Louis Riel, a fugitive under Canadian law, nonetheless was sworn in as a Member of Parliament for Provencher and signed the rolls, after which he slipped out of the city.
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Ostensibly exploring the practice of law before the internet. Heck, before good highways for that matter.
Louis Riel, a fugitive under Canadian law, nonetheless was sworn in as a Member of Parliament for Provencher and signed the rolls, after which he slipped out of the city.
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Erik Weisz (Erich Weiss), better known by his stage name of Harry Houdini, was born in Budapest.
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The Third French Republic and the Nguyễn dynasty of Vietnam executed the Treaty of Saigon. The treaty granted economic and territorial concessions to France. France waived a previous war indemnity award from Vietnam in the treaty from 1862 and promised military protection against China. Vietnam was reduced to a French protectorate.
France already occupied three provinces south and east of the Mekong and had since 1867. They became the French colony of Cochinchina. The Red River, Hanoi, Haiphong and Qui Nhơn were opened to international trade. France recognized "the sovereignty of the king of Annam and his complete independence from any foreign power" (la souveraineté du roi d'Annam et son entière independence vis-à-vis de toute puissance étrangère). France understood this to mean independence from Chinese influence, although neither Vietnam nor China understood the terms in that fashion.
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Millard Fillmore, the 13th President of the United States, and the last Whig President, died at age 74.
Formally cited frequently, and perhaps unfairly, as the worst President in U.S. history, his position in that contra honorific has been firmly supplanted by Donald Trump, who stands to very likely be the last Republican President in U.S. history. Unlike his blowhard, crude fellow New Yorker, Fillmore was a personally honorable man who suffered much personal tragedy in his life. He was a lawyer by trade, and not a wealthy man.
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He lived until 1951 and passed away at age 77, writing his attorney just before his death that "This is my last game, and I'm going to strike out this time." He and his wife Marie had no children.
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On this day in 1874 supporters of Queen Emma attacked supporters of King Kalākaua in Honolulu over who would be the reigning monarch following the election for the same, which the king had won.
Marines and blue jackets from US and British warship intervened, and King Kalākaua was able to take the oath of office the following day.
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The sixth king of Hawaii reigned for only one year. The popular monarch was only 39 years old when he died of tuberculosis.
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The battlefield today is nearly untouched.
I'm a bit late to this but, um, no, that was Grant.
Roosevelt was just 13 years old at the time.
I have no doubt whatsoever that if the same thing was attempted today, Wyoming's Congressional representation would oppose it, and probably the senior elected officials in the state as well.
Contrary to the way it is sometimes recounted, the jury was not all female, but half male and half female, with six women jurors. It returned a verdict finding Mr. Howie guilty of manslaughter, which must have been included as a lessor offense in the charges. The trial convinced Downey who in turn became a champion of women's suffrage.
This memorial is not at the Albany County Courthouse, but at the downtown railroad park. Judicial proceedings in Laramie were originally held in a store at that location.
(Photo and reasearch by MKTH).
The Japanese submarine I26 shelled Estevan Point on British Columbia's Vancouver Island, but did not hit it, even after firing over 25 shells. Ironically, the effort was somewhat successful in that it was then decided to turn all of the lights off for Pacific coast lighthouses, which caused problems for coast shipping.
The I26's raid was the first time that Canadian soil had been attacked since the last of the Fenian Raids in 1871.
The I26 was the Imperial Japanese Navy's third-highest scoring submarine. In October 1944 it disappeared at sea, and the cause of its loss is not really known.
The Afrika Korps commenced attacking Tobruk with artillery and aircraft, resulting in the 11th Infantry Brigade retreating and opening up the lines.
Three German saboteurs were arrested in New York City, their mission having been betrayed.
A really radical idea that won't happen, but maybe should.
There have been really horrific floods, as we all know, in Yellowstone National Park. Roads in the northern part of the park may be closed for the rest of the summer. Here's a National Park Service item on it:
Updates
- Aerial assessments conducted Monday, June 13, by Yellowstone National Park show major damage to multiple sections of road between the North Entrance (Gardiner, Montana), Mammoth Hot Springs, Lamar Valley and Cooke City, Montana, near the Northeast Entrance.
- Many sections of road in these areas are completely gone and will require substantial time and effort to reconstruct.
- The National Park Service will make every effort to repair these roads as soon as possible; however, it is probable that road sections in northern Yellowstone will not reopen this season due to the time required for repairs.
- To prevent visitors from being stranded in the park if conditions worsen, the park in coordination with Yellowstone National Park Lodges made the decision to have all visitors move out of overnight accommodations (lodging and campgrounds) and exit the park.
- All entrances to Yellowstone National Park remain temporarily CLOSED while the park waits for flood waters to recede and can conduct evaluations on roads, bridges and wastewater treatment facilities to ensure visitor and employee safety.
- There will be no inbound visitor traffic at any of the five entrances into the park, including visitors with lodging and camping reservations, until conditions improve and park infrastructure is evaluated.
- The park’s southern loop appears to be less impacted than the northern roads and teams will assess damage to determine when opening of the southern loop is feasible. This closure will extend minimally through next weekend (June 19).
- Due to the northern loop being unavailable for visitors, the park is analyzing how many visitors can safely visit the southern loop once it’s safe to reopen. This will likely mean implementation of some type of temporary reservation system to prevent gridlock and reduce impacts on park infrastructure.
- At this time, there are no known injuries nor deaths to have occurred in the park as a result of the unprecedented flooding.
- Effective immediately, Yellowstone’s backcountry is temporarily closed while crews assist campers (five known groups in the northern range) and assess damage to backcountry campsites, trails and bridges.
- The National Park Service, surrounding counties and states of Montana and Wyoming are working with the park’s gateway communities to evaluate flooding impacts and provide immediate support to residents and visitors.
- Water levels are expected to recede today in the afternoon; however, additional flood events are possible through this weekend.
Here's an idea.
Don't rebuild the roads.
For years, there have been complaints about how overcrowded Yellowstone National Park has become. A combination of a tourist economy and high mobility, and frankly the American inability to grasp that the country has become overpopulated, had contributed to that. For years there have been suggestions that something needed to be done about that.
Maybe what is needed is. .. nothing.
Well, nothing now, so to speak.
Yellowstone was the nation's first National Park. It was created at a time when park concepts, quite frankly, were different from they are now. Created in 1872, its establishment was in fact visionary, and it did grasp in part that the nation's frontier was closing, even though the creation of the park came a fully four years prior to the Battle of Little Big Horn. There was, at the time of its creation, a sort of lamentation that the end of the Frontier was in sight, and the nation was going to become one of farms and cities.
Nobody saw cities like they exist now, however, and nobody grasped that the day would come when agricultural land would be the province of the rich, and that homesteading would go from a sort of desperate act to something that people would cite to, in the case of their ancestors, as some sort of basis for moral superiority. Things are much different today than they were then.
Indeed, in some ways, the way the park is viewed is a bit bipolar. To some, particularly those willing to really rough it, Yellowstone is a sort of giant wilderness area. To others, it's a sort of theme park.
The appreciation of the need to preserve wilderness existed then, but what that meant wasn't really understood. The park was very much wilderness at first, and some things associated with wilderness went on within it, and of course still do. Early camping parties travelled there. People fished there, and still do. Hunting was prohibited early on, which had more to do with the 19th Century decline in wildlife due to market hunting than it did anything else. This has preserved a sort of bipolarism in and of itself, as fishing is fish-hunting, just as bird hunting is fowling. There's no reason in fact that Yellowstone should have not been opened back up to hunting some time during the last quarter-century, but it is not as just as the park is wilderness to young adventurers from the National Outdoor Leadership School in Lander, and hearty back country folks of all ages, it's also a big public zoo for people from Newark or Taipei.
Since 1872, all sorts of additional parks have been created. Some are on the Yellowstone model, such as Yosemite. Others are historical sites such as Gettysburg or Ft. Laramie. All, or certainly all that I've seen, are of value.
But they don't all have the same value.
Much of Yellowstone's value is in its rugged wilderness. Some cite to the geothermal features of the park, but that's only a small portion of it. And for that reason, much of Yellowstone today would make more sense existing as a Wilderness Area under the Wilderness Act of 1964, the act that helps preserve the west in a very real way, and which western politicians, who often live lives much different than actual westerners, love to hate.
A chance exists here to bring back Yellowstone into that mold, which it was intended in part to be fro the very onset, and which many wish it was, or imagine it to be, today.
Don't rebuilt the roads.
That would in fact mean the northern part of the park would revert to wilderness, truly. And it means that many fewer people would go to the park in general. And it would hurt the tourist communities in the northern areas, and even in the southern areas, as the diminished access to the park would mean that the motorized brigade of American and International tourists wouldn't go there, as they wouldn't want to be too far from their air-conditioned vehicles.
But that's exactly what should be done.
Desert Island Discs premiered on the BBC. The show invited guests on to imagine that they were shipwrecked on a desert island, but could bring 8 records with them, then featuring the eight.
The show ran throughout the war, and has been revived from time to time. The concept remains a popular one in the imagination.
Indeed, at least for the stressed, being shipwrecked on a desert island, as long as you have food and some comfort, starts to look like a pretty good thing. . . for a while.
January 29, 1942: Iran signs treaty of alliance with Britain and USSR, which promise to depart Iran 6 months after Axis defeat.
Iran frankly didn't have much of a choice but to agree, and the Soviets would nearly have to be forced out after the war.
Persia had been long part of the "great game", along with Afghanistan, played between the United Kingdom and Russia. As it was between the two, its position was untenable during the Second World War, and it was occupied, as we've previously discussed, by both powers.
The New York Times reported, on the previous days byline, that Prime Minister Churchill was standing for a vote of confidence:
LONDON, Jan. 28 -- Debate on conduct of the war raged in Parliament today with a political fury quite equal to the fighting on the fronts. At the end of one of the longest single day's sittings that Parliament has had since the war began, there was little doubt that Prime Minister Winston Churchill would get a big majority in a vote of confidence that will close the three-day debate.
He survived the vote.
The NYT also reported that:
Hard to believe this was a concern with some people.
Blood is blood, but the "mixing of blood" to mean the mixing of "races" had been a long fear in a certain section of the United States, with no quarter of it being immune. Laws existed nearly everywhere preventing mixed marriages, although the degree to which they were enforced varied enormously.
Scientifically, it was well known and had been for a very long time that there's no difference whatsoever between the blood of various humans, not matter what their ethnicity. Indeed, the concept of "race" itself is a false one, although it's still widely believed. The genetic variance between various human populations is slight, and to the extent it's real, it's real between various populations that are grouped into "races" as well. I.e, there's a genetic variance, albeit slight, between, let's say, Irish men and Italians, and so on.
As we've discussed here before, it's widely stated, inaccurately, that World War Two brought about a phenomenal change in regard to women in the workplace, and hence society. It'd be more accurate to say that about the status of African Americans in American society.
Their place, of course, had been fought over and struggled over since the end of the Civil War. The Compromise of 1877 had caused a massive nationwide retreat in the cause of civil rights in the country, but the issue had not gone away. The creation of the Lost Cause myth, its strong growth in the early 20th Century, and increased mobility, had brought about the Great Migration in the second decade of the 20th Century. World War One saw African Americans volunteer to fight in the belief that their performance in the war would bring about a final leap to full equality, but that not only did not occur, the end of the war brought a racist reaction with the Red Summer of 1919.
Still, things were slowly changing, and the liberal administration of Frankly Roosevelt at least held the promise of the advancement of civil rights for African Americans.
African Americans had served in some numbers in the U.S. military since the Revolution. Interestingly, the Navy had been originally integrated, as we've also discussed here previously, but the Army had been segregated since large-scale recruiting of blacks first occurred during the Civil War. The Marine Corps had not admitted blacks its entire history, going into the Second World War. Given the excellent performance of black troops during World War One, it would be natural to suppose that the experiment would have been repeated during World War Two, but in fact the Army was, at least at first, more prejudiced during the Second World War than the First.
In spite of having longstanding all black combat units, prejudice from career officers, often with Southern roots, meant that the Army declined to deploy them as combat troops. For the most part, the Regular Army black units were busted up into service units during the war. African American sailors likewise were relegated to service roles on board ship, something that had been the case since the steel wall Navy replaced the wooden wall one. Blacks were allowed into the Marine Corps as the war progressed, but again in service roles. Only late in the war, when pressure from African American groups and combat necessity required it, would this start to break down in the Army.
Still, the fact that the nation went to war espousing the ideal of equality made the hypocrisy a bit too much for society to bear. Integration of the services would commence in the late 1940s and there was no going back. This was brought about, in large part, due to the ideals expressed in the Second World War.
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