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Events, deaths, births, of JUL 04
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• “Your 4th of July is hypocrisy”... • US declares independence... • 2 US independence leaders die on 50th anniversary... • Écrasée l'indépendance des  Philippines... • Sikorski dies, conveniently for UK~USSR relations... • Butcher of Lyons convicted... • Chateaubriand  dies... • Surrender of Vicksburg... • Alice in Wonderland... • Independent Treasury Act... • Hawthorne is born... • Leaves of Grass...
On a July 04:
2000 El paro se sitúa en España por debajo del 9%, por primera vez desde 1980
1999 En vísperas del 37º aniversario de la independencia de Argelia y tres meses
1997 Pathfinder lands on Mars         ^top^
      Seven months' time and 190 million kilometers from earth, NASA's Mars Pathfinder became the first US spacecraft to land on Mars in more than two decades. In an unusual but cost-saving landing, Pathfinder used parachutes to slow its approach to the Martian surface, and then deployed airbags to cushion its impact. Colliding with the Ares Vallis floodplain at 64 km/h, the spacecraft bounced high into the Martian atmosphere sixteen times before safely coming to rest.
      On 05 July, the Pathfinder lander was renamed Sagan Memorial Station in honor of the late American astronomer, and on 06 July, Sojourner, the first remote control interplanetary rover, rolled off the station. Sojourner, which traveled a total of 52 meters during its thirty-day mission, sent back a wealth of information about the chemical components of rock and soil in the area. In addition, nearly 10'000 images were taken off the Martian landscape. The Mars Pathfinder mission, which cost a measly $150 million, was hailed as a great triumph for NASA, and millions of internet users visited the official Pathfinder website every day to view newly uploaded images of the red planet.
1995 Lukee, 1-year-old Lhasa Apso bitch, scared by fireworks, escapes from the yard of her human, Shauna Lukesh, in Fontana, California. Lukee would be found by Animal Control officers in mid-June 2001 in the streets of Los Angeles suburb Baldwin Park, some 50 km west of Fontana. She was about to be euthanized on 19 June 2001 when scanning discovered a microchip implanted in her neck identifying her, so she was then returned to her home.
1991 España y Marruecos firman en Rabat el Tratado de Amistad, Buena Vecindad y Cooperación entre ambos países.
1988 La policía francesa intercepta en París cien millones de pesetas, destinados a ETA a cuenta del rescate del industrial Emiliano Revilla.
1987 Butcher of Lyons convicted in France         ^top^
      Ten minutes after midnight in France, Klaus Barbie, 73, the former Nazi Gestapo chief of German-occupied Lyons, is found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment, France's highest punishment.
      As chief of Nazi Germany's secret police in the city during World War II, Barbie sent thousands of French Jews and French Resistance members to their deaths in concentration camps, while torturing, abusing, or executing many others. After the Allied liberation, he fled to Germany where under an assumed identity he joined other ex-Nazi officials in the formation of an underground anti-Communist organization.
      In 1947, the US Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) broke up the organization and arrested its senior members, although Barbie remained at large until the CIC offered him money and protection in exchange for his cooperation in countering Soviet espionage efforts. Barbie worked as a US agent in Germany for two years, and in 1949 was smuggled to Bolivia, where he assumed the name of "Klaus Altmann" and continued his work as a US agent.
      In addition to his work for the Americans, he increasingly performed services for Bolivia's various military regimes, especially that of Hugo "El Petiso" Banzer, who came to power in 1971 and became one of the country's most oppressive leaders. Barbie performed a similar type of work for Banzer as he had for the Nazis, torturing and interrogating political opponents, and dispatching many of these political prisoners to special internment camps where most were executed or died from mistreatment. It was at this time that Nazi hunters Serge Klarsfeld and Beatte Kunzel discovered Barbie's whereabouts, but Banzer refused to extradite him to France.
      In the early 1980s, a liberal regime came to power in Bolivia and agreed to extradite Barbie in exchange for French aid to the destitute nation. On January 19, 1983, Barbie was arrested, and, on 07 February, he arrived in France. Legal wrangling, especially between the groups representing his Jewish and French Resistance victims, delayed his trial for four years.
      Finally, on 11 May 1987, the "Butcher of Lyons," as he was known in France, went on trial for charges of 177 crimes against humanity. In a courtroom twist that would have been unimaginable four decades earlier, Barbie was defended by three minority lawyers — an Asian, an African, and an Arab — who made the dramatic case that the French and the Jews were as guilty of crimes against humanity as Barbie or any other Nazi. However, Barbie's lawyers were more interested in putting France and Israel on trial than in actually proving their client's innocence, and on 04 July 1987, he is found guilty and sentenced to spend in prison the remainder of his life, which was little more than four years, as he died on 25 September 1991.
1985 Felipe González forma su segundo Gobierno con dos sustituciones destacadas: Boyer deja el ministerio de Economía en favor de Solchaga y Morán da el relevo en Exteriores a Fernández Ordóñez.
1976 Israeli commandos raided Entebbe airport in Uganda, rescuing 229 (almost all) of the passengers and crew of an Air France jetliner seized by pro-Palestinian hijackers.
1979 El ex presidente de Argelia, Ahmed Ben Bella, es liberado de la cárcel por decisión del Gobierno argelino.
1970 Un consejo de guerra en Colombia, que ha estado deliberando durante año y medio, condena a 108 de los 325 guerrilleros procesados.
1968 Thieu vows to wipe out corruption in South Vietnam.         ^top^
      At a formal ceremony inaugurating the formation of a new multiparty pro-government political group, the People's Alliance for Social Revolution, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu praises the organization as a "major step toward grassroots political activity." An Alliance manifesto asserted that the group was "determined to wipe out corruption, do away with social inequalities, and rout out the entrenched forces of militarists and reactionaries who have always blocked progress." Thieu's government had long been accused of corruption and, in order to garner political support from the People's Alliance, he vowed to take steps to eradicate the corruption. Unfortunately, neither Thieu nor the People's Alliance could do much about the entrenched corruption in the South Vietnamese government.
1967 US Freedom of Information Act goes into effect
1966 US President Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act, which went into effect the following year.
1966 Se suspenden las libertades constitucionales en Perú, a causa de la actividad guerrillera.
1963 South Vietnamese officers plot coup         ^top^
      Gen. Tran Van Don informs Lucien Conein of the CIA that certain officers are planning a coup against South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Diem, who had been supported by the Kennedy administration, had refused to make any meaningful reforms and had oppressed the Buddhist majority. Conein informed Washington that the generals were plotting to overturn the government. President John F. Kennedy, who had come to the conclusion that the Diem government should no longer be in command, sent word that the United States would not interfere with the coup. In the early afternoon hours of 01 November, a group of South Vietnamese generals ordered their troops to seize key military installations and communications systems in Saigon and demanded the resignation of Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu. Diem was unable to summon any support, so he and Nhu escaped the palace through an underground passage to a Catholic church in the Chinese sector of the city. From there, Diem began negotiating with the generals by phone. He agreed to surrender and was promised safe conduct, but shortly after midnight he and his brother were brutally murdered in back of the armored personnel carrier sent to pick them up and return them to the palace. Kennedy, who had given tacit approval for the coup, was reportedly shocked at the murder of Diem and Nhu. Nevertheless, US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge called the insurgent generals to his office to congratulate them and cabled Kennedy that the prospects for a shorter war had greatly improved with the demise of Diem and Nhu.
1963 Entra en funcionamiento la primera central atómica, desmontable y transportable, construida por científicos soviéticos.
1960 America's new 50-star flag honoring Hawaiian statehood unfurled.
1959 America's new 49-star flag honoring Alaska statehood unfurled.
1959 Cayman Islands separated from Jamaica, made a crown colony.
1958 Funcionarios japoneses determinan que las recientes pruebas atómicas de Estados Unidos en el Pacífico han provocado una lluvia altamente radiactiva en el país.
1957 El FLN plantea en Argelia la independencia como condición previa a toda negociación con Francia.
1956 US most intense rain fall (3.1 cm in 1 minute) at Unionville, Maryland.
1950 Truman signs public law 600 (Puerto Ricans write own constitution)
1948 El cólera causa diez mil muertos en la India.
1946 Indépendance des Philippines, obtenue des États Unis (promise en 1934). Découvertes en 1521 par Magellan et annexées par l'Espagne en 1589, les Philippines étaient restées sous domination espagnole jusqu'à la guerre hispano-américaine de 1898. — Se proclama la República de Filipinas.
1945 Computer pioneers meet
      English scientist Douglas Hartree visits the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where computer scientists Presper Eckert and John Mauchly are leading an effort to create an electronic computer. Inspired, Hartree returned to England and pressured the government to initiate its own computer projects. As a result, the government launched several computer research centers shortly after World War II, advancing progress in computer memory and program storage.
1944 Se funda el Partido Liberal Independiente en Nicaragua.
1942 First American bombing mission over enemy-occupied Europe (WW II)
1942 Los Estados Unidos ordenan un ataque aéreo contra las bases militares japonesas en las islas Aleutianas.
1940 La Francia de Vichy rompe sus relaciones con Inglaterra a consecuencia del ataque a Mers-el-Kebir..
1933 El líder independentista indio Mohandas Gandhi ingresa en prisión por su llamamiento a la desobediencia civil.
1931 El Papa Pío XI, publica la encíclica Azione Cattolica.
1924 El rey Alfonso XIII firma un decreto de amnistía e indulto para conseguir la pacificación social en España.
1917 First ground-to-plane phone call
      Engineers at Langley Field in Virginia call an airplane flying several kilometers away. The plane can only receive, not reply. The reverse was true in a phone call made several days earlier, when a pilot called the ground crew but could not hear their voices. The first two-way phone call from ground to air happened in August of that year.
1914 Saturday : in the aftermath of the June 28 assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and of his wife, Sophia:
  • Archduke Franz Ferdinand is buried.
  • Victor Naumann, messenger for the German Foreign Office, arrives in Vienna to assure German support in the event Russia was provoked by Austrian action.
  • Foreign Office Chief Alexander Hoyos volunteers to take the letter requesting support, composed by Franz Josef and Austrian Foreign Minister Count Leopold von Berchtold , to Berlin and deliver it to the Kaiser personally. The letter has been composed with moderation. Hoyos will see that it is interpreted with hostility.
  • 1910 Rusia y Japón llegan a un acuerdo por el cual Japón permite a Rusia actuar en Manchuria y aquélla se inhíbe ante la invasión japonesa de Corea.
    1908 Se confirma la noticia de que en Asunción (Paraguay) ha estallado una sublevación militar.
    1907 Pío X condena por decreto todas las tendencias modernistas en teología.
    1905 Los boers se manifiestan en Pretoria contra la ley electoral, que pone en desventaja a la lengua holandesa y da el derecho de voto a los británicos.
    1904 El general Rafael Reyes resulta elegido presidente de Colombia.
    1902 Fin de l'insurrection des Philippines, déclare le président Roosevelt.         ^top^
          À la fin d’août 1896, ses plans ayant été découverts par les Espagnols, Bonifacio lança l’appel à l’insurrection générale pour renverser, comme à Cuba, la domination coloniale. La révolution gagna rapidement plusieurs provinces, et l’exécution de Rizal par les Espagnols à Manille (30 dec. 1896) ne fit qu’enflammer encore les esprits. Si l’insurrection faisait des progrès, des rivalités divisaient déjà ses rangs. Un dirigeant de Cavite, Emilio Aguinaldo, fit arrêter et exécuter Bonifacio (10 mai 1897), et installa un gouvernement révolutionnaire à Biaknabato.
          Cependant, les Espagnols, par une stratégie plus subtile, obtenaient des succès dans la pacification. Ils offrirent aux insurgés, s’ils cessaient la lutte et remettaient leurs armes, une forte indemnité et une amnistie. Aguinaldo accepta (15 dec. 1897) et se retira avec ses cadres à Hong Kong. La paix sembla revenir. Mais les Espagnols ne tinrent pas leurs promesses, et l’agitation reprit dès avril 1898.
          C’est à ce moment que les États-Unis déclarèrent la guerre à l’Espagne à propos de Cuba. Le 1er mai, l’escadre américaine détruisit la flotte espagnole dans la baie de Manille. Aguinaldo ordonna alors aux Philippins de reprendre la lutte contre le pouvoir colonial, et il constitua un gouvernement philippin. Le 12 Jun 1898, il proclama l’indépendance des Philippines "sous la protection de la puissante et généreuse nation nord-américaine". Les insurgés s’étaient rendus maîtres de la plus grande partie de Luçon et assiégeaient Manille, ce qui permit aux Américains de débarquer à proximité de la capitale, puis, le 13 Aug 1898, de s’en emparer sans le concours des Philippins. Madrid demanda la paix. Après deux mois de négociations, les États-Unis conclurent avec l’Espagne le traité de Paris (10 déc. 1898) et se firent céder les Philippines moyennant 20 millions de dollars.
          Proche de la Chine, l’archipel était pour les États-Unis d’une grande importance stratégique et économique, et ceux-ci n’avaient pas l’intention d’en reconnaître l’indépendance. Or Aguinaldo avait convoqué à Malolos un congrès national qui avait ratifié la proclamation de l’indépendance (29 sept. 1898), nationalisé les terres de l’Église et préparé une constitution républicaine, qui fut promulguée le 21 janvier 1899. Le gouvernement républicain contrôlait la majeure partie des îles.
          Cependant, le Sénat américain ayant ratifié, à une voix de majorité, le traité de Paris (6 févr. 1899), le président McKinley ordonna à l’armée américaine de liquider la république de Malolos. Après avoir dû abandonner sa capitale, Aguinaldo continua la guérilla. Washington dut envoyer près de 150'000 soldats et conseillers techniques aux Philippines pour y réaliser, par des méthodes inhumaines une "pacification" qui dura des années. Plus de 200'000 Philippins périrent du fait des seules opérations.
          Aguinaldo et son second, A. Mabini, furent capturés en mars 1901 et "suicidé" en cellule. Un gouverneur civil américain put être nommé en juillet 1901. Mais, bien que le président Theodore Roosevelt eût déclaré, le 4 juillet 1902, l’"insurrection" philippine officiellement terminée, la lutte se poursuivit encore, sporadiquement, jusqu’en 1908. Mindanao ne sera même considérée comme soumise qu’à la fin de 1913.
    1898 US flag hoisted over Wake Island (Spanish-American War)
    1894 Republic of Hawaii established
    1886 1st North American scheduled transcontinental passenger train reaches Pt Moody, BC
    1884 Statue of Liberty presented to US in Paris. Treize ans après son arrivée à New-York, Bartholdi offre au nom de la France la Statue de la Liberté aux Etats-Unis. Pour en connaître davantage relisez la chroniques de ce 21 Juin 1871 qui retrace l’arrivée de Bartholdi dans la baie de new-York et sa "vision fulgurante" de l’œuvre qui plus de 125 ans plus tard reste encore un des monuments les plus visités au monde.
    1883 Buffalo Bill's first Wild West Show         ^top^
          In North Platte, Nebraska, William Frederick Cody, popularly known as "Buffalo Bill" Cody, holds his first " Wild West Show," an open-air extravaganza featuring horses and riders in a variety of displays with frontier themes. The production is staged as part of the town's Independence Day celebrations. Receiving an enthusiastic response from North Platte's citizens, Cody would expand the Wild West Show into a traveling show that was eventually seen by tens of thousands of people around America and Europe.
          Born near Davenport, Iowa, William Cody began his working career at age eleven following his father's death, employed as a mounted messenger for a railroad company. In 1860, after a stint trapping beaver, Cody joined in the gold rush to Pike's Peak, Colorado. In the same year, he briefly rode for the Pony Express, during which time, according to his own accounts, he set several riding endurance records.
          During the US Civil War, he served in a guerilla group loyal to the Union and then in the Seventh Kansas Volunteer Cavalry. It was around this time that he earned the nickname Buffalo Bill for his skill in supplying railroad workers with buffalo meat. In 1868, he was appointed chief of scouts for the Fifth US Cavalry, and in the next year, his Western frontier exploits became nationally famous when author Ned Buntline wrote his first dime novel with Buffalo Bill as the hero. In 1872, Cody won the Medal of Honor, led the hunting party of Grand Duke Alexis of Russia along with George Armstrong Custer, and was persuaded by Ned Buntline to act in his play, The Scouts of the Plains, which started Cody on his entertainment career.
          Over the next decade, he alternately took to the frontier or the stage, and on 04 July 1883, staged his first Wild West Show, a production that featured reenactments of legendary frontier events such as stagecoach robberies and the Battle of Little Bighorn. The Wild West Show later featured colorful figures such as Annie Oakley, a sharp-shooting frontier woman, and Native Americans who had actually fought in the US-Indian wars, such as Sioux leader Sitting Bull.
          For the next three decades, the show toured across the United States and Europe and was seen by tens of thousands of people, including foreign dignitaries such as Queen Victoria of England. Over time, the show became increasingly elaborate, took on international riders and themes, and Buffalo Bill's retelling of his life became ever more legendary. However, finance was not among Cody's great talents, and in 1913, the Wild West Show went bankrupt. Four years later, Buffalo Bill died and was buried on Lookout Mountain in Colorado.
    1881 Booker T Washington establishes Tuskegee Institute
    1864 Engagement at Vining's Station (Smyrna), Georgia
    1863 Lee's forces begin to retreat from Gettysburg
    1863 Siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana continues
    Confederate 1863 surrender of Vicksburg         ^top^
          The Confederacy is torn in two when General John C. Pemberton surrenders to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Vicksburg. The Vicksburg campaign was one of the most successful campaigns of the war. Although Grant's first attempt to take the city failed in the winter of 1862-63, he renewed his efforts in the spring. Admiral David Porter had run his flotilla past the Vicksburg defenses in early May as Grant marched his army down the west bank of the river opposite Vicksburg, crossed back to Mississippi, and drove toward Jackson. After defeating a Confederate force near Jackson, Grant turned back to Vicksburg. On 16 May he defeated a force under John C. Pemberton at Champion Hill. Pemberton retreated back to Vicksburg, and Grant sealed the city by the end of May. In three weeks, Grant's men marched 290 km, won five battles, and took 6000 prisoners. Grant made some attacks after bottling Vicksburg, but found the Confederates well entrenched. Preparing for a long siege, his army constructed 24 km of trenches and enclosed Pemberton's force of 29'000 men inside the perimeter. It was only a matter of time before Grant, with 70'000 soldiers, captured Vicksburg. Attempts to rescue Pemberton and his force failed from both the east and west, and conditions for both military personnel and civilians deteriorated rapidly. Many residents moved to tunnels dug from the hillsides to escape the constant bombardments. Pemberton surrendered on 04 July, and President Lincoln wrote that the Mississippi River "again goes unvexed to the sea." The town of Vicksburg would not celebrate the Fourth of July for 81 years.
    1861 US Congress convenes in special session.
    1852 Frederick Douglass: Your 4th of July is hypocrisy!         ^top^
          Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) was the best known and most influential African American leader of the 1800s. He was born a slave in Maryland but managed to escape to the North in 1838. He traveled to Massachusetts and settled in New Bedford, working as a laborer to support himself. In 1841, he attended a convention of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society and quickly came to the attention of its members, eventually becoming a leading figure in the New England antislavery movement.
          In 1845, Douglass published his autobiography, "The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave." With the revelation that he was an escaped slave, Douglass became fearful of possible re-enslavement and fled to Great Britain and stayed there for two years, giving lectures in support of the antislavery movement in America. With the assistance of English Quakers, Douglass raised enough money to buy his own his freedom and in 1847 he returned to America as a free man.
          He settled in Rochester, New York, where he published The North Star, an abolitionist newspaper. He directed the local underground railroad which smuggled escaped slaves into Canada and also worked to end racial segregation in Rochester's public schools.
         (other works by Douglass: The Heroic Slave, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) , My Bondage and My Freedom)
         In 1852, the leading citizens of Rochester asked Douglass to give a speech as part of their Fourth of July celebrations. Douglass accepted their invitation. In his speech, however, Douglass delivered a scathing attack on the hypocrisy of a nation celebrating freedom and independence with speeches, parades and platitudes, while, within its borders, nearly four million humans were being kept as slaves.

    Frederick DouglassFellow citizens, pardon me, and allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits, and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

    Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions. Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been torn from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the "lame man leap as an hart."

    But such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak today? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you, that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation (Babylon) whose crimes, towering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin.

    Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!"

    To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.

    My subject, then, fellow citizens, is "American Slavery." I shall see this day and its popular characteristics from the slave's point of view. Standing here, identified with the American bondman, making his wrongs mine, I do not hesitate to declare, with all my soul, that the character and conduct of this nation never looked blacker to me than on this Fourth of July.

    Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity, which is outraged, in the name of liberty, which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of America! "I will not equivocate - I will not excuse." I will use the severest language I can command, and yet not one word shall escape me that any man, whose judgment is not blinded by prejudice, or who is not at heart a slave-holder, shall not confess to be right and just.

    But I fancy I hear some of my audience say it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother Abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more and denounce less, would you persuade more and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light? Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? That point is conceded already. Nobody doubts it. The slave-holders themselves acknowledge it in the enactment of laws for their government. They acknowledge it when they punish disobedience on the part of the slave. There are seventy-two crimes in the State of Virginia, which, if committed by a black man (no matter how ignorant he be), subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of these same crimes will subject a white man to like punishment.

    What is this but the acknowledgment that the slave is a moral, intellectual, and responsible being? The manhood of the slave is conceded. It is admitted in the fact that Southern statute books are covered with enactments, forbidding, under severe fines and penalties, the teaching of the slave to read and write. When you can point to any such laws in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue the manhood of the slave. When the dogs in your streets, when the fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, and the reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute, then I will argue with you that the slave is a man!

    For the present it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the Negro race. Is it not astonishing that, while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships, working in metals of brass, iron, copper, silver, and gold; that while we are reading, writing, and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants, and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers; that we are engaged in all the enterprises common to other men — digging gold in California, capturing the whale in the Pacific, feeding sheep and cattle on the hillside, living, moving, acting, thinking, planning, living in families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshipping the Christian God, and looking hopefully for life and immortality beyond the grave — we are called upon to prove that we are men?

    Would you have me argue that man is entitled to liberty? That he is the rightful owner of his own body? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to understand? How should I look today in the presence of Americans, dividing and subdividing a discourse, to show that men have a natural right to freedom, speaking of it relatively and positively, negatively and affirmatively? To do so would be to make myself ridiculous, and to offer an insult to your understanding. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

    What! Am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood and stained with pollution is wrong? No - I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

    What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman cannot be divine. Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may - I cannot. The time for such argument is past.

    At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation's ear, I would today pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be denounced.

    What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mock; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy - a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.

    Go search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

    1845 Texas Congress votes for annexation to US
    1845 Henry David Thoreau began his two-year experiment in simpler living by moving into his shack at Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts.
    1840 Independent Treasury Act         ^top^
          The "Locofocos" (who borrowed their name from a then-popular brand of "self igniting" matches) were a considerably strong voice in the Democratic Party during the first half of the nineteenth century. Formed by a like-minded group of workers and reformers, the Locofocos were left-leaning fiscal firebrands; their platform was studded with a number of radical notions, including proposed bans on paper bills, tariffs and oversized corporate trusts.
          But, the Locofocos' central goal was to oust the Federal government from the banking world. In 1840, the party found a potent ally in President Martin Van Buren, who had long since opposed a government-centric banking system. During his tenure as Vice President in Andrew Jackson's administration, Van Buren had supported Jackson's zealous drive to destroy the government-supported Bank of the United States, and called on Congress to cut the ties between banks and the government.
          After a nasty political tussle, legislators pass the aptly-named Independent Treasury Act on July 4, 1840. The bill mandates the transfer of funds from state banks to a putatively "independent" treasury. To help handle the inevitable tide of fiscal transactions, the bill creates a network of subtreasuries, which are dotted along the east coast — including branches in Boston, New York and Philadelphia — and in other patches of the country.
    1836 Wisconsin Territory formed
    1832 "America" 1st sung publicly
    1831 Baptist clergyman Samuel Francis Smith writes the American patriotic hymn,'America' ('My Country, 'tis of Thee'). Smith was unaware that the tune, ironically, was also that of England's national anthem: 'God Save the Queen'! (And also of the German “Heimatland, gross und weit”) [the words in the three languages]
    1828 Construction begins on B&O (Baltimore-Ohio) 1st US passenger RR
    1827 Slavery abolished in NY
    1817 Construction on Erie Canal begins
    1789 1st US tariff act
    1653 Barebones Parliment goes into session in England
    1636 City of Providence, Rhode Island, forms.
    1190 IIIème croisade C'est sur la colline de Vezelay symboliquement d'où est partie la première croisade après l'appel du pape Urbain II en 1095 qu'elle commence. C'est dans cette basilique où Pierre l'Ermite a préché pour les pauvres en 1096, que se retrouvent Philippe Auguste et Richard Coeur de Lion avant de partir pour la troisième croisade. Ceux-ci la décident en raison de la prise de Jérusalem par Saladin, le 2 octobre 1187. L'empereur Frédéric Barberousse a déjà pris la route.
    1189 Paix d'Asay-le-Rideau, humiliante pour le roi Henri II d'Angleterre, qui désigne son fils Richard comme nouveau roi et abandonne à Philippe Auguste l'Auvergne, Issoudun et Châteauroux. Il meurt deux jours plus tard.
    1054 Brightest known super-nova (which became the Crab Nebula) starts shining (23 days)
    TO THE TOP
    HadayetDeaths which occurred on a July 04:         ^top^
    Vicky Chen2002 Victoria “Vicky” Chen, 25, Yakov Aminov, 47, and Hesham Mohamed Hadayet [top photo >] who, just before 11:30, attacks with .45 and 9mm caliber handguns and a 15-cm knife in the Tom Bradley International Terminal of Los Angeles International airport at the El Al counter which was conducting check-in for passengers of Flight 106 destination Tel Aviv. Hadayet is wrestled to the ground, disarmed, and subdued by an unarmed El Al security guard who was standing behind him (and modestly wants to remain anonymous), then shot at close range in the stomach by Haim Sapir, chief local El Al security guard.
          Born on 04 July 1961, Hadayet worked driving his own limousine. He had come to live in the US in 1992 with his wife Hala Mohammed Sadeq El-Awadly, now 41. They have two sons (Omar, 12, Adam, 7). Sons and wife are in Cairo since 15 June 2002, visiting her sick mother.
          Chen [< photo], Israel-born and in the US since the age of 12, was at the counter, working for a company under contract with El Al.
     Aminov     Aminov [second photo >], Orthodox Jew diamond importer who immigrated from Israel in 1988, had driven his Tel Aviv-bound friend Michael Shabtai to the airport. Aminov had 6 children, all under the age of 11, including one not yet born.
          Four persons besides Sapir are injured. Thirty-five departing flights and some 10'500 passengers are delayed. Normal terminal operations resume before midnight. The El Al flight departs the next evening, a Friday, despite the rule that “El Al does not fly on the Sabbath”, under an exception granted by Israeli Transportation Minister Ephraim Sneh, who is bitterly criticized for it. 20 passengers refuse to board the Sabbath flight and wait one more day.
    2002 Michael Brand, 44, Michael Alder, 49, Jackie Ngo-Ton, girl, 12, and Brandon Truong, boy, 15 months, in the afternoon, as the Cesna 310 piloted by Brand, with passenger Alder, has difficulty lifting off (probably due to left engine failure) from Brackett Field in La Verne, California, and crashes into some 500 picnickers at a lakeside beach in a San Dimas park. Jackie's brother Andy Ngo-Ton, 8, is critically injured with head wounds. 11 others are injured.
    2002 Jihad Al Omarin, 45, and Wael al-Namara, 33, in Omarin's car which explodes at in the center of Gaza City, presumably the doing of Israel, as Omarin was a colonel in a Palestinian security organization and Gaza leader of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. Namara was his assistant. A third man in the car is critically injured.
    2001 Ciaran Cummings, 19, Catholic, shot several times at close range by a gunman from the outlawed Protestant extremists “Red Hand Defenders” in Antrim, Northern Ireland. Cummings was standing on a sidewalk waiting to be picked up for work.
    2001 All 136 passengers and 9 crew members on a Vladivostokavia Tu-154 which crashes at 02:10 local (GMT+9) near Burdakovka, some 30 km south-east of Irkutsk where it was attempting to land en route from Yekaterinburg to Vladivostok.
    2001 Mounique Shanta Hadnot, 16; Frank Glen Thomas, 13; and Kym Stephane Hadnot, 4, and their mother Stephanie Hadnot, 30; in fire started by a boy playing with a fireplace lighter, in Houston. The mother initially escaped with her mother, Sophie Hadnot, her stepfather, two of her children and the boy, 12, who had started the fire, to look after whom Sophie Hadnot had agreed while his mother was at work. When Sophie Hadnot realized that three of her children were still inside she ran back in. All four were found near a window in a back bedroom, the children in a closet and their mother just outside the closet, dead of smoke inhalation. The window was blocked by bars.
    1990 Marshall Hall, mathematician
    1990 Abilio Barbero de Aguilera, historiador español.
    1986 Zariski, mathematician
    1970 Barnett Newman, US Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist painter born on 29 January 1905. — LINKSWho's afraid of Red Yellow & Blue?
    1954 Marilyn Sheppard, 31, beaten to death inside her suburban home in Cleveland, Ohio, sometime after midnight..         ^top^
         This led to a sensationalized murder trial which inspired The Fugitive. Her husband, Dr. Samuel Holmes Sheppard, claimed to have returned home to find a man with bushy hair fleeing the scene. The authorities, who uncovered the fact that Dr. Sheppard had been having an affair, did not believe his story and charged him with killing his 4-months pregnant wife.
          Creating a national sensation, the media invaded the courtroom and printed daily stories premised on Sheppard's guilt. The jurors, who were not sequestered, found Sheppard guilty. Arguing that the circumstances of the trial had unfairly influenced the jury, Sheppard appealed to the Supreme Court and got his conviction overturned in 1966. Yet, despite the fact that Sheppard had no previous criminal record, many still believed that he was responsible for his wife's murder. Sam Sheppard failed in his renewed medical practice, became a pro wrestler and died on 6 April 1970 of liver damage caused by alcoholism.
          The Sheppard case brought to light the issue of bias within the court system. Jurors are now carefully screened to ensure that they have not already come to a predetermined conclusion about a case in which they are about to hear. In especially high-profile cases, jurors can be sequestered so that they are not exposed to outside media sources. However, most judges simply order jurors not to watch news reports about the case, and rely on them to honor the order.
          Sheppard's case provided the loose inspiration for the hit television show The Fugitive, in which the lead character, Richard Kimble, is falsely accused of killing his wife, escapes from prison, and pursues the one-armed man he claimed to have seen fleeing the murder scene.
          In 1998, DNA tests on physical evidence found at Sheppard's house revealed that there had indeed been another man at the murder scene. Sheppard's son, who had pursued the case long after his father's death in order to vindicate his reputation, sued the state for wrongful imprisonment in 2000, but his case was rejected
    1943 Wladyslaw Sikorski, Polish general fighting for justice, when his plane crashes less than a mile from its takeoff point at Gibraltar.         ^top^
          Controversy remains over whether it was an accident or an assassination. Born May 20, 1888, in Austrian Poland (that part of Poland co-opted by the Austro-Hungarian Empire), Sikorski served in the Austrian army. He went on to serve in the Polish Legion, attached to the Austrian army, during World War I, and fought in the Polish-Soviet War of 1920-21. He became prime minister of Poland for a brief period (1922-23).
          When Germany invaded and occupied Poland in 1939, Sikorski became leader of a Polish government-in-exile in Paris. He developed a good working relationship with the Allies — until April 1943, when Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin broke off Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations after Sikorski requested that the Red Cross investigate the alleged Soviet slaughter of Polish officers in the Katyn forest of eastern Poland in 1942. After Germany and the USSR divided up Poland in 1939, thousands of Polish military personnel were sent to prison camps by the Soviets.
          When Germany invaded Russia in 1941, Stalin made a pact with the Polish government-in-exile to cooperate in the battle against the Axis. Given the new relationship, the Poles requested the return of the imprisoned military men, but the Soviets claimed they had escaped and could not be found. But when Germany overran eastern Poland, the part that had previously been under Soviet control, mass graves in the Katyn forest were discovered, containing the corpses of over 4000 Polish officers, all shot in the back. The Soviets, apparently, had massacred them. But despite the evidence, the Soviet government insisted it was the Germans who were responsible.
          Once news of the massacre spread, a formal Declaration of War Crimes was signed in London on 13 January 1943. Among the signatories was General Sikorski and General Charles de Gaulle. But Sikorksi did not want to wait until after the war for the punishment of those responsible for the Katyn massacre. He wanted the International Red Cross to investigate immediately. It is believed that Britain considered this request a threat to Allied solidarity and some believe that in order to silence Sikorski on this issue, the British went so far as to shoot down his plane. There is no solid evidence of this. After the war, the communist Polish government officially accepted the Soviet line regarding the mass graves. It was not until 1992 that the Russian government released documents proving that the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, had been responsible for the Katyn slaughter — backed up by the old Soviet Politburo.
    1934 Marie Curie, of leukemia caused by radiation. Born Marie Sklodowska in Poland on 07 November 1867, scientist, who in 1895 married scientist Pierre Curie, with him discovered radium (which they announced on 26 December 1898, and for which they shared with Becquerel the 1903 Physics Nobel Prize). After Pierre Curie's 19 April 1906 death (run over by a heavy dray in Paris), she became the only person to receive two Nobel Prizes when she got the 1911 Chemistry one. Author of Recherches sur les Propriétés Magnétiques des Aciers Trempés — Recherches sur les Substances Radioactives — L'Isotropie et les Elements Isotropes — Pierre Curie — Traité de Radioactivité.
    1901 Peter G Tait, mathematician.
    1901 Julian Scott, US artist born on 14 February 1846.-
    1898: 549 drown as French liner La Bourgogne collides with British sailing bark Cromartyshire.
    1875 White Democrats kill several Blacks in terrorist attacks in Vicksburg.
    1874 Wouter Verschuur, Dutch artist born on 11 June 1812. — An Inn
    1848 François-Auguste-René vicomte de Chateaubriand, 79         ^top^
         French author and diplomat, one of his country's first Romantic writers. He was the preeminent literary figure in France in the early 19th century and had a profound influence on the youth of his day.
         Atala (1801) tells the story of a Christian girl who has taken a vow to remain a virgin but who falls in love with a Natchez Indian. Torn between love and religion, she poisons herself to keep from breaking her vow.
          In Le Génie du Christianisme (1802) Chateaubriand tried to rehabilitate Christianity from the attacks made on it during the Enlightenment by stressing its capacity to nurture and stimulate European culture, architecture, art, and literature over the centuries. Chateaubriand's theology was weak and his apologetics illogical, but his assertion of Christianity's moral superiority on the basis of its poetic and artistic appeal proved an inexhaustible sourcebook for Romantic writers.
         The novel René (1805) tells the story of a sister who enters a convent rather than surrender to her passion for her brother. In this thinly veiled autobiographical work Chateaubriand began the Romantic vogue for world-weary, melancholy heroes suffering from vague, unsatisfied yearnings in what has since been called the mal du siècle.
          Mémoires d'Outre-tombe (1849-1850) is as much a history of his thoughts and sensations as it is a conventional narrative of his life from childhood into old age. The vivid picture it draws of contemporary French history, of the spirit of the Romantic epoch, and of Chateaubriand's own travels is complemented by many self-revealing passages in which the author recounts his unstinting appreciation of women, his sensitivity to nature, and his lifelong tendency toward melancholy. Chateaubriand's most enduring preoccupation was himself, and his memoirs have proved to be his most enduring work.
         Chateaubriand was not only poet, novelist, statesman, but also a chef who gave his name to a style of steak: a large tenderloin steak usually grilled or broiled and served with a sauce (as béarnaise)
    CHATEAUBRIAND ONLINE (en français):
  • De la Monarchie selon la Charte: le Roi, la Charte et les Honnêtes Gens
  • Le Génie du Christianisme, ou Beautés de la Religion chrétienne
  • Congrès de Vérone; Guerre d'Espagne de 1823; Colonies espagnoles
  • Courtes Explications sur les 12.000 Francs offerts par Mme la Duchesse de Berry aux Indigents affamés de la Contagion
  • De la Nouvelle Proposition relative au Bannissement de Charles X et de sa Famille
  • Essai historique, politique et moral sur les Révolutions anciennes et modernes, avec les notes inédites d'un exemplaire confidentiel
  • Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem et de Jérusalem à Paris
  • Mémoire sur la Captivité de Mme la Duchesse de Berry
  • Lettre à M. De Fontanes, sur l'Ouvrage de Mme de Staël
  • Analyse raisonnée de l'Histoire de France
  • Les Aventures du Dernier Abencérage
  • Sur l'Art du Dessin dans les Paysages
  • De Buonaparte et des Bourbons
  • Essai sur la Littérature anglaise
  • Cinq Jours à Clermont (Auvergne)
  • Réflexions politiques
  • Tableaux de la Nature
  • Les quatre Stuarts
  • Mélanges littéraires
  • Pensées, Réflexions et Maximes
  • Mémoires d'Outre-tombe
  • Mémoires sur le duc de Berry
  • Notices nécrologiques
  • Opinions et Discours
  • Voyage au Mont-Blanc
  • Voyage en Amérique
  • Atala (rtf)
  • Atala
  • Atala
  • Les Martyrs
  • Les Martyrs
  • Poésies diverses
  • René
  • René (rtf)
  • René
  • Moïse
  • Les Natchez
  • Vie de Rancé
  • Voyage en Italie
  • De la Presse
  • 1831 James Monroe 5th US president 1831, in New York City.
    1826 Thomas Jefferson, 83, at about 12:30 (local time). His last conscious words, uttered the preceding evening, were "Is it the Fourth?" Letters of Thomas Jefferson: 1743-1826         ^top^
    1826 John Adams, 90, just before dying, at his farm in Quincy, whispers his last words: "Thomas Jefferson survives." But Jefferson had died at Monticello a few hours earlier that same day, 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of which he was the author selected by John Adams. John Quincy Adams, son of John Adams one week short of his 59th birthday, was in the second year of his presidency. Some writings of John Adams {not letters)
         John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Founding Fathers, the second and third presidents of the United States, respectively, died on this day, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Both men had been central in the drafting of the historic document; Jefferson had authored it, and Adams, who was known as the "colossus of the debate," served on the drafting committee and had argued eloquently for the declaration's passage.
          After July 4, 1776, Adams traveled to France as a diplomat, where he proved instrumental in winning French support for the Patriot cause, and Jefferson returned to Virginia where he served as state governor during the dark days of the American Revolution. After British defeat at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, Adams was one of the negotiators of the Treaty of Paris that ended the war, and with Jefferson he returned to Europe to try and negotiate a US-British trade treaty.
          After the ratification of the Constitution, Adams was elected vice president to George Washington, and Jefferson was appointed secretary of state. During Washington's administration, Jefferson, with his democratic ideals and concept of states' rights, often came into conflict with Secretary of the Treasurer Alexander Hamilton, who supported a strong federal government and conservative property rights. During this period, Adams arbitrated between Hamilton and his old friend Jefferson; although, in politics he was generally allied with Hamilton.
          In 1796, Adams defeated Jefferson in the presidential election, but the latter became vice president as the office was still filled by the candidate who finished second. As president, Adams's main concern was America's deteriorating relationship with France, and war was only prevented because of his diplomatic talents. In 1800, Jefferson's Democratic Republicans defeated the Federalist party of Adams and Hamilton, and Adams retired to his estate in Quincy, Massachusetts.
          As president, Jefferson reduced the power and expenditures of the central government, but advocated the purchase of Louisiana Territory from France, which more than doubled the size of the United States. During his second administration, Jefferson faced renewed conflict with Great Britain, but he left office before the War of 1812 began.
         Jefferson retired to his estate in Monticello, Virginia, but he often advised his presidential successors and helped establish the University of Virginia. Jefferson also corresponded with John Adams to discuss politics, and these famous letters are regarded as masterpieces of the American enlightenment. By remarkable coincidence, Jefferson and Adams died on the same day, Independence Day, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.
    1783 (1778?) Michel-François Dandré-Bardon, French painter born on 22 May 1700 — LINKSDiana and Endymion
    1742 Grandi, mathematician.
    1672 Govert Dirckszoon Camphuysen, Dutch painter born in 1623, specialized in Portraits. — LINKS
    1671 Jan Cossiers, Flemish painter born on 15 July 1600. — LINKSFortune Telling
    1667 Christian Couwemberg, Dutch artist born on 08 September 1604.
    1627 Thomas Middleton Elizabethan dramatist, (birth date unknown) — MIDDLETON ONLINE: A Chaste Maid in CheapsideComplete on-line worksThe Family of Love —: Hengist, King of KentNo Wit, No Help Like a Woman'sThe PhoenixThe Puritan — co- The Roaring Girl, — A Trick to Catch the Old OneThe WitchYour Five Gallants — co-author of Any Thing for a Quiet LifeThe ChangelingA Fair Quarrel, — The Old Law,
    1541 Pedro de Alvarado, conquistador español.
    Births which occurred on a July 04:         ^top^
    1946 Michael Milken LA Calif, partner (Intl Capital Access Group)
    1929 Erich Brauer, Austrian artist.
    1927 Neil Simon, playwright.
    1921 Gerard Debreu France, economist (Nobel 1983)
    1919 José Luis Castillo Puche, escritor español.
    1918 Esther Pauline Friedman (Ann Landers) (advice columnist; twin sister of Abigail Van Buren)
    1918 Pauline Esther Friedman (Abigail Van Buren) (advice columnist; twin sister of Ann Landers)
    1917 Livsic, mathematician
    1916 Tokyo Rose WW II propagandist.
    1906 Rutherford, mathematician.
    1900 Robert Desnos, à Paris, poète surréaliste français ("Les Yeux d’Elsa" chanté par Jean Ferrat, "Que serais-je sans toi?" …)
    1900 Louis Armstrong, trompetista y jazzman estadounidense.
    1899 Pedro Nel Gómez Agudelo, pintor, escultor y arquitecto colombiano.
    1895 Massimo Campigli, Italian painter who died in May 1971. — LINKS
    1885 Louis B Mayer Minsk Russia, motion-picture executive (MGM)
    1883 Ruben Lucius “Rube” Goldberg, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist (elaborate, involved contraptions that accomplish simple tasks), sculptor, and author. He died in 1970. — MORE ON GOLDBERG AT ART “4” JULY — Cartoons by GOLDBERG ONLINE: Baseball and Business Photo taking contraptionHow to Keep Shop Windows CleanSimplified Pencil SharpenerDodging Bill CollectorsKeep from Forgetting to Mail your Wife's LetterPicture Snapping MachineSafety Device for Walking on Icy PavementsHow to Keep the Boss from Knowing you are Late for WorkHow to Tee up a Golf Ball Without Bending OverOur Special Never-Miss PutterGolf Inventions
    1875 Giovanni & Giacomo Tocci Italy, siamese twins
    1872 John Calvin Coolidge, in Plymouth, Vermont. (R) (30th US President 1923-29) Coolidge acceded to the presidency after the death in office of Warren G. Harding, just as the Harding scandals were coming to light. He restored integrity to the executive branch of the federal government while continuing the conservative pro-business policies of his predecessor.
    1870 James Moffatt, Scottish New Testament scholar. Moffatt translated theNew (1913) and Old (1924) Testaments into the colloquial English of his day. They were first published together in 1935.
    1865 Alice in Wonderland's first version, an oral story.        ^top^
         English mathematician Rev. Charles L. Dodgson ("Lewis Carroll") makes up a story, which he calls Alice's Adventures Under Ground, for his young friend Alice Pleasance Liddell and her sisters, Lorina, and Edith, during a boating outing.
    LEWIS CARROLL ONLINE:
  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
  • Alice's Adventures Under Ground
  • Complete on-line works and commentary
  • Complete Stories
  • Euclid and His Modern Rivals
  • The Hunting of the Snark
  • The Nursery "Alice"
  • Sylvie and Bruno
  • Sylvie and Bruno Concluded
  • Through the Looking Glass
  • Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
  • Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing
  • Phantasmagoria and Other Poems
  • click for portrait1855 Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass         ^top^
    [< click on image for portrait by Eakins]
          Walt Whitman's first edition of the self-published Leaves of Grass is printed, containing a dozen poems. Whitman was born in West Hills, Long Island, and raised in Brooklyn. He left school at the age of 14 to become a journeyman printer and later worked as a teacher, journalist, editor, and carpenter to support his writing. In 1855, he self-publishes Leaves of Grass, which carried his picture but not his name. He revised the book many times, constantly adding and rewriting poems.
          The second edition, in 1856, included his "Sundown Poem," later called "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," one of his most beloved pieces. Whitman sometimes took long ferry and coach rides as an excuse to talk with people, and was also fond of long walks and cultural events in Manhattan.
          In 1862, Whitman's brother was wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg, and Whitman went to care for him. He spent the rest of the war comforting both Union and Confederate soldiers. After the war, Whitman worked for several government departments until 1873, when he suffered a stroke. He spent the rest of his life in Camden, New Jersey, and continued to issue revised editions of Leaves of Grass until shortly before his death in 1892.
    1847 James Anthony Mcginnes (later: Bailey) Detroit, circus impresario (Barnum & Bailey)
    1845 Frank Montague Holl, British Social Realist, painter who died on 31 July 1888. — LINKSDesertedA Family at Prayer
    1845 Pal Szynyei Merse, Hungarian artist who died on 02 February 1920.
    1837 Charles Emile Auguste Durand “Carolus-Duran”, French painter specialized in Portraits, who died on 18 February 1917. — LINKSMarie-Anne Carolus-Duran (The artist's little girl, with dog) — N. M. PolovtsovaMargaret Anderson, Wife of the Honorable Ronald Grenville
    1826 Stephen Foster Lawrencevil, Pa, composer (Oh! Susanna, Swanee River)
    1813 Johann Baptist Reiter, Austrian artist who died on 10 January 1890. — [When he was depressed, did they refer to him as “der blaue Reiter”?]
    1807 Giuseppe Garibaldi, militar italiano, artífice de la unidad del país. — Giuseppe Garibaldi unified Italy
    1804 Nathaniel Hawthorne, author.       ^top^
          Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts. Although the infamous Salem witch trials had taken place more than 100 years earlier, the events still hung over the town and made a lasting impression on the young Hawthorne. Witchcraft figured in several of his works, including Young Goodman Brown (1835) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), in which a house is cursed by a wizard condemned by the witch trials.
          After attending Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, Hawthorne returned to Salem, where he began his career as a writer. He self-published his first book, Fanshawe (1828), but tried to destroy all copies shortly after publication. He later wrote several books of short stories, including Twice Told Tales (1837). In 1841, he tried his hand at communal living at the agricultural cooperative Brook Farm but came away highly disillusioned by the experience, which he fictionalized in his novel The Blithedale Romance (1852).
          Hawthorne married Sophia Peabody in 1842, having at last earned enough money from his writing to start a family. The two lived in a house called the Old Manse, in Concord, Massachusetts, and socialized with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Branson Alcott, father of writer Louisa May Alcott. Plagued by financial difficulties as his family grew, he took a job in 1845 at Salem's custom house, where he worked for three years. After leaving the job, he spent several months writing The Scarlet Letter, a story of adultery and betrayal in colonial America published.on 16 March 1850. It made him famous. In 1853, Hawthorne's old college friend, President Franklin Pierce, appointed him American consul to England, and the family moved to England, where they lived for three years. Hawthorne died in Plymouth, New Hampshire, in 1864.
    HAWTHORNE ONLINE:
  • The Scarlet Letter
  • Tanglewood Tales
  • Twice-Told Tales
  • The Marble Faun
  • The Blithedale Romance
  • The Celestial Railroad
  • The House of the Seven Gables
  • Complete On-Line Works.
  • Legends of the Province House
  • The Life of Franklin Pierce
  • Mosses from an Old Manse
  • A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys
  • The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair
  • Our Old Home: A Series of English Sketches
  • Passages from the American Note-Books
  • The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales
  • The Snow-Image: A Childish Miracle
  • The Great Stone Face and Other Tales from the White Mountains
  • 1804 Benno Friedrich Tormer, German artist who died on 06 February 1859.
    1802 The US Military Academy officially opens at West Point, N.Y.
    1776 US Independence:         ^top^
          After a decade of economic conflict with Great Britain, the thirteen American colonies answered King George III's flat refusal of political reform with a call for revolution. On July 4, 1776, over a year after the first volleys of the war were fired at Lexington, Massachusetts, the Second Continental Congress officially adopts the Declaration of Independence. Seven years later, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris with Britain, the United States formally became a free and independent nation.
    [picture of the original document]
    IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.
    The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,
    When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

    He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

    He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

    He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

    He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

    He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

    He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

    He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

    He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

    He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

    He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

    He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

    He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

    He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

    For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

    For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

    For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

    For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

    For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

    For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

    For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

    For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

    For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

    He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

    He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

    He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

    He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

    He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
    In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

    Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

    We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.


         In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims the independence of the United States of America from Great Britain and its king. The declaration came 442 days after the first volleys of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts and marked an ideological expansion of the conflict that would eventually encourage France's intervention on behalf of the Patriots.
          The first major American opposition to British policy came in 1765 after Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a taxation measure to raise revenues for a standing British army in America. Under the banner of "no taxation without representation," colonists convened the Stamp Act Congress in October 1765 to vocalize their opposition to the tax. With its enactment in November, most colonists called for a boycott of British goods, and some organized attacks on the customhouses and homes of tax collectors. After months of protest in the colonies, Parliament voted to repeal the Stamp Act in March 1766.
          Most colonists continued to quietly accept British rule until Parliament's enactment of the Tea Act in 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a monopoly on the American tea trade. The low tax allowed the East India Company to undercut even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny. In response, militant Patriots in Massachusetts organized the "Boston Tea Party," which saw British tea valued at some £18'000 dumped into Boston harbor.
          Parliament, outraged by the Boston Tea Party and other blatant acts of destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts, in 1774. The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America, and required colonists to quarter British troops. The colonists subsequently called the first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance to the British.
          With the other colonies watching intently, Massachusetts led the resistance to the British, forming a shadow revolutionary government and establishing militias to resist the increasing British military presence across the colony. In April 1775, Thomas Gage, the British governor of Massachusetts, ordered British troops to march to Concord, Massachusetts, where a Patriot arsenal was known to be located. On April 19, 1775, the British regulars encountered a group of American militiamen at Lexington, and the first shots of the American Revolution were fired.
          Initially, both the Americans and the British saw the conflict as a kind of civil war within the British Empire: To King George III it was a colonial rebellion, and to the Americans it was a struggle for their rights as British citizens. However, Parliament remained unwilling to negotiate with the American rebels and instead purchased German mercenaries to help the British army crush the rebellion. In response to Britain's continued opposition to reform, the Continental Congress began to pass measures abolishing British authority in the colonies.
          In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, an influential political pamphlet that convincingly argued for American independence and sold more than 500'000 copies in a few months. In the spring of 1776, support for independence swept the colonies, the Continental Congress called for states to form their own governments, and a five-man committee was assigned to draft a declaration.
          The Declaration of Independence was largely the work of Virginian Thomas Jefferson. In justifying American independence, Jefferson drew generously from the political philosophy of John Locke, an advocate of natural rights, and from the work of other English theorists. The first section features the famous lines, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The second part presents a long list of grievances that provided the rationale for rebellion.
          On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted to approve a Virginia motion calling for separation from Britain. The dramatic words of this resolution were added to the closing of the Declaration of Independence. Two days later, on July 4, the declaration was formally adopted by 12 colonies after minor revision. New York approved it on July 19. On August 2, the declaration was signed.
          The American War for Independence would last for five more years. Yet to come were the Patriot triumphs at Saratoga, the bitter winter at Valley Forge, the intervention of the French, and the final victory at Yorktown in 1781. In 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris with Britain, the United States formally became a free and independent nation.
    Georgia:
    Button Gwinnett
    Lyman Hall
    George Walton
    North Carolina:
    William Hooper
    Joseph Hewes
    John Penn
    South Carolina:
    Edward Rutledge
    Thomas Heyward, Jr.
    Thomas Lynch, Jr.
    Arthur Middleton
    Massachusetts:
    John Hancock
    Maryland:
    Samuel Chase
    William Paca
    Thomas Stone
    Charles Carroll of Carrollton
    Virginia:
    George Wythe
    Richard Henry Lee
    Thomas Jefferson
    Benjamin Harrison
    Thomas Nelson, Jr.
    Francis Lightfoot Lee
    Carter Braxton
    Pennsylvania:
    Robert Morris
    Benjamin Rush
    Benjamin Franklin
    John Morton
    George Clymer
    James Smith
    George Taylor
    James Wilson
    Geo. Ross
    Delaware:
    Caesar Rodney
    George Read
    Thomas McKean
    New York:
    William Floyd
    Philip Livingston
    Francis Lewis
    Lewis Morris
    New Jersey:
    Richard Stockton
    John Witherspoon.
    Francis Hopkinson
    John Hart
    Abraham Clark
    New Hampshire:
    Josiah Bartlett
    William Whipple
    Massachusetts:
    Samuel Adams
    John Adams
    Robert Treat Paine
    Elbridge Gerry
    Rhode Island:
    Step. Hopkins
    William Ellery
    Connecticut:
    Roger Sherman
    Samuel Huntington
    William Williams
    Oliver Wolcott
    New Hampshire:
    Matthew Thornton
    1753 Jean-Pierre-Francois Blanchard 1st balloon flights in England, US
    1715 Christian Gellert
    Saxony, poet, novelist (Fables & Tales)
    Holidays Bahamas : Queen's Birthday / Cayman Islands : Constitution Day / Hannibal Missouri : Tom Sawyer Fence painting Day / Italy : Garibaldi Day (1807) / Philippines : Philippine-American Friendship Day (1946) / Rhode Island : Providence Day (1636) / Tonga : King's Birthday / US & Possessions : Independence Day (1776) / Yugoslavia : Fighter's Day / Zambia : Unity Day -( Tuesday )

    Religious Observances Muslim-Libya : Mohammed's Ascension / RC : St Bertha, abbess / RC : St Elizabeth of Portugal, queen/widow, (opt) / San Laureano; santa Isabel de Portugal, Nuestra Señora del Refugio.

    Thoughts for the day : “The bigger the bankroll, the tighter the band around it.”
    “The bigger the bankroll, the closer to bursting the band around it.”
    “The bigger the bankroll, the bigger the bank's role.”
    "The bigger the bankroll, the louder the bang around it."
    “The bigger the bankroll, the tighter the gang around it.”
    “The bigger the bank's role, the tighter the gang around it.”
    “The smaller the bandstand, the tighter the band inside it.”
    “The louder the drum roll, the tighter you should hold on to your bankroll.”
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