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How And Why Abraham Lincoln Freed The Slaves: The American Minute
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How And Why Abraham Lincoln Freed The Slaves: The American Minute
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
How And Why Abraham Lincoln Freed The Slaves: The American Minute
How And Why Abraham Lincoln Freed The Slaves: The American Minute
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Today In History with Ray November 8
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Today In History with Ray November 8
On this day in 1864, Northern voters overwhelmingly endorse the leadership and policies of President Abraham Lincoln when they elect him to a second term. With his re-election, any hope for a negotiated settlement with the Confederacy vanished.
In 1864, Lincoln faced many challenges to his presidency. The war was now in its fourth year, and many were questioning if the South could ever be fully conquered militarily. Union General Ulysses S. Grant mounted a massive campaign in the spring of that year to finally defeat the Confederate army of General Robert E. Lee, but after sustaining significant losses at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor, the Yankees bogged down around Petersburg, Virginia. As the fall approached, Grant seemed no closer to defeating Lee than his predecessors. Additionally, Union General William T. Sherman was planted outside of Atlanta, but he could not take that city. Some of the Radical Republicans were unhappy with Lincoln’s conciliatory plan for reconstruction of the South. And many Northerners had never been happy with Lincoln’s 1862 Emancipation Proclamation, which converted the war from one of reunion to a crusade to destroy slavery. Weariness with the war fueled calls for a compromise with the seceded states.
The Democrats nominated George B. McClellan, the former commander of the Union Army of the Potomac. McClellan was widely regarded as brilliant in organizing and training the army, but he had failed to defeat Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Virginia.McClellan and Lincoln quarreled constantly during his tenure as general in chief of the army, and Lincoln replaced him when McClellan failed to pursue Lee into Virginia after the Battle of Antietam in Maryland in September 1862.
In the months leading up to the 1864 election, the military situation changed dramatically. While Grant remained stalled at Petersburg, Mobile Bay fell to the Federal navy in August, Sherman captured Atlanta in September, and General Philip Sheridan secured Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in October. On election day, Lincoln carried all but three states (Kentucky, New Jersey, and Delaware), and won 55 percent of the vote. He won 212 electoral votes to McCellan’s 21. Most significantly, a majority of the Union troops voted for their commander in chief, including a large percentage of McClellan’s old command, the Army of the Potomac.
Perhaps most important was the fact that the election was held at all. Before this, no country had ever held elections during a military emergency. Lincoln himself said, “We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.” Five months after Lincoln’s re-election, the collapse of the Confederacy was complete.
On this day, Doc Holliday–gunslinger, gambler, and occasional dentist–dies from tuberculosis.
Though he was perhaps most famous for his participation in the shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, John Henry “Doc” Holliday earned his bad reputation well before that famous feud. Born in Georgia, Holliday was raised in the tradition of the southern gentleman. He earned his nickname when he graduated from the Pennsylvania College of Dental Surgery in 1872. However, shortly after embarking on a respectable career as a dentist in Atlanta, he developed a bad cough. Doctors diagnosed tuberculosis and advised a move to a more arid climate, so Holliday moved his practice to Dallas, Texas.
By all accounts, Holliday was a competent dentist with a successful practice. Unfortunately, cards interested him more than teeth, and he earned a reputation as a skilled poker and faro player. In 1875, Dallas police arrested Holliday for participating in a shootout. Thereafter, the once upstanding doctor began drifting between the booming Wild West towns of Denver, Cheyenne, Deadwood, and Dodge City, making his living at card tables and aggravating his tuberculosis with heavy drinking and late nights.
Holliday was famously friendly with Wyatt Earp, who believed that Holliday saved his life during a fight with cowboys. For his part, Holliday was a loyal friend to Earp, and stood by him during the 1881 shootout at the O.K. Corral and the bloody feud that followed.
In 1882, Holliday fled Arizona and returned to the life of a western drifter, gambler, and gunslinger. By 1887, his hard living had caught up to him, forcing him to seek treatment for his tuberculosis at a sanitarium in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. He died in his bed at only 36 years old.
On this day in 1895, physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen (1845-1923) becomes the first person to observe X-rays, a significant scientific advancement that would ultimately benefit a variety of fields, most of all medicine, by making the invisible visible. Rontgen’s discovery occurred accidentally in his Wurzburg, Germany, lab, where he was testing whether cathode rays could pass through glass when he noticed a glow coming from a nearby chemically coated screen. He dubbed the rays that caused this glow X-rays because of their unknown nature.
X-rays are electromagnetic energy waves that act similarly to light rays, but at wavelengths approximately 1,000 times shorter than those of light. Rontgen holed up in his lab and conducted a series of experiments to better understand his discovery. He learned that X-rays penetrate human flesh but not higher-density substances such as bone or lead and that they can be photographed.
Rontgen’s discovery was labeled a medical miracle and X-rays soon became an important diagnostic tool in medicine, allowing doctors to see inside the human body for the first time without surgery. In 1897, X-rays were first used on a military battlefield, during the Balkan War, to find bullets and broken bones inside patients.
Scientists were quick to realize the benefits of X-rays, but slower to comprehend the harmful effects of radiation. Initially, it was believed X-rays passed through flesh as harmlessly as light. However, within several years, researchers began to report cases of burns and skin damage after exposure to X-rays, and in 1904, Thomas Edison’s assistant, Clarence Dally, who had worked extensively with X-rays, died of skin cancer. Dally’s death caused some scientists to begin taking the risks of radiation more seriously, but they still weren’t fully understood. During the 1930s, 40s and 50s, in fact, many American shoe stores featured shoe-fitting fluoroscopes that used to X-rays to enable customers to see the bones in their feet; it wasn’t until the 1950s that this practice was determined to be risky business. Wilhelm Rontgen received numerous accolades for his work, including the first Nobel Prize in physics in 1901, yet he remained modest and never tried to patent his discovery. Today, X-ray technology is widely used in medicine, material analysis and devices such as airport security scanners.
On November 8, 1917, one day after an armed uprising led by his radical socialist Bolsheviks toppled the provisional Russian government, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin rises before the newly formed All-Russian Congress of Soviets to call for an immediate armistice with the Central Powers in World War I.
Lenin, in exile in Western Europe when the war broke out in 1914, managed to secure passage through Germany back to Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) in April 1917, after the first wave of Russia’s revolution in March overthrew the regime of Czar Nicholas II. In the months that followed, the Bolsheviks increased their influence, aided in their cause by Russia’s dismal economic situation and widespread frustration with the continuing war effort. In late June, the spectacular failure of an offensive ordered by the provisional government’s minister of war, Alexander Kerensky, sent the army into a tailspin, with millions of soldiers deserting the front and streaming home to join the socialist cause.
Over the next several months, Russia’s revolutionary fervor only increased, as Kerensky–by now serving as prime minister–struggled to maintain order in the face of growing opposition. Meanwhile, Lenin was hiding in Finland after an abortive workers’ uprising in July. He returned to Russia in late September, in time to push the Bolshevik Central Committee to organize an armed insurrection and seize power. The committee approved the plan in late October. On the night of November 6-7, under the direction of Leon Trotsky, an armed band of workers, soldiers and sailors stormed the Winter Palace, headquarters of the provisional government. The following morning, after a virtually bloodless victory, Trotsky announced that the government had fallen. Kerensky escaped and went into exile, while several other ministers were arrested later that day.
On November 8, Lenin made his first appearance before the Congress of Soviets, in which the Bolsheviks held a 60 percent majority. “We shall now proceed to the construction of the socialist order,” he announced. The first order of business for the new Bolshevik state was putting an end to Russia’s participation in what Lenin and his followers considered an imperialist, upper-class war. That day, the Congress adopted a manifesto calling for “all warring peoples and their governments to open immediate negotiations for a just, democratic peace.” A formal ceasefire between Russia and the Central Powers was declared on December 2.
Russia’s exit from the war–which was formalized in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the following March–shook the Allied war effort to its very foundations, as Germany and Austria-Hungary would be now be able to shift all their efforts to the west. Even more importantly, the rise to power of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Russia announced the arrival of a new vision of the world order–a vision that would over the next decades rise to challenge the ideals of liberal democracy not only in Europe but around the world.
On this day in 1939, on the 16th anniversary of Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch, a bomb explodes just after Hitler has finished giving a speech. He was unharmed.
Hitler had made an annual ritual on the anniversary of his infamous 1923 coup attempt, (Hitler’s first grab at power that ended in his arrest and the virtual annihilation of his National Socialist party), of regaling his followers with his vision of the Fatherland’s future. On this day, he had been addressing the Old Guard party members, those disciples and soldiers who had been loyal to Hitler and his fascist party since the earliest days of its inception. Just 12 minutes after Hitler had left the hall, along with important Nazi leaders who had accompanied him, a bomb exploded, which had been secreted in a pillar behind the speaker’s platform. Seven people were killed and 63 were wounded.
The next day, the Nazi Party official paper, the Voelkischer Beobachter,squarely placed the blame on British secret agents, even implicating Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain himself. This work of propaganda was an attempt to stir up hatred for the British and whip the German people into a frenzy for war. But the inner-Nazi Party members knew better—they knew the assassination attempt was most probably the work of a German anti-Nazi military conspiracy.
In an ingenious scheme to shift blame, while getting closer to the actual conspirators, Heinrich Himmler, the Gestapo chief, sent a subordinate, Walter Schellenberg, to Holland to make contact with British intelligence agents. The pretext of the meeting was to secure assurances from the British that in the event of an anti-Nazi coup, the British would support the new regime. The British agents were eager to gain whatever inside information they could about the rumored anti-Hitler movement within the German military; Schellenberg, posing as “Major Schaemmel,” was after whatever information British intelligence may have had on such a conspiracy within the German military ranks.
But Himmler wanted more than talk—he wanted the British agents themselves. So on November 9, SS soldiers in Holland kidnapped, with Schellenberg’s help, two British agents, Payne Best and R.H. Stevens, stuffing them into a Buick and driving them across the border into Germany. Himmler now proudly announced to the German public that he had captured the British conspirators. The man who actually planted the bomb at their behest was declared to be Georg Elser, a German communist who made his living as a carpenter.
While it seems certain that Elser did plant the bomb, who the instigators were—German military or British intelligence—remains unclear. All three “official” conspirators spent the war in Sachsenhausen concentration camp (Elser was murdered by the Gestapo on April 16, 1945—so he could never tell his story). Hitler dared not risk a public trial, as there were just too many holes in the “official” story.
On November 8, 1951, Yankees catcher Yogi Berra is voted the American League’s most valuable player for the first time in his career. St. Louis Browns’ ace pitcher and slugger Ned Garver almost won the award–in fact, a representative from the Baseball Writers Association of America phoned him and told him that he had won it–but after a recount it turned out that Berra had edged Garver out by a nose. “It’s great to be classed with fellows like DiMaggio and Rizzuto who have won the award,” Berra told reporters that night. “I sure hope I can win it a couple of more times, like Joe did.” He went on to be the league MVP twice more, in 1954 and 1955.
Berra had had a great season, for the most part–he’d been the Yanks’ leading slugger, with 27 homers and 88 RBI–but he’d had a dramatic slump near the end of the year. His teammate Allie Reynolds, meanwhile, had pitched two no-hitters in 1951, and Garver had won 20 games and batted .305 for the Browns, a “collection of old rags and tags” that had only managed to win 32 games that Garver wasn’t pitching. In the face of these performances, Berra was sure he wouldn’t win the award. “I was afraid I had blown it with the bad finish,” he said.
In fact, it was one of the closest MVP races ever. Each member of the baseball writers’ association voted by naming the league’s 10 best players and then ranking them. A first-place vote got a player 14 points; second place was worth nine, third place eight, and so on. When the votes were tallied, the player with the most points overall won the MVP. Berra, Garver and Reynolds actually had the same number of first-place votes–six each–but Yogi squeaked by on his second-, third- and fourth-place points. (His final score was 187; Garver’s was 157; and Reynolds’ was 125.)
Berra was only the second catcher to win the AL MVP prize. (Mickey Cochrane was the first.) That same year, another catcher–Roy Campanella of the Dodgers–was the NL MVP.
November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy becomes the youngest man ever to be elected president of the United States, narrowly beating Republican Vice President Richard Nixon. He was also the first Catholic to become president.The campaign was hard fought and bitter. For the first time, presidential candidates engaged in televised debates. Many observers believed that Kennedy’s poised and charming performance during the four debates made the difference in the final vote. Issues, however, also played a role in the election, and the nation’s foreign policy was a major bone of contention between Kennedy and Nixon. Nixon took every opportunity to characterize Kennedy as too young and inexperienced to handle the awesome responsibilities of America’s Cold War diplomacy. (Nixon was, in fact, only a few years older than Kennedy.) He defended the past eight years of Republican rule, arguing that Soviet power had been contained and America’s strength increased. Kennedy responded by portraying foreign policy during the Eisenhower years as stagnant and reactionary. In particular, he charged the Republicans with losing Cuba and allowing a dangerous “missile gap” to develop, in which the Soviets had overtaken the United States in the building of missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads. Kennedy promised to reinvigorate America’s foreign policy, relying on a flexible response to changing situations and exploring options ignored by the staid and conservative Eisenhower administration.Kennedy claimed during the campaign that he looked forward to meeting the challenges facing the strongest nation in the Free World. He did not have long to wait before those challenges were upon him. During the first few months of the Kennedy presidency, Nixon’s criticisms seemed to have some validity. Kennedy appeared overwhelmed, first by the catastrophic failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, then by a blustering Nikita Khrushchev during a summit meeting in Europe, and finally by the construction of the Berlin Wall. And there was also the deteriorating situation in Southeast Asia to consider.
If you had made a friendly wager back in 1974 as to which recent or current pop-music figure might go on to serve in the United States Congress in 20 years’ time, you might have picked someone with an apparent political agenda, like Joan Baez, or at least one who was associated with some kind of cause, like nature-lover John Denver. You almost certainly wouldn’t have placed your bet on Sonny Bono, a singer of arguably limited talents who appeared content to stand, literally and figuratively, in the shadow of his far more popular wife, Cher. It was indeed Salvatore “Sonny” Bono, however, who had a future in elective politics—a future that included his election to the United States House of Representatives from California’s 44th Congressional District on this day in 1994
Sonny Bono fell almost completely out of the public eye following the cancellation of The Sonny and Cher Show in 1977. While his ex-wife and erstwhile musical partner, Cher, launched a hugely successful second phase of her career with well-received acting roles in the 1980s, Sonny left the spotlight behind to focus on the restaurant business. Although he presented himself as a none-too-bright bumbler during his days on television, Bono had been an astute operator in shepherding his and Cher’s early musical career and in his later business dealings. The owner of several successful restaurants, Bono got involved in politics after growing frustrated with the bureaucratic hurdles placed before one of his restaurant construction projects by local officials in Palm Springs, California, in the late 1980s. Though he himself had registered to vote for the first time only one year earlier, Bono was elected mayor of Palm Springs in 1988. Following a failed run in the California Republican Senatorial primary in 1992, Bono turned his attention to the 44th District’s Congressional seat in 1994. A conservative Republican, Bono was swept into office as part of the Newt Gingrich-led Republican “revolution” that year, and he was re-elected in 1996.
During his time in office, Bono did not treat his fellow lawmakers to any singing performances, but the man behind the hits “I Got You Babe” (1965) and “The Beat Goes On” (1967) did trade on his public persona as a good-natured, non-threatening nice guy. As The Washington Post noted in its obituary following Bono’s death in a skiing accident in 1996, “Bono brought to Congress a rare skill: He could make lawmakers—even the most pompous among them—laugh at themselves.” Or as President Bill Clinton said, “”His joyful entertainment of millions earned him celebrity, but in Washington he earned respect by being a witty and wise participant in policymaking processes that often seem ponderous to the American people.”
Today In History with Ray November 8
Today In History with Ray November 8
Friday, August 7, 2015
Ray"s Today in History – August 5
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Ray’s Today in History – August 5
This is Ray Mossholder from the headquarters of Reach More Now in Fort Worth, Texas, and this is Today in History. These are the stories that have made news throughout history – stories that happened on
AUGUST 5
Ray’s Today in History – August 5
August 5, 1100 – Henry I is crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey.
In 1305 on this date, William Wallace, who led the Scottish resistance against England, is captured by the English near Glasgow and transported to London where he is put on trial and executed. Mel Gibson immortalized William Wallace in the 1995 movie “Braveheart”.
On August 5, 1604, John Eliot was baptized in England. His non-conformist views eventually prompted him to come to America, where he founded fourteen congregations of Indian Christians, translated the Bible into Algonquin and helped prepare the Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in America. Captured at one point by Indians, he learned their language while in captivity.
On this day in 1620, the Separatists left England for Massachusetts, which didn’t exist yet.
In 1608, a congregation of judgmental and disgruntled English Protestants from the village of Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, left England and moved to Leyden, a town in Holland. These “Separatists” didn’t want to pledge allegiance to the Church of England. (They were not the same as the Puritans, who had many of the same objections to the English church but wanted to reform it from within.) The Separatists hoped that in Holland, they would be free to worship as they liked
In fact, the Separatists (they called themselves “Saints”) did find religious freedom in Holland, but they also found a secular life that was more difficult to navigate than they’d anticipated. For one thing, Dutch craft guilds excluded the migrants, so they were relegated to menial, low-paying jobs.
Even worse was Holland’s easygoing, cosmopolitan atmosphere, which proved alarmingly seductive to some of the Saints’ children. (These young people were “drawn away,” Separatist leader William Bradford wrote, “by evill [sic] example into extravagance and dangerous courses.”) For the strict, devout Separatists, this was the last straw. They decided to move again, this time to a place without government interference or worldly distraction: the “New World” they called it, across the Atlantic Ocean.
First, the Separatists returned to London to get organized. A prominent merchant agreed to advance the money for their journey. The Virginia Company gave them permission to establish a settlement, or “plantation,” on the East Coast between 38 and 41 degrees north latitude (roughly between the Chesapeake Bay and the mouth of the Hudson River). And the King of England gave them permission to leave the Church of England, “provided they carried themselves peaceably.”
In August 1620, a group of about 40 joined a much larger group of (comparatively) secular colonists– “The Saints”called everyone else “Strangers,” but they set sail anyway from England on two merchant ships: the Mayflower and the Speedwell. The Speedwell began to leak almost immediately, however, and the ships headed back to port. The travelers squeezed themselves and their belongings uncomfortably onto the Mayflower and set sail once again.
Because of the delay caused by the leaky Speedwell, the Mayflower had to cross the Atlantic at the height of storm season. As a result, the journey was horribly unpleasant. Many of the passengers were so seasick they could scarcely get up, and the waves were so rough that one “Stranger” was swept overboard and drowned. (William Bradford wrote in his diary “It was the just hand of God upon him for the young sailor had been a proud and very profane yonge man.”)
After two miserable months at sea, the ship finally reached the New World. There, the Mayflower’s passengers found an abandoned Indian village and not much else. They also found that they were in the wrong place: Cape Cod was located at 42 degrees north latitude, well north of the Virginia Company’s territory. Technically, the Mayflower colonists had no right to be there at all.
In order to establish themselves as a legitimate colony under these dubious circumstances, they named the area “Plymouth,” after the English port from which they had departed. 41 of the Saints and Strangers drafted and signed a document they called the Mayflower Compact. This Compact promised to create a “civil Body Politick” governed by elected officials and “just and equal laws.” It also swore allegiance to the English king.
The colonists spent the first winter, which only 53 passengers and only half the crew survived, living onboard the Mayflower. But the Mayflower sailed back to England in April 1621.
Once they moved ashore, the colonists faced even more challenges. During their first winter in America, more than half of the Plymouth colonists died from malnutrition, disease and exposure to the harsh New England weather. In fact, without the help of Indians, it is likely that none of the colonists would have survived.
An English-speaking Pawtuxet Indian named Samoset helped the colonists form an alliance with the local Wampanoags, who taught them how to hunt local animals, gather shellfish and grow corn, beans and squash. At the end of the next summer, the Plymouth colonists celebrated their first successful harvest with a three-day festival of thanksgiving. We still commemorate this feast today and we call it “Thanksgiving”.
Eventually, the Plymouth colonists were absorbed into the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony. Still, the Mayflower Saints and their descendants remained convinced that they alone had been specially chosen by God to act as a beacon for Christians around the world. Even today, those who can trace their ancestry all the way back to the Mayflower consider themselves the elite.
Harriet Tubman was
an African American abolitionist, humanitarian, and, during the American Civil War, a Union spy. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some thirteen missions to rescue approximately seventy enslaved family and friends,[1] using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. She later helped abolitionist John Brown recruit men for his raid onHarpers Ferry, and in the post-war era struggled for women’s suffrage.
Born a slave in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by her various masters as a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate slave owner threw a heavy metal weight at her, intending to hit another slave. The injury caused dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her entire life. A devout Christian, she also experienced strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to premonitions from God.
In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, then immediately returned to Maryland to rescue her family. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state, and eventually guided dozens of other slaves to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme secrecy, Tubman (or “Moses”, as she was called) “never lost a passenger”. Her actions made slave owners anxious and angry, and they posted rewards for her capture. When a far-reaching United StatesFugitive Slave Law was passed in 1850, she helped guide fugitives further north into Canada, and helped newly freed slaves find work.
When the US Civil War began, Tubman worked for the Union Army, first as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. The first woman to lead an armed expedition in the war, she guided the raid at Combahee Ferry, which liberated more than seven hundred slaves. After the war, she retired to the family home in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents.
She was active in the women’s suffrage movement until illness overtook her and she had to be admitted to a home for elderly African-Americans that she had helped to establish years earlier.
On August 5, 1892, Harriet Tubman received a pension for the rest of her life from Congress for her work as a nurse, spy and scout during the Civil War. After she died in 1913 at the age of 91, she became an icon of American courage and freedom, most especially black American courage and freedom.
On this day in 1779, Lieutenant Colonel James DeLancey’s New York Loyalists and Patriot William Hull’s Connecticut Brigade engage in a civil war for the Bronx in New York. The Patriots destroyed numerous buildings and food stores while also capturing several Loyalists, along with some horses and cattle. First-hand accounts give conflicting figures as to the number of casualties sustained by each side.
On this day in 1858, after several unsuccessful attempts, the first telegraph line across the Atlantic Ocean is completed, a feat accomplished largely through the efforts of American merchant Cyrus West Field.
The telegraph was first developed by Samuel F. B. Morse, an artist-turned-inventor who conceived of the idea of the electric telegraph in 1832. Several European inventors had proposed such a device, but Morse worked independently and by the mid 1830s had built a working telegraph instrument. In the late 1830s, he perfected Morse Code, a set of signals that could represent language in telegraph messages. In May 1844, Morse inaugurated the world’s first commercial telegraph line with the message “What hath God wrought,” sent from the U.S. Capitol to a railroad station in Baltimore. Within a decade, more than 20,000 miles of telegraph cable crisscrossed the country. The rapid communication it made possible greatly aided American expansion, making railroad travel safer as it provided a boost to business conducted across the great distances of a growing United States.
In 1854, Cyrus West Field conceived the idea of the telegraph cable and secured a charter to lay a well-insulated line across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Obtaining the aid of British and American naval ships, he made four unsuccessful attempts, beginning in 1857. In July 1858, four British and American vessels–the Agamemnon, the Valorous, the Niagara, and the Gorgon–met in mid-ocean for the fifth attempt. On July 29, the Niagara and the Gorgon, with their load of cable, departed for Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, while the Agamemnon and the Valorous embarked for Valentia, Ireland. By August 5, the cable had been successfully laid, stretching nearly 2,000 miles across the Atlantic at a depth often of more than two miles. On August 16, President James Buchanan and Queen Victoria exchanged formal introductory and complimentary messages. Unfortunately, the cable proved weak and the current insufficient and by the beginning of September had ceased functioning.
Field later raised new funds and made new arrangements. In 1866, the British ship Great Eastern succeeded in laying the first permanent telegraph line across the Atlantic Ocean. Cyrus West Field was the object of much praise on both sides of the Atlantic for his persistence in accomplishing what many thought to be an impossible undertaking. He later promoted other oceanic cables, including telegraph lines that stretched from Hawaii to Asia and Australia.
On this day in 1861 the United States Army abolished flogging.
Also on this day in 1861, President Abraham Lincoln imposed the first federal income tax by signing the Revenue Act. Strapped for cash with which to pursue the Civil War, Lincoln and Congress agreed to impose a 3 percent tax on annual incomes over $800.
On this day in 1864, at the Battle of Mobile Bay, Union Admiral David Farragut led his flotilla through the Confederate defenses at Mobile, Alabama, to seal one of the last major Southern ports. The fall of Mobile Bay was a huge blow to the Confederacy, and the victory was the first in a series of Yankee successes that helped secure the re-election of Abraham Lincoln later that year.
The world’s first electric traffic signal is put into place on the corner of Euclid Avenue and East 105th Street in Cleveland, Ohio, on this day in 1914.
In the earliest days of the automobile, navigating America’s roads was a chaotic experience, with pedestrians, bicycles, horses and streetcars all competing with motor vehicles for right of way. The problem was alleviated somewhat with the gradual disappearance of horse-drawn carriages, but even before World War I it had become clear that a system of regulations was necessary to keep traffic moving and reduce the number of accidents on the roads. As Christopher Finch writes in his “Highways to Heaven: The AUTO Biography of America” (1992), the first traffic island was put into use in San Francisco, California in 1907; left-hand drive became standard in American cars in 1908; the first center painted dividing line appeared in 1911, in Michigan; and the first “No Left Turn” sign would debut in Buffalo, New York, in 1916.
Various competing claims exist as to who was responsible for the world’s first traffic signal. A device installed in London in 1868 featured two semaphore arms that extended horizontally to signal “stop” and at a 45-degree angle to signal “caution.” In 1912, a Salt Lake City, Utah, police officer named Lester Wire mounted a handmade wooden box with colored red and green lights on a pole, with the wires attached to overhead trolley and light wires. Most prominently, the inventor Garrett Morgan has been given credit for having invented the traffic signal based on his T-shaped design, patented in 1923 and later reportedly sold to General Electric.
Despite Morgan’s greater visibility, the system installed in Cleveland on August 5, 1914, is widely regarded as the first electric traffic signal. Based on a design by James Hoge, who received U.S. patent 1,251,666 for his “Municipal Traffic Control System” in 1918, it consisted of four pairs of red and green lights that served as stop-go indicators, each mounted on a corner post. Wired to a manually operated switch inside a control booth, the system was configured so that conflicting signals were impossible. According to an article in The Motorist, published by the Cleveland Automobile Club in August 1914: “This system is, perhaps, destined to revolutionize the handling of traffic in congested city streets and should be seriously considered by traffic committees for general adoption.”
On August 5, 1914, the German army launched an assault on the city of Liege in Belgium, violating the latter country’s neutrality and beginning the first battle of World War I.
1926 – For the very first time, magician Harry Houdini performed his greatest feat, spending 91 minutes underwater in a sealed tank before escaping. That was the same trick that would later kill him.
The 5th of August, 1940 – Prior to World War II: The Soviet Union formally annexed Latvia. In order to ensure that Latvia wouldn’t fight back, Joseph Stalin released everyone who had been in prison to keep the Latvian people subdued.
1941 – World War II: The Battle of Smolensk concluded with Germany capturing about 300,000 Soviet Red Army prisoners.
1944 – World War II: Possibly the biggest prison breakout in history occurs as 545 Japanese prisoners of war attempted to escape outside the town of Cowra, New South Wales, Australia.
1944 – World War II: The Nazis began a week-long massacre of anywhere between 40,000 and 100,000 civilians and prisoners of war in Wola, Poland.
Still on this day in 1944, Polish insurgents liberated a German forced-labor camp in Warsaw, freeing 348 Jewish prisoners, who joined in a general uprising against the German occupiers of the city.
As the Red Army advanced on Warsaw in July, Polish patriots, still loyal to their government-in-exile back in London, prepared to overthrow their German occupiers. On July 29, the Polish (underground) Home Army, the People’s Army (a communist guerilla movement), and armed civilians took back two-thirds of Warsaw from the Germans.
On August 4, the Germans counterattacked, mowing down Polish civilians with machine-gun fire. By August 5, more than 15,000 Poles were dead. The Polish command cried to the Allies for help. Churchill telegraphed Stalin, informing him that the British intended to drop ammunition and other supplies into the southwest quarter of Warsaw to aid the insurgents. The prime minister asked Stalin to aid in the insurgents’ cause. Stalin balked, claiming the insurgency was too insignificant to waste time with.
Britain succeeded to getting some aid to the Polish patriots, but the Germans also succeeded-in dropping incendiary bombs. The Poles fought on, and on August 5 they freed Jewish forced laborers who then joined in the battle, some of whom formed a special platoon dedicated solely to repairing captured German tanks for use by the Polish in the struggle.
The Poles would battle on for weeks against German reinforcements, and without Soviet help, because Joseph Stalin had his own plans for Poland.
An earthquake hit Ecuador killing 6,000 people and injuring another 20,000 on this day in 1948. The 6.7-magnitude tremor was particularly deadly for its size.
The quake hit high in the Andes Mountains, about 100 miles south of Quito. The tremor caused serious damage over an area of 1,500 square miles. Landslides set off by the quake proved to be the most deadly feature of the disaster. Houses fell down hills and others were buried. Approximately 100,000 people lost their homes. The landslides also caused some flooding by changing water-flow patterns. Some of the victims lost their lives to drowning.
In Ambato, Ecuador, the textile mills were hard hit, with hundreds of workers perishing. Only 300 of the 3,500 residents of Pelileo survived and virtually every home in the town was demolished. It was estimated that another 20,000 people suffered serious injuries from the earthquake. Further compounding the tragedy, a Shell Oil plane bringing rescue workers to the area crashed and killed all 34 people onboard.
In 1949 on this day, the terrible Mann Gulch fires in Montana killed 13 firefighters.
On August 5, 1955, Jesse Irvin Overholtzer, the founder and first director of Child Evangelism Fellowship, died.
On August 5, 1957 – American Bandstand, a show dedicated to the teenage “baby-boomers” by playing the songs and showing popular dances of the time, debuted on the ABC television network.
And on August 5, 1958 – Herbert Hoover eclipsed John Adams as having the longest retirement of any former U.S President until that time. Hoover’s record was 31 years, 7 months, and 16 days, but it has since been eclipsed by “Duracell” Jimmy Carter.
In 1962 on this day apartheid in South Africa: Nelson Mandela was jailed. He would not be released until 1990.
On August 5, 1962, movie actress Marilyn Monroe is found dead in her home in Los Angeles. An autopsy found a fatal amount of sedatives in her system, and her death was ruled a probable suicide. Ever since her death there have been a number of conspiracy theories about her. But the mystery surrounding her death if it wasn’t a suicide is buried with Marilyn.
On this day in 1963, representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain sign the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in outer space, underwater, or in the atmosphere. The treaty was hailed as an important first step toward the control of nuclear weapons.
Discussions between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning a ban on nuclear testing began in the mid-1950s. Officials from both nations came to believe that the nuclear arms race was reaching a dangerous level. In addition, public protest against the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons was gaining strength. Nevertheless, talks between the two nations (later joined by Great Britain) dragged on for years, usually collapsing when the issue of verification was raised. The Americans and British wanted on-site inspections, something the Soviets vehemently opposed. In 1960, the three sides seemed close to an agreement, but the downing of an American spy plan over the Soviet Union in May brought negotiations to an end.
The Cuban Missile Crisis provided a major impetus for reinvigorating the talks in October 1962. The Soviets attempted to install nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba, bringing the Soviet Union and the United States to the brink of a nuclear war. Cooler heads prevailed and the crisis passed, but the other possible scenarios were not lost on U.S. and Russian officials. In June 1963, the test ban negotiations resumed, with compromises from all sides. On August 5, British, American, and Russian representatives signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. France and China were asked to join the agreement but refused.
The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was a small but significant step toward the control of nuclear weapons. In the years to come, discussions between the United States and the Soviet Union grew to include limits on many nuclear weapons and the elimination of others. Whether each of the countries involved will keep their promise remains to be seen.
August 5, 1966 – The Beatles released their groundbreaking album Revolver
On the same day in 1969, NASA’S Mariner 7 made its closest fly-by of Mars
And in 1974 on this day Congress placed a $1 billion ceiling on military aid to South Vietnam for fiscal year 1974. This figure was trimmed further to $700 million by August 11. Military aid to South Vietnam in fiscal year 1973 was $2.8 billion; in 1975 it would be cut to $300 million. Once aid was cut, it took the North Vietnamese only 55 days to defeat the South Vietnamese forces when they launched their final offensive in 1975.
On this day in 1976, the National Basketball Association (NBA) merged with its rival, the American Basketball Association and took on the ABA’s four most successful franchises: the Denver Nuggets, the Indiana Pacers, the New York (later New Jersey) Nets and the San Antonio Spurs.
On August 5, 1981, President Ronald Reagan began firing 11,359 air-traffic controllers striking in violation of his order for them to return to work. The executive action, regarded as extreme by many, significantly slowed air travel for months.
Two days earlier, on August 3, almost 13,000 air-traffic controllers went on strike after negotiations with the federal government to raise their pay and shorten their workweek proved fruitless. The controllers complained of difficult working conditions and a lack of recognition of the pressures they face. Across the country, some 7,000 flights were canceled. The same day, President Reagan called the strike illegal and threatened to fire any controller who had not returned to work within 48 hours. Robert Poli, president of the Professional Air-Traffic Controllers Association (PATCO), was found in contempt by a federal judge and ordered to pay $1,000 a day in fines.
On August 5, an angry President Reagan carried out his threat, and the federal government began firing the 11,359 air-traffic controllers who had not returned to work. In addition, he declared a lifetime ban on the rehiring of the strikers by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). On August 17, the FAA began accepting applications for new air-traffic controllers, and on October 22 the Federal Labor Relations Authority decertified PATCO.
On this day in 2002, the rusty iron gun turret of the U.S.S. Monitor broke from the water and into the daylight for the first time in 140 years. The ironclad warship was raised from the floor of the Atlantic, where it had rested since it went down in a storm off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, during the Civil War. Divers had been working for six weeks to bring it to the surface.
Nine months before sinking into its watery grave, the Monitor had been part of a revolution in naval warfare. On March 9, 1862, it dueled to a standstill with the C.S.S. Virginia (originally the C.S.S. Merrimack) in one of the most famous moments in naval history–the first time two ironclads faced each other in a naval engagement. During the battle, the two ships circled one another, jockeying for position as they fired their guns. The cannon balls simply deflected off the iron ships. In the early afternoon, the Virginia pulled back to Norfolk. Neither ship was seriously damaged, but the Monitor effectively ended the short reign of terror that the Confederate ironclad had brought to the Union navy.
That evening, the Monitor’s commander, J.P. Bankhead, signaled the Rhode Island that he wished to abandon ship. The wooden side-wheeler pulled as close as safety allowed to the stricken ironclad, and two lifeboats were lowered to retrieve the crew. Many of the sailors were rescued, but some men were terrified to venture onto the deck in such rough seas. The ironclad’s pumps stopped working, and the ship sank before 16 of its crew members were rescued. The remains of two of these sailors were discovered by divers during the Monitor’s 2002 reemergence.
Many of the ironclad’s artifacts are now on display at the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia.
In 2010 on this day – The Copiapó mining accident occurred, trapping 33 Chilean miners approximately 2,300 feet below the ground.
And finally – today, Wednesday, August 5, 2015 – the top story:
While hideous fires continue to rage in many parts of California, and Republican presidential candidates rehearse for tomorrow night’s debates on Fox News, A man wielding a gun and a hatchet was shot dead by police after attacking theatergoers with pepper spray and exchanging fire with authorities inside a screening of Mad Max: Fury Road at a movie theater near Nashville, Tenn., officials said.
The shooting at the Hickory 8 Theater in Antioch, Teen. follows soon after a movie theater shooting in Lafayette, La. left three dead last month.
The Nashville Police Department’s bomb squad detonated a backpack containing a fake bomb left behind by the shooter late Wednesday afternoon. Authorities said contents of the backpack made the squad “uncomfortable” and were searching a second backpack for dangerous items, according to police spokesman Don Aaron.
Authorities believe the suspected shooter is a white 51-year-old man who lives in the area
The suspect opened fire when a police officer encountered him inside the theater. The officer returned fire, then retreated. A SWAT team then shot and killed the gunman as he tried to leave a through a rear exit.
Three people were injured in the attack, which are still under investigation. According to Haas, a 58-year-old man was treated for chemical spray exposure, along with a superficial wound caused by a hatchet or axe. Two women—53 and 17—were also treated for chemical spray exposure. All three have been treated and released. Haas said don’t the department doesn’t anticipate needing to transport any patients to the hospital.
“Police response was swift, and this could have been worse,” Brian Haas, a spokesperson with the Nashville Fire Department, said.
The shooter had a surgical mask-like covering on his face, likely to protect his face from the chemical irritant he sprayed in the theater.
Police are questioning “about 20 people” who were in the multiplex at the time, Aaron told press. A local mall and other area businesses near the theater have been placed on lockdown, local news outlet WSMV reported.
This is Ray Mossholder and that’s it for August 5. And unless the Lord comes within the next 24 hours, I’ll be back with August sixth tomorrow.
Ray’s Today in History – August 5
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Ray"s Today in History – August 5
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Ray"s Today in History – July 22, 2015
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Ray’s Today in History – July 22, 2015
July 22, 2015 – This is Ray Mossholder with today in history.
On this day in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln informs his chief advisors and cabinet that he will issue a proclamation to free slaves, but adds that he will wait until the Union Army has achieved a substantial military victory to make the announcement.
The issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation had less to do with ending slavery than saving the crumbling union. In an August 1862 letter to New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, Lincoln confessed “my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or to destroy slavery.” He hoped a strong statement declaring a national policy of emancipation would stimulate a rush of the South’s slaves into the ranks of the Union Army, thus depleting the Confederacy’s labor force, on which it depended to wage war against the North.
As promised, Lincoln waited to unveil the proclamation until he could do so on the heels of a successful Union military advance. On September 22, 1862, after a victory at Antietam, he publicly announced a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves free in the rebellious states as of January 1, 1863. Lincoln and his advisors limited the proclamation’s language to slavery in states outside of federal control as of 1862. The proclamation did not, however, address the contentious issue of slavery within the nation’s border states. In his attempt to appease all parties, Lincoln left many loopholes open that civil rights advocates began working on in the 1960s. They are still working on them today.
On this day in 1793, Alexander Mackenzie reached the Pacific Ocean across from what is today called Vancouver Island. Using a paint he concocted from grease and vermilion, he wrote on a rock: “Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three.” With this inscription, Great Britain staked its first tenuous claim on the northwest.
Aside from the Spanish explorers who had previously crossed the comparatively narrow Mexican land mass, Mackenzie was the first Euro-American to cross the North American continent to reach the Pacific Ocean. Yet, he considered his achievement to be “at least in part a failure” because he had failed to find a passable commercial route. Mackenzie later returned to Scotland and never returned to Canada. Twelve years later, the discoveries he made on what he had called his “failed” voyage played a key role in President Thomas Jefferson’s decision to send Lewis and Clark on their two-year journey to the Pacific.
On July 22, 1923, John Herbert Dillinger joins the Navy in order to avoid charges of auto theft in Indiana, marking the beginning of America’s most notorious criminal’s downfall. Years later, Dillinger’s reputation was forged in a single 12-month period, during which he robbed more banks than Jesse James did in 15 years and became the most wanted fugitive in the nation.
J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, reportedly put out an order that agents should shoot Dillinger on sight. An immigrant named Anna Sage offered to set the outlaw up if deportation proceedings against her for operating a brothel were dropped.
On July 22, 1934, detective Martin Zarkovich shot a man identified by the FBI as Dillinger as he was leaving the Biograph Theater in Chicago, Illinois. Some historians believe that the man killed that day was not Dillinger, and that Dillinger may have engineered the setup to drop out of sight. If so, he was successful–no further record of Dillinger exists.
In August 1935, he was attempting to fly across the North Pole to the USSR with American humorist Will Rogers when both men were killed in a crash near Point Barrow, Alaska.
July 22, 1940 – Jeopardy’s TV game host Alex Trebek was born in Sudbury Ontario, Canada
On this day in 1942, the systematic deportation of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto begins, as thousands are rounded up daily and transported to a newly constructed concentration/extermination camp at Treblinka, in Poland.
On July 17, Heinrich Himmler, head of the Nazi SS, arrived at Auschwitz, the concentration camp in eastern Poland, in time to watch the arrival of more than 2,000 Dutch Jews and the gassing of almost 500 of them, mostly the elderly, sick and very young. The next day, Himmler promoted the camp commandant, Rudolph Hoess, to SS major and ordered that the Warsaw ghetto (the Jewish quarter constructed by the Nazis upon the occupation of Poland, enclosed first by barbed wire and then by brick walls), be depopulated–a “total cleansing,” as he described it–and the inhabitants transported to what was to become a second extermination camp constructed at the railway village of Treblinka, 62 miles northeast of Warsaw.
Within the first seven weeks of Himmler’s order, more than 250,000 Jews were taken to Treblinka by rail and gassed to death, marking the largest single act of destruction of any population group, Jewish or non-Jewish, civilian or military, in the war. Upon arrival at “T. II,” as this second camp at Treblinka was called, prisoners were separated by sex, stripped, and marched into what were described as “bathhouses,” but were in fact gas chambers.
T. II’s first commandant was Dr. Irmfried Eberl, age 32, the man who had headed up the euthanasia program of 1940 and had much experience with the gassing of victims, especially children. He compelled several hundred Ukrainian and about 1,500 Jewish prisoners to assist him. They removed gold teeth from victims before hauling the bodies to mass graves. Eberl was relieved of his duties for “inefficiency.” It seems that he and his workers could not remove the corpses quickly enough, and panic was occurring within the railway cars of newly arrived prisoners.
By the end of the war, between 700,000 and 900,000 would die at either Treblinka I or II. Hoess was tried and sentenced to death by the Nuremberg Tribunal. He was hanged in 1947.
July 22, 1979 – Rock ‘n roll legend Little Richard, known as Reverend Richard Penniman, spoke at a revival meeting in North Richmond, CA. He warned the congregation about the evils of rock & roll music.
July 22, 1987 – In a dramatic turnaround, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev indicates that he is willing to negotiate a ban on intermediate-range nuclear missiles without conditions. Gorbachev’s decision paved the way for the groundbreaking Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with the United States.
Since coming to power in 1985, Gorbachev had made it clear that he sought a less contentious relationship with the United States. His American counterpart, President Ronald Reagan, was a staunch anticommunist and initially harbored deep suspicions about Gorbachev’s sincerity.
But after several times of meeting together, Gorbachev seemed to have a sincere personal trust in and friendship with Ronald Reagan, and this feeling was apparently reciprocal. In December 1987, during a summit in Washington, the two men signed off on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons.
Finally, Gorbachev seemed to have a sincere personal trust in and friendship with Ronald Reagan, and this feeling was apparently reciprocal. In December 1987, during a summit in Washington, the two men signed off on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons.
July 22, 1991, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, police officers spot Tracy Edwards running down the street in handcuffs, and upon investigation, they find one of the grisliest scenes in modern history-Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment.
Edwards told the police that Dahmer had held him at his apartment and threatened to kill him. Although they initially thought the story was dubious, the officers took Edwards back to Dahmer’s apartment. Dahmer calmly explained that the whole matter was simply a misunderstanding and the officers almost believed him. However, they spotted a few Polaroid photos of dismembered bodies, and Dahmer was arrested.
When Dahmer’s apartment was fully searched, a house of horrors was revealed. In addition to photo albums full of pictures of body parts, the apartment was littered with human remains: Several heads were in the refrigerator and freezer; two skulls were on top of the computer; and a 57-gallon drum containing several bodies decomposing in chemicals was found in a corner of the bedroom. Dahmer later confessed to 17 murders in all, dating back to his first victim in 1978.There was also evidence to suggest that Dahmer had been eating some of his victims.
The jury rejected Dahmer’s insanity defense, and he was sentenced to 15 life terms. He survived one attempt on his life in July 1994, but was killed by another inmate on November 28, 1994.
Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s sons, Qusay and Uday Hussein, are killed after a three-hour firefight with U.S. forces in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. It is widely believed that the two men were even more barbaric and evil than their notorious father. Both were rapists of girls as young as 12, grossly sadistic torturers and murderers and their death was celebrated among many Iraqis. Uday and Qusay were 39 and 37 years old, respectively, when they died. Both are said to have amassed considerable fortunes through their participation in illegal oil smuggling.
Though it was widely speculated that they would not be found together because of their mutual hate for each other, an informant’s tip led U.S. Special Forces to a house in which they were both staying on July 22, 2003. After drawing fire, the soldiers withdrew, until receiving backup in the form of 100 troops from the 101st Airborne division, Apache helicopters, and an A-10 gunship. A battle ensued, after which Americans entered the house and found the bodies of the two brothers, as well as that of Qusay’s 14-year-old son. They were buried in a cemetery near the city of Tikrit, their father’s birthplace.
On July 22, 2003, U.S. Army Private Jessica Lynch, a prisoner-of-war who was rescued from an Iraqi hospital, receives a hero’s welcome when she returns to her hometown of Palestine, West Virginia. The story of the 19-year-old supply clerk, who was captured by Iraqi forces in March 2003, gripped America; however, it was later revealed that some details of Lynch’s dramatic capture and rescue might have been exaggerated.
In April 2007, Lynch testified before Congress that she had falsely been portrayed as a “little girl Rambo” and the U.S. military had hyped her story for propaganda reasons. According to Lynch: “I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and tried to make me a legend when the real heroics of my fellow soldiers that day were, in fact, legendary.” She added: “The truth of war is not always easy to hear but is always more heroic than the hype.”
Finally today, July 22, 2015
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Demonstrators gathered in New York City’s Times Square this evening evening in protest over the recent landmark nuclear deal with Iran.
As CBS2’s Jessica Schneider reported, thousands are rallying in solidarity with signs and voices raised against the nuclear deal struck by Secretary of State John Kerry and President Obama.
Protest organizers proclaim: “Washington is prepared to give Iran virtually all that it needs to get to the bomb. To release $150 billion to Iran will result in the expansion of worldwide terror.”
The Stop Iran Rally Coalition — which claims to be a bi-partisan group — is also calling out Sen. Charles Schumer, saying he “has the votes as presumptive leader to override this deal….If this deal is not stopped, New York voters will know whom to blame.”
Sen. Schumer said in a statement Wednesday that he wasn’t ready to make a decision on the deal yet.
“I’ve read the agreement and I’m seeking answers to the many questions I have. Before I make a decision, I’m going to speak at length with experts on both sides,” the lawmaker said.
In Washington, Secretary of State John Kerry led back-to-back, closed-door briefings, trying to sway lawmakers to approve the deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program.
“We are convinced that the agreement that we have arrived at with world powers is an agreement that will prevent Iran from the potential of securing a nuclear weapon. It will make the region, our friends and allies safer, it will make the world safer,” Kerry said. “And we are convinced that the absence of any viable alternative absolutely underscores that fact.”
Meanwhile, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. is fiercely lobbying lawmakers to reject the deal. And Republicans are pledging to do just that.
“Because a bad deal threatens the security of the American people, and we’re going to do everything possible to stop it,” said Speaker of the House Representative John Boehner.
And many at the rally said more people in the country need to start listening and speaking out as well.
“I’m very concerned about what our situation is here. Nobody wants this deal to go through and we’re hoping that Obama will hear the voice of the American people and we’re hoping thatCongress
“I feel people really don’t understand the main issue. To me the main issue is not what happens 10 years from now, but what happens as soon as the sanctions are removed from Iran,” another protester told Schneider. “Which is the main terrorist regime in the world, which spreads terrorism all around the world, which is responsible for the deaths of Americans as well as Israelis.”
Several academic, military, and political
Ray’s Today in History – July 22, 2015
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So until the next newscast this is Ray Mossholder, praying for you my friend. Have a miraculous day!
Ray"s Today in History – July 22, 2015