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nine years ago that a bomb was exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people, and injuring 500.

Chairs representing some of the public servants who lost their life that day (Oklahoma City National Memorial).

It’s Patriot’s Day in New England (formerly April 19th, now the third Monday in April — today both). Patriot’s Day commemorates the action at Lexington and Concord on this date in 1775, when British troops marching to arrest John Hancock and Sam Adams were met with armed resistance, first at Lexington Green where “the shot heard ’round the world was fired,” and then at Concord where the British were forced to turn back to Boston. It was the beginning of the American War for Independence.

The Library of Congress informs us that:

On April 19, 1775, troops under the command of Brigadier General Hugh Percy, played “Yankee Doodle” as they marched from Boston to reinforce British soldiers already fighting the Americans at Lexington and Concord. Whether sung or played on that occasion, the tune was martial and intended to deride the colonials:

Yankee Doodle came to town,
For to buy a firelock;
We will tar and feather him
And so we will John Hancock.

(CHORUS)
Yankee Doodle, keep it up,
Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Mind the Music and the step,
And with the girls be handy.

There are numerous conflicting accounts of the origin of “Yankee Doodle.” Some credit its melody to an English air, others to Irish, Dutch, Hessian, Hungarian and Pyrenean tunes or a New England jig. Its first American verses are attributed to British military surgeon, Dr. Richard Schackburg. Tradition holds that Schackburg invented his lyrics in 1755 while at the home of the Van Rensselaer family attending a wounded prisoner of the French and Indian War.

“Yankee Doodle’s” catchy tune has allowed for seemingly endless adaptation and expansion. This early verse, probably Schackburg’s, comments on the difference between the commissioned officers of the British military and those of the motley dressed Americans who then fought with them against the French:

There is a man in our town,
I pity his condition,
He sold his oxen and his sheep
To buy him a commission.

“Yankee Doodle” was well known in the New England colonies before Lexington and Concord but only after the skirmishes there did the American militia appropriate it. Tradition holds that the colonials began to sing it as they forced the British back to Boston on April 19, 1775, after the battles of Lexington and Concord. It is documented that the American’s sang the following verse at Bunker Hill:

Father and I went down to camp,
along with Captain Good’in,
And there we see the men and boys
as thick as hasty puddin’.

As George Washington received his commission and took command of the nascent Continental Army on Cambridge Common, additional verses evolved and were incorporated:

And there was Captain Washington,
And gentlefolks about him,
They say he’s grown so tarnal proud,
He will not ride without them.

and

And there was Captain Washington
upon a slapping stallion,
A giving orders to his men;
I guess there was a million.

By the end of the summer of 1775, the colonists had confined the British army to Boston and destroyed the royal governor’s power. An 18th century copy of “Yankee Doodle,” published in London, reflected this triumph. The following verse was included under the published title “Yankee Doodle; or, (as now christened by the Saints of New England) The Lexington March.”

Sheep’s Head and Vinegar,
ButterMilk and Tansy,
Boston is a Yankee town,
Sing Hey Doodle Dandy.

By 1777, “Yankee Doodle” had certainly become an unofficial American anthem. Following General Burgoyne’s surrender of British troops to the Continental Army on October 17, 1777, British officer Thomas Anburey wrote:

. . . the name [of Yankee] has been more prevalent since the commencement of hostilities. . . . The soldiers at Boston used it as a term of reproach, but after the affair at Bunker’s Hill, the Americans gloried in it. Yankee Doodle is now their paean, a favorite of favorites, played in their army, esteemed as warlike as the Genadier’s March — it is the lover’s spell, the nurse’s lullaby . . . it was not a little mortifying to hear them play this tune, when their army marched down to our surrender.

Fittingly, “Yankee Doodle” is also said to have been played at Yorktown, along with “The World Turned Upside Down,” when Lord Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at the end of the war.

After the Revolutionary War, “Yankee Doodle” surfaced in stage plays, classical music, and opera. An 1887 theater piece jokingly referred to the song having 199 verses.

The writer, producer, and composer George M. Cohan adapted “Yankee Doodle” for his Broadway play Little Johnny Jones, the story of an American jockey who goes to England to win a derby. A portion of Cohan’s 1904 play was incorporated into the biographical 1942 film Yankee Doodle Dandy staring James Cagney as Cohan, and again into the 1955 movie The Seven Little Foys starring Bob Hope and Cagney. [Eddie Foy (1854-1928) was vaudevillian who performed with his seven children.]

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

Continue reading Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

this morning that a magnitude 8.3 earthquake struck San Francisco killing an estimated 3,000 people (out of a population of 450,000).

The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco has an engrossing online exhibit about the quake that includes photographs, eyewitness accounts, police and fire department reports, the Mayor’s “Shoot to Kill” Order and more.

was born on this date in in 1894. Khrushchev was Soviet Premier from 1954-1964. The New York Times has posted its lengthy obituary from 1971.

One of the more infamous moments at the United Nations took place when Khrushchev visited there in 1960 and reportedly banged his shoe on the desk in a protest. Or maybe he didn’t. Khrushchev biographer William Taubman isn’t so sure.

Nikita Khrushchev and the Shoe

The shoe that the world thinks Khrushchev banged at the United Nations is one of history’s most iconic symbols. Ask many Westerners, and even quite a few Russians, about the man who succeeded Stalin and then denounced him, who ruled the Soviet Union for a decade and brought to world to the nuclear brink in Cuba, and what they remember most is the shoe. But it may never have happened. The celebrated shoe was allegedly banged on Oct. 13, 1960. A New York Times correspondent, Benjamin Welles, reported that Khrushchev was reacting to a speech by a Philippine delegate who charged that the Soviet Union had “swallowed up” Eastern Europe and “deprived [it] of political and civil rights.” According to Welles, Khrushchev “pulled off his right shoe, stood up and brandished the shoe at the Philippine delegate on the other side of the hall. He then banged his shoe on the desk.”

Yet another Times man, James Feron, who was at the United Nations but did not write a story, recalls, “I actually saw Khrushchev not bang his shoe.” According to Feron, whom I interviewed in 2002, the Soviet leader “leaned over, took off a slip-on shoe, waved it pseudomenacingly, and put it on his desk, but he never banged his shoe.”

Did he or didn’t he? A KGB general remembered that Khrushchev banged the shoe rhythmically, “like a metronome.” A UN staffer claimed Khrushchev didn’t remove his shoe (“he couldn’t have,” she recalled, because the size of his stomach prevented him from reaching under the table), but it fell off when a journalist stepped on his heel. The staffer said she passed the shoe wrapped in a napkin to Khrushchev, after which he did indeed bang it. Viktor Sukhodrev, Khrushchev’s brilliant interpreter, for Soviet leaders from Khrushchev to Gorbachev remembers that his boss pounded the UN desk so hard with his fists that his watch stopped, at which point, irritated by the fact that some “capitalist lackey” had in effect broken a good watch, Khrushchev took off his shoe and began banging.

When I talked about Khrushchev to veterans of his era in Washington, one eyewitness confirmed the banging. But another eyewitness confirmed the nonbanging. A third, who said he’d been standing several feet behind the premier, insisted that the heel of the hand that held the shoe slammed the desk but that shoe never actually touched it.

John Loengard, former picture editor for Life magazine, wrote me that he was in a General Assembly booth, along with 10 or so photographers from New York city dailies and national wire services. Loengard is “certain” that Khrushchev “did not bang his shoe on the desk,” but that “he certainly meant to do so.” According to Loengard, Khrushchev “reached down and took off a brown loafer from his right foot and put it on the desk. He grinned to delegates from the United Arab Republic who sat across the aisle and mimed (with an empty hand) that the next time he’d use the shoe to bang. I can assure you that every camera in the booth was trained on Khrushchev, waiting for him to use the shoe. He only put it on again and left. None of us missed the picture — which would have been a serious professional error. The event never occurred.” A woman whose parents emigrated from Ukraine wrote to say that her husband, who was getting ready to go to work, happened to see it as he was walking past the TV. “He told me to run quickly to watch, and we stood there transfixed,” she wrote. “We had a house guest at the time — my cousin Sonia, who was here from the Soviet Union on a visit. When we told her what had happened she didn’t believe us. Eventually, other relatives who had also been watching told her they had seen it, too, so she finally conceded he must have done so.”

One might think that the controversy could be resolved by television or photo archives. Several years ago, Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, asked NBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for a tape of the event, but neither could find one. A former CBS Moscow correspondent told me that his search turned up nothing either. My own Internet quest unearthed a photo of the shoe (a light brown sandal, it turns out) on the UN desk, but none of the former colliding with the latter.

Whether Khrushchev banged or merely brandished, the larger question is how to establish truth in history, or whether it can be established at all. A friend in Moscow, a distinguished medieval historian, reacted to the shoe controversy this way, his tongue only partly in cheek: “If one cannot establish the truth in an event with hundreds of eyewitnesses many of whom are alive and talking, what’s the point of reconstructing events centuries old?”

From the Cold War International History Project @ the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

in 1790, Benjamin Franklin died at the age of 84.