1260 – Kublai Khan becomes ruler of the Mongol Empire
1494 – On second voyage to New World, Christopher Columbus sights Jamaica
1780 – Second oldest learned society in US (American Academy of Arts & Sciences) forms in Boston
1809 – Mary Kies is first woman issued a US patent for a ‘weaving straw’
1855 – NYC regains Castle Clinton, to be used for immigration
1877 – Indian Wars: Sitting Bull leads his band of Lakota into Canada to avoid harassment by the United States Army under Colonel Nelson Miles.
1891 – Carnegie Hall opens with Tchaikovsky as guest conductor
1893 – Panic of 1893: Great crash on NY Stock Exchange
1912 – Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda begins publishing
1920 – US Pres Wilson makes Communist Labor Party illegal
1921 – Miniature newspaper published (Brighton Gazette 10 x 13 cm)
1942 – US begins rationing sugar during WW II
1943 – Postmaster General Frank C Walker invents Postal Zone System
1944 – Gandhi freed from prison
1944 – Russian offensive against Sebastopol, Crimea
1945 – World War II: Admiral Karl Dönitz, leader of Germany after Hitler’s death, orders all U-boats to cease offensive operations and return to their bases.
1961 – Alan Shepard becomes first American in space (aboard Freedom 7)
1965 – First large-scale US Army ground units arrive in South Vietnam
1969 – Pulitzer prize awarded to Norman Mailer (Armies of the Night)
2012 – Japan shuts down its nuclear reactors leaving the country without nuclear power for the first time since 1970
Birthdays
867 – Uda, Emperor of Japan (d. 931)
1818 – Karl Marx, Trier, Prussia, philosopher (Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital), (d. 1883)
1865 – Nellie Bly, [Elizabeth Cochran Seaman], journalist and writer (d. 1922)
Deaths
1309 – Charles II, the Lame, King of Naples (1285-1309), dies
1821 – French emperor (1799-1815) Napoleon Bonaparte , dies in exile on the island of Saint Helena
1981 – Bobby Sands, IRA activist/terrorist dies in the 66th day of his hunger strike
2011 – Claude Choules, last surviving World War I veteran (b. 1901)Nellie Bly was the pen name of American journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochrane.
In 1887, working for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, she wrote an exposé in which she faked insanity to study the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island from within. After 10 days she was released at Pulitzer’s behest and went on to write 10 Days in a Mad-House.
On the effect of her experiences, she wrote:
“What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment? Here is a class of women sent to be cured. I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.”
A year later in 1888, she pitched the idea to her editor that she make Jules Verne’sAround the World in Eighty Days come to real life. And so, after a year of planning, she sailed from Hoboken aboard the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line. She traveled through England and France, where she met Jules Verne, however briefly. Ms. Cochrane was in a hurry and made her way through the Suez Canal and onto Ceylon, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. Rough weather crossing the Pacific caused her to arrive two days late in San Francisco so Mr. Pulitzer chartered a private train to bring her back to Hoboken where she began her journey. She completed her trip in 72 days. By 1913 however, three gentlemen bested her record by completing the ’round-the-world’ journey in 36 days. |
