Brief narratives about people and events in the American past.
died yesterday. She was Alberta Martin, born in 1906. A 21-year-old widow with a small child, she married William Jasper Martin in 1927. He was 81 and had a $50-a-month Confederate veteran’s pension. When he died in 1931, Mrs. Martin married his grandson.
The last Union widow died last year.
gave way on this date in 1889 flooding Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The Johnstown Flood National Memorial (National Park Service) describes the event:
There was no larger news story in the latter nineteenth century after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The story of the Johnstown Flood has everything to interest the modern mind: a wealthy resort, an intense storm, an unfortunate failure of a dam, the destruction of a working class city, and an inspiring relief effort.
The rain continued as men worked tirelessly to prevent the old South Fork Dam from breaking. Elias Unger, the president of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, was hoping that the people in Johnstown were heeding the telegraph warnings sent earlier, which said that the dam might go. When it finally happened, at 3:10 P.M., May 31, 1889, an era of the Conemaugh Valley’s history ended, and another era started. Over 2,209 people died on that tragic Friday, and thousands more were injured in one of the worst disasters in our Nation’s history.
According to the Library of Congress:
In 1868, Commander in Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic issued General Order Number 11 designating May 30 as a memorial day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet churchyard in the land.”
The first national celebration of the holiday took place May 30, 1868 at Arlington National Cemetery, where both Confederate and Union soldiers were buried. Originally known as Decoration Day, at the turn of the century it was designated as Memorial Day. In many American towns, the day is celebrated with a parade. …
In 1971, federal law changed the observance of the holiday to the last Monday in May and extended it to honor all soldiers who died in American wars. A few states continue to celebrate Memorial Day on May 30.
of Nepal and Edmund Hillary of New Zealand become the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest (29,035 feet/8,850 meters) on this date in 1953. The mountain is called Chomolungma (“goddess mother of the world”) in Tibet and Sagarmatha (“goddess of the sky”) in Nepal. It’s growing/moving about 6 cm a year.
George Everest (1790-1866) was the British Surveyor General of India (1830-1843). (He pronounced his name E-ver-est, not Ev-er-est as we know it.) Everest’s successor named the mountain for the surveyor.
entered the Union as the 30th state on this date in 1848.
ratified the Constitution on this date in 1790, thereby becoming the 13th state.
35th President of the United States, was born on this date 87 years ago (1917).
George Washington engaged in his first military action.
Washington arrived at the Great Meadows, as the Fort Necessity area was than called, on May 24. Although the meadow was nearly all marsh, he believed it “a charming field for an encounter” and ordered his men to set up an encampment. Three days later, after hearing that a group of French soldiers had been spotted about seven miles away on Chestnut Ridge, Washington and 40 men set out to find them. At dawn on May 28, the Virginians reached the camp of Tanacharison, a friendly Seneca chief known as the Half King. His scouts then led them to the ravine about two miles to the north where the French were encamped.
The French, commanded by Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de Jumonville, were taken by surprise. Ten were killed, including Jumonville, one was wounded, and 21 were made prisoner. One man escaped to carry the news back to Fort Duquesne. Washington’s command suffered only one man killed and two wounded.
Fearing “we might be attacked by considerable forces,” Washington undertook to fortify his position at the Great Meadows. During the last two days of May and the first three days of June, he built a circular palisaded fort, which he called Fort Necessity.
Source: Fort Necessity National Battlefield (National Park Service)
The two oldest former Presidents ever are alive today: Ronald Reagan, who was 93 in February, and Gerald Ford, who will be 91 in July. John Adams lived to be 90 and 8 months. Herbert Hoover lived to be 90 and 2 months.
The year of birth of the last 12 presidents (in order of birth) and their age when they became president:
1882 Franklin Roosevelt 51
1884 Harry Truman 60
1890 Dwight Eisenhower 62
1908 Lyndon Johnson 55
1911 Ronald Reagan 69
1913 Richard Nixon 56
1913 Gerald Ford 61
1917 John Kennedy 43
1924 George H. W. Bush 64
1924 Jimmy Carter 52
1946 George W. Bush 54
1946 Bill Clinton 46
The German battleship Bismarck was sunk by the British Navy on this date in 1941.
Design for the Bismarck began in 1934, her keel was laid down in 1936, she was launched in 1939 and commissioned in August 1940. The Bismarck embarked on her maiden combat voyage on May 18, 1941. Nine days later she went to the bottom. Of her crew of 2,300, only 110 survived.
The Hood found the Bismark and on that fatal day
The Bismark started firin’ fifteen miles away
We gotta sink the Bismark was the battle sound
But when the smoke had cleared away
The mighty Hood went down
For six long days and weary nights
They tried to find her trail
Churchill told the people put ev’ry ship a-sail
‘Cause somewhere on that ocean
I know she’s gotta be
We gotta sink the Bismark to the bottom of the sea
We’ll find that German battleship
That’s makin’ such a fuss
We gotta sink the Bismark
‘Cause the world depends on us
Hit the decks a-runnin’ boys
And spin those guns around
When we find the Bismark we gotta cut her down
From “Sink the Bismarck” written by Johnny Horton and Tilman Franks
opened on this date in 1937. Vehicular traffic began the next day. Jumping off began three months later.
Read about the world’s leading location for suicide from an article last October in The New Yorker.
On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”
Ken Baldwin, one of 26 known survivors
was born in Wallace, South Dakota, on this date in 1911.
Humphrey was first elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1945 and U.S. Senator in 1948. He introduced his first bill in 1949; it became law in 1965 and we know it as Medicare.
Humphrey became Vice President with the election of President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. After Johnson withdrew from the 1968 campaign, and after Robert Kennedy was killed, Humphrey was nominated as the Democratic candidate for President. He lost to Richard Nixon in one of the closest elections in history. Some commented that with the vote trending as it did, had the election been one or two days later Humphrey would have won.
But then we wouldn’t have had Watergate and Nixon to kick around.
Who knew? Troy was in England.
Although the Iliad was written in ancient Greek, the war was not waged by Greeks and not caused by the abduction of Helen. The real cause was access to tin in Britain, a precious metal which was essential for the production of bronze.
During the second millenium BC, the tales of the greatest war of prehistory were orally transmitted by Sea Peoples migrating from western Europe to the Mediterranean. This is why traces of the war could not be found near Hissarlik in Turkey, the site previously believed to be that of Homer’s Troy.
This work clearly demonstrates that the Iliad, however poetic, is based on real historical events in the Bronze Age.
From Archaeology, the director of the excavations at Troy sums up:
According to the archaeological and historical findings of the past decade especially, it is now more likely than not that there were several armed conflicts in and around Troy at the end of the Late Bronze Age. At present we do not know whether all or some of these conflicts were distilled in later memory into the “Trojan War” or whether among them there was an especially memorable, single “Trojan War.” However, everything currently suggests that Homer should be taken seriously, that his story of a military conflict between Greeks and the inhabitants of Troy is based on a memory of historical events–whatever these may have been. If someone came up to me at the excavation one day and expressed his or her belief that the Trojan War did indeed happen here, my response as an archaeologist working at Troy would be: Why not?
Since so many wingnuts want to paint objections to the disaster in Iraq as unpatriotic, it’s time to remember that anti-war traitor A. Lincoln, congressman from Illinois, who in December 1847, sponsored a resolution requiring President Polk to provide the House with “all the facts which go to establish whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so shed, was, or was not, our own soil.”
According to David Herbert Donald in Lincoln (1995):
In the manner of a prosecuting attorney, he demanded that the President inform the Congress whether that spot had ever been part of Texas and whether its inhabitants had ever “submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas, …by consent, or by compulsion, either by accepting office, or voting at elections, or paying taxes, or serving on juries, or…in any other way. ” Lincoln clearly intended to show that the American army had begun the war by making an unprovoked attack on a Mexican settlement, despite the fact that “Genl. Taylor had, more than once, intimated to the War Department that…no such movement was necessary to the defence or protection of Texas.”
Thanks to Political Animal for the reminder.
Legend and a number of historical accounts have it that on this date in 1626, Manhattan Island was purchased from the Canarsee Delawares by the Dutchman Peter Minuit. Most accounts state that Dutch beads were part of the deal.
The only known document specifically relating to the acquisition was written in Amsterdam late in 1626 as a report to the board of the West India Company. It said, in part:
They [the crew and passengers of a returning ship] report that our people are in good heart and live in peace there; the women have also borne some children there. They have purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders; ’tis 11,000 morgens (about 22,00[0] acres) in size.
[60 guilders has been estimated as worth from $24 to $300. Manhattan is actually about 15,000 acres, not 22,000.]
The late bead historian Peter Francis argued in his prize-winning 1986 article “The Beads That Did Not Buy Manhattan Island” that, because this contemporary report does not mention beads, we cannot assume that beads were part of the transaction. According to Francis, beads were added to the story by Martha J. Lamb in her History of the City of New York (1877). It was only from then on that Dutch beads became part of the story. [And, as a result, making the Delawares seem even more ignorant in light of Manhattan’s growing importance and wealth.]
NewMexiKen however, wonders whether “for the value of 60 guilders” does not imply trade goods rather than coin. What use would Dutch money have been to the Delawares? And, if the transaction was strictly for money, why not report “for 60 guilders” rather than the vague “for the value of 60 guilders”? Trade goods were used in the purchase of Staten Island in August 1626 according to a copy of the deed – “Some Diffies, Kittles, Axes, Hoes, Wampum, Drilling Awls, Jew’s Harps, and diverse other wares” [Diffies are cloth]. What does “Wampum” mean in this Dutch account if not beads? [The word “Wampum” comes from the Narragansett word for white shell beads.]
More than likely the Delawares assumed they were “leasing” the use of the land. Permanent title would not have occurred to them. And $24 to $300 for a lease (whether in cash or goods) would not have been unattractive.
As the result of war, the Dutch traded New Amsterdam to the English in 1667 for what is now Suriname (Dutch Guyana).
opened on this date in 1883. Click here for every fact you ever needed to know about this landmark.
Wednesday May 23rd 8 Indians Kick: [Kickapoo] Came to Camp with meat we recved their pesents of 3 Deer & gave them Whisky:
The beginning of Clark’s entry for this date, 1804
Clyde Champion Barrow and Bonnie Parker were shot to death in an ambush near Sailes, Bienville Parish, Louisiana, on this date 70 years ago. The FBI has a web page with details about Bonnie and Clyde, including a photo of each.
Not exactly Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway and Gene Hackman (who portrayed Clyde’s brother Buck). All three were nominated for an acting Oscar, as was Michael J. Pollard. Estelle Parsons, who played Buck’s wife Blanche in the 1967 film, won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.
was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor on this date in 1900 — for duty performed nearly 37 years earlier at Fort Wagner, S.C. Sergeant Carney was the first African-American to receive the Medal of Honor.
Carney was a member of the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry, the regiment whose story was told in the film Glory (1989) with Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman and Matthew Broderick. Carney was not portrayed in the film by name.
The citation for Carney’s Medal of Honor reads: “When the color sergeant was shot down, this soldier grasped the flag, led the way to the parapet, and planted the colors thereon. When the troops fell back he brought off the flag, under a fierce fire in which he was twice severely wounded.”
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were established on this date in 1873 as the North-West Mounted Police. The RCMP web site has an extensive history that begins:
On May 23, 1873, the Dominion Parliament passed an act to provide for the establishment of a “Mounted Police Force for the Northwest Territories”. The Force was recruiting men between the ages of 18 and 40, of sound constitution, able to ride, active, able-bodied and of good character. The pay was set at 75 cents per day for sub-constables, $1.00 for constables. Furthermore, the men were required to “be able to read and write either the English or French language.”
The Command was to be divided into Troops. The Commanding Officer was to be termed “Commissioner”. The term of service was set at three years. The Force was to be a paramilitary body. Its immediate objectives: to stop liquor trafficking in the North-west; to gain the respect and confidence of the natives; to collect customs dues; and to perform all the duties of a police force.
ratified the U.S. Constitution on this date in 1788, thereby becoming the eighth state.
It was 77 years ago today that Lindbergh landed in Paris. The Writer’s Almanac tells the story well.
NewMexiKen missed noting the actual anniversary of the Brown decision on Monday, so let me do so in a simple way. Of all the “important” people I have ever seen in person — and that includes presidents, at least one king and one queen, cabinet heads, sports figures and celebrities — the one I treasure most was a glimpse of Chief Justice Earl Warren at the New York World’s Fair (1964).