http://reachmorenow.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/ball2.jpg
Ray’s Today in History – August 6
Ray opens up his almanac to August 6 to tell us about everyone from one of the wild West’s most notorious female outlaws, Belle Starr, to one of America’s all-time favorite women comedians, Lucille Ball. And Ray will tell you about everything from the Cane Ridge, Kentucky, revival to the mysterious disappearance of a New York Supreme Court judge. August 7 will be videoed live later this evening. But join Ray right now for this live report.
This is Ray Mossholder from the headquarters of Reach More Now in Fort Worth, Texas, this is Today in History. These are the stories that have made news throughout history – stories that happened on
AUGUST 6
For example, 258 A.D. – Roman emperor Valerian, the Bishop of Rome, seized St. Sixtus II while he was holding an illegal service in a cemetery. He was executed sitting in his own chair. The emperor’s soldiers kill several deacons that same day.
On August 6, 1727 – French Ursuline nuns first arrived at New Orleans, where they set up the first Catholic charitable institution in America. It comprised an orphanage, a girl’s school and a hospital.
Thursday 6 August 1801, the camp meeting at Cane Ridge, Kentucky finally broke up.
Late in the eighteenth century, both pastors and Christian laity in Kentucky recognized the deep spiritual need in their region. Most people living on what was then the western frontier were indifferent to faith or actively opposed to it. Christians began to pray for revival. Believing the work of the Holy Spirit would be hampered by neglected sin, many churches purged their membership of individuals who claimed faith but lived in open defiance of biblical teachings.
Revival began in 1800, when a woman who had been seeking assurance of salvation for years suddenly broke into songs and shouts of joy while listening to the exhortations of preacher and evangelist James McGready. Others began to sob and plead for similar assurance. They shared their experience and the news spread like wildfire throughout the state. People hurried to Logan County where McGready was preaching, hoping to share the experience.
Presbyterian minister Barton Stone scheduled a three-day service at Cane Ridge, a day’s ride from the “big city” of Lexington, during the first week of August. Although such services were relatively common, the surrounding atmosphere was now so charged with expectation that there was widespread anticipation of great things from the gathering. Whereas there might ordinarily be hundreds in attendance for such a service, this time thousands came.
Nothing exceptional occurred on Friday, but some campers spent the entire night in prayer. Saturday evening their prayers were answered: a spiritual wave swept the crowd. Preachers raised their voices and urged repentance. Men, women, and children cried aloud. Some fainted. Scoffers mocked. Penitents became hysterical and some began to jerk.
Sunday morning opened with Communion. Afterward, emotion once again swept the crowd under the exhortation of a Methodist minister. Sinners fell to their knees, crying for forgiveness. There were not enough pastors to counsel everyone, so the laypeople counseled one another. The campground was filled with singing, shouting, dancing, groaning and weeping. Some people lay as if dead. With more people arriving and the revival showing no sign of letting up, the leaders extended the services all that night and throughout the following week.
Altogether as many as thirty thousand people—one tenth of Kentucky’s population—made their way to Cane Ridge that week. Hundreds professed conversion. After the meetings ended, their effects persisted. A number of slave owners even freed their slaves. For a year or more afterward, interest in religion ran high in Kentucky. Later, when pleading for revival, Christians would pray, “Lord, make it like Cane Ridge.”
On August 6, 1806, Francis II, the very last Holy Roman Emperor abdicated his throne, which ended the Holy Roman Empire.
In 1874 Law officers killed Jim Reed, the first husband of the famous bandit queen Belle Starr.
Reed’s main claim to fame came from his marriage to Myra Maybelle Shirley, better known as Belle Starr. Belle’s family had once been prosperous, but the Civil War destroyed her father’s business in Carthage, Missouri. The family moved to Texas when Belle was 16 years old, and it was there that the young girl fell in love with Jim Reed, a family acquaintance from Missouri who had served as a Confederate guerilla. Belle married Reed in 1866 and returned to Missouri with him.
Reed quickly proved to be a poor choice for a husband. He was more interested in horse racing and gambling than in farming, and he eventually became involved with a ruthless Cherokee outlaw named Tom Starr. Starr led a brutal band of rustlers and thieves, and he liked to wear a rawhide necklace strung with the rotting ears of the men he had killed. Under Starr’s tutelage, Reed became involved in rustling and whiskey running, and he may have taken part in several murders.
Belle, who by 1871 had given birth to two children, apparently approved of her husband’s career in crime. She assisted in several robberies, began dressing in fancy velvet skirts and plumed hats, and embraced the role of a “bandit queen.” As Reed became more notorious, the couple tried to lay low, and in 1873, they retreated to an isolated farm in Texas with their children. Reed seemed unable to settle down for long, however. In April 1874, he joined a small gang in holding up a stagecoach, again attracting the attention of the law.
Bounty hunters eager to win the sizeable reward offered for Reed’s capture-dead or alive-soon tracked him down. Reed managed to elude his pursuers, but on this day in 1874, a treacherous member of his own gang killed him for the reward money. Two years later, Belle married Sam Starr, the handsome son of Reed’s old Cherokee partner. Sam Starr, too, eventually died in a gun battle. Belle lived for three more years before finally following her two husbands to a violent death, shot in the back by an unidentified enemy.
1890 At Auburn Prison in New York, the first execution by electrocution in history was carried out against William Kemmler, who had been convicted of murdering his lover, Matilda Ziegler, with an axe.
Electrocution as a humane means of execution was first suggested in 1881 by Dr. Albert Southwick, a dentist. Southwick had witnessed an elderly drunkard “painlessly” killed after touching the terminals of an electrical generator in Buffalo, New York. In the prevalent form of execution at the time–death by hanging–the condemned were known to hang by their broken necks for up to 30 minutes before succumbing to asphyxiation.
In 1889, New York’s Electrical Execution Law, the first of its kind in the world, went into effect, and Edwin R. Davis, the Auburn Prison electrician, was commissioned to design an electric chair. Closely resembling the modern device, Davis’ chair was fitted with two electrodes, which were composed of metal disks held together with rubber and covered with a damp sponge. The electrodes were to be applied to the criminal’s head and back.
On August 6, 1890, William Kemmler became the first person to be sent to the chair. After he was strapped in, a charge of approximately 700 volts was delivered for only 17 seconds before the current failed. Although witnesses reported smelling burnt clothing and charred flesh, Kemmler was far from dead, and a second shock was prepared. The second charge was 1,030 volts and applied for about two minutes, whereupon smoke was observed coming from the head of Kemmler, who was clearly deceased. An autopsy showed that the electrode attached to his back had burned through to the spine.
Dr. Southwick applauded Kemmler’s execution with the declaration, “We live in a higher civilization from this day on,” while American inventor George Westinghouse, an innovator of the use of electricity, remarked, “They would have done better with an axe.”
A bouncing baby boy was born on August 6, 1902 – Arthur Flegenheimer, who will go on to become one of New York’s most feared criminals. He was born in the Bronx. After dropping out of grade school, Flegenheimer joined a local gang. He didn’t feel Flegenheimer was a tough enough name for a gangster, so He stole the nickname of another hood and from then on was known as either Dutch Schultz or “the Dutchman.”
He soon became involved in bootlegging, bringing liquor down from Canada during the early Prohibition years, and making his own beer.
Within a few years, Dutch Schultz was one of the biggest gangsters in New York, employing as many as 100 gunmen to enforce his rackets—one of whom, Legs Diamond, split from Schultz and started his own operation. When Diamond’s gang began hijacking Schultz’s liquor shipments, a full-scale war broke out. On December 19, 1931, the war ended abruptly: Diamond was shot 17 times by one of Schultz’s hit men. Schultz reportedly quipped, “Just another punk caught with his hands in my pockets.” With Diamond’s competition eliminated, Schultz’s operation was clearing an estimated $20 million a year.
Prosecutors charged Schultz with tax evasion. After the trial was moved to a small upstate New York town, Schultz hired a public relations firm to change his image. He donated a lot of money to charity and briefly gave up his expensive wardrobe. The act worked: Schultz was acquitted. However, when he returned to New York City, the authorities were more determined than ever to bring him in.
In a meeting with several other major organized crime figures, Schultz demanded that they kill Thomas Dewey, the city’s special prosecutor. But, not wanting to draw any more attention to their own illegal operations, the other leaders decided to eliminate Schultz instead.
On this day in 1912– The Bull Moose Party held their convention at the Chicago Coliseum.
“The Bull Moose Party” got his name from Theodore Roosevelt who, when he was asked whether he felt that to be president of the United States responded “I’m fit as a bull moose!”
Teddy Roosevelt had been the president until 1909. When he left office, William Howard Taft was elected and. Roosevelt was extremely unhappy with Taft in office and came to the Republican convention in 1912 to get another four years as president. But at the convention, William Howard Taft was nominated for a second term. Roosevelt stormed out of the convention angry as a bull moose.
1926 – In New York City, the Warner Bros.‘ Vitaphonesystem premiered with the movie Don Juan starring John Barrymore.
1964– Prometheus, a bristlecone pine and the world’s oldest tree – close to 5000 years old – was cut down. It had grown in all those centuries on Wheeler Peak in Great Basin National Park in Eastern Nevada and was cut down for research purposes. However, the United States Forest Service personnel had no idea of the trees record age before it was toppled, and had they known, the tree would have never been cut down. The actual age of the tree was afterward listed as 4862 years by actual ring count. The young college graduate who actually cut the tree down, on hearing how old the tree was, said “Woops!”
August 6, 2011– It doesn’t just happen in America. A black march began in protest of the death of 29-year-old Mark Duggan in Tottenham, London, ended in a riot, sparking off a wave of rioting throughout the country that continued for the following four nights.
To be reelected, Mr. Roosevelt immediately formed his own political party – the Progressive Party, which was popularly called the Bull Moose party. Hiram Johnson was nominated as his running mate. His party’s platform included giving women the right to vote, social welfare assistance for women and children, farm relief, major revisions and banking and in health insurance industries, and workers compensation. Still another part of the platform was a way to make it easier to amend the United States Constitution.
The Democrats put up as their presidential nominee, Woodrow Wilson. Their platform at a great deal of similarity to the Progressive Party’s platform. Many historians blame Theodore Roosevelt for the election that year of Democrat Woodrow Wilson because so many Republicans voted for Roosevelt or for Taft that it split the Republican Party. By 1916, Roosevelt wouldn’t accept their nomination and the Bull Moose Party dissolved.
A bouncing baby boy was born on this day August 6, 1902. His name was Arthur Flegenheimer, but he would go on to become one of New York’s most feared criminals.
After dropping out of grade school, Flegenheimer joined a local gang. He didn’t think his name sounded tough enough so he stole the nickname of another thug and from then on was known as either Dutch Schultz or “the Dutchman.” He soon became involved in bootlegging, bringing liquor down from Canada during the early Prohibition years, and making his own beer.
Within a few years, Dutch Schultz was one of the biggest gangsters in New York, employing as many as 100 gunmen to enforce his rackets—one of whom, Legs Diamond, split from Schultz and started his own operation. When Diamond’s gang began hijacking Schultz’s liquor shipments, a full-scale war broke out. On December 19, 1931, the war ended abruptly: Diamond was shot 17 times by one of Schultz’s hit men. Schultz reportedly quipped, “Just another punk caught with his hands in my pockets.” With Diamond’s competition eliminated, Schultz’s operation was clearing an estimated $20 million a year.
In 1933, prosecutors charged Schultz with tax evasion. After the trial was moved to a small upstate New York town, Schultz hired a public relations firm to change his image. He donated a lot of money to charity and briefly gave up his expensive wardrobe. The act worked: Schultz was acquitted. However, when he returned to New York City, the authorities were more determined than ever to bring him in.
In a meeting with several other major organized crime figures, Schultz demanded that they kill Thomas Dewey, the city’s special prosecutor. But, not wanting to draw any more attention to their own illegal operations, the other leaders decided to eliminate Schultz instead.
On October 23, 1935, Schultz was plotting to kill Dewey with his gang at the Palace Chophouse when Charlie “Bug” Workman walked into the restroom and shot him as he was washing his hands. Workman then proceeded to kill three others in the Schultz gang. But Schultz did not die instantly. He was delirious and rambled to police officers trying to identify the killer. Eventually, he slipped into a coma and died soon afterward at the age of 33.
On this day in 1911, Lucille Desiree Ball, one of America’s most famous redheads and beloved comic actresses, was born near Jamestown, New York.
At age 15, Ball went to New York City to attend drama school and become an actress. However, she received little encouragement and was rejected multiple times from Broadway chorus lines. After waitressing and working as a hat model, Ball was hired in 1933 as the Chesterfield Cigarette Girl. Around this time, she began playing bit parts in Hollywood movies. She went on to leading roles in dozens of B-movies in the late 1930s and 1940s. In 1940, Ball met the Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz while shooting Too Many Girls and the couple soon eloped.
From 1947 to 1951, Ball starred as a ditzy wife on the radio program My Favorite Husband. When CBS decided to launch the popular series on the relatively new medium of TV, Lucy insisted that Arnaz be cast as her husband in the TV version. Network executives initially argued against the idea, arguing that no one would believe the couple were married. However, Ball and Arnaz were eventually cast as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo in I Love Lucy, which aired from 1951 to 1957 and became one of the most popular TV sitcoms in history. According to Ball’s obituary in The New York Times: “It was a major national event when, on Jan. 19, 1953, Lucy Ricardo gave birth to Little Ricky on the air the same night Lucille Ball gave birth to her second child, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha 4th. The audience for the episode was estimated at 44 million, a record at the time, and CBS said 1 million viewers responded with congratulatory telephone calls, telegrams, letters or gifts.”
The success of I Love Lucy turned the couple’s production company, Desilu, into a multimillion-dollar business. Ball and Arnaz divorced in 1960, and their professional collaboration also ended. Arnaz died in 1986. Ball also starred in several other “Lucy” programs, including The Lucy Show, which debuted in 1962 and ran for six seasons, and Here’s Lucy, in which she starred with her two children; the show was cancelled in 1974. A later show, Life with Lucy, featuring Lucy as a grandmother, was cancelled after only eight episodes in 1986. Ball died at age 77 on April 26, 1989. In 2001, the U.S. Postal Service honored her with a commemorative stamp.
On the evening of August 6, 1915, Allied forces commanded by Sir Frederick Stopford land at Suvla Bay, on the Aegean Sea, to launch a fresh attack against Turkish and German forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula during World War I.
The landing at Suvla Bay was part of the larger “August Offensive,” which was an attempt by the Allied forces to break through the Turkish and German lines to take command of the Gallipoli Peninsula. The large-scale Allied land invasion of Gallipoli had begun the previous April 25, after an attempted naval attack on the Dardanelles failed miserably.
On August 6, Hamilton attempted to reinvigorate the Allied campaign with an offensive push from positions of the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) against the Turks at Sari Bair ridge. The simultaneous landing of troops at Suvla Bay, to the north of Sari Bair, was intended as a supporting attack, but when the ANZAC attacks failed, Hamilton presented the Suvla Bay landings as the principal thrust of the offensive.
At Suvla Bay, British troops of the 10th, 11th and 53rd Divisions in Gallipoli were under the command of General Stopford, an officer nearing retirement, whose previous service was limited to a ceremonial post in London. German commander Liman von Sanders had received a warning from Berlin about a possible Allied attack in early August and had previously dispatched some Turkish and German divisions to protect the most likely targets. After the landing, British troops quickly secured the local hills but Stopford’s inexperience and the delay of his orders allowed time for General von Sanders to send reinforcements to recover lost ground, inflicting more than 12,000 Allied casualties in the process.
When Turkish snipers and artillerymen took the high ground in positions above the Allied troops on the peninsula, the British lost any chance to regain the upper hand. An easy scapegoat for the failure of Hamilton’s planned attacks, General Stopford was relieved of his command of the division on August 15, 1914; General Sir Henry de Beauvoir de Lisle succeeded him. In total, the Allies suffered nearly 20,000 casualties during the landings at Suvla Bay.
If you like war movies, “Gallipoli” was one of the best.
On this day in 1926, on her second attempt, 19-year-old Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim the 21 miles from Dover, England, to Cape Griz-Nez across the English Channel, which separates Great Britain from the northwestern tip of France.
Ederle was born to German immigrants on October 23, 1906, in New York City. She did not learn to swim until she was nine years old, and it was not until she was 15 that she learned proper form in the water. Just two years later, at the 1924 Paris Olympics, Ederle won a gold medal in the 4 x 100 meter relay and a bronze in the 100- and 400-meter freestyle races. In June 1925, Ederle became the first woman to swim the length of New York Bay, breaking the previous men’s record by swimming from the New York Battery to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, in 7 hours 11 minutes. That same summer, Ederle made her first attempt at crossing the notoriously cold and choppy English Channel, but after eight hours and 46 minutes, her coach, Jabez Wolff, forced her to stop, out of concern that she was swallowing too much saltwater. Ederle disagreed and fired Wolff, replacing him with T.W. Burgess, a skilled Channel swimmer.
On August 6, 1926, Ederle entered the water at Cape Gris-Nez in France at 7:08 a.m. to make her second attempt at the Channel. The water was predictably cold as she started out that morning, but unusually calm. Twice that day, however–at noon and 6 p.m.–Ederle encountered squalls along her route and Burgess urged her to end the swim. Ederle’s father and sister, though, who were riding in the boat along with Burgess, agreed with Ederle that she should stay the course. Ederle’s father had promised her a new roadster at the conclusion of the swim, and for added motivation he called out to her in the water to remind her that the roadster was only hers if she finished. Ederle persevered through storms and heavy swells, and, finally, at 9:04 p.m. after 14 hours and 31 minutes in the water, she reached the English coast, becoming the sixth person and first woman to swim the Channel successfully. Furthermore, she had bettered the previous record by two hours.
Afterward, Ederle told Alec Rutherford of The New York Times, “I knew it could be done, it had to be done, and I did it.” Ederle’s feat was celebrated by a ticker-tape parade in New York City, and she received congratulations from fans ranging from the mayor of New York City to Henry Sullivan, the first American man ever to swim the Channel.
Ederle damaged her hearing during the Channel swim, and went on to spend much of her adult life teaching deaf children in New York City to swim. She died in 2003 at the age of 98.
August 6, 1926, one of the most influential artists of the latter part of the 20th century, is born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A frail and diminutive man with a shock of silver-blond hair, Warhol was a major pioneer of the pop art movement of the 1960s but later outgrew that role to become a cultural icon.
Warhol was the son of immigrants from Czechoslovakia, and his father was a coal miner. For years, there was confusion as to his exact date and place of birth because Warhol gave conflicting accounts of these details, probably out of embarrassment of his provincial origins. “I’d prefer to remain a mystery,” he once said. “I never give my background and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I’m asked.” He enrolled in the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and graduated with a degree in pictorial design in 1949. That year, he moved to New York City, where he found work as a commercial illustrator. After being incorrectly credited as “Warhol” under an early published drawing, he decided to permanently remove the “a” from his last name.
He began painting in the late 1950s and took literally the advice of an art teacher who said he should paint the things he liked. He liked ordinary things, such as comic strips, canned soup, and soft drinks, and so he painted them. In 1962, he received notoriety in the art world when his paintings of Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, and wooden replicas of Brillo soap-pad boxes were exhibited in Los Angeles and New York.
In 1963, he dispensed with the paintbrush and began mass-producing images of consumer goods and celebrities like Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy. These prints, accomplished through his use of a silk-screen technique, displayed multiple versions of the same image in garish colors and became his trademark. He was hailed as the leader of the pop art movement, in which Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and others depicted “popular” images such as a soup can or comic strip as a means of fusing high and low culture and commenting on both.
Although shy and soft-spoken, Warhol attracted dozens of followers who were anything but. This mob of underground artists, social curiosities, and hangers-on operated out of the “Factory,” Warhol’s silver-painted studio in Manhattan. In the mid-1960s, Warhol began making experimental films, employing his friends as actors and billing them as “superstars.” Some of his films were monumental essays on boredom, such as the eight-hour continuous shot of the Empire State Building in Empire (1964), and others were gritty representations of underground life, like The Chelsea Girls (1966). He also organized multimedia events such as “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable” and sponsored the influential rock group the Velvet Underground. In 1968, Warhol was shot and nearly killed by Valerie Solanis, a follower who claimed he was “exercising too much influence” over her life.
After more than a year of recuperation from his wounds, Warhol returned to his career and founded Interview magazine, a publication centered on his fascination with the cult of celebrity. He became a fixture on the fashion and jet-set social scenes and was famous for pithy cultural observations like, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” Meanwhile, he continued to produce commercially successful silk-screen prints of entertainment and political figures.
In the 1980s, after a period of relative quiet in his career, he returned to the contemporary art scene as a mentor and friend to a new generation of artists, including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. With the rise of postmodern art, he came to be regarded as an archetypal role model by many young artists. On February 22, 1987, he died in the hospital of a heart attack shortly after a gall bladder operation.
In 1994, the Andy Warhol Museum, the largest single-artist museum in the United States, opened in Pittsburgh.
On this day in 1930, New York Supreme Court judge Joseph Force Crater vanished on the streets of Manhattan near Times Square. The dapper 41-year-old’s disappearance launched a massive investigation that captivated the nation, earning Crater the title of “the missingest man in New York.”
Born to Irish immigrants in 1889, Crater grew up in Pennsylvania and received his law degree from Columbia University in 1916. As he worked his way up from a lowly clerk to a successful lawyer, he cultivated numerous political connections throughout New York City. In April 1930, Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Crater to the state bench, passing over the official candidate put forth by the powerful and corrupt Tammany Hall political machine. Rumors swirled that Crater, whose alleged fondness for showgirls had already earned him a shady reputation, had paid off the Tammany bosses for his lucrative new job.
A few months later, on August 3, 1930, Crater returned to New York from a trip to Maine, leaving behind his wife, Stella, and promising to return within a week. His law clerk later reported that, on the morning of August 6, the judge destroyed various documents, moved several portfolios of papers to his Fifth Avenue apartment and arranged for $5,000 to be withdrawn from his bank account. That evening, he left his office, bought a ticket to the Broadway comedy “Dancing Partner” and shared a meal with his lawyer friend William Klein and a showgirl named Sally Lou Ritz at a Manhattan chophouse. His dining companions claimed they last saw Crater walking down the street outside the restaurant, presumably on his way to attend the play.
News of Crater’s disappearance broke on September 3, triggering a dramatic manhunt and investigation. The missing judge’s suspicious behavior in the days leading up to his disappearance spawned rampant speculation that he had fled the country with a mistress or been a victim of foul play. His sensational story captured so much media attention that the phrase “pulling a Crater” briefly entered the public vernacular as a synonym for going AWOL. Comedians, meanwhile, seized upon the unsolved case as fodder for their standup routines, using the line “Judge Crater, call your office” as a standard gag.
At his wife’s request, Joseph Force Crater was declared legally dead in 1939. In 2005, New York police revealed that new evidence had emerged in the case of the city’s missingest man. A woman who had died earlier that year had left a handwritten note in which she claimed that her husband and several other men, including a police officer, had murdered Crater and buried his body beneath a section of the Coney Island boardwalk. That site had been excavated during the construction of the New York Aquarium in the 1950s, long before technology existed to detect and identify human remains. As a result, the question of whether Judge Crater sleeps with the fishes remains a mystery.
On this day in 1945, at 8:16 a.m. Japanese time, an American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, drops the world’s first atom bomb, over the city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people are killed as a direct result of the blast, and another 35,000 are injured. At least another 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout.
U.S. President Harry S. Truman, discouraged by the Japanese response to the Potsdam Conference’s demand for unconditional surrender, made the decision to use the atom bomb to end the war in order to prevent what he predicted would be a much greater loss of life were the United States to invade the Japanese mainland. And so on August 5, while a “conventional” bombing of Japan was underway, “Little Boy,” (the nickname for one of two atom bombs available for use against Japan), was loaded onto Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets’ plane on Tinian Island in the Marianas. Tibbets’ B-29, named the Enola Gay after his mother, left the island at 2:45 a.m. on August 6. Five and a half hours later, “Little Boy” was dropped, exploding 1,900 feet over a hospital and unleashing the equivalent of 12,500 tons of TNT. The bomb had several inscriptions scribbled on its shell, one of which read “Greetings to the Emperor from the men of the Indianapolis” (the ship that transported the bomb to the Marianas).
There were 90,000 buildings in Hiroshima before the bomb was dropped; only 28,000 remained after the bombing. Of the city’s 200 doctors before the explosion; only 20 were left alive or capable of working. There were 1,780 nurses before—only 150 remained who were able to tend to the sick and dying.
According to John Hersey’s classic work Hiroshima, the Hiroshima city government had put hundreds of schoolgirls to work clearing fire lanes in the event of incendiary bomb attacks. They were out in the open when the Enola Gay dropped its load.
There were so many spontaneous fires set as a result of the bomb that a crewman of the Enola Gay could count them all.
The dropping of the atom bombs, first on Hiroshima and three days later on Nagasaki, is still hotly debated regarding whether it should’ve been done at all. Those who believe that it shouldn’t have happened point to the death and destruction of two Japanese cities and their inhabitants. The other side of the argument is that it ended the Second World War and saved countless more military and civilian lives by ending it.
August 6, 1960 – Cuban Revolution: Under the Cuban revolution of dictator Fidel Castro, Castro nationalizes American and foreign-owned property in the nation
August 6, 1962, Jamaica became independent from Britain after 300 years.
On this day in 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing African Americans the right to vote. The bill made it illegal to impose restrictions on federal, state and local elections that were designed to deny the vote to blacks.
Johnson assumed the presidency in November 1963 upon the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In the presidential race of 1964, Johnson was officially elected in a landslide victory and used this mandate to push for legislation he believed would improve the American way of life, which included stronger voting-rights laws. A recent march in Alabama in support of voting rights, during which blacks were beaten by state troops, shamed Congress and the president into passing the law, meant to enforce the 15th Amendment of the Constitution ratified by Congress in 1870.
In a speech to Congress on March 15, 1965, Johnson had outlined the devious ways in which election officials denied African-American citizens the vote. Blacks attempting to vote were often told by election officials that they had gotten the date, time or polling place wrong, that the officials were late or absent, that they possessed insufficient literacy skills or had filled out an application incorrectly. Often African Americans, whose population suffered a high rate of illiteracy due to centuries of oppression and poverty, would be forced to take literacy tests, which they inevitably failed.
Johnson also told Congress that voting officials, primarily in southern states, had been known to force black voters to “recite the entire constitution or explain the most complex provisions of state laws”–a task most white voters would have been hard-pressed to accomplish. In some cases, even blacks with college degrees were turned away from the polls.
Although the Voting Rights Act passed, state and local enforcement of the law was weak and it was often outright ignored, mainly in the South and in areas where the proportion of blacks in the population was high and their vote threatened the political status quo. Still, the Voting Rights Act gave African-American voters the legal means to challenge voting restrictions and vastly improved voter turnout.
In Mississippi alone, voter turnout among blacks increased from 6 percent in 1964 to 59 percent in 1969. In 1970, President Richard Nixon extended the provisions of the Voting Rights Act and lowered the eligible voting age for all voters to 18.
On August 6, 1971, The last remaining troops of the Fourth Battalion, 503rd Infantry of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, (the first U.S. Army ground combat unit to arrive in Vietnam in May 1965), ceased combat operations and began preparations to leave Vietnam.
The first U.S. ground combat unit of any branch to reach Vietnam was the Third Marine Regiment, Third Marine Division, which began arriving on March 8, 1965. The initial U.S. combat forces were followed by a vast array of combat, combat support, and logistics units that together with U.S. Navy and Air Force personnel in-country reached a peak of 543,400 in April 1969. In June 1969, President Richard Nixon gave the order, as part of his “Vietnamization” policy, which began the process of reducing American troop strength. The troop withdrawals began the following fall and continued until the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973.
August 6, 1986– A low-pressure system that redeveloped off the coast of New South Wales dumped a record 328 millimeters (13 inches) of rain in one day on Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
The Tompkins Square Park Riot occurred on August 6–August 7, 1988 in New York City‘s Tompkins Square Park. Groups of “drug pushers, homeless people and young people known as ‘skinheads‘” had largely taken over the park. The Alphabet City/East Village neighborhood, in which the park was located, was divided about what, if anything, should be done about it.[1] The local governing body, Manhattan Community Board 3, adopted a 1 a.m. curfew for the previously 24-hour park, in an attempt to bring it under control.[2] On July 31, a protest rally against the curfew saw several clashes between protesters and police.[3]
Another rally was held on August 6. The police charged a crowd of protesters, and a riot ensued. Bystanders, activists, police officers, neighborhood residents and journalists were caught up in the violence.[4] Despite a brief lull in the fighting, the mêlée continued until 6 a.m. the next day. Mayor Ed Koch temporarily rescinded the curfew. The neighborhood, previously divided over how to deal with the park, was unanimous in its condemnation of the heavy-handed actions of the police.
On this day in 1991, in a letter to around 150 of its United States franchisees, the French automaker Peugeot (manufacturer of both Peugeot and Citroen cars) announces that it will stop producing cars for the U.S. market as of the following September after five years of steadily decreasing sales.
Despite its continuing absence from the U.S. car market, Peugeot remains one of Europe’s leading automakers, as well as a major producer of bicycles, motorcycles and scooters around the world.
August 6, 1997, A Korean Air Boeing 747 crashes in Guam, killing 228 people on this day in 1997. An inexperienced crew and poor air-traffic policies on the island territory contributed to the disaster.
Flight 801, carrying 254 passengers and crew members from Seoul, South Korea, came in toward Guam at about 1:40 a.m. in the midst of a rainstorm. The captain and pilot of the plane had already flown several flights during the day and were beginning to show signs of fatigue. Ordinarily, a tired pilot has several backup systems to prevent crashes, but, on this night, there were no such protections.
The plane’s minimum safe altitude warning system was not operational due to computer software problems. In addition, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which oversees the A.B. Won Guam International Airport in Agana, had not maintained the air-traffic infrastructure properly–only one localizer, a device that shows where a plane is in relation to the runway, was working that night. Furthermore, many believe that the private air-traffic controllers employed at the airport following the notorious 1981 strike were not as vigilant and effective as the former controllers.
Flight 801 missed the runway by several miles and slammed into the jungle, killing nearly everyone onboard. Remarkably, rescue workers managed to make their way through the thick jungle at night, rescuing the 22 passengers and 3 crew members who were still alive.
August 6, 2012, NASA‘s Curiosity robotic rover landed on the surface of Mars NASA was launched from Earth nearly a year before, on November 26, 2011. Although there are many purposes for this robotic vehicle, it’s major purpose is to decide whether Mars is inhabitable for humans.
And finally – the major story on Thursday, August 6, 2015…..
CLEVELAND — The Republican presidential candidates took on the issues, the Democrats, and each other Thursday night, tackling everything from the economy to Iraq to Planned Parenthood – and God.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz may have faired the best in the first GOP debate heading into the 2016 Presidential campaigning.
Fox News insider Frank Luntz reported that both of them saw huge spikes in “reaction meters” for comments on Iran and terrorism.
Huckabee responded to a question about the Iran deal saying in part, “we got nothing.” He went on to say, “We couldn’t even get four hostages released.”
He was referring to American-Iranian Pastor Saeed Abadini who’s being helded in an Iranian prison for his faith… as well as at least three other American prisoners there.
Click play to watch CBN News Chief Political Correspondent David Brody’s updated report.
Huckabee said that Republican President Ronald Reagan always said “trust but verify,” whereas President Barack Obama “trusts and villifies.” Huckabee was referring to the president comparing opponents of the Iran nuclear deal with Islamic radicals.
Cruz really connected with voters when he went after the president for his unwillingness to call ISIS and other groups like radical Islamic terrorists. He told the audience the President won’t even recognize that in fighting ISIS, “we are fighting radical Islamic terrorists.”
The top ten candidates spoke passionately on issues like unemployment, national security, Obamacare and even “took off the gloves” with each other in the Fox News/Facebook sponsored event in Cleveland, Ohio.
The recent videos released exposing Planned Parenthood’s practice of selling the body parts of babies also came up. Several of the candidates said they would support and fight for defunding the abortion provider.
Gay marriage was also disussed with Ohio Gov. John Kasich saying that he supports traditional marriage but respects the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. He even told the audience he went to wedding of a gay friend because he believes in loving and supporting people even if you may have different view-points.
The man who was supposed to be the star of the night, Donald Trump, came into the debate leading in the polls, was hit hard with questions and commentators are grading him harshly for how he handled it.
One focus group had a majority of participants who said they went in supporting him but aren’t after this debate. One observer said he didn’t handle himself well and did not come across “presidential.”
Trump received boos from the audience off the top. A moderator asked the candidates to raise their hand if they would not support the eventual republican nominee. Trump was the only candidate who raised his hand saying he wouldn’t commit to it. Senator Rand Paul accused Trump of already “hedging his bets” on the election if he’s not the nominee.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who came into the debate second in the polls, defended his stand on illegal immigration and a statement he made saying it was “an act of love.”
Bush said America needs to control its borders but find solutions for people who come here wanting to provide for their families, “There should be a path to earn legal status,” Bush said.
Sen. Rand Paul and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie exchanged words in the debate over national security and the NSA and data mining of everyday citizens verses potential terrorists.
Ben Carson, who is a conservative favorite, didn’t seem to get much time but stole the show with his closing statement. He talked about some of the things he’s done as a surgeon like separate siamese twins.
He also said he’s removed half a brain then joked that if you visit Washington, “you may not think I was the first to do that.” He also went on to say, “Freedom is not free and we must fight for it everyday… we’re fighting for our children and the next generation.”
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio also talked about the future. He said if he was the Republican nominee Hillary Clinton couldn’t lecture him about some of the issues Democrats usually use to attack Republicans.
“If I’m our nominee, how is Hillary Clinton going to lecture me about living paycheck to paycheck? I was raised paycheck to paycheck,” he said.
There was a second-tier candidate debate before the prime-time debate. The one who probably made the biggest splash of the evening is the only female GOP candidate: Carly Fiorina.
“On day one in the Oval Office, I would make two phone calls,” she said. “The first one would be to my good friend, Bibi Netanyahu, to reassure him we will stand with the State of Israel.”
“The second will be to the supreme leader of Iran,” she continued. “He might not take my phone call, but he would get the message, and the message is this: Until you open every nuclear and every military facility to full, open, anytime, anywhere, for real inspections, we are going to make it as difficult as possible for you to move money around the global financial system.”
I thought after watching both the earlier Fox News debate with the bottom tier of the candidates, seven of them. And then watching the two-hour top 10 candidates that, for the first time I feel far more confident about 2016. Standouts in tonight’s debates were in the 5 o’clock hour former CEO of Hewlett-Packard Carly Fiorina and former Governor of Texas Rick Perry.
In the larger and longer debate I was deeply impressed with Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, and Scott Walker. Donald Trump was Donald Trump.
If I’m right about Carly Fiorina and Rick Perry deserving to be in the top 10 for the next debate, who would I drop to the bottom seven? That would be Rand Paul, who in my mind is far too defensive and totally self opinionated to be president. And Lindsey Graham who is a clone of John McCain.
There is a whole lot more time in this horserace – six months before the first primary. Many a horse has been known to stumble and become disqualified before a race is over. Some of the candidates will drop out because they simply don’t have the money or the backing of enough donors with deep pockets.
While I’m at it, I’ve often been asked what I think of Donald Trump. I think he’s a breath of fresh air and keeps all of the other candidates on their toes. He is a billionaire who is used to buying his way into whatever he wants. I enjoy his bombastic personality and it is obvious that his aim for the presidency is sincere. My only concern is that he, as he said tonight, is used to buying people. We have no idea what his major positions are on hardly anything that matters. And with his sharp tongue, would he end up offending everyone in America for four whole years, doing whatever he wants to, no matter how America feels about it. And could you really push China and Mexico around along with Mr. Putin, the Ayatollah, and the rest of our enemies, or would they come together as one mind to do what Mr. Trump’s critics would like to do now – get totally rid of him even if he takes America along with him.
This is Ray Mossholder and that’s it for August 6. And unless the Lord comes within the next couple of hours, I’ll be back with August seventh later this evening
Ray’s Today in History – August 6
Ray"s Today in History - August 6
No comments:
Post a Comment