1616 Captain Major Francisco Branco founded the Brazilian city Belem on the Amazon River delta. It has ever after been the portal to the vast region of the Amazon. It is much storied in Brazilian literature. Then there was Klaus Kinski. When Henry Ford set up a rubber planation in the Amazon, Belem was the base. Two books about this effort are discussed elsewhere on this blog.
1836 HMS Beagle with Charles Darwin aboard landed in Sydney, Australia. He went for a walk in the Blue Mountains where legend has it that he realised the sedimentary layers of rock not he escarpment could be read downward like a book into the past.
1895 The National Trust was founded in Britain with the purpose of preserving the best of the past.
1932 Ophelia Wyatt Caraway was elected to the U.S. Senate from Arkansas. The first woman to be so elected. She the active support of Huey Long whose national ambitions were in full flower. Caraway was the widow of the previous incumbent. She campaigned as hard as Huey always did.
1969 In Miami quarterback Joe Namath led the New York Jets to a 16-7 upset victory over the heavily favoured Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III. When the Jets were deprecated in a press conference, Namath angrily retorted that ‘We will win. I guarantee it.’ The assembled representatives of the media mocked him, mimicked him, laughed at him, and hissed their derision. Not so at the end of the game. The Jets defence stopped the most prolific scoring team of the NFL. The game was not as close as the score indicates. There the historic NFL and the upstart AFL came level in the public mind. NFL owners had refused to expand the League for fear of diminishing income, leading others to found the rival AFL.
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