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BTW, thank you for planting "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" as one of the longest lasting earworms I've had in years.
Such a great song and I hadn't thought about it in a long time.


That would be the rough equivalent of 750,000 today.“Henry Berry Lowry was a great, great man” goes the song. #OTD 1872 Lumbee Legend Henry Berry Lowry & accomplices made their last raid in Robeson Cty, taking $28K. He disappeared 4 days later & was never publicly heard from again. The story is complex & debated. Start reading here:
https://ncpedia.org/biography/lowry-henry
unrememberedhistory.com
To this day there is still some controversy about whether it was a Spanish mine or an accidental internal coal fire that caused the magazine explosion of the USS Maine. Both are plausible with a preponderance of evidence but not definitive evidence pointing to an accident.
#OTD (Feb. 15) in 1898 an explosion of “unknown origin” sank the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor. 266 died. A blockade of Cuba ensued and war with Spain began in late April. The Terms ‘Yellow Journalism’ and Empire are key to understanding this war—as are Exceptionalism and Racism.
Today the rattling of sabres mixes with the low, steady murmurs of greed, all umbrella-cloaked in protestations of fake pro-democracy sentiments as once again grasping imperialism rears its head in Washington. All that backfilled with a Kiplingesque cadence reciting “The White Man’s Burden” and marching, soaring, and sailing to reoccupy Havana Harbor and bring 21st century Real Estate values to Olde Havana —once and for all.
The “Yellow Journalism” of the historical papers inspires anew a branch of the media so thoroughly propaganda that William Randolph Hearst himself would pale at the brazen product while admiring the thrall enveloping so many, so completely. Even such as he could not have imagined a cultish following so utterly ovine.
Many morning papers of February 16, 1898 shouted to the nation of the tragedy - many called for revenge. Covetous gazes had long spied south into the Caribbean from the Colossus of The North and the sinking of The USS Maine was the spark that worked to take in territory in the region. Serendipitous by the figuring of most in current calculations, designs on the region under trumpism, while easily matching the greed, appear destined to surpass the previous lawlessness.