On This Day in History

[Schmidt Meister]

August 1st In Music

1960 - Chubby Checker releases "The Twist," starting a dance craze that soon grips the nation.

1972 - The Eagles release "Witchy Woman."

1981 - Australian singer Rick Springfield started a two week run at No. 1 on the US singles chart with 'Jessie's Girl'. The song was at No. 1 when MTV launched on 8.1.1981 back in the day when MTV actually played music videos.

1987 - Bob Seger scored his first US No. 1 single with 'Shakedown'.

Birthdays:

1779 - Francis Scott Key is born in Carroll County, Maryland.

1942 - Jerry Garcia. American singer-songwriter and guitarist, the Grateful Dead. He was ranked 13th in Rolling Stone's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" cover story. Garcia also founded a variety of side projects, including the Saunders–Garcia Band, the Jerry Garcia Band, Old and in the Way, the Garcia/Grisman acoustic duo, Legion of Mary, and the New Riders of the Purple Sage. Born in San Francisco, California. Garcia died on 8.9.1995.

1946 - Boz Burrell. English musician, who with Bad Company scored the 1974 US No.5 single 'Can't Get Enough'). He was also a member of King Crimson. Born in Holbeach, Lincolnshire, England. Burrell died on 9.21.2006 aged 60.

1951 - Tim Bachman. Bachman-Turner Overdrive. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

1951 - Tommy Bolin. Guitarist. Joined Deep Purple in 1975, member of Zephyr and The James Gang. Born in Sioux City, Iowa. Bolin died on 12.4.1976.

1959 - Joe Elliott, vocals. Def Leppard, who had the 1987 UK No. 6 single 'Animal' and the 1987 world wide No. 1 album Hysteria 1988 and the US No. 1 single 'Love Bites'. As one of the world's best-selling music artists, Def Leppard have sold more than 100 million records worldwide. Born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 2, 1934, with the death of German President Paul von Hindenburg, Chancellor Adolf Hitler becomes absolute dictator of Germany under the title of Fuhrer, or “Leader.” The German army took an oath of allegiance to its new commander-in-chief, and the last remnants of Germany’s democratic government were dismantled to make way for Hitler’s Third Reich. The Fuhrer assured his people that the Third Reich would last for a thousand years, but Nazi Germany collapsed just 11 years later.
Adolf Hitler was born in Braunau am Inn, Austria, in 1889. As a young man he aspired to be a painter, but he received little public recognition and lived in poverty in Vienna. Of German descent, he came to detest Austria as a “patchwork nation” of various ethnic groups, and in 1913 he moved to the German city of Munich in the state of Bavaria. After a year of drifting, he found direction as a German soldier in World War I, and was decorated for his bravery on the battlefield. He was in a military hospital in 1918, recovering from a mustard gas attack that left him temporarily blind, when Germany surrendered.
He was appalled by Germany’s defeat, which he blamed on “enemies within”, chiefly German communists and Jews, and was enraged by the punitive peace settlement forced on Germany by the victorious Allies. He remained in the German army after the war, and as an intelligence agent was ordered to report on subversive activities in Munich’s political parties. It was in this capacity that he joined the tiny German Workers’ Party, made up of embittered army veterans, as the group’s seventh member. Hitler was put in charge of the party’s propaganda, and in 1920 he assumed leadership of the organization, changing its name to Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ party), which was abbreviated to Nazi.
The party’s socialist orientation was little more than a ploy to attract working-class support; in fact, Hitler was fiercely right-wing. But the economic views of the party were overshadowed by the Nazis’ fervent nationalism, which blamed Jews, communists, the Treaty of Versailles, and Germany’s ineffectual democratic government for the country’s devastated economy. In the early 1920s, the ranks of Hitler’s Bavarian-based Nazi party swelled with resentful Germans. A paramilitary organization, the Sturmabteilung (SA), was formed to protect the Nazis and intimidate their political opponents, and the party adopted the ancient symbol of the swastika as its emblem.
In November 1923, after the German government resumed the payment of war reparations to Britain and France, the Nazis launched the “Beer Hall Putsch”, an attempt at seizing the German government by force. Hitler hoped that his nationalist revolution in Bavaria would spread to the dissatisfied German army, which in turn would bring down the government in Berlin. However, the uprising was immediately suppressed, and Hitler was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison for treason.
Imprisoned in Landsberg fortress, he spent his time there dictating his autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a bitter and rambling narrative in which he sharpened his anti-Semitic and anti-Marxist beliefs and laid out his plans for Nazi conquest. In the work, published in a series of volumes, he developed his concept of the Fuhrer as an absolute dictator who would bring unity to German people and lead the “Aryan race” to world supremacy.
Political pressure from the Nazis forced the Bavarian government to commute Hitler’s sentence, and he was released after nine months. However, Hitler emerged to find his party disintegrated. An upturn in the economy further reduced popular support of the party, and for several years Hitler was forbidden to make speeches in Bavaria and elsewhere in Germany.
The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 brought a new opportunity for the Nazis to solidify their power. Hitler and his followers set about reorganizing the party as a fanatical mass movement, and won financial backing from business leaders, for whom the Nazis promised an end to labor agitation. In the 1930 election, the Nazis won six million votes, making the party the second largest in Germany. Two years later, Hitler challenged Paul von Hindenburg for the presidency, but the 84-year-old president defeated Hitler with the support of an anti-Nazi coalition.
Although the Nazis suffered a decline in votes during the November 1932 election, Hindenburg agreed to make Hitler chancellor in January 1933, hoping that Hitler could be brought to heel as a member of his cabinet. However, Hindenburg underestimated Hitler’s political audacity, and one of the new chancellor’s first acts was to exploit the burning of the Reichstag (parliament) building as a pretext for calling general elections. The police under Nazi Hermann Goering suppressed much of the party’s opposition before the election, and the Nazis won a bare majority. Shortly after, Hitler took on dictatorial power through the Enabling Acts.
Chancellor Hitler immediately set about arresting and executing political opponents, and even purged the Nazis’ own SA paramilitary organization in a successful effort to win support from the German army. With the death of President Hindenburg on August 2, 1934, Hitler united the chancellorship and presidency under the new title of Fuhrer. As the economy improved, popular support for Hitler’s regime became strong, and a cult of Fuhrer worship was propagated by Hitler’s capable propagandists.
German remilitarization and state-sanctioned anti-Semitism drew criticism from abroad, but the foreign powers failed to stem the rise of Nazi Germany. In 1938, Hitler implemented his plans for world domination with the annexation of Austria, and in 1939 Germany seized all of Czechoslovakia. Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, finally led to war with Germany and France. In the opening years of World War II, Hitler’s war machine won a series of stunning victories, conquering the great part of continental Europe. However, the tide turned in 1942 during Germany’s disastrous invasion of the USSR.
By early 1945, the British and Americans were closing in on Germany from the west, the Soviets from the east, and Hitler was holed up in a bunker under the chancellery in Berlin awaiting defeat. On April 30, with the Soviets less than a mile from his headquarters, Hitler died by suicide with Eva Braun, his mistress whom he married the night before.
Hitler left Germany devastated and at the mercy of the Allies, who divided the country and made it a major battlefield of Cold War conflict. His regime exterminated some six millions Jews and an estimated 250,000 Romani in the Holocaust, and an indeterminable number of Slavs, political dissidents, disabled persons, homosexuals, and others deemed unacceptable by the Nazi regime were systematically eliminated. The war Hitler unleashed upon Europe took even more lives, close to 20 million people killed in the USSR alone. Adolf Hitler is reviled as one of history’s greatest villains.

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On Aug 2, 1990, at about 2 a.m. local time, Iraqi forces invade Kuwait, Iraq’s tiny, oil-rich neighbor. Kuwait’s defense forces were rapidly overwhelmed, and those that were not destroyed retreated to Saudi Arabia. The emir of Kuwait, his family, and other government leaders fled to Saudi Arabia, and within hours Kuwait City had been captured and the Iraqis had established a provincial government. By annexing Kuwait, Iraq gained control of 20 percent of the world’s oil reserves and, for the first time, a substantial coastline on the Persian Gulf. The same day, the United Nations Security Council unanimously denounced the invasion and demanded Iraq’s immediate withdrawal from Kuwait. On August 6, the Security Council imposed a worldwide ban on trade with Iraq.
On August 9, Operation Desert Shield, the American defense of Saudi Arabia, began as U.S. forces raced to the Persian Gulf. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, meanwhile, built up his occupying army in Kuwait to about 300,000 troops. On November 29, the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq if it failed to withdraw by January 15, 1991. Hussein refused to withdraw his forces from Kuwait, which he had established as a province of Iraq, and some 700,000 allied troops, primarily American, gathered in the Middle East to enforce the deadline.
At 4:30 p.m. EST on January 16, 1991, Operation Desert Storm, the massive U.S.-led offensive against Iraq, began as the first fighter aircraft were launched from Saudi Arabia and off U.S. and British aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. All evening, aircraft from the U.S.-led military coalition pounded targets in and around Baghdad as the world watched the events transpire on television footage transmitted live via satellite from Iraq. Operation Desert Storm was conducted by an international coalition under the supreme command of U.S. General Norman Schwarzkopf and featured forces from 32 nations, including Britain, Egypt, France, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.
During the next six weeks, the allied force engaged in an intensive air war against Iraq’s military and civil infrastructure and encountered little effective resistance from the Iraqi air force or air defenses. Iraqi ground forces were helpless during this stage of the war, and Hussein’s only significant retaliatory measure was the launching of SCUD missile attacks against Israel and Saudi Arabia. Saddam hoped that the missile attacks would provoke Israel to enter the conflict, thus dissolving Arab support of the war. At the request of the United States, however, Israel remained out of the war.
On February 24, a massive coalition ground offensive began, and Iraq’s outdated and poorly supplied armed forces were rapidly overwhelmed. By the end of the day, the Iraqi army had effectively folded, 10,000 of its troops were held as prisoners, and a U.S. air base had been established deep inside Iraq. After less than four days, Kuwait was liberated, and the majority of Iraq’s armed forces had either surrendered, retreated to Iraq, or been destroyed.
On February 28, U.S. President George Bush declared a cease-fire, and on April 3 the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 687, specifying conditions for a formal end to the conflict. According to the resolution, Bush’s cease-fire would become official, some sanctions would be lifted, but the ban on Iraqi oil sales would continue until Iraq destroyed its weapons of mass destruction under U.N. supervision. On April 6, Iraq accepted the resolution, and on April 11 the Security Council declared it in effect. During the next decade, Saddam Hussein frequently violated the terms of the peace agreement, prompting further allied air strikes and continuing U.N. sanctions.
In the Persian Gulf War, 148 American soldiers were killed and 457 wounded. The other allied nations suffered about 100 deaths combined during Operation Desert Storm. There are no official figures for the number of Iraqi casualties, but it is believed that at least 25,000 soldiers were killed and more than 75,000 were wounded, making it one of the most one-sided military conflicts in history. It is estimated that 100,000 Iraqi civilians died from wounds or from lack of adequate water, food, and medical supplies directly attributable to the Persian Gulf War.

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On August 2, 1945, the last wartime conference of the “Big Three”, the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain, concludes after two weeks of intense and sometimes acrimonious debate. The conference failed to settle most of the important issues at hand and thus helped set the stage for the Cold War that would begin shortly after World War II came to an end.
The meeting at Potsdam was the third conference between the leaders of the Big Three nations. The Soviet Union was represented by Joseph Stalin, Britain by Winston Churchill, and the United States by President Harry S. Truman. This was Truman’s first Big Three meeting. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died in April 1945, attended the first two conferences, in Tehran in 1943 and Yalta in February 1945.
At the Potsdam meeting, the most pressing issue was the postwar fate of Germany. The Soviets wanted a unified Germany, but they also insisted that Germany be completely disarmed. Truman, along with a growing number of U.S. officials, had deep suspicions about Soviet intentions in Europe. The massive Soviet army already occupied much of Eastern Europe. A strong Germany might be the only obstacle in the way of Soviet domination of all of Europe. In the end, the Big Three agreed to divide Germany into three zones of occupation (one for each nation), and to defer discussions of German reunification until a later date. The other notable issue at Potsdam was one that was virtually unspoken. Just as he arrived for the conference, Truman was informed that the United States had successfully tested the first atomic bomb. Hoping to use the weapon as leverage with the Soviets in the postwar world, Truman casually mentioned to Stalin that America was now in possession of a weapon of monstrously destructive force. The president was disappointed when the Soviet leader merely responded that he hoped the United States would use it to bring the war with Japan to a speedy end.
The Potsdam Conference ended on a somber note. By the time it was over, Truman had become even more convinced that he had to adopt a tough policy toward the Soviets. Stalin had come to believe more strongly that the United States and Great Britain were conspiring against the Soviet Union. As for Churchill, he was not present for the closing ceremonies. His party lost in the elections in England, and he was replaced midway through the conference by the new prime minister, Clement Attlee. Potsdam was the last postwar conference of the Big Three.

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On Aug 2, 1776, members of Congress affix their signatures to an enlarged copy of the Declaration of Independence.
Fifty-six congressional delegates in total signed the document, including some who were not present at the vote approving the declaration. The delegates signed by state from North to South, beginning with Josiah Bartlett of New Hampshire and ending with George Walton of Georgia. John Dickinson of Pennsylvania and James Duane, Robert Livingston and John Jay of New York refused to sign. Carter Braxton of Virginia; Robert Morris of Pennsylvania; George Reed of Delaware; and Edward Rutledge of South Carolina opposed the document but signed in order to give the impression of a unanimous Congress. Five delegates were absent: Generals George Washington, John Sullivan, James Clinton and Christopher Gadsden and Virginia Governor Patrick Henry.
Exactly one month before the signing of the document, Congress had accepted a resolution put forward by Richard Henry Lee that stated “Resolved: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”
Congress adopted the more poetic Declaration of Independence, drafted by Thomas Jefferson, two days later, on July 4. The president of Congress, John Hancock, and its secretary, Charles Thompson, immediately signed the handwritten draft, which was dispatched to nearby printers. On July 19, Congress decided to produce a handwritten copy to bear all the delegates’ signatures. Secretary Thompson’s assistant, Philadelphia Quaker and merchant Timothy Matlack, penned the draft.
of the Declaration of Independence arrived in London eight days later, on August 10. The draft bearing the delegates’ signatures was first printed on January 18 of the following year by Baltimore printer Mary Katharine Goddard.

[Schmidt Meister]

August 2nd In Music

1968 - The Doors started a two week run at No. 1 on the US singles chart with 'Hello I Love You', the group's second US No. 1. The Doors scored 8 top 40 US hits from 67-71.

1975 - The Eagles went to No. 1 on the US singles chart with 'One Of These Nights', the group's second US No. 1 single and the first to chart in the UK where it peaked at No. 23.

1978 - Boston release their second album, Don't Look Back.

2014 - Weird Al Yankovic's Mandatory Fun goes to No. 1, giving the parody master his first chart-topping album.

Birthdays:

1937 - Garth Hudson. Canadian multi-instrumentalist and a master of the Lowrey organ. The Hawks, who then became known as The Band. The Band had the 1969 US No. 25 single 'Up On Cripple Creek’. Born in Windsor, Ontario, Canada.

1952 - Les Dudek. American guitarist, singer and songwriter. He has played guitar with Steve Miller Band, The Dudek-Finnigan-Krueger Band, Stevie Nicks, Cher, Boz Scaggs and Allman Brothers Band.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 3, 1958, the U.S. nuclear submarine Nautilus accomplishes the first undersea voyage to the geographic North Pole. The world’s first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus dived at Point Barrow, Alaska, and traveled nearly 1,000 miles under the Arctic ice cap to reach the top of the world. It then steamed on to Iceland, pioneering a new and shorter route from the Pacific to the Atlantic and Europe.
The USS Nautilus was constructed under the direction of U.S. Navy Captain Hyman G. Rickover, a brilliant Russian-born engineer who joined the U.S. atomic program in 1946. In 1947, he was put in charge of the navy’s nuclear-propulsion program and began work on an atomic submarine. Regarded as a fanatic by his detractors, Rickover succeeded in developing and delivering the world’s first nuclear submarine years ahead of schedule. In 1952, the Nautilus’ keel was laid by President Harry S. Truman, and on January 21, 1954, first lady Mamie Eisenhower broke a bottle of champagne across its bow as it was launched into the Thames River at Groton, Connecticut. Commissioned on September 30, 1954, it first ran under nuclear power on the morning of January 17, 1955.
Much larger than the diesel-electric submarines that preceded it, the Nautilus stretched 319 feet and displaced 3,180 tons. It could remain submerged for almost unlimited periods because its atomic engine needed no air and only a very small quantity of nuclear fuel. The uranium-powered nuclear reactor produced steam that drove propulsion turbines, allowing the Nautilus to travel underwater at speeds in excess of 20 knots.
In its early years of service, the USS Nautilus broke numerous submarine travel records and on July 23, 1958, departed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on “Operation Northwest Passage”, the first crossing of the North Pole by submarine. There were 116 men aboard for this historic voyage, including Commander William R. Anderson, 111 officers and crew, and four civilian scientists. The Nautilus steamed north through the Bering Strait and did not surface until it reached Point Barrow, Alaska, in the Beaufort Sea, though it did send its periscope up once off the Diomedes Islands, between Alaska and Siberia, to check for radar bearings. On August 1, the submarine left the north coast of Alaska and dove under the Arctic ice cap.
The submarine traveled at a depth of about 500 feet, and the ice cap above varied in thickness from 10 to 50 feet, with the midnight sun of the Arctic shining in varying degrees through the blue ice. At 11:15 p.m. EDT on August 3, 1958, Commander Anderson announced to his crew: “For the world, our country, and the Navy, the North Pole.” The Nautilus passed under the geographic North Pole without pausing. The submarine next surfaced in the Greenland Sea between Spitzbergen and Greenland on August 5. Two days later, it ended its historic journey at Iceland. For the command during the historic journey, President Dwight D. Eisenhower decorated Anderson with the Legion of Merit.
After a career spanning 25 years and almost 500,000 miles steamed, the Nautilus was decommissioned on March 3, 1980. Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1982, the world’s first nuclear submarine went on exhibit in 1986 as the Historic Ship Nautilus at the Submarine Force Museum in Groton, Connecticut.

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On August 3, 1492, from the Spanish port of Palos, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus sets sail in command of three ships, the Santa Maria, the Pinta and the Nina, on a journey to find a western sea route to China, India, and the fabled gold and spice islands of Asia.
On October 12, the expedition sighted land, probably Watling Island in the Bahamas, and went ashore the same day, claiming it for Spain. Later that month, Columbus sighted Cuba, which he thought was mainland China, and in December the expedition landed on Hispaniola, which Columbus thought might be Japan. He established a small colony there with 39 of his men. The explorer returned to Spain with gold, spices, and “Indian” captives in March 1493 and was received with the highest honors by the Spanish court. He was the first European to explore the Americas since the Vikings set up colonies in Greenland and Newfoundland in the 10th century.
During his lifetime, Columbus led a total of four expeditions to the New World, discovering various Caribbean islands, the Gulf of Mexico, and the South and Central American mainland, but never accomplished his original goal, a western ocean route to the great cities of Asia. Columbus died in Spain in 1506 without realizing the great scope of what he did achieve: He had discovered for Europe the New World, whose riches over the next century would help make Spain the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth.

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August 3rd In Music

1968 - The Doors started a two week run at No. 1 on the US singles chart with 'Hello I Love You', the group's second US No. 1.

1969 - Creedence Clearwater Revival released their third studio album and first US No. 1 Green River. The album featured the title track and 'Bad Moon Rising' both of which were major hits in the US.

1971 - Paul McCartney announced the formation of his new group Wings with his wife Linda and former Moody Blues guitarist and singer Denny Laine.

1974 - Bad Company's Bad Company album hits No. 1.

Birthdays:

1929 - Arthur Wood. Keyboardist for The Climax Blues Band.

1946 - John York. The Byrds, 1965 US No. 1 single 'Mr Tambourine Man.’

1949 - Morris “B.B.” Dickerson. American bassist with funk band War. Their album The World Is a Ghetto was the best-selling US album of 1973. They also scored the 1973 US No. 2 single 'Cisco Kid'. Born in Torrance, California. Died on 4.2.2021.

1951 - John Graham. Guitarist with Earth, Wind & Fire, who had the 1975 US No. 1 single 'Shining Star', and the 1981 UK No. 3 single 'Let's Groove'. The band has received 20 Grammy nominations and were the first African-American act to sell out Madison Square Garden. Born in Louisville, Kentucky.

1953 - Ian Bairnson. Guitarist for Pilot, The Alan Parsons Project. Born in Lerwick, Shetland Isles, Scotland.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 4, 1944, acting on tip from a Dutch informer, the Nazi Gestapo captures 15-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family in a sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse. The Franks had taken shelter there in 1942 out of fear of deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. They occupied the small space with another Jewish family and a single Jewish man, and were aided by Christian friends, who brought them food and supplies. Anne spent much of her time in the so-called “secret annex” working on her diary. The diary survived the war, overlooked by the Gestapo that discovered the hiding place, but Anne and nearly all of the others perished in the Nazi death camps.
Annelies Marie Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on June 12, 1929. She was the second daughter of Otto Frank and Edith Frank-Hollander, both of Jewish families that had lived in Germany for centuries. With the rise of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in 1933, Otto moved his family to Amsterdam to escape the escalating Nazi persecution of Jews. In Holland, he ran a successful spice and jam business. Anne attended a Montessori school with other middle-class Dutch children, but with the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 she was forced to transfer to a Jewish school. In 1942, Otto began arranging a hiding place in an annex of his warehouse on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam.
On her 13th birthday in 1942, Anne began a diary relating her everyday experiences, her relationship with her family and friends, and observations about the increasingly dangerous world around her. Less than a month later, Anne’s older sister, Margot, received a call-up notice to report to a Nazi “work camp.” Fearing deportation to a Nazi concentration camp, the Frank family took shelter in the secret annex the next day. One week later, they were joined by Otto Frank’s business partner and his family. In November, a Jewish dentist, the eighth occupant of the hiding place, joined the group.
For two years, Anne kept a diary about her life in hiding that is marked with poignancy, humor, and insight. The entrance to the secret annex was hidden by a hinged bookcase, and former employees of Otto and other Dutch friends delivered them food and supplies procured at high risk. Anne and the others lived in rooms with blacked-out windows, and never flushed the toilet during the day out of fear that their presence would be detected. In June 1944, Anne’s spirits were raised by the Allied landings at Normandy, and she was hopeful that the long-awaited liberation of Holland would soon begin.
On August 1, 1944, Anne made her last entry in her diary. Three days later, 25 months of seclusion ended with the arrival of the Nazi Gestapo. Anne and the others had been given away by an unknown informer, and they were arrested along with two of the Christians who had helped shelter them.
They were sent to a concentration camp in Holland, and in September Anne and most of the others were shipped to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In the fall of 1944, with the Soviet liberation of Poland underway, Anne was moved with her sister Margot to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Suffering under the deplorable conditions of the camp, the two sisters caught typhus and died in February 1945. The camp was liberated by the British less than two months later.
Otto Frank was the only one of the 10 to survive the Nazi death camps. After the war, he returned to Amsterdam via Russia, and was reunited with Miep Gies, one of his former employees who had helped shelter him. She handed him Anne’s diary, which she had found undisturbed after the Nazi raid.
In 1947, Anne’s diary was published by Otto in its original Dutch. An instant best-seller and eventually translated into more than 70 languages, The Diary of Anne Frank has served as a literary testament to the nearly six million Jews, including Anne herself, who were silenced in the Holocaust.
The Frank family’s hideaway at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam opened as a museum in 1960. A new English translation of Anne’s diary in 1995 restored material that had been edited out of the original version, making the work nearly a third longer.

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On August 4, 1914, as World War I erupts in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson formally proclaims the neutrality of the United States, a position that a vast majority of Americans favored, on August 4, 1914.
Wilson’s initial hope that America could be “impartial in thought as well as in action” was soon compromised by Germany’s attempted quarantine of the British Isles. Britain was one of America’s closest trading partners, and tension arose between the United States and Germany when several U.S. ships traveling to Britain were damaged or sunk by German mines.
In February 1915, Germany announced unrestricted warfare against all ships, neutral or otherwise, that entered the war zone around Britain. One month later, Germany announced that a German cruiser had sunk the William P. Frye, a private American vessel that was transporting grain to England when it disappeared. President Wilson was outraged, but the German government apologized and called the attack an unfortunate mistake.
In early May 1915, several New York newspapers published a warning by the German embassy in Washington that Americans traveling on British or Allied ships in war zones did so at their own risk. The announcement was placed on the same page as an advertisement for the imminent sailing of the British-owned Lusitania ocean liner from New York to Liverpool. On May 7, the Lusitania was torpedoed without warning by a German submarine just off the coast of Ireland. Of the nearly 2,000 passengers, 1,201 were killed, including 128 Americans.
It was revealed that the Lusitania was carrying about 173 tons of war munitions for Britain, which the Germans cited as further justification for the attack. The United States eventually sent three notes to Berlin protesting the action, and Germany apologized and pledged to end unrestricted submarine warfare. In November, however, a U-boat sunk an Italian liner without warning, killing 272 people, including 27 Americans. Public opinion in the United States began to turn irrevocably against Germany.
In late March, Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships, and on April 2, President Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany. On April 4, the Senate voted 82 to six to declare war against Germany. Two days later, the House of Representatives endorsed the declaration by a vote of 373 to 50, and America formally entered World War I.
On June 26, the first 14,000 U.S. infantry troops landed in France to begin training for combat. After four years of bloody stalemate along the Western Front, the entrance of America’s well-supplied forces into the conflict was a major turning point in the war. By the time the war finally ended on November 11, 1918, more than 2 million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of these men had lost their lives.

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August 4th In Music

1966 - The Troggs were at No. 1 on the UK singles chart with 'With A Girl Like You', the group's only UK No. 1 single.

1967 - Pink Floyd released their debut album, The Piper At the Gates of Dawn, on which most songs were penned by Syd Barrett. In subsequent years, the record has been recognized as one of the seminal psychedelic rock albums of the 1960s.

Birthdays:

1940 - Larry Knechtel. Keyboardist/multi-instrumentalist for Bread. Born in Bell, California.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 5, 1858, after several unsuccessful attempts, the first telegraph line across the Atlantic Ocean is completed, a feat accomplished largely through the efforts of American merchant Cyrus West Field.
The telegraph was first developed by Samuel F. B. Morse, an artist-turned-inventor who conceived of the idea of the electric telegraph in 1832. Several European inventors had proposed such a device, but Morse worked independently and by the mid 1830s had built a working telegraph instrument. In the late 1830s, he perfected Morse Code, a set of signals that could represent language in telegraph messages. In May 1844, Morse inaugurated the world’s first commercial telegraph line with the message “What hath God wrought,” sent from the U.S. Capitol to a railroad station in Baltimore. Within a decade, more than 20,000 miles of telegraph cable crisscrossed the country. The rapid communication it made possible greatly aided American expansion, making railroad travel safer as it provided a boost to business conducted across the great distances of a growing United States.
In 1854, Cyrus West Field conceived the idea of the telegraph cable and secured a charter to lay a well-insulated line across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Obtaining the aid of British and American naval ships, he made four unsuccessful attempts, beginning in 1857. In July 1858, four British and American vessels, the Agamemnon, the Valorous, the Niagara, and the Gorgon, met in mid-ocean for the fifth attempt. On July 29, the Niagara and the Gorgon, with their load of cable, departed for Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, while the Agamemnon and the Valorous embarked for Valentia, Ireland. By August 5, the cable had been successfully laid, stretching nearly 2,000 miles across the Atlantic at a depth often of more than two miles. On August 16, President James Buchanan and Queen Victoria exchanged formal introductory and complimentary messages. Unfortunately, the cable proved weak and the current insufficient and by the beginning of September had ceased functioning.
Field later raised new funds and made new arrangements. In 1866, the British ship Great Eastern succeeded in laying the first permanent telegraph line across the Atlantic Ocean. Cyrus West Field was the object of much praise on both sides of the Atlantic for his persistence in accomplishing what many thought to be an impossible undertaking. He later promoted other oceanic cables, including telegraph lines that stretched from Hawaii to Asia and Australia.

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On August 5, 1944, Polish insurgents liberate a German forced-labor camp in Warsaw, freeing 348 Jewish prisoners, who join in a general uprising against the German occupiers of the city.
As the Red Army advanced on Warsaw in July, Polish patriots, still loyal to their government-in-exile back in London, prepared to overthrow their German occupiers. On July 29, the Polish Home Army (underground), the People’s Army (a communist guerilla movement), and armed civilians took back two-thirds of Warsaw from the Germans. On August 4, the Germans counterattacked, mowing down Polish civilians with machine-gun fire. By August 5, more than 15,000 Poles were dead. The Polish command cried to the Allies for help. Churchill telegraphed Stalin, informing him that the British intended to drop ammunition and other supplies into the southwest quarter of Warsaw to aid the insurgents. The prime minister asked Stalin to aid in the insurgents’ cause. Stalin balked, claiming the insurgency was too insignificant to waste time with.
Britain succeeded to getting some aid to the Polish patriots, but the Germans also succeeded-in dropping incendiary bombs. The Poles fought on, and on August 5 they freed Jewish forced laborers who then joined in the battle, some of whom formed a special platoon dedicated solely to repairing captured German tanks for use in the struggle.
The Poles would battle on for weeks against German reinforcements, and without Soviet help, as Joseph Stalin had his own plans for Poland.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 5, 1861, President Lincoln imposes the first federal income tax by signing the Revenue Act. Strapped for cash with which to pursue the Civil War, Lincoln and Congress agreed to impose a 3 percent tax on annual incomes over $800.
As early as March 1861, Lincoln had begun to take stock of the federal government’s ability to wage war against the South. He sent letters to cabinet members Edward Bates, Gideon Welles and Salmon Chase requesting their opinions as to whether or not the president had the constitutional authority to “collect [such] duties.” According to documents housed and interpreted by the Library of Congress, Lincoln was particularly concerned about maintaining federal authority over collecting revenue from ports along the southeastern seaboard, which he worried, might fall under the control of the Confederacy.
The Revenue Act’s language was broadly written to define income as gain “derived from any kind of property, or from any professional trade, employment, or vocation carried on in the United States or elsewhere or from any source whatever.” According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the comparable minimum taxable income in 2003, after adjustments for inflation, would have been approximately $16,000.
Congress repealed Lincoln’s tax law in 1871, but in 1909 passed the 16th Amendment, which set in place the federal income-tax system used today. Congress ratified the 16th Amendment in 1913.

 

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 5, 1914, the world’s first electric traffic signal is put into place on the corner of Euclid Avenue and East 105th Street in Cleveland, Ohio.
In the earliest days of the automobile, navigating America’s roads was a chaotic experience, with pedestrians, bicycles, horses and streetcars all competing with motor vehicles for right of way. The problem was alleviated somewhat with the gradual disappearance of horse-drawn carriages, but even before World War I it had become clear that a system of regulations was necessary to keep traffic moving and reduce the number of accidents on the roads. As Christopher Finch writes in his “Highways to Heaven: The AUTO Biography of America” (1992), the first traffic island was put into use in San Francisco, California in 1907; left-hand drive became standard in American cars in 1908; the first center painted dividing line appeared in 1911, in Michigan; and the first “No Left Turn” sign would debut in Buffalo, New York, in 1916.
Various competing claims exist as to who was responsible for the world’s first traffic signal. A device installed in London in 1868 featured two semaphore arms that extended horizontally to signal “stop” and at a 45-degree angle to signal “caution.” In 1912, a Salt Lake City, Utah, police officer named Lester Wire mounted a handmade wooden box with colored red and green lights on a pole, with the wires attached to overhead trolley and light wires. Most prominently, the inventor Garrett Morgan has been given credit for having invented the traffic signal based on his T-shaped design, patented in 1923 and later reportedly sold to General Electric.
Despite Morgan’s greater visibility, the system installed in Cleveland on August 5, 1914, is widely regarded as the first electric traffic signal. Based on a design by James Hoge, who received U.S. patent 1,251,666 for his “Municipal Traffic Control System” in 1918, it consisted of four pairs of red and green lights that served as stop-go indicators, each mounted on a corner post. Wired to a manually operated switch inside a control booth, the system was configured so that conflicting signals were impossible. According to an article in The Motorist, published by the Cleveland Automobile Club in August 1914: “This system is, perhaps, destined to revolutionize the handling of traffic in congested city streets and should be seriously considered by traffic committees for general adoption.”

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 5, 1963, representatives of the United States, the Soviet Union and Great Britain sign the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited the testing of nuclear weapons in outer space, underwater, or in the atmosphere. The treaty was hailed as an important first step toward the control of nuclear weapons.
Discussions between the United States and the Soviet Union concerning a ban on nuclear testing began in the mid-1950s. Officials from both nations came to believe that the nuclear arms race was reaching a dangerous level. In addition, public protest against the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons was gaining strength. Nevertheless, talks between the two nations (later joined by Great Britain) dragged on for years, usually collapsing when the issue of verification was raised. The Americans and British wanted on-site inspections, something the Soviets vehemently opposed. In 1960, the three sides seemed close to an agreement, but the downing of an American spy plane over the Soviet Union in May brought negotiations to an end.
The Cuban Missile Crisis provided a major impetus for reinvigorating the talks in October 1962. The Soviets attempted to install nuclear-capable missiles in Cuba, bringing the Soviet Union and the United States to the brink of a nuclear war. Cooler heads prevailed and the crisis passed, but the other possible scenarios were not lost on U.S. and Russian officials. In June 1963, the test ban negotiations resumed, with compromises from all sides. On August 5, British, American, and Russian representatives signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. France and China were asked to join the agreement but refused.
The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was a small but significant step toward the control of nuclear weapons. In the years to come, discussions between the United States and the Soviet Union grew to include limits on many nuclear weapons and the elimination of others.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 5, 1914, the German army launches its assault on the city of Liege in Belgium, violating the latter country’s neutrality and beginning the first battle of World War I.
By August 4, the German 1st, 2nd and 3rd Armies, some 34 divisions of men, were in the process of aligning themselves on the right wing of the German lines, poised to move into Belgium. In total, seven German armies, with a total of 1.5 million soldiers, were being assembled along the Belgian and French frontiers, ready to put the long-held Schlieffen Plan, a sweeping advance through Belgium into France envisioned by former German Chief of Staff Alfred von Schlieffen, into practice. The 2nd Army, commanded by Field Marshal Karl von Bulow, was charged with taking the city of Liege, located at the gateway into Belgium from Germany. Built on a steep 500-foot slope rising up from the Meuse River, some 200 yards wide, and defended by 12 heavily armed forts, six on either side of the river, stretching along a 30-mile circumference, Liege was considered by many to be the most heavily fortified spot in Europe.
Bulow’s 2nd Army, numbering some 320,000 men, began its attack on Liege and its 35,000 garrison troops on August 5. Six brigades, commanded by General Otto von Emmich, were detached from the 2nd Army to form a special “Army of the Meuse” that would open the way for the rest of its comrades through Liege. Confident of an easy victory with little significant Belgian resistance, the Germans assumed Emmich’s men could topple Liege while the rest of the German troops were still assembling. In fact, the Belgians put up a valiant defense from the first moment, a struggle led by their sovereign, King Albert, who had earlier urged his subjects to fight this threat to their neutrality and independence at all costs. By the end of the day on August 5, all of Liege’s 12 fortresses remained in Belgian hands.
Liege eventually fell to the Germans on August 15, but only after they had brought up the most powerful land weapons in their arsenal, the enormous siege cannons. One type of cannon, built by the Austrian munitions firm Skoda, had a barrel measuring 12-inches (305mm); the other, manufactured by Krupps in Essen, Germany, was even more massive at 16.5 inches (420mm). Until that point, the largest guns had measured 13.5 inches and were used by the British navy; the largest on land had only measured 11 inches. The heavy shelling of Liege began on August 12; on August 15, after taking 11 of Liege’s 12 forts and exploding the walls of the 12th , Fort Loncin, with a shell, Emmich and his comrade Erich Ludendorff entered Loncin to find Liege’s commander, General Gerard Mathieu Leman, alive but unconscious. Taken prisoner by the Germans, he later wrote to King Albert from Germany, “I would gladly have given my life, but Death would not have me.” For their parts, Emmich and Ludendorff were awarded Germany’s highest military medal, the Pour la Merite cross, for their capture of Liege.
The main German advance through Belgium, towards France, began three days later, on August 18. Fearful of civilian resistance, especially from snipers, or franc-tireurs, shooting at them from hidden positions in trees and bushes, German troops from the first day in Belgium took a hard line against the native population. As early as August 5, the Germans had begun not only the shooting of ordinary civilians but the deliberate execution of Belgian priests, whom German propaganda at home insisted were encouraging franc-tireur activity. “Our advance in Belgium is certainly brutal,” wrote German Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke to his Austrian counterpart, Conrad von Hotzendorff, on August 5. “But we are fighting for our lives and all who get in the way must take the consequences.” In total, German troops killed 5,521 civilians in Belgium and 896 in France, earning Germany the full measure of Belgian hatred and damning it in the eyes of many foreign observers. The steadfast Belgian resistance, meanwhile, at Liege and elsewhere during the German advance, would earn the small country and its valiant king the world’s respect, and provide a shining example, and a worthy cause, to the other Allied nations then entering what would become Europe’s most devastating conflict.

[Schmidt Meister]

August 5th In Music

Birthdays:

1947 - Gregory Leskiw. Guitarist from Canadian rock band Guess Who who had the 1970 US No. 1 single 'American Woman'. Leskiw operated Vox Pop Studios in Fort Garry, a popular recording studio for local Winnipeg Groups such as Crash Test Dummies. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 6, 1945, the United States becomes the first and only nation to use atomic weaponry during wartime when it drops an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people are killed as a direct result of the blast, and another 35,000 are injured. At least another 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout.
Though the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan marked the end of World War II, many historians argue that it also ignited the Cold War.
Since 1940, the United States had been working on developing an atomic weapon, after having been warned by Albert Einstein that Nazi Germany was already conducting research into nuclear weapons. By the time the United States conducted the first successful test (an atomic bomb was exploded in the desert in New Mexico in July 1945), Germany had already been defeated. The war against Japan in the Pacific, however, continued to rage. President Harry S. Truman, warned by some of his advisers that any attempt to invade Japan would result in horrific American casualties, ordered that the new weapon be used to bring the war to a speedy end.
On August 6, 1945, the American bomber Enola Gay dropped a five-ton bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. A blast equivalent to the power of 15,000 tons of TNT reduced four square miles of the city to ruins and immediately killed 80,000 people. Tens of thousands more died in the following weeks from wounds and radiation poisoning. Three days later, another bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, killing nearly 40,000 more people. A few days later, Japan announced its surrender.
In the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a number of historians have suggested that the weapons had a two-pronged objective. First, of course, was to bring the war with Japan to a speedy end and spare American lives. It has been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union.
By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between U.S. President Harry S. Truman, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of his advisers hoped that the U.S. atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War.
If U.S. officials truly believed that they could use their atomic monopoly for diplomatic advantage, they had little time to put their plan into action. By 1949, the Soviets had developed their own atomic bomb and the nuclear arms race began.
Soon after arriving at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, U.S. President Harry S. Truman received word that the scientists of the Manhattan Project had successfully detonated the world’s first nuclear device in a remote corner of the New Mexico desert.
On July 24, eight days after the Trinity test, Truman approached Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, who along with Truman and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (soon to be succeeded by Clement Attlee) made up the “Big Three” Allied leaders gathered at Potsdam to determine the post-World War II future of Germany.
According to Truman, he “casually mentioned” to Stalin that the United States had “a new weapon of unusual destructive force,” but Stalin didn’t seem especially interested. “All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese,’” Truman later wrote in his memoir, Year of Decisions.
For Truman, news of the successful Trinity test set up a momentous choice: whether or not to deploy the world’s first weapon of mass destruction. But it also came as a relief, as it meant the United States wouldn’t have to rely on the increasingly adversarial Soviet Union to enter World War II against Japan.
Truman never mentioned the words “atomic” or “nuclear” to Stalin, and the assumption on the U.S. side was that the Soviet premier didn’t know the exact nature of the new weapon. In fact, while Truman himself had first learned of the top-secret U.S. program to develop atomic weapons just three months earlier, after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death, Soviet intelligence had begun receiving reports about the project as early as September 1941.
While Stalin didn’t take the atomic threat as seriously during wartime as some of his spies did—he had other problems on his hands, thanks to the German onslaught and occupation—Truman’s words at Potsdam made more of an impact than the president realized.
“We now know that Stalin immediately went to his subordinates and said, we need to get Kurchatov working faster on this,” says Gregg Herken, emeritus professor of U.S. diplomatic history at the University of California and the author of The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War and Brotherhood of the Bomb. Igor Kurchatov was the nuclear physicist who headed up the Soviet atomic bomb project, the Soviet equivalent, in other words, of Manhattan Project mastermind J. Robert Oppenheimer.
On August 6, 1945, just days after the Potsdam Conference ended, the U.S. bomber Enola Gay dropped the uranium bomb known as “Little Boy” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Despite its devastating effects, Japan didn’t offer unconditional surrender right away, as the United States had hoped. Then on August 8, Soviet forces invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria, violating an earlier non-aggression pact signed with Japan.
Herken argues that the Soviet invasion may have had at least as great an effect on Japanese morale as the first atomic bomb. “The last hope for the Japanese government, the peace faction, was that the Soviet Union might actually agree to negotiate a peace with the United States as a neutral party,” he explains. “But once the Soviets invaded Manchuria, it was clear that was not going to happen.”
On August 9, U.S. forces dropped “Fat Man,” a plutonium bomb, on Nagasaki. Together, the two bombs dropped in Japan would kill more than 300,000 people, including those who died instantly and those who perished from radiation and other lingering effects of the explosions.
Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender via radio address on August 15, bringing World War II to a close. In the peace negotiations at Yalta, as at Potsdam, the ideological gulf between the Soviet Union and its Western allies solidified, particularly when it came to the fate of Eastern Europe.
Even today, historians continue to disagree over whether or not the Truman administration made the decision to drop the atomic bomb for political reasons, namely, to intimidate the Soviet Union, rather than strictly military ones.
“The bomb was so top secret that there were no formal meetings about it, there was no official discussion about what to do, there wasn't the kind of decision-making process that we have with most kinds of policy,” says Campbell Craig, professor of international relations in the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University and co-author of The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War (with Sergey Radchenko). “So a lot of our opinions about what really drove the United States to drop the bomb is guesswork.”
Whatever the U.S. intention had been at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin certainly saw U.S. possession of the atomic bomb as a direct threat to the Soviet Union and its place in the post-war world, and he was determined to level the playing field. Meanwhile, thanks to atomic espionage, Soviet scientists were well on their way to developing their own bomb.
Some members of Truman’s administration would argue in favor of cooperation with the Soviets, seeing it as the only way to avoid a nuclear arms race. But an opposing view, articulated by State Department official George Kennan in his famous “Long Telegram” in early 1946, would prove far more influential, inspiring the Truman Doctrine and the “containment” policy toward Soviet and communist expansionism around the globe.
Later in 1946, during the first meeting of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC), the United States presented the Baruch Plan, which called for the Soviets to share every detail of their atomic energy program, including opening their facilities to international inspectors, before the United States would share anything with them. Surprising no one, the Soviets rejected these terms.
“The Baruch Plan would have required the Soviets to basically surrender their sovereignty for them to have any share in atomic energy,” Herken says. “Stalin was the last person to want to do that.”
By 1949, all thoughts of cooperation were off the table: On August 29, the Soviets successfully tested their own nuclear device, producing a 20-kiloton blast roughly equal to the Trinity test. The nuclear arms race that would define the rest of the Cold War was on, as the two superpowers battled to see who could amass the most weapons of mass destruction, and figure out how to deploy them most effectively.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 6, 1787, in Philadelphia, delegates to the Constitutional Convention begin debating the first complete draft of the proposed Constitution of the United States.
The Articles of Confederation, ratified several months before the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781, provided for a loose confederation of U.S. states, which were sovereign in most of their affairs. On paper, Congress, the central authority, had the power to govern foreign affairs, conduct war, and regulate currency, but in practice these powers were sharply limited because Congress was given no authority to enforce its requests to the states for money or troops. By 1786, it was apparent that the Union would soon break up if the Articles of Confederation were not amended or replaced. Five states met in Annapolis, Maryland, to discuss the issue, and all the states were invited to send delegates to a new constitutional convention to be held in Philadelphia.
On May 25, 1787, delegates representing every state except Rhode Island convened at Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania State House for the Constitutional Convention. The building, which is now known as Independence Hall, had earlier seen the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and the signing of the Articles of Confederation. The assembly immediately discarded the idea of amending the Articles of Confederation and set about drawing up a new scheme of government. Revolutionary War hero George Washington, a delegate from Virginia, was elected convention president.
During an intensive debate, the delegates devised a brilliant federal system characterized by an intricate system of checks and balances. The convention was divided over the issue of state representation in Congress, as more-populated states sought proportional legislation, and smaller states wanted equal representation. The problem was resolved by the Connecticut Compromise, which proposed a bicameral legislature with proportional representation in the lower house (House of Representatives) and equal representation of the states in the upper house (Senate).
On September 17, 1787, the Constitution of the United States of America was signed by 38 of the 41 delegates present at the conclusion of the convention. As dictated by Article VII, the document would not become binding until it was ratified by nine of the 13 states.
Beginning on December 7, five states, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, and Connecticut, ratified it in quick succession. However, other states, especially Massachusetts, opposed the document, as it failed to reserve undelegated powers to the states and lacked constitutional protection of basic political rights, such as freedom of speech, religion, and the press. In February 1788, a compromise was reached under which Massachusetts and other states would agree to ratify the document with the assurance that amendments would be immediately proposed. The Constitution was thus narrowly ratified in Massachusetts, followed by Maryland and South Carolina. On June 21, 1788, New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the document, and it was subsequently agreed that government under the U.S. Constitution would begin on March 4, 1789. In June, Virginia ratified the Constitution, followed by New York in July.
On September 25, 1789, the first Congress of the United States adopted 12 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and sent them to the states for ratification. Ten of these amendments were ratified in 1791. In November 1789, North Carolina became the 12th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Rhode Island, which opposed federal control of currency and was critical of compromise on the issue of slavery, resisted ratifying the Constitution until the U.S. government threatened to sever commercial relations with the state. On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island voted by two votes to ratify the document, and the last of the original 13 colonies joined the United States. Today, the U.S. Constitution is the oldest written constitution in operation in the world.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 6, 1890, at Auburn Prison in New York, the first execution by electrocution in history is carried out against William Kemmler, who had been convicted of murdering his lover, Matilda Ziegler, with an axe.
Electrocution as a humane means of execution was first suggested in 1881 by Dr. Albert Southwick, a dentist. Southwick had witnessed an elderly drunkard “painlessly” killed after touching the terminals of an electrical generator in Buffalo, New York. In the prevalent form of execution at the time, death by hanging, the condemned were known to hang by their broken necks for up to 30 minutes before succumbing to asphyxiation.
In 1889, New York’s Electrical Execution Law, the first of its kind in the world, went into effect, and Edwin R. Davis, the Auburn Prison electrician, was commissioned to design an electric chair. Closely resembling the modern device, Davis’ chair was fitted with two electrodes, which were composed of metal disks held together with rubber and covered with a damp sponge. The electrodes were to be applied to the criminal’s head and back.
On August 6, 1890, William Kemmler became the first person to be sent to the chair. After he was strapped in, a charge of approximately 700 volts was delivered for only 17 seconds before the current failed. Although witnesses reported smelling burnt clothing and charred flesh, Kemmler was far from dead, and a second shock was prepared. The second charge was 1,030 volts and applied for about two minutes, whereupon smoke was observed coming from the head of Kemmler, who was clearly deceased. An autopsy showed that the electrode attached to his back had burned through to the spine.
Dr. Southwick applauded Kemmler’s execution with the declaration, “We live in a higher civilization from this day on,” while American inventor George Westinghouse, an innovator of the use of electricity, remarked, “They would have done better with an axe.”

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, guaranteeing African Americans the right to vote. The bill made it illegal to impose restrictions on federal, state and local elections that were designed to deny the vote to blacks.
Johnson assumed the presidency in November 1963 upon the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In the presidential race of 1964, Johnson was officially elected in a landslide victory and used this mandate to push for legislation he believed would improve the American way of life, which included stronger voting-rights laws. A recent march in Alabama in support of voting rights, during which blacks were beaten by state troops, shamed Congress and the president into passing the law, meant to enforce the 15th Amendment of the Constitution ratified by Congress in 1870.
In a speech to Congress on March 15, 1965, Johnson had outlined the devious ways in which election officials denied African-American citizens the vote. Blacks attempting to vote were often told by election officials that they gotten the date, time or polling place wrong, that the officials were late or absent, that they possessed insufficient literacy skills or had filled out an application incorrectly. Often African Americans, whose population suffered a high rate of illiteracy due to centuries of oppression and poverty, would be forced to take literacy tests, which they inevitably failed. Johnson also told Congress that voting officials, primarily in southern states, had been known to force black voters to “recite the entire constitution or explain the most complex provisions of state laws”–a task most white voters would have been hard-pressed to accomplish. In some cases, even blacks with college degrees were turned away from the polls.
Although the Voting Rights Act passed, state and local enforcement of the law was weak and it was often outright ignored, mainly in the South and in areas where the proportion of blacks in the population was high and their vote threatened the political status quo. Still, the Voting Rights Act gave African-American voters the legal means to challenge voting restrictions and vastly improved voter turnout. In Mississippi alone, voter turnout among blacks increased from 6 percent in 1964 to 59 percent in 1969. In 1970, President Richard Nixon extended the provisions of the Voting Rights Act and lowered the eligible voting age for all voters to 18.

[Schmidt Meister]

August 6th In Music

1960 - Chubby Checker appeared on US TV show American Bandstand and performed 'The Twist.' The song went to No. 1 on the US chart and again 18 months later in 1962. It is the only song to go to the top of the charts on two separate occasions.

1974 - ABBA scored their first US top 10 hit when 'Waterloo' went to No. 6. The original title of the song was 'Honey Pie'.

1981 - Stevie Nicks released her first solo album Bella Donna which contained four top 40 US hits. ‘Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around’, ‘Leather and Lace’, (with Don Henley), ‘Edge of Seventeen’ and ‘After the Glitter Fades.’

1982 - Pink Floyd's The Wall starring Bob Geldof opened in movie theaters in New York. The film was conceived alongside the double album by Pink Floyd's, Roger Waters.

[ChuteTheMall]

August 5, 1992 (sorry to post a day late)

Jeff Porcaro, drummer and founder of the band Toto, dies at the age of 38.

He collapsed at home while spraying insecticide in his yard, and at first, this was claimed to be his cause of death. Later an autopsy report claimed he had an undiagnosed heart ailment and died due to hardening of the arteries. This was blamed on finding a trace amount of cocaine in his blood, although close friends and family said he had been clean for many years. Also, he was a lifelong smoker. Media reports were sensationalized, band members were upset and the band nearly broke up. Porcaro toured and sat in on sessions with a vast number of other musicians, from Santana to Springsteen to Steely Dan and there is an amazing list of artists on Wikipedia , where it also states he was one of the most recorded session musicians in history. 

Here's a cool video where he demonstrates his craft: