Today in History: November 2nd

Happy 237th Birthday, Correspondence Committee! (See the 1772 entry below for details)



Highlights of this day in history: President Harry Truman wins re-election in an upset; South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem killed after coup; Howard Hughes flies his 'Spruce Goose'; Game show scandal rocks early TV; Singer K.D. Lang born.

Other notable November 2nd events include:

1772 – American Revolutionary War: Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren form the first Committee of Correspondence.

1783 – In Rocky Hill, New Jersey, US General George Washington gives his "Farewell Address to the Army".

1898 – Cheerleading is started at the University of Minnesota with Johnny Campbell leading the crowd in cheering on the football team.

1920 – In the United States, KDKA of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania starts broadcasting as the first commercial radio station.

1936 – The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is established.

1960 – Penguin Books is found not guilty of obscenity in the Lady Chatterley's Lover case.

1983 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan signs a bill creating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Today in History: November 1st

Highlights of this day in history: The Stamp Act takes effect; The United States explodes the first hydrogen bomb; Sistine Chapel paintings are first shown to the public; The Algerian War of Independence begins; Walter Payton dies.

Other notable November 1st events include:

1520 – The Strait of Magellan, the passage immediately south of mainland South America, connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, is first navigated by Ferdinand Magellan during his global circumnavigation voyage.

1604 – William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello is presented for the first time, at Whitehall Palace in London.

1611 – William Shakespeare's romantic comedy The Tempest is presented for the first time, at Whitehall Palace in London.

1800 – US President John Adams becomes the first President of the United States to live in the Executive Mansion (later renamed the White House).

1870 – In the United States, the Weather Bureau (later renamed the National Weather Service) makes its first official meteorological forecast.

1894 – Nicholas II becomes the new Tsar of Russia after his father, Alexander III, dies.

1896 – A picture showing the unclad (bare) breasts of a woman appears in National Geographic magazine for the first time.

1941 – American photographer Ansel Adams takes a picture of a moonrise over the town of Hernandez, New Mexico that would become one of the most famous images in the history of photography.

1957 – The Mackinac Bridge, the world's longest suspension bridge between anchorages at the time, opens to traffic connecting Michigan's upper and lower peninsulas.

1968 – The Motion Picture Association of America's film rating system is officially introduced, originating with the ratings G, M, R, and X.

1982 – Honda becomes the first Asian automobile company to produce cars in the United States with the opening of their factory in Marysville, Ohio.

AFTER-PUB: Halloween Edition - bring your drinks and candy! BOO!!!

As Halloween Night winds down, I leave you with a tale of a Halloween night at the home of a family who treat every day as if it's Halloween. They're the Addams Family, and the episode is Halloween, Addams Style.

I hope you've enjoyed C2's Halloween Liberty Pubs and After-Pubs, and thank you for watching and posting!

The Liberty Pub - Halloween Edition - OPEN #2

Now, we're not going to let our Pumpkin King off easily here on Halloween. He gets a good roasting (literally) in Night Ghoulery.

The Liberty Pub - Halloween Edition - OPEN

We've made it! This is Halloween, so I give you This Is Halloween, the opening song from The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Connections: The Long Chain (Part 7 of 10)

The Long Chain is the title of this week's Connections episode. Last week, we followed a path in history from the assembly line to the development of the airplane.

What happened the last time an efficient cargo-carrier was developed? This week, James Burke starts with the Dutch Fluyt ships, which were remarkably similar in principle to the modern 747, and takes us to a long history of disease, war, famine and empires, to end at the last place you'd expect.

Following the video are links to further research on the major topics of this episode, with ones that reveal the ending, as always, purposefully left out.



Links:

Boeing 747
Fluyt
Hoorn
Dutch East India Company
Bank of England
Triangular trade
Edward Lloyd
Lloyd's of London
Mary Celeste
Shipworm
Tar
Pitch
Great Northern War
Turpentine
Revolutionary War
Archibald Cochrane, 9th Earl of Dundonald
Coal tar
Copper
Copper sheathing
James Watt
Cotton mill
William Murdoch
Frederick Albert Winsor
Gas Light and Coke Company
Gasometer
The Great Stink
Ammonia
Naphtha
Natural rubber
Charles Macintosh
Thomas Hancock
Spice trade
Anopheles Mosquito
Malaria
Cinchona
Quinine
Gin and tonic
William Henry Perkin
Mauveine
BASF
Hoechst AG
Agfa
Bayer
Indigo-Marsch
Eugénie de Montijo
Analgesic
Combine harvester
Rye bread
Junker
Fertilizer
Fritz Haber
Nitric acid
Sodium nitrate
Haber–Bosch process
Henri Moissan
Calcium carbide
Acetylene
Adolph Frank
Heinrich Caro
Potash
Wuppertal monorail
Wilhelm II
World War I
Oxyacetylene welding
Fritz Klatte
1939 New York World's Fair
Polymer

Today in History: October 31st

Highlights of this day in history: Martin Luther leads start of Protestant Reformation; President Lyndon B. Johnson halts U.S. bombing of North Vietnam; India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi assassinated; Magician Harry Houdini dies.

Other notable October 31st events include:

1864 – Nevada (click here for correct pronunciation) is admitted as the 36th U.S. state.

1917 – World War I: Battle of Beersheba – "last successful cavalry charge in history".

1941 – After 14 years of work, drilling is completed on Mount Rushmore.

1943 – World War II: An F4U Corsair accomplishes the first successful radar-guided interception.

1959 – Lee Harvey Oswald attempts to renounce his American citizenship at the US Embassy in Moscow, USSR.

1997 – 19-year-old British au pair Louise Woodward, convicted by a Cambridge, Massachusetts, jury of second-degree murder the day before, is sentenced to life in prison.

1999 – Roman Catholic Church and Lutheran Church leaders sign the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, ending a centuries-old doctrinal dispute over the nature of faith and salvation.

1999 – Yachtsman Jesse Martin returns to Melbourne after 11 months of circumnavigating the world, solo, non-stop and unassisted.

AFTER-PUB: Halloween Edition - bring your drinks!

Tomorrow is Halloween! C2 has been celebrating all this week, by introducing after-pub posts with a fun, scary Halloween classic!

And now, let's turn to some classical music by Modest Mussorgsky and Franz Schubert. What does this have to do with Halloween? Very little, unless you turn to Disney's original 1940 film Fantasia, which combined Ave Maria and Night on Bald Mountain in a piece title after the latter work.

It begins with the demon Chernabog, who summons restless souls from their graves on Walpurgis night...

The Liberty Pub - Halloween Edition - OPEN #2

Tomorrow is Halloween! C2 has been celebrating all this week, by introducing liberty pub posts with a fun, scary Halloween classic!

This video is a black-and-white student film from 1982, based on an original poem by the student. Since the poem mentioned Vincent Price, and the student was working for Disney at the time, some connections and arrangements were made to get Vincent Price himself to do the narration.

Whatever happened to that film student? He's doing quite well - his name is Tim Burton. The film is called Vincent.

The Liberty Pub - Halloween Edition - OPEN

Tomorrow is Halloween! C2 has been celebrating all this week, by introducing liberty pub posts with a fun, scary Halloween classic!

Besides being the night before Halloween, it's also the 71st anniversary of the classic 1938 Mercury Theatre on the Air presentation of War of the Worlds that caused panic among thousands of Americans.

Since we're presenting scary and fun Halloween classics, here's the full original radio broadcast, as it was heard on October 30, 1938. Being a radio broadcast, the video track consists of just stationary pictures, so start this up in another browser tab or window (so you can hear it while posting and reloading without interruption), and get a feel for what it must've been like 71 years ago today.

Today in History: October 30th

Highlights of this day in history: Escaped slave Nat Turner is captured and arrested; The Lamborghini is unveiled for the first time; Michael Jordan briefly comes out of retirement; Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds.

BONUS: Listen to the complete original October 30th, 1938 Mercury Theatre on the Air presentation of War of the Worlds here.

Other notable October 30th events include:

1864 – Helena, Montana is founded after four prospectors discover gold at "Last Chance Gulch".

1905 – Czar Nicholas II of Russia grants Russia's first constitution, creating a legislative assembly.

1922 – Benito Mussolini is made Prime Minister of Italy.

1944 – Anne Frank and sister Margot Frank are deported from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

1945 – Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs signs a contract for the Brooklyn Dodgers to break the baseball color barrier.

1950 – Pope Pius XII witnesses "The Miracle of the Sun" while at the Vatican.

1974 – The Rumble in the Jungle boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman takes place in Kinshasa, Zaire.

1975 – The New York Daily News runs the “Ford to City: Drop Dead” headline.

1985 – Space Shuttle Challenger lifts off for mission STS-61-A, its final successful mission.

2009 - The USS New York, an amphibious transport dock made with metal from the World Trade Center Towers, is officially commissioned.

AFTER-PUB: Halloween Edition - bring your drinks!

This coming Saturday is Halloween! C2 is celebrating all this week, by introducing after-pub posts with a fun, scary Halloween classic!

Looking back over the past Halloweens, you start to realize certain things.

It's astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness takes control...

The Liberty Pub - Halloween Edition - OPEN #2

This coming Saturday is Halloween! C2 is celebrating all this week, by introducing liberty pub posts with a fun, scary Halloween classic!

Tonight's feature, released in 1953, is the first film ever to be rated X in Great Britain, yet it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in the US. I give you Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart.

The Liberty Pub - Halloween Edition - OPEN, but Brandy might be late tonight.

This coming Saturday is Halloween! C2 is celebrating all this week, by introducing liberty pub posts with a fun, scary Halloween classic!

This video is a special request by doppelganglander.

Tonight's ingredients for horror and fun: A nightmarish traveling carnival, the offer to live out your secret fantasies, and two innocent 13-year-old boys. From the combined efforts of Walt Disney Studios and Ray Bradbury, I give you Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Today in History: October 29th

Highlights of this day in history: 'Black Tuesday' on Wall St. as the Great Depression begins; Osama bin Laden admits ordering the Sept. 11th attacks; Suez crisis heats up; McKinley assassin executed; John Glenn returns to space.

Other notable October 29th events include:

1390 – The first trial for witchcraft in Paris begins.

1467 – Battle of Brustem: Charles the Bold defeats Liege.

1618 – English adventurer, writer, and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh is beheaded for allegedly conspiring against James I of England.

1921 – The Harvard University football team loses to Centre College, ending a 25 game winning streak. This is considered one of the biggest upsets in college football.

1923 – Turkey becomes a republic following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire.

1960 – In Louisville, Kentucky, Cassius Clay (who later takes the name Muhammad Ali) wins his first professional fight.

1966 – National Organization For Women is founded.

1969 – The first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.

1994 – Francisco Martin Duran fires over two dozen shots at the White House (Duran is later convicted of trying to kill US President Bill Clinton).

2004 – In Rome, European heads of state sign the Treaty and Final Act establishing the first European Constitution.

AFTER-PUB: Halloween Edition - AN AMERICAN SASQUATCH IN LONDON

This coming Saturday is Halloween! C2 is celebrating all this week, by introducing after-pub posts with a fun, scary Halloween classic!

Every year, the Simpsons do a special Halloween episode known as the “Treehouse of Horror”. Most are classics, but one of the best is Treehouse of Horror V, where they parodied The Shining, Crime and Punishment and Soylent Green.

The Liberty Pub - Halloween Edition - NIGHTMARE ON SQUATCH STREET

This coming Saturday is Halloween! C2 is celebrating all this week, by introducing liberty pub posts with a fun, scary Halloween classic!

A mysterious older man moves in next door to a boy who is a monster movie fan. Is this mysterious new neighbor a real vampire?

Courtesy of the New Twilight Zone comes the episode called MONSTERS!, starring Ralph Bellamy.

The Liberty Pub - Halloween Edition - THE RETURN OF SQUATCH

This coming Saturday is Halloween! C2 is celebrating all this week, by introducing liberty pub posts with a fun, scary Halloween classic!

Yep - you've already guessed it by the screen shot, so we'll go right to the late Michael Jackon's music video, Thriller!

Today in History: October 28th

Highlights of this day in history: Harvard University founded; President Grover Cleveland dedicates the Statue of Liberty; Gateway Arch completed.

Other notable October 28th events include:

1538 – The first university in the New World, the Universidad Santo Tomás de Aquino, is established.

1919 – The U.S. Congress passes the Volstead Act over President Woodrow Wilson's veto, paving the way for Prohibition to begin the following January.

1936 – US President Franklin D. Roosevelt rededicates the Statue of Liberty on its 50th anniversary.

1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: Soviet Union leader Nikita Khrushchev announces that he had ordered the removal of Soviet missile bases in Cuba.

1985 – Sandinista Daniel Ortega becomes president of Nicaragua and makes peace overtures to the United States.

AFTER-PUB: Halloween Edition - bring your drinks!

This coming Saturday is Halloween! C2 is celebrating all this week, by introducing after-pub posts with a fun, scary Halloween classic!

Did you know Dave Seville collects masks? It's this unusual hobby that inspires Alvin and the Chipmunks to sing one of their big hits - Witch Doctor!