the Congress to curb the power of trusts "within reasonable limits".
1917: After nearly 20 years of planning and construction, the Quebec Bridge opens to traffic.1929: President Herbert Hoover announces to the U.S. Congress that the worst effects of the recent stock market crash are behind the nation and the American people have regained faith in the economy.
1931: Jaye P. Morgan, Gong Show panelist, is born.

1947: "A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams opens on Broadway.
1948: Ozzy Osbourne is born.

1960: Daryl Hannah is born1964: The Berkeley Free Speech Movement begins as police arrest over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, following their takeover and sit-in at the administration building in protest at the UC Regents' decision to forbid protests on UC property.
1967: The luxury train 20th Century Limited completes its last run from New York City to Chicago (the train was inaugurated on June 15, 1902).1973: Pioneer 10 sends back the first close-up images of Jupiter.
1976: An assassination attempt is made on Bob Marley. He is shot twice, but plays a concert two days later
1979: In Cincinnati, Ohio, eleven fans are killed during a stampede for seats before a Who concert at Riverfront Coliseum.
1984: A methyl isocyanate leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, kills more than 3,800 people outright and injures 150,000-600,000 others (some 6,000 of whom would later die from their injuries) in one of the worst industrial disasters in history.
1989: In a meeting off the coast of Malta, US President George H. W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev release statements indicating that the cold war between their nations may be coming to an end (some commentators from both nations exaggerated the wording and independently declared the Cold War over).

Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.

Today in History, 12/2

1755: The second Eddystone Lighthouse is destroyed by fire.1804: At Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself Emperor of the French, the first French Emperor in a thousand years.
1805: At the Battle of Austerlitz, French troops under Napoleon defeat a joint Russo-Austrian force.
1823: President James Monroe outlines his doctrine opposing European expansion in the Western Hemisphere.
1845: President James K. Polk announces to Congress that the United States should aggressively expand into the West.
1859: Militant abolitionist leader John Brown is hanged for his October 16th raid on Harper's Ferry.
1867: In a New York City theater, British author Charles Dickens gives his first public reading in the United States.
1914: Ray Walston is born.

1924: Alexander Haig is born.1927: Following 19 years of Ford Model T production, the Ford Motor Company unveils the Ford Model A as its new automobile.
1930: President Herbert Hoover goes before the United States Congress and asks for a US$150 million public works program to help generate jobs and stimulate the economy.
1939: New York City's La Guardia Airport opens.
1942: A team led by Enrico Fermi initiates the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.
1954: The United States Senate votes 65 to 22 to condemn Joseph McCarthy for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute."
1956: The Granma yacht reaches the shores of Cuba's Oriente province and Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and 80 other members of the 26th of July Movement disembark to initiate the Cuban Revolution.
1961: In a nationally-broadcast speech, Cuban leader Fidel Castro declares that he is a Marxist-Leninist and that Cuba is going to adopt Communism.
1968: Lucy Liu is born.1969: The Boeing 747 jumbo jet debuts.1970: The United States Environmental Protection Agency begins operations.

Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.

Today in History, 12/1

1761: Marie Tussaud, French creator of wax sculptures, is born.1824: Since no presidential candidate receives a majority of electoral college votes in the election, the House of Representatives is given the task to decide the winner (as stipulated by the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution). Eventually, John Quincy Adams is chosen over Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay.
1864: In his State of the Union Address President Abraham Lincoln reaffirms the necessity of ending slavery as ordered ten weeks earlier in the Emancipation Proclamation.
1913: The Ford Motor Company introduces the first moving assembly line.
1913: Mary Martin is born. She played Peter Pan on Broadway.1918: Iceland becomes a sovereign state, yet remains a part of the Danish kingdom.
1933: Lou Rawls is born.

1934: In the Soviet Union, Politburo member Sergei Kirov is shot dead at the Communist Party headquarters in Leningrad by Leonid Nikolayev. This was all the excuse Stalin needed to start a massive purge that would cost tens of millions of lives.1935: Woody Allen is born.

1937: Chuck Lowe is born. He is most famous for playing Morrie in Goodfellas.

1940: Richard Pryor is born.

1945: Bette Midler is born.

1946: Gilbert O'Sullivan is born. He is responsible for one of the worst songs ever written.

1949: Pablo Escobar, drug lord, is born.1951: Treat Williams is born.1955: In Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city's racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
1956: Julee Cruise is born. Her haunting voice has been a favorite of David Lynch for soundtracks for years.

1959: The Antarctic Treaty is signed , which sets aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve and bans military activity on that continent.
1960: Paul McCartney and Pete Best are arrested and then deported from Hamburg, Germany for accusation of attempted arson.
1960: Carol Alt, supermodel, is born. This is her iconic 80's poster: 1963: The Beatles' first single, "I Want to Hold Your Hand," is released in the United States.
1970: Sarah Silverman is born. Here she is doing standup in 1992.

1981: The AIDS virus is officially recognized.
1988: Benazir Bhutto is appointed Prime Minister of Pakistan.1990: Channel Tunnel sections started from the United Kingdom and France meet 40 meters beneath the seabed.

Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.