1774 Bath, Science: Astronomers Caroline and William Herschel sighted, recorded , and described the Orion nebula.
1789 Philadelphia, Politics: The United States Constitution was promulgated by a meeting of nine senators and thirteen representatives constituting Congress. A mere twenty-two men made it the law of the land. Name them!
1831 Swan River (WA), Politics: In late 1828, Captain Sir James Stirling RN had been designated Lieutenant-Governor of the Swan River colony which was half the continent. (See the map below.) After the 1829 Act to provide for the government of the Colony in November 1830, Stirling was elevated to Governor and Commander-in-Chief.
1954 Boston, Medicine; The first successful kidney transplant was announced at Brigham Hospital. The operation had been done earlier. The donor and recipient were twin brothers. The recipient lived for eight more years.
2007 Tallinn, Politics: In the Estonian parliamentary election about 30,000 citizens voted electronically from home. This the world’s first general election permitting remove electronic voting. One imagines the hack attacks. We have been to Tallinn and hosted some Estonians at home.
3 March
1284 Rhuddlan, Politics: King Edward I promulgated the Statutes of Wales making it a principality under the English Crown. In 1535 Henry VIII made Wales a part of the realm of England period.
1875 Paris, Music: George Bizet’s opera ‘Carmen’ premiered with a story derived from Prosper Mérimée’s novel, which was thought too salacious for the stage. How they do roll those cigars. First Bizet struggled to find a financial backer, and then at least a dozen sopranos rejected the title role. Bizet refused to compromise and it finally appeared to a mixed reaction. However Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms and Pyotr Tchaikovsky all heard the music and admired it. Indeed!
1887 Ivy Green (Alabama), Education: Anne Sullivan began to teach the truculent six year old Helen Keller, blind and deaf since a bout of scarlet fever at nineteen months of age, using a touch teaching method. Keller’s parents had written to Alexander Graham Bell who worked with the deaf, and he recommended Sullivan. Keller went on to graduate from Radcliffe with honours in 1904, becoming thereafter a fundraiser and advocate for the disabled. (The Anti-vaxxers are now campaigning to bring back scarlet fever.)
2002 Zurich, Politics: In a referendum the Swiss voted to join the United Nations in 55% versus 45% spilt. Canton by canton the vote was 12 for and 11 against. While all major political parties favoured the move, there was considerable opposition from German- and Italian-speaking areas because it would mean involvement in world affairs. A referendum on the same question in 1986 was decisively defeated 3 to 1. It was also seen as a prelude to greater integration into the Euro and the European Community at the time.
2005 Salina (Kansas), Technology: Steve Fossett becomes the first person to fly an airplane around the world solo without any stops and without refuelling in a solar powered aircraft – a journey of 40,234 km/25,000 mi completed in 67 hours and 2 minutes. In 2007 Fossett disappeared on a flight over the Great Basin Desert in Nevada.
2 March
1836 Brazos (Texas), History: A convention of residents, including Tejanos as well as Americanos, declared Texas independent of the distant and corrupt government in Mexico City. We saw an original of the Declaration in the excellent state museum in Austin.
1877 Washington, D.C., Politics: With a minority of the popular vote Rutherford Hayes became President. The results in four states were disputed. Electoral College representatives from two other states were replaced at the last minute. Irregularities were alleged in another four states. A joint sitting of the two houses of Congress appointed a Special Commission of five Democrats, five Republicans, and five of the Justices of the Supreme Court to resolve the impasse. The selection of the members of the Commission itself was disputed. This Commission ruled by an 8-7 vote on party lines that Hayes had won by a single electoral vote from Louisiana. The loser Samuel Tilden maintained a studied calm and accepted the result and disappeared from history. If only Al Gore had followed that example. [Sigh.]
1933 New York City, Entertainment: ‘King Kong’ premiered. With its special effects it was a sensation reversed the love of Beauty and the Beast. Of course, Fay Wray’s scream helped a lot. Could that woman scream, or what! KK, however, did not get a best actor gong. Wallace Beery did. In the picture below Kong is on the Empire State bailing which had not yet had the radio mast installed.
1949 New Milford (Connecticut), Technology: The first automated street light system turned on. Until then the lamp of each light was lit by hand by turning a switch. The New Milford system was operated for the whole town by a single operator in an office. That was soon automated by a mechanical clock. It made street lighting cheaper and simpler to operate and so it spread rapidly but the lamplighter lost the job. Many worried that such street lighting would fade the curtains. Others opposed it for destroying the ancient and honourable profession of the lamplighter. These same people today go to a check-out clerk rather than scan their own goods.
1972 Cape Canaveral, Space: Pioneer 10 was launched into the void to survey Jupiter. It navigated the perils of the Asteroid Belt and meteor showers, going on another 620 million miles to send back the first close images of the gas giant. It continued out of the solar system, transmitting data that was received until 1997. It travelled a total of six billion miles at that time. It bore the brass plate shown below, designed by Carl Sagan, to introduce us to whoever is out there.
1 March
1867 Lincoln, History: Nebraska became the 37th state. Its border were slightly amended in 1882 to follow the Missouri River in the north east.
1873 Ilion (New York), Technology: Eliphalet Remington began production of a typewriter. Remington and his sons had produced firearms for the Union Army during the Civil War, and then sewing machines. In 1872 Remington purchased the patent (79,265 from Christoper Sholes) for a Type-Writer with which a skilled operator could produce text faster and clearer than a person could do in long-hand. It had the QWERTY layout of keys as does my IMAC keyboard purchased a year ago.
1921 Forty-one year old E. M. Forster embarked on a sea voyage to India. He distilled the experiences and observations of that trip into ‘A Passage to India’ (1924). No reader ever forgets Adela’s visit to the Marabar Caves.
1975 Sydney, Technology: Colour television broadcasting began in Australia when James Dibble read 7 pm news on the ABC. I probably saw it but the memory is gone. But I pine for the day when news readers read the news without editorial eyebrows, adverbs, and adjectives to let the viewer know their oracular judgements. I never did know what Dibble thought and we were both happy with that.
1977 The Bank of America began issuing VISA cards. Got mine. It had been issuing credit cards in its own name but wanted something more suited for an international clientele without the need for an account at the Bank of America.
29 February
0704 Rome, History: Per the Gregorian calendar This was the first leap day in a leap year.
1848 Neuchâtel, History: The principality of Neuchâtel declared its independence from Prussia. By matrimony, treaty, and conquest Prussia once extend from Königsberg in what is now Russia to Neuchâtel in Switzerland in a loose confederation. On a map it looked like an archipelago. Went to Neuchâtel once in pursuit of an autograph manuscript from the hand of Jean-Jacques Rousseau which I was permitted to hold in my hand.
1868 London, Politics: Benjamin Disraeli formed his first government. Is he the only British Prime Minister to write novels? Never read any myself.
1904 Washington, D.C., Politics: President Theodore Roosevelt appointed a commission to oversee the construction of a canal at the Isthmus of Panama. Completed ten years later, it cut shipping time between the East and West coasts by two-thirds, and offered a much less hazardous route than around the Cape Horn off Tierra del Fuego and the Roaring Forties.
1940 Hollywood, Entertainment: Kansas-born Hattie McDaniel won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for ‘Gone with the Wind,’ the first black to earn such an award. She edged out Olivia de Havilland, who did not take it well.
28 February
202 BC Peking, History: The four hundred years of the Han Dynasty in China began with the coronation of Liu Bang as Emperor Gaozu. During this long period of stability, China prospered.
1790 Sydney, History: Governor Phillip signed John Irving’s Warrant of Emancipation, making him the first convict to be freed. He went to Norfolk Island to work as a surgeon’s assistant. Later when he returned to Port Jackson he was awarded thirty acres of land at Parramatta.
1840 Ripon (Wisconsin), Politics: In the Little White School House the Free Soil Party was born and it later morphed into the Republican party in 1852. Three of the five signatories to the minutes of the first Free Soil meeting had been members of an Associationist Fourier community inspired by French utopian socialist Charles Fourier which had flourished in what is now Fond du Lac county at Ceresco just east of Ripon. This origin is discussed on other posts on this blog. Get clickin’ for enlightenment. By the way, the term ‘Free Soil’ referred to those who worked it, free, not slaves.
1933 Washington, D.C., Politics: President Franklin Roosevelt appointed the first woman to a cabinet position, Francis Perkins, who became and remained Secretary of Labor until 1945, playing a pivotal role in Roosevelt’s make-work programs during the Depression, and an even larger role during the war. She is one of two only cabinet members to serve throughout Roosevelt’s presidency.
1953 Cambridge, Science: James Watson and Francis Crock published the double-helix structure of DNA.
‘The Singing Masons’ (1950) by Francis Vivian and ‘Beekeeper ‘(1999) by J. Robert Janes
‘The Singing Masons’ (1950) by Francis Vivian
GoodReads meta-dat is 226 pages, rated 4.25 by 4 litizens
‘Beekeeper ‘(1999) by J. Robert Janes
GoodReads meta-data is 305 pages, rated 3.96 by 28 litizens
Verdict: Beeology galore.
In ‘The Singing Masons’ the local playboy is found at the bottom of a well. Scotland Yard dispatches Inspector Knollis to the small town of Cleverly to get to the bottom of things. (Groan.) He does.
Nobody has a good word to say about the deceased, not his fiancee, not colleagues at work, not his many conquests, not his landlord, not his cousin, not anyone. Moreover, as investigation continues it seems Playboy was up to some shenanigans of his own, burning down the property of a romantic rival, and planning to murder his fiancee as soon as they were married so he could inherit and move on. Like a good stereotype, there was no end to his perfidy.
The manners and mores are rural England of the 1950s. I expected my crush Flavia to show up at any moment on her bicycle Gladys and sort things out with her chemicals. No such luck.
This is a puzzle krimi in the manner of the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie. All the information is there for the reader to detect the villain and in due course, after repeated, and I mean repeated, interrogations the plod do detect the villain, who was obvious from page one to hardened krimiologists.
I chose to start with this, the sixth, volume in the Knollis series because I have been reading about bees in several books discussed elsewhere on this blog. There is much lore about bees, and in the end the bees are well integrated into the story throughout and decisive in the plot.
While in the literary apiary I also re-read Janes’s ‘Beekeeper.’ This is the eleventh in his series. He sustains the an atmosphere like few others. It is winter in Occupied Paris, January 1943. There is no fuel for heating. No energy for lighting. Little food. The Occupier is everywhere.
A beekeeper is found poisoned and St Cyr and Kohler, that odd couple, are assigned the case. It is dark and tangled world of black market, rapacious Naziis, rivalries among rapacious Naziis, bitter priests who have been displaced by the Occupier, the shadowy resistance, and the sheer struggle to survive.
The fact at the bottom of the mystery is that one of the evils of Naziism was the wholesale destruction of beekeeping in Russia. In rear areas, apiaries were systematically looted with the hives piled on railway cars and send to Paris, where there was a thriving market for beeswax candles (since no electricity was available any longer, and moreover churches had to have beeswaax candles). Thousands and thousands of hives, and in them came a bee virus that began to infect French bees.
The beekeeper had found this out and was about to tell all. Is that why he was poisoned? Or was it because his wife hated him for rejecting her son by another marriage? Or was it the animus of childhood friends whom he had blackmailed for years? Or the local priest who might suppose the flock would be more stable without this volatile man around? Or did the alienated step-son do it? Or was it a supremo of the black market? Or the German importing the hives? Or…. Or was the poison intended for someone else entirely?
I admit at the end I was not quite sure what the answer was, but the trip, as always in these stories was engrossing..
27 February
1827 New Orleans, Popular Culture: On this Tuesday a group of costumed and masked youths danced through the streets of the Vieux Carré accompanied by musicians. Mardi Gras remained amateurish until 1833 when a wealthy planter funded an official celebration in the city. From these seeds Tuesday grew fat.
1860 New York City, Technology: Mathew Brady photographed presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln campaigning. Brady said ‘I felt an obligation to preserve the faces of the country’s historic men and women.’
1907 Vienna, Science: Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud met for the first time at a coffee house where they ate sachertorte. Other dates are given for their first meeting, first discussion, first handshake….but the cake remains the same.
1932 Cambridge, Science: James Chadwick discovered the neutron for which he got a Nobel Prize. Later he headed the British atomic bomb project.
1990 Devonport (NZ), History: The final day of the rum ration for sailors of the Royal New Zealand Navy. Believe it or not, Ripley. The Royal Navy had ended the practice twenty years earlier in 1970.
26 February
1606 Arnhem Land, History: Seaman Willem Jansz of the Dutch East India Company landed near Weipa in the far north of Queensland to take on water. He is the first recorded European visitor to the mainland of Australia, though he thought it was continuous with New Guinea, as it once was.
1616 Rome, Religion: Pope ordered Galileo Galilei to deny helio-centrism, or else.
1919 Washington, D.C., Politics: Congress legislated to establish the Grand Canyon National Park. The original bill had been introduced in 1882. Using the executive powers of the Presidency in 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt had made the Grand Canyon a game reserve. He did the same in 1908 when he had made it a National Monument under the protection of the Federal Government. But legislation to make it a Park was repeatedly defeated in 1883, 1886, 1905, 1907, 1910, and 1911. Even today there are rumours of minerals and oil in them there canyons.
1949 Fort Worth, Technology: A B-50 Superfortress took off in the first continuous round-the-world flight with a crew of fourteen. In 94 hours it travelled 23,452 miles. It was re-fueled four times in the air by B-29 tankers in carefully planned rendezvouses, and returned to Fort Worth on 2 March. The flight tested equipment, crew endurance, planning, flight fuelling, and weather conditions. This was a Cold War exercise. It is pictured below landing back in Fort Worth.
1984 New Haven, Literature: Robert Penn Warren became the first United States poet laureate. He had moved to New England in a self-imposed exile from the South where his support for racial integration had made him a pariah. I heard him read his poetry twenty years earlier, and felt privileged for it.
25 February
1862 Philadelphia, Economy: The first United States paper money was issued. Because of its green colour it quickly became known as the greenback. Heretofore banknotes had been just that notes issued by particular banks. The Government had minted coins (hard money) and issued warrants that could be converted into gold at banks.
1904 Dublin, Literature: J. M. Synge’s ‘Riders to the Sea’ premiered. It is a one-act tragedy famed for its poetic language in which the waters give and take the lives of the fisherman and their folk.
1956 Moscow, Politics: In a secret speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, party chairman Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror.
1964 Miami Beach, Sports: At a 3-1 underdog defeated reigning heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston and did so easily. That was Cassius Clay.
1965 Ottawa, Politics: The André Laurendeau and Davidson Dunton’s Royal Commission Report committed Canada to Bilingualism and Biculturalism. It morphed into Bilingualism and Multi-culturalism in short order. It was the first time the Federal government undertook to preserve French.
