1886 Dinner jacket worn to a ball in Tuxedo Park, NY becomes known as a tuxedo. Tuxedo Park was and is an enclave of the rich on the Hudson River. Pictured is one such estate.
1903 Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union in Great Britain.
1957 U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower invited Ghanaian foreign minister to dinner at a public restaurant in Washington D.C. to apologise after he was refused service in Dover Delaware.
1970 La crise d’octobre a commencé au Québec. The Federal Government declared a state of siege and put the army on the streets of Ottawa, Quebec Cité, and Montréal.
2013 Canadian Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She wrote mostly short stories, a lot of them, and won all the literary prizes there are in Canada. The mint struck a commemorative coin on the occasion.
Category: Practice
9 October had its moments.
768 Charlemagne crowned himself King of the Franks. He went on to unite most of Western Europe for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire. He came to be called the Father of Europe because of that.
1000 Leif Ericson landed in Vinland in North America, perhaps I’Anse aux meadows in Newfoundland. Been there.
1635 Massachusetts Bay Colony expelled Roger Williams because he had opposed punishing religious dissension and confiscating Indian land. He went on to found Rhode Island as a haven for religious freedom. Ironic, isn’t it that those seeking religious freedom in the new world defined that as the freedom to punish others on religious grounds and to steal. Never been to Rhode Island.
1779 Ned Luddite led riots against spinning cotton machines in Manchester. His relatives today eschew ATMs, the Opal Card, and self-check with lame excuses. Drove through Manchester once.
1874 The General Postal Union Treaty was signed by twenty-two nations, agreeing to deliver each others’ mail. It became the Universal Postal Union. Have licked many stamps but no more.
Psst. 8 October has a past.
314 Emperor Constantine became Great by defeating his rival. Big Connie moved to Byzantium to consolidate this victory. We have been there and saw lots of images of the big guy. The city on the Bosphorus became known as Constantinople for the next two millennia, though it was never officially so named.
1840 An Hawaiian constitution was declared in Honolulu. Been there (often, but not often enough). It was done to show the British that Hawaii could govern itself and to lure investment from the United States.
1873 O’Leary’s cow got blamed for the Great Chicago Fire. Who spoke for the cow? Not Elsie. The fire burned for three days in wooden Chicago, killing at least 200 people, and it consumed Abraham Lincoln’s hand written copy of the Emancipation Proclamation which had been on display along with other Lincoln memorabilia.
1897 Franz Jospeh I named Gustav Mahler director of the Vienna Court Opera. The appointment was bold because of the toxic anti-semitism of Vienna. In fact, the position made Mahler a target for the venom.
1956 Don Larson. That is all that needs to be said to a baseball fan. The journeyman Larson reached a pinnacle that no one had done before that day and which no one else has done since. He pitched a perfect game in the World Series. It remains a unique achievement. I watched on television with my dad.
7 October has a long history.
1806 Ralph Wedgwood patented carbon paper in London. Carbon paper? We pay deference to it every time we use the CC address line in an email.
1913 The Highland park Ford factory started the first assembly line on a conveyor belt carrying the automobile chassis past work stations.
1959 The Soviet spaceship Luna transmitted the first pictures of the far side of the Moon. No doubt there are pinheads who deny the reality of either the pictures or the far side, or both.
1999 Prime Minister Jean Chrétien appointed Adrienne Clarkson Governor General of Canada. All previous GGs had political or military careers. She was a journalist. All previous GGs were white-bread. She was Chinese. I met her once at a political science conference in TO. Her husband was on a panel with me. He probably didn’t think of it that way. Snob. This posed picture came from the Canadian Nation Library web site.
2003 The Terminator became the governator: Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California. After the comic opera of the Gray Years in California I welcomed the coming of the Terminator, much to the muffled irritation of Bubbles and Curly in the outer office. I hope that they now know better.
6 October’s yesterdays
A dose of history, right here.
1781 Siege of Yorktown began in a joint Franco-American operation. This led to the final American victory over the British. It was a combined land and sea operation with a French fleet and Alexander Hamilton’s artillery.
1847 ‘Jane Eyre’ was published by Currer Bell. Huh? Yes, Charlotte Brontë used a masculine pseudonym so that snowflake he-men would not melt.
1876 American Library Association was founded in Philadelphia, a fount of learning since Benjamin Franklin set the precedent. The ALA raised and spent money on books for public libraries, and lobbied Andrew Carnegie for more.
1903 Australian High Court convened for first time in Melbourne. It required a great deal of nit-unpicking to free it from the London Privy Council.
1973 Yom Kippur War started. It brought the United States and the Soviet Union into a confrontation that derailed President Richard Nixon’s long and carefully contrived policy of Detente.
5 October in history.
1582 Gregorian calendar standardised in Catholic Europe. It’s on the wall. We have been leaping every four years since. It replaced the Julian calendar which had to be reset every ten years. For calendar fun see my previous post on the French Revolutionary Calendar. Tuesday will never seem the same again.
1789 Women from Paris marched on Versailles (been there) to demand bread. And Marie said….
1880 Alonzo Cross patented the first ball-point pen. Used (more than) one.
1947 First televised US presidential speech by Harry Truman. It was about food conservation and the Marshall Plan. He asked for meatless Tuesday and poultry-free Thursdays and one less slice of bread a day. I know we complied. It was a bipartisan appeal. Former President Herbert Hoover joined it.
1984 Mark Garneau became the first Canadian in space (since Jean Drapeau landed). Monsieur Garneau crewed on a Challenger space shuttle flight.
3 October in history.
1863 U.S. President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the fourth Thursday in November to be a national day for Thanksgiving. He was prompted by the Union victory at Gettysburg. It has remained thus since. The previous practice of Thanksgiving had been ad hoc and on various dates across jurisdictions, and not a national holiday.
1906 An international conference on telegraphy in Berlin established SOS as the signal of distress. Three dots three dashes three dots, ergo: …—… It does not stand for anything, but was chosen because it was distinctive.
1927 A trans-Atlantic telephone call between Canadian Prime minister McKenzie King and British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin occurred.
1935 Tasteless egg whites were dubbed Pavlova after Anna.
1952 The British explode an Atomic bomb on Monte Bello Island in North West Australia. Britain is still paying compensation to the aboriginal people who were there exposed to radiation.
History today! Read all about it.
1492 Spanish drove Moors out of Granada. Been there. Napoleon ordered the destruction of the Al hambra. It survived that order and that man. Seen that.
1866 J. Oosterhout patented a tin can with key opener. Eaten some sardines from such a tin.
1903 President T Roosevelt closed the post office in Indianola MI because citizens had attacked Minnie M. (Geddings) Cox (1869–1933), the post master because she was a woman, worse, a black woman. She had been appointed in 1891.
1919 Cogadh na Saoirse: Dáil and Sinn Féin outlawed. Seen the pock marks in the central Post Office.
1947 Mahatma Gandhi marched for peace in East-Bengali to reduce conflict between Muslim and Hindi. Neither of these camps were as amiable as the British.
1 October in history.
1815 The Congress of Vienna started. It brought stability to Europe for nearly a century. A precursor of the United Nations and also the European Community.
1847 Maria Mitchell became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The first woman to be inducted. She was a stargazer, a Massachusetts Quaker who taught at Vassar.
1850 The University of Sydney was founded. It preceded Cal 1868 and the LSE 1895. It followed Toronto 1827.
1867 Karl Marx published the first value of ‘Das Kapital.’ He preferred seat G7 in the Reading Room of the British Library. Sat there.
1946 A dozen major Nazi leaders were sentenced to death at Nuremberg. No comment necessary.
30 September in history.
1199 Moses Maimonides published ‘The Guide to the Perplexed’ in Córdoba. Been there but still perplexed.
1791 ‘Die Zauberflöte’ with that aria from the Queen of the Night premiered with Amadaus Mozart conducting the orchestra in Vienna. Been there and heard that.
1902 Rayon patented. Worn that but no more.
1938 The Munich Accords signed. (Been there.) Alas. See Robert Harris’s superb reconstruction reviewed elsewhere on this blog. Members of the Chamberlain family have said that the Prime Minister meant to say ‘peace for a time.’ The paper in his hand is not the Accord but a letter signed by Adolf Hitler pledging peace.
1953 Auguste and Jacques Piccard descended 3150 meters in a bathyscaph and returned. Not me.
