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This is Ray Mossholder with Today In History – December 18, 2015
On December 18, 1620, the British ship Mayflower docked at modern-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, and its passengers prepared to begin their new settlement, Plymouth Colony.
The famous Mayflower story began in 1606, when a group of reform-minded Puritans in Nottinghamshire, England, founded their own church, separate from the state-sanctioned Church of England. Accused of treason, they were forced to leave the country and settle in the more tolerant Netherlands. After 12 years of struggling to adapt and make a decent living, the group sought financial backing from some London merchants to set up a colony in America. On September 6, 1620, 102 passengers–dubbed Pilgrims by William Bradford, a passenger who would become the first governor of Plymouth Colony–crowded on the Mayflower to begin the long, hard journey to a new life in the New World.
On November 11, 1620, the Mayflower anchored at what is now Provincetown Harbor, Cape Cod. Before going ashore, 41 male passengers–heads of families, single men and three male servants–signed the famous Mayflower Compact, agreeing to submit to a government chosen by common consent and to obey all laws made for the good of the colony. Over the next month, several small scouting groups were sent ashore to collect firewood and scout out a good place to build a settlement. Around December 10, one of these groups found a harbor they liked on the western side of Cape Cod Bay. They returned to the Mayflower to tell the other passengers, but bad weather prevented them from docking until December 18. After exploring the region, the settlers chose a cleared area previously occupied by members of a local Native American tribe, the Wampanoag. The tribe had abandoned the village several years earlier, after an outbreak of European disease. That winter of 1620-1621 was brutal, as the Pilgrims struggled to build their settlement, find food and ward off sickness. By spring, 50 of the original 102 Mayflower passengers were dead. The remaining settlers made contact with returning members of the Wampanoag tribe and in March they signed a peace treaty with a tribal chief, Massasoit. Aided by the Wampanoag, especially the English-speaking Squanto, the Pilgrims were able to plant crops–especially corn and beans–that were vital to their survival. The Mayflower and its crew left Plymouth to return to England on April 5, 1621.
Over the next several decades, more and more settlers made the trek across the Atlantic to Plymouth, which gradually grew into a prosperous shipbuilding and fishing center. In 1691, Plymouth was incorporated into the new Massachusetts Bay Association, ending its history as an independent colony.
Christmas was not held in high regard by the Puritans, who complained that the holiday was nowhere commanded in Scripture. During the period of the English Civil War, Parliament even banned the celebration of Christmas. The Mercurius Civicus, or London’s Intelligencer, printed an article in the issue dated 18 December 1645, explaining to Londoners the absurdity—and impiety—of keeping Christmas Day. The paper stated that it was more probable that Jesus was born in September than in December, and quoted a “late minister” as saying: “God did conceale the time when Christ was borne, upon the same reason that He tooke away the body of Moses, that they might not put a holinesse upon that day.”
The new United States celebrated its first national day of thanksgiving on Thursday, December 18, 1777, commemorating the American victory at the Battle of Saratoga after the surrender of General John Burgoyne and 5,000 British troops in October 1777.
In proclaiming the first national day of thanksgiving, Congress wrote, “It is therefore recommended to the Legislative or executive Powers of these UNITED STATES, to set apart THURSDAY, the eighteenth Day of December next, for solemn THANKSGIVING and PRAISE; That at one Time and with one Voice the good People may express the grateful Feelings of their Hearts, and consecrate themselves to the Service of their Divine Benefactor”
Neither when the Congress proclaimed the day of Thanksgiving on November 1, nor when the population celebrated in December, were they aware that on December 17, the French would finally formalize a military and trade alliance with the rebelling states. These were not disconnected events. The victory at Saratoga convinced the French king that the Americans might be worthy allies and the ensuing alliance made an American victory possible.
Merely having a national day of thanksgiving was a tremendous step forward in creating an American identity. Previously, the colonies had celebrated individually or as part of the British Empire. Now they had experienced an event that had affected them all and formalized a celebration that involved them all. With the French alliance, they had an ally who supported them all. Americans had just taken a major step on the tortured trail from colonies to states and from states to nation.
December 18, 1881, While searching for stray cattle in the isolated canyons of southwest Colorado, Richard Wetherill and his brother-in-law stumbled upon the magnificent ancient Indians ruins of Mesa Verde.
The Wetherill family started ranching in the rugged southwest lands of Colorado in 1881, and Richard and his brothers often explored the canyons and mesas for Indian ruins. Once, while looking up the mouth of Cliff Canyon, Wetherill was approached by a Ute Indian named Acowitz who reportedly told him, “Deep in that canyon and near its head are many houses of the old people-the Ancient Ones. One of those houses, high, high in the rocks, is bigger than all the others. Utes never go there, it is a sacred place.” Wetherill was intrigued, but his ranching duties kept him from exploring the canyon further.
On December 18, 1888, Wetherill and his brother-in-law, Charles Mason, were searching for stray cattle on top of a broad mesa when a heavy snow began to fall. Fearing they might ride over a cliff in the blinding snow, they dismounted and were moving ahead on foot when they came to an overlook point. From across the canyon they saw a snow-blurred image of a magnificent stone city three stories high and perched high up a cliff wall under a massive rock overhang. Fascinated, Wetherill and Mason abandoned their search for the stray cattle and, after considerable effort, managed to climb up and explore the ruins for several hours.
Wetherill and Mason had stumbled across the “houses, high, high in the rocks” that Acowitz had told them about. The ruins were once the home of the Anasazi (the Indian term for “ancient ones”) people. Subsequent archaeological studies showed that the Cliff Palace, as it became known, was built during the 13th century, when the Anasazi moved from the top of the mesas onto ledges and caves along the canyon walls, presumably to better defend themselves against invaders. Eventually a prolonged drought that started around 1275 forced the Anasazi to abandon their magnificent cliff dwellings.
In the years following the discovery, Wetherill collected thousands of artifacts from the Cliff Palace and other area ruins. Most of Wetherill’s artifacts ended up in museums, where they could be studied by professional archaeologists and viewed by the public. The same cannot be said of the many other priceless artifacts that were stolen by visitors over the years. In order to protect the site from further looting and degradation, Congress created Mesa Verde National Park in 1906.
On December 18, 1904, Christ appeared to fifteen-year-old Indian mystic Sadhu Sundar Singh and he was immediately converted to Christianity. Baptized into the Church of England in 1905, Singh afterward donned the robe of a Sadhu (holy man) in an endeavor to present Christianity to the Hindus. (He disappeared in April 1929, while undertaking a strenuous work in Tibet.) The story of his life can be found in several books and a motion picture was made about his life. I strongly commend both the movie and the books.
After three years of digging in the Piltdown gravel pit in Sussex, England, on December 18, 1912, amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson announced the discovery of two skulls that appeared to belong to a primitive hominid and ancestor of man, along with a canine tooth, a tool carved from an elephant’s tusk, and fossil teeth from a number of prehistoric animals.
Despite muted criticism from a minority of paleontologists, the majority of the scientific community hailed the so-called Piltdown Man as the missing evolutionary link between ape and man. The remains were estimated to be up to a million years old. For the next decade, scientists heralded the finding of Eoanthropus dawsoni, or “Dawson’s Dawn-man” in Latin, as confirmation of Darwin’s still-controversial theory of human evolution.
In the 1920s and ’30s, however, the Piltdown gravels were found to be much less ancient than believed, and other finds of human ancestors around the world seemed to call the authenticity of the Piltdown Man into question. In 1953, at an international congress of paleontologists, the Piltdown Man was first openly called a fraud. An intensive study of the remains showed that they were made up of a modern human cranium–no more than 600 years old; the jaw and teeth of an orangutan; and the tooth of a chimpanzee. Microscopic tests indicated that the teeth had been doctored with a file-like tool to make them seem more human. Scientists also found that the bones had been treated with chemicals to make them appear older. Other fossils found in the Piltdown quarry proved to be authentic but of types not found in Britain.
The person who orchestrated the hoax never came forward, but in 1996 a trunk in storage at the British Museum was found to contain fossils treated in the exact same manner as the Piltdown remains. The trunk bore the initials M.A.C.H., which seemed to suggest that Martin A.C. Hinton, a volunteer at the British Museum in 1912 and later a curator of zoology at the institution, was likely the culprit. Some theorized that he was attempting to embarrass Arthur Smith Woodward, curator of the British Museum’s paleontology department, because Woodward had refused Hinton’s request for a weekly pay raise.
On this day in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson married Edith Galt in Washington, D.C. The bride was 43 and the groom was 59. It was the second marriage for Wilson, whose first wife died the year before from a kidney ailment. Edith, who claimed to be directly descended from Pocahantas, was the wealthy widow of a jewelry-store owner and a member of Washington high society.
According to the National First Ladies’ Library, the couple was introduced by his cousin and a mutual friend. Unlike Wilson’s first wife, who was shy and avoided politics, Edith shared Wilson’s passion for the subject. Wilson proposed three months later and they married at her Washington, D.C. home. As the 1916 presidential campaign heated up, many of Wilson’s advisors worried that his whirlwind courtship and marriage to Edith so soon after his first wife’s death would become a political liability. By the time of his second inaugural in March 1917, though, Americans soon had more serious matters to think about: America’s entry into World War I.
Throughout the war and the rest of Wilson’s second term, Edith was constantly at her husband’s side and her presence irritatated and frustrated his advisors. Wilson enjoyed having her sit in the Oval Office while he conducted business, which led to accusations that she had undue influence over who was allowed access to the president. This was exacerbated when Wilson suffered a stroke in October 1919 while touring the nation to promote his plan for the League of Nations, an international organization designed to prevent further conflicts like World World I. During his recovery, Edith assumed the role of “steward” for Wilson, screening his mail and official papers. In some cases, she was accused of signing Wilson’s signature without consulting him, though she insisted this was not the case and blamed the accusations on her husband’s political opponents.
Wilson recovered from the stroke, but remained partially paralyzed on one side. Though his plan for the League of Nations was never ratified by Congress, Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1920 for his work on it and in brokering the treaty that ended World War I. At the conclusion of his second term in 1921, he retired, though he and Edith continued to live in Washington, D.C. Wilson passed away three years later; after his death, Edith dedicated herself to compiling her husband’s presidential papers. She died in 1961 at the age of 89.
The song that topped the Billboard pop chart on December 18, 1961, was an instant classic that went on to become one of the most successful pop songs of all time, yet its true originator saw only a tiny fraction of the song’s enormous profits.
The story begins in Johannesburg, South Africa, where in 1938, a group of Zulu singers and dancers called Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds stepped into the first recording studio ever set up in sub-Saharan Africa and recorded a song called “Mbube”—Zulu for “the lion.” “Mbube” was a regional hit, and it helped make Solomon Linda into a South African star. But the story might have ended there had a copy of the record not made its way to New York City in the early 1950s, where it was saved from the slush pile at Decca Records by the legendary folklorist Alan Lomax. Without actually hearing any of the records in a box sent from Africa, Lomax thought a friend of his might be interested in the box’s contents. That friend was the folksinger Pete Seeger.
Unable to understand the lyrics of “Mbube,” Seeger transcribed the central chant as “Wimoweh,” and that became the name of the song as recorded by the Weavers and released in early 1952, just as the group was about to be blacklisted thanks to the McCarthy hearings. Eventually, Jay Siegel, the teenage lead singer of the Tokens, would hear and fall in love with “Wimoweh” through the Kingston Trio’s cover version of the Weavers’ song. The Tokens’ label commissioned English-language lyrics for the song, which was re-titled “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” and went on to become not just a #1 song on this day in 1961, but one of the most-covered, most successful pop songs of all time.
In an excellent article for Rolling Stone magazine in 2000, South African journalist Rian Malan followed both the music and the money associated with “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” exposing the sequence of business arrangements that ended up making millions for a handful of prominent U.S. music publishers while yielding only a $1,000 personal check from Pete Seeger to Solomon Linda during Linda’s lifetime. Because his composition was treated as public-domain “folk” material by Seeger and by the subsequent writer of the English-language lyrics in the Tokens’ version, Linda never participated in the royalty stream generated by either “Wimoweh” or “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” And prior to reaching an undisclosed settlement in 2006, his heirs received only a tiny fraction of the millions of dollars they might have been due had Linda retained his songwriting credit on what Malan rightly calls “The most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa.”
1956 | ||
| Japan is admitted to the United Nations. They will become part of the International Security Council. |
| 2002 | California Governor Gray Davis announced the state faced a record budget deficit; the looming $35 billion shortfall was almost double the amount reported a month earlier during the state’s gubernatorial campaign. The Democrat, Gray Davis, was replaced by Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger who beat such dignitaries in the election race as Adriana Huffington and Larry Flint. | |
| 2008 | United Arab Emirates holds it first-ever elections. Women were allowed to vote right along with the men. | |
| 2010 | Today In History – December 18, 2015 | In an opening act of Arab Spring, anti-government protests erupt in Tunisia. And now the major story of today…….December 18, 2015……. President Obama announced “The most important thing happening at the White House today is the release of the seventh “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”. So we will take him at his word on that.
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