This Date in History

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Day late but too important to pass on. Sam Cooke passed 60 years ago from a gunshot wound. Wrote and performed many hit songs but this is the most impactful.

"A Change Is Gonna Come" is a song by American singer-songwriter Sam Cooke. It initially appeared on Cooke's album Ain't That Good News, released mid-February 1964[1] by RCA Victor; a slightly edited version of the recording was released as a single on December 22, 1964. Produced by Hugo & Luigi and arranged and conducted by René Hall, the song was the B-side to "Shake".

The song was inspired by various events in Cooke's life, most prominently when he and his entourage were turned away from a whites-only motel in Louisiana. Cooke felt compelled to write a song that spoke to his struggle and of those around him, and that pertained to the Civil Rights.

Ed. note. Cooke was in Durham in May of 63 when there was a large sit-in at a restaurant. He started writing the lyrics on the bus out of town.

 
December 13, 1983: 41 years ago today, the Detroit Pistons beat the Denver Nuggets 186-184 (3OT), in the highest scoring game in NBA history.
 
1791 - The first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution—the Bill of Rights, which is a collection of mutually reinforcing guarantees of individual rights and limitations on federal and state governments—were adopted as a single unit.
 
grimes70 said:
1791 - The first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution—the Bill of Rights, which is a collection of mutually reinforcing guarantees of individual rights and limitations on federal and state governments—were adopted as a single unit.
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Let’s just hope the Bill of Rights still exists 4 years from now.
 
1890 - The Hunkpapa Lakota chief Sitting Bull was killed by Native American policemen who, with others, were attempting to arrest him near the Grand River in South Dakota.
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Boston Tea Party

On this day in 1773, in what is known as the Boston Tea Party, American colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians threw 342 chests of tea belonging to the British East India Company into Boston Harbor to protest a tax on tea.

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grimes70 said:
Boston Tea Party

On this day in 1773, in what is known as the Boston Tea Party, American colonists disguised as Mohawk Indians threw 342 chests of tea belonging to the British East India Company into Boston Harbor to protest a tax on tea.

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I always preferred the alternative explanation of the Boston Tea Party. Because the British East Indian Company had monopoly on tea, they could charge outrageous prices for tea. So high, that American smugglers, such as Samuel Adams, could buy it from the Dutch East Indian Company and sell it for less than legal tea. To stamp out this smuggling, the English gradually reduced the cost of and tax on tea until the "legal" tea was cheaper than the "smuggled" tea. And the Boston Tea party was not a reaction to high taxes on tea, but to reduced taxes on tea that resulted in running the smugglers out of business. And the resulting "tea party" was an attempt to diminish the supply of legal tea so that, once more, smuggled tea could be cost competitive.
 
Flight of the Wright brothers

On this day in 1903 near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful sustained flights in an airplane—Orville first, gliding 120 feet (36.6 metres) through the air in 12 seconds.

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The episode of the first season of The Simpsons premiered on FOX on December 17, 1989, with the Christmas special "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire", with the rest of the season airing from January 14 to May 13, 1990.
 
1860 Following Abraham Lincoln's election as U.S. president, South Carolina became the first U.S. state to secede from the Union.
 

A day late, but still a good read....​

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December 19, 2024​

Heather Cox Richardson
Dec 20
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
These were the first lines in a pamphlet that appeared in Philadelphia on December 19, 1776, at a time when the fortunes of the American patriots seemed at an all-time low. Just five months before, the members of the Second Continental Congress had adopted the Declaration of Independence, explaining to the world that “the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled…do…solemnly publish and declare, 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.”
The nation’s founders went on to explain why it was necessary for them “to dissolve the political bands” which had connected them to the British crown.
They explained that their vision of human government was different from that of Great Britain. In contrast to the tradition of hereditary monarchy under which the American colonies had been organized, the representatives of the united states on the North American continent believed in a government organized according to the principles of natural law.
Such a government rested on the “self-evident” concept “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Governments were created to protect those rights and, rather than deserving loyalty because of tradition, religion, or heritage, they were legitimate only if those they governed consented to them. And the American colonists no longer consented to be governed by the British monarchy.
This new vision of human government was an exciting thing to declare in the heat of a Philadelphia summer after a year of skirmishing between the colonial army and British regulars, but by December 1776, enthusiasm for this daring new experiment was ebbing. Shortly after colonials had cheered news of independence in July as local leaders read copies of the Continental Congress’s declaration in meetinghouses and taverns in cities and small towns throughout the colonies, the British moved on General George Washington and the troops in New York City.
By September the British had forced Washington and his soldiers to retreat from the city, and after a series of punishing skirmishes across Manhattan Island, by November the Redcoats had pushed the Americans into New Jersey. They chased the colonials all the way across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.
By mid-December, things looked bleak for the Continental Army and the revolutionary government it backed. The 5,000 soldiers with Washington who were still able to fight were demoralized from their repeated losses and retreats, and since the Continental Congress had kept enlistments short so as not to risk a standing army, many of the men would be free to leave the army at the end of the year, further weakening it.
As the British troops had taken over New York City and the Continental soldiers had retreated, many of the newly minted Americans outside the army were also having doubts about the whole enterprise of creating a new, independent nation based on the idea that all men were created equal. Then things got worse: as the American soldiers crossed into Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress abandoned Philadelphia on December 12 out of fear of a British invasion, regrouping in Baltimore (which they complained was dirty and expensive).
“These are the times that try men’s souls.”
The author of The American Crisis was Thomas Paine, whose January 1776 pamphlet Common Sense had solidified the colonists’ irritation at the king’s ministers into a rejection of monarchy itself, a rejection not just of King George III, but of all kings. In early 1776, Paine had told the fledgling Americans, many of whom still prayed for a return to the comfortable neglect they had enjoyed from the British government before 1763, that the colonies must form their own independent government.
Now he urged them to see the experiment through. He explained that he had been with the troops as they retreated across New Jersey and, describing the march for his readers, told them “that both officers and men, though greatly harassed and fatigued, frequently without rest, covering, or provision, the inevitable consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit. All their wishes centred in one, which was, that the country would turn out and help them to drive the enemy back.”
For that was the crux of it. Paine had no doubt that patriots would create a new nation, eventually, because the cause of human self-determination was just. But how long it took to establish that new nation would depend on how much effort people put into success. “I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake,” Paine wrote. “Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.”
In mid-December, British commander General William Howe had sent most of his soldiers back to New York to spend the winter, leaving garrisons across the river in New Jersey to guard against Washington advancing.
On Christmas night, having heard that the garrison at Trenton was made up of Hessian auxiliaries who were exhausted and unprepared for an attack, Washington and 2,400 soldiers crossed back over the icy Delaware River in a winter storm. They marched nine miles to attack the garrison, the underdressed soldiers suffering from the cold and freezing rain. Reaching Trenton, they surprised the outnumbered Hessians, who fought briefly in the streets before surrendering.
The victory at Trenton restored the colonials’ confidence in their cause. Soldiers reenlisted, and in early January they surprised the British at Princeton, New Jersey, driving them back. The British abandoned their posts in central New Jersey, and by March the Continental Congress moved back to Philadelphia. Historians credit the Battles of Trenton and Princeton with saving the Revolutionary cause.
There is no hard proof that Washington had officers read The American Crisis to his troops when it came out six days before the march to Trenton, as some writers have said, but there is little doubt they heard it one way or another. So, too, did those wavering loyalists.
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” Paine wrote in that fraught moment, “yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”
 
grimes70 said:
1860 Following Abraham Lincoln's election as U.S. president, South Carolina became the first U.S. state to secede from the Union.
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Wow! What a missed opportunity. If only cooler heads had prevailed and we as a nation had stood together and waved a fond farewell as South Carolina receded in our national rearview mirror. Probably leaving South Carolina behind was the only issue which could have united all the remaining states and energized them to peacefully resolve our differences. "For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'It might have been'."
 
grimes70 said:
1972 American gridiron football running back Franco Harris of the Pittsburgh Steelers made “the Immaculate Reception,” a dramatic catch that is regarded as one of the most famous plays in NFL history.

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Just because I am a jerk, when I lived in Pittsburgh I always enjoyed talking about how amazing watching "the Immaculate Reception" was when I saw it live on TV. The person to whom I was talking would immediately correct me, point out the game wasn't a sell-out, and as such, Pittsburgh and surrounding communities were subject to a TV black-out. Then, in an exaggerated Southern drawl, I would response something like, "Yeap, ya'll sure are correct, but that black-out did not extend down to North Carolina."
 
05C40 said:
Just because I am a jerk, when I lived in Pittsburgh I always enjoyed talking about how amazing watching "the Immaculate Reception" was when I saw it live on TV. The person to whom I was talking would immediately correct me, point out the game wasn't a sell-out, and as such, Pittsburgh and surrounding communities were subject to a TV black-out. Then, in an exaggerated Southern drawl, I would response something like, "Yeap, ya'll sure are correct, but that black-out did not extend down to North Carolina."
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One of my best friends from Chapel Hill went to Penn State.

He hated the Steelers and swears the “Immaculate Reception” hit the ground and was an incompletion. He’s a Raiders fan.

After graduating from Penn State, he worked in Chicago and then moved to Pittsburgh. He’s been in Pittsburgh for 35+ years.

I haven’t asked him about the “Immaculate Reception” in decades
 
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All my life I’ve heard the phrase, “A Vale of Humility” to describe North Carolina. It is a disarming description to be sure but it serves as a preface to a smack down when the finish reads, “…between two Mountains of Conceit.” What great irony to be so proud of one’s humbleness.

As I have pondered this phrase more recently and fallen down the rabbit holes researching it I’ve found that the genesis of the saying is, and believably so, attributed to the colonial period when North Carolina was noticeably poor in comparison to the plantation export producing slavocracies of Virginia and South Carolina. A number of factors made for North Carolina’s relative poverty but the One-Two Punch of The Outer Banks-Graveyard of the Atlantic geography is the place to start as it influenced just how the invasion of Europeans of the so-called Age of Exploration literally entered the state, i.e., not by ship. After all, we tell the tale of The Lost Colony to any and all who will listen and it is one of failed settlement entering by sea.

So the colonizers mostly came to North Carolina by land, up from Charleston, or even more often, down from the ports of Philadelphia, Yorktown, and Norfolk, rather than sea. Wilmington, a not-too-bad port all things considered, frankly got a late start comparatively and the export of naval stores, the Tar of our Famed Nickname, just did not draw the wealth to it that tobacco, rice, and cotton did to our neighbor colonies.

The economics of the geography does not mean that North Carolina was not without the stain of slavery as a labor system from the beginning but it did mean that the giant plantations like those of Virginia and South Carolina were rare. Not only did that influence who moved into the colony but also where they settled. I’ve mentioned Noelleen McIlveena’s book, ‘A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1600-1713’ before - there you can find the best recounting of this time and the motivations behind those colonizers if your interest is piqued. Mutinous well describes those invaders - so too would the terms, stubborn, willful, eccentric, maverick, and unmanageable. Many were fugitives of some sort, fleeing their past in so many cases.

How we got to ‘humility’ from ‘mutinous’ is an interesting story I am sure - but about it I can only speculate. I suspect that as Virginia moved toward the much heralded Birthing of Presidents and elite white South Carolinians hunkered down into the paranoid lifestyle of a Slave Society, the worldview that itself creates the nickname of Fire-Eater, North Carolinians settled into their own place between, one in which they flipped the script and became humble about their pride in being less prescribed, pedigreed, and pretentious but infinitely more pig-headed — errr, headstrong.

This was a round-about way of getting to the #OnThisDay for December 24: #OTD in 1937 Mary Van Landingham died (b. 1852). A Charlottean whose family’s roots were deep in The Old North State, she was a strong booster of Tar Heel literature and culture. During a speech in March 1900 at The Mecklenburg Historical Society she introduced the now-(in)famous phrase referencing The Mother of Presidents to our north, and The Fire-Eaters to our south. And so it went — and goes. Of course, she didn’t coin the phrase as it had long been too obvious to far too many. Mary Van Landingham, Long Remembered for Humility Quip
 
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