Thursday April 24, 2014

KALW

Published April 24, 2014 at 6:34 AM PDT

On This Day In …
1558 -- Mary, Queen of Scotland, married the French dauphin, Francis.
1781 --- British General William Phillips lands on the banks of the James River at City Port, Virginia. Once there, he combined forces with British General Benedict Arnold, the former American general and notorious traitor, to launch an attack on the town of Petersburg, Virginia, located about 12 miles away.

1792 --- The French national anthem, "La Marseillaise," was composed by Capt. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
1800 --- President John Adams approves legislation to appropriate $5,000 to purchase "such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress," thus establishing the Library of Congress. The first books, ordered from London, arrived in 1801 and were stored in the U.S. Capitol, the library's first home. The first library catalog, dated April 1802, listed 964 volumes and nine maps. Twelve years later, the British army invaded the city of Washington and burned the Capitol, including the then 3,000-volume Library of Congress.

1898 --- Spain declared war on the United States after rejecting America's ultimatum to withdraw from Cuba.

1901 --- Four games were scheduled to open the brand new American League baseball season. Three of them, however, were rained out. The Chicago White Stockings beat theCleveland Blues

8-2 before a paid crowd of over 10,000 fans in the only game played. The new league, nicknamed the junior circuit, was made up of teams in Buffalo, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Milwaukee and Minneapolis.

1908 --- A single tornado travels 150 miles through Louisiana

and Mississippi, leaving 143 dead in its wake. In total, 311 people lost their lives to twisters during the deadly month of April 1908 in the southeastern United States. Another 1,600 were seriously injured.

1915 --- The Ottoman Empire rounded up Armenian political and cultural leaders in Constantinople at the start of what many scholars regard as the first genocide of the 20th century, in which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians died.

1916 --- The Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret organization of Irish nationalists led by Patrick Pearse, launches the so-called Easter Rebellion, an armed uprising against British rule. Assisted by militant Irish socialists under James Connolly, Pearse and his

fellow Republicans rioted and attacked British provincial government headquarters across Dublin and seized the Irish capital's General Post Office. Following these successes, they proclaimed the independence of Ireland, which had been under the repressive thumb of the United Kingdom for centuries, and by the next morning were in control of much of the city. Later that day, however, British authorities launched a counteroffensive, and by April 29 the uprising had been crushed. Nevertheless, the Easter Rebellion is considered a significant marker on the road to establishing an independent Irish republic.

1934 --- Laurens Hammond announced news that would be favored by many churches across the United States. The news was the development of the pipe less organ -- and a granting of a U.S. patent for same. Hammond fostered many of the developments that

would make electronic keyboards so popular in modern music. The Hammond B-3 and B-5 organs, for example, became mainstays for many recording artists, while inventions in Hammond organ loud speaker development (the Hammond Leslie Tremolo speaker) produced still other important milestones that allowed small organs to emulate the big concert theater console organs.

1945 --- President Harry Truman learns the full details of the Manhattan Project, in which scientists are attempting to create the first atomic bomb. The information thrust upon Truman a momentous decision: whether or not to use the world's first weapon of mass destruction.

1954 --- Billboard magazine, the music industry trade publication, headlined a change to come about in the music biz. The headline read, “Teenagers Demand Music with a Beat -- Spur Rhythm and Blues” ... a sign of times to come. Within a year, R&B music by both black and white artists caught the public’s fancy.

1955 --- The Afro-Asian Conference--popularly known as the Bandung Conference because it was held in Bandung, Indonesia--comes to a close on this day. During the conference,

representatives from 29 "non-aligned" nations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East met to condemn colonialism, decry racism, and express their reservations about the growing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

1961 --- Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers struck out 18 batters becoming the first major-league pitcher to do so on two different occasions.
1961 --- President Kennedy accepted "sole responsibility" following Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

1961 --- Bob Dylan earned a $50 session fee for playing harmonica on Harry Belafonte's "Midnight Special." It was his recording debut.

1967 --- At a news conference in Washington, Gen. William Westmoreland, senior U.S. commander in South Vietnam, causes controversy by saying that the enemy had "gained support in the United States that gives him hope that he can win politically that which he cannot win militarily." Though he said that, "Ninety-five

percent of the people were behind the United States effort in Vietnam," he asserted that the American soldiers in Vietnam were "dismayed, and so am I, by recent unpatriotic acts at home." This criticism of the antiwar movement was not received well by many in and out of the antiwar movement, who believed it was both their right and responsibility to speak out against the war.

1974 --- David Bowie released "Diamond Dogs."
1980 --- An an ill-fated military operation to rescue the 52 American hostages held in Tehran ends with eight U.S. servicemen dead and no hostages rescued. With the Iran Hostage Crisis stretching into its sixth month and all diplomatic appeals to the Iranian government ending in failure, President Jimmy Carter ordered the military mission as a last ditch attempt to save the hostages. During the operation, three of eight helicopters failed, crippling the crucial airborne plans. The mission was then canceled at the staging area

in Iran, but during the withdrawal one of the retreating helicopters collided with one of six C-130 transport planes, killing eight soldiers and injuring five. The next day, a somber Jimmy Carter gave a press conference in which he took full responsibility for the tragedy.

1990 --- The road crew for Roger Waters discovered an unexploded World War II era bomb while constructing the set for "The Wall" concert in Potsdamer Platz, Germany.
1994 --- The world's largest lollipop, 3,011 pounds, is made in Denmark.

1996 --- The main assembly of the Palestine Liberation Organization voted to revoke clauses in its charter that called for an armed struggle to destroy Israel.