Daily history

Good morning,


Quote of the day:

"Just because someone does not love you the way you want them to doesn't mean that they do not love you with everything they have."

                                 Oscar Wilde

There will be a small change in the format today. First there will be a biography and then the "What happened today in history".

                            Catherine de Medici

Catherine was born on April 13, 1519 in Florence, Italy. Her father was Florentine ruler Lorenzo de Medici otherwise known as Lorenzo the Magnificent because of his support and fostering of the arts. In 1533 at the age of 14 she married the Duke of Orleans as part of a political arrangement as was done most of the time with the powerful families in Europe. The good Duke became the King of France as Henry II making Catherine the queen of France. Many of the French did not cotton to having and Italian as queen but she stayed anyway. She had little influence in affair of state until Henry II dies and soon thereafter her first son and also king, Francis II, dies in 1560 leaving her in control of the French government as regent for her younger son Charles IX until he became of age to take control. In 1563 Charles reached the appointed age and became a full-fledged king but Catherine continued to dominate Charles throughout his reign. Catherine saw her role as maintaining royal power at all costs. This girl was ruthless when it came to that, as ya’ll will see. She spent much time and energy trying to maintain a balance of power between the Huguenots, a Protestant group led by military leader Gaspard de Coligny, and the Catholics led by the powerful House of Guise. After the beginning of the religious wars that began in 1562, Catherine was a Roman Catholic but sided with which ever side held sway at any given time. In order to maintain a balance she included her family in her wheeling and dealing. She arranged for her daughter Elizabeth to marry the powerful Roman Catholic king of Spain Phillip II. And then she arranged for another daughter, Margaret, to marry the powerful Protestant ruler Henry of Navarre. You see what she is doing here, maintaining political and religious alliances no matter what it took. Catherine looked on with alarm at the rise in influence the Huguenots were having on her son Charles the king. Then in 1572 she did the honorable thing in having the Huguenot leader Garpard de Coligny assassinated along with an estimated 50,000 of his followers. This event went down in history as the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre, as indeed it was. In 1574 her son Charles the king dies and is succeeded by her third son Henry III. Henry III ain’t buying any of this Momma shit and tells Catherine to take a hike, that he and only he, is in command. Well, needless to say, Catherine’s influence over the French court went down the toilet. Catherine died January 5, 1589 in Blois, France at the age of 70. Catherine, like her father, was instrumental in the promotion of the arts what time she wasn’t involved in political intrigue. She added a wing to the famous Louvre Museum began construction of the Tuileries Gardens and built the chateau of Monceau. Her personal library and rare manuscripts was and are some of the most treasured in history. She was a patron of the arts in spite of that indiscretion in the St.Bartholomew’s Day thing. She was a powerful influence in the history of Europe but as with most women, don’t threaten their security or they will do something rash.

Births and deaths:

1808    US Vice President/President Andrew Johnson is born. Johnson became President of the US after the assassination of A. Lincoln. He said “I feel incompetent to do the duties that have been cast upon me.” Indeed.

1809    British Prime Minister William Gladstone is born. He said “No man becomes great or good except through many and great mistakes.” If that is the case, then I should be pretty damned great.

1814    US clergyman Edwin Chapin is born. He once said “Every action of our live strikes on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.” That is heavy, ya’ll.

1919    US writer Jim Murray is born. He said “The only thing bad about Spokane is that there is nothing to do after 10 o’clock in the morning.” I imagine that a world traveler like Jim would not be enamored by small town America.

1946    British rock singer Marianne Faithful is born. Marianne had “relationships” with Mick Jagger, Keith Richard and Brian Jones. I do not know if it was simultaneous or not. Anyway, she said “Maybe the best you can expect from a relationship gone bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.” Marianne has to be admired because of being able to have a “relationship” with the walking dead like Keith Richard. It boggles the imagination, doesn’t it?

1959    US comedienne Paula Poundstone is born. She said “I cannot have a bank account because I do not know my mother’s maiden name.” She’s funny.

1894    English writer Christine Rossetti dies. She once said “It is far better to forget and smile than to remember and be sad.” This is confusing. How can you smile at something you have forgotten?

This date in history December 17

1777    Earlier in October British General John Burgoyne had his ass handed to him by Patriot General Horatio Gates and the Continental army at the Battle of Saratoga, New York. The news of that ass-kicking reached France and our minister to France, Benjamin Franklin, on December 24. Franklin had been leaning on France to recognize the United Sates as an independent nation. The king of France, Louis XVI had been reluctant to openly recognize the United States until they had proven they were capable of holding their own against the mightiest army in the world, that being the British army, and the victory at Saratoga demonstrated that. France had secretly been sending supplies to the United States for years. But on this date, Ben Franklin prevailed and France officially recognized the United States as a free and independent nation. This, of course meant war with England . France had been smarting about the loss of the North American continent to the British during the Seven Years War and the French and Indian War and they saw this as a way of sticking it to the British in revenge. Even though there was five more years of bloody conflict in our future, there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

1862    US General Ulysses Grant in a fit of anger issued an order that bans all Jews from his “department” and that being the states of Tennessee , Kentucky and Mississippi . The reason was this. As a result of Grant’s military successes, thousands of slaves escaped which proved to be one hell of a logistics problem. One of the solutions was to have the slaves pick the cotton in abandoned fields and share in the profit once the Federal government sold off the cotton bales. The problem was that the cotton traders, mostly Jews, tried to divert the sale of the cotton from the government to the free market to themselves. They could make an enormous profit in this process. The final straw came when Grant’s father came to visit and he was accompanied by two men that had befriended Grant’s father on the train. It turned out that the two men were Jewish cotton traders that had befriended Grant’s father in the hopes of using Grant’s father as an avenue for them to get their hands of some of that cotton. Needless to say that Grant hit the damned roof when he found out the true reason the Jews had befriended his father. I would have been pretty upset my damned self. It took the President of the United States , Abraham Lincoln to order Grant to rescind the order. Grant did indeed rescind the order but his dislike of the Jews prevailed throughout the rest of his life.

1905    On this momentous day two bicycle mechanics from Dayton , Ohio name Wilbur and Orville Wright got a contraption that they had created to fly on under its own power for the first time in the history of the world on the dunes of Kitty Hawk , NC . This airplane flew for 12 seconds for a distance of 120 feet which is a little short of the wingspan of a Boeing 747. Just think on it folks, just 11 years later World War I fighter planes were flying 100 miles an hour for over an hour. There is no need for me to go into how far we have come in the aviation field since then. In the span of 100 years we have seen men on the moon and have erected a manned space station. It boggles mind.

1996    “Operation Iceman” comes to an end with the arrest of Richard Kuklinski in a truck stop on the New Jersey turnpike. A multiple killer, Kuklinski was brought down by an undercover agent named Dominick Pulitrone. It was believed that Kuklinski killed his business partner in 1980 with a shot to the head and stuffed him into a 55 gallon barrel and then froze it. He disposed of the body in 1983. He formed another partnership with two other men named George Mallibrand and Louis Matheny. They were in an illegal business and Kuklinski got nervous and decide to kill them both. He shot Matheny and poisoned Mallibrand with cyanide. The undercover agent had made friends with Kuklinski and asked Kuklinski the best way to kill someone and Kuklinski answered with cyanide. He is right. The physical evidence disappears almost immediately. It can kill with ingestion and even a spray in the face. From this the ATF was able to amass enough evidence to put Kuklinski away for life without parole.

1941    Here it is only 10 days after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor , Hawaii and the hunt is complete for a scapegoat, they found one in the Commander of the Pacific Fleet, Rear Admiral Husband Kimmel. On this date he was relieved of command. Previously, Kimmel had been a favorite of President Roosevelt and have served admirable as various battleship commanders. His damning fault was that he did not put enough credence in his intelligence sources. There were plenty of clues that an attack was imminent but chose to believe that attack was going to happen somewhere else other than Hawaii . His US army counterpart, General Walter Short was also relieved of command at the same time, they were both acknowledged scapegoats and during their court martial they were not even allowed to testify in their own behalf nor call witnesses. The court martial accused and convicted them of dereliction of duty. In February of 1941, Rear Admiral Kimmel had received a temporary rank of Admiral while overseeing a training exercise of the Pacific Fleet but he reverted back to his original rank of Rear Admiral after war had been declared on December 8. Both commanders were not given the military intelligence available to those in Washington . If they had; perhaps things would nave been different. They are those that believe US President Roosevelt allowed that attack to take place to get the Unites States people on a wartime footing. Roosevelt had stated on more than one occasion that “Unless attacked, the United States would not fight wars on foreign soil.” Well, here was an attack and sure enough, the United States did indeed fight wars on foreign soils.

Birth and deaths:

1796    Canadian writer Thomas Halliburton is born, he said “Nicknames stick to people, the more ridiculous, the more adhesive.”

1957    English writer Dorothy Sayers dies. She said “As I grow older and totter toward the tomb, I find I care less and less who goes to bed with whom."

Quotable quotes:

“Never raise your hands to your kids; it leaves your groin unprotected.” Red Buttons

Thanks for listening I can hardly wait until tomorrow