I just finished reading a collection of his letters from Hawaii. Great stuff.
When Twain was older, he made a round-the-world trip (chronicled in Following the Equator, but was unable to land on Hawaii because of a quarantine. It was a big disappointment to him. He never got another chance to return.
Spectre of Pithecanthropus writes:
Not only that, there was a Cibvil War battle in St. Albans, Vermont.
Vermont!
There was also an aborted Confederate terrorist incident in New York City. Ellis writes about it in The Epic of New York City.
Damn you! I was looking for this too but couldn’t find a cite. Coincidentally it happened right near Hamilton St in New Brunswick. Oh wait, maybe they named it that after…
Most Americans can tell you the whats and even the whens of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, but few are familiar with one of the bloodiest wars in US history, King Philip’s War. Percentage-wise, this war took a large toll between 1675 and 1676, with about 600 colonists and 3000 Indians taking a dirt nap. “King Philip” was actually a Wampanoag named Metacom (sounds like a Silicon Valley company). He was referred to as King Philip because of his ambitions to be the leader of all the local tribes. Alliances between tribes sprang up, as did alliances between colonists and tribes (notably the Mohegans). The year-long struggles taxed the resources of both sides, with the Indians being the worse for wear, but even so, it was touch and go for the colonies for awhile. Metacom had a habit of fading away into the trees whenever capture or death came near, and so remained a strong influence up until his death. He was beheaded and his head displayed at Plymouth for many years. A good article on this can be found on Wiki.
Centralia, PA (or at least the ground under it) has been on fire for 45 years.
And on an even more obscure (and trivial) note: Clark University in Worcester, MA was the only American University to host a lecture by Sigmund Freud, and the only American University to grant him an honorary degree.
You mght be thinking of Wyatt Earp, who was a teamster working between San Bernadino and Los Angeles in the 1860s. I coiuld be wrong, but I thought he drove a freight wagon, not a stagecoach. Most of the Earps are buried in Colma, which I think is somewhere out towards Berdoo.
In later life he was a technical advisor on Westerns to the early film directors, and died in L.A. in 1929. The historical novel Bat Masterson–well worth reading if you are at all interested in this stuff–depicted Wyatt Earp, around 1919, as an impoverished and somewhat embittered man, but I don’t know if there was any truth to that. In the novel, he and Bat, and wives, meet up at the Alexandria Hotel, presumably because Earp didn’t want his friends to see what a dump he and Josie lived in. But again, that’s only a novel.
The paper he wrote them for also discussed sending Twain to Japan, & it almost came off.
But Twain & the publisher quarreled, & he got canned.
I’d have loved to read that.
Sam Clemens was an acute observer, & Japan was in transition from a medeval society to a modern one. He’d have had a lot to say.
This is not just U.S. History but world history, but as it’s important to both I’ll mention it. When the Puritans and Pilgrims settled Massachusetts, nobody on Earth had any conception of the methodology of conception, or more precisely, of embryology. There were many theories and of course it was known that pregnancies were caused by sex and that fertile and infertile times of the month could be linked to the timing of menses, etc., but the role of women in formation of a fetus was completely underestimated and that an ejaculate contained individual sperm cells was unknown until the invention of the microscope in the late 17th century.
Fallopio had written treatises on the tubes that now bear his name in the 16th century but he was not sure what they did, with “female semen” even entering into medical literature, and there was much debate over whether an infant was deposited fully formed into the mother by its father’s sperm (17th century drawing of a sperm cell seen under a microscope based upon this theory) or, as Aristotle opined and Wm. Harvey championed at the time of the Puritans, a fetus was a big mess that formed gradually. There were theories that babies were formed by the mingling of ejaculate and menstrual blood even, or that it was hastened by the mother eating certain foods directly before or after sex.
By the 18th century, Harvey’s view of unformed embryo was the leading one. He did believe that “everything begins with an egg”, but his concept of that egg had nothing to do with the one that actually existed. It was not until years after the U.S. Civil War that the sperm fertilizes egg theory was really understood. In a paper in 1875 a trio of embryologists (Barry, Bischoff and van Beneden) first pretty much “got it right”, and their work was not immediately accepted by all doctors.
This seems trivial, but it actually was of MAJOR importance to how women, sex, and babies were viewed. It explains much of the stigma of male masturbation (you’re killing bunches of iddy biddy humans in addition to the kittens Jesus stomps on), of why infertility was almost always the fault of the woman (and she could be divorced for it even if the man’s first three wives had also been “infertile”- all she had to do was lay there and let him put the wee babies in her), of the relatively low opinion of women, etc… Plus, it’s just amazing that only for 1/50th of recorded history have we understood something as elemental and universal as human conception. Not to say people used to be stupid or ignorant- how would they know that an ejaculate contains all these little boogers swimming around?- but does show how much we take for granted by way of knowledge today and how in a century we went from just beginning to understand fertilization to test tube babies.
[QUOTE=CalMeacham]
There is no way that Adams would ever have agreed to a peaceful reconciliation with Britain. I suspect Franklin wouldn’t either, but he’d be more ambiguous about it.
[quote]
Adams would have gone for a peaceful settlement, but by then the terms were independance and nothing less. He did not hold grudges for the most part and usually forgave those who aggreived him.
Oh yes. Here’s my story:
Franklin was a miracle worker with the French. But there was a flaw. He was absolutely the worst administrator and least effective consular in history. This wasn’t totally his fault, as he wasn’t technicaly consul. But at the same time, it was difficult for Congress to handle the job in a time of sea-going warfare. And Franklin was notoriously poor at keeping in touch with Congress, writing around once a season and half his messages failed to get through.
The net result was that Congress had no idea what was going on in Europe, no idea what France had done, couldn’t make arrangements to receive French aid (much of which was wasted through Franklin’s abominable record keeping, inability to choose transportation for goods, lack of security, and poorly-chosen purchases of textiles and supplies). This is what drove John Adams to fury. Adams could be harsh, but in this case his ire was well deserved. Franklin did more than anyone else to gain material aid for America but also wasted more of it than anyone could imagine (we’re talking fortunes upon fortunes here).
The history of the bathtub in America was invented by H. L Menken in an article in the New York Evening Mail* in 1917 entitled “A Neglected Anniversary.” Known now as “The Great Bathtub Hoax,” Mencken’s article was taken seriously and is still the basis for various “histories” of the tub, most notably the story that Milliard Fillmore was the first to install a bathtub in the White House.
By the time of that conference, neither would have been amenable to reconciliation. Franklin had exhausted all avenues with England, diplomatic and otherwise, and met with intransigence, obstinance and ridicule.
The letters that Adams wrote from Paris certainly reeked of dislike, envy and disdain for Franklin, not that much of it wasn’t deserved.
I took you seriously, because I have no notion of your knowledge of this period (possibly a bad assumption on this board).
In John Adams, David McCullough details how Adams pretty much single-handedly prevented the US from going to war with France while he was president. War fever against Napoleon was running high. If we HAD gone to war with France, then the Louisiana Purchase would almost certainly never have occurred, and the course of US history would have been altered dramatically.
There are two murder cases in Wisconsin’s history that stand out when it comes to the death penalty. (Never mind that only something like ten people have been executed since Wisconsin was a territory.)
The first is the rather spectacular hanging of William Caffee in Mineral Point in 1842. Caffee rode to the gallows beating out his own funeral march with liquor bottles on his coffin. It’s estimated that over 5,000 people came to Mineral Point to witness the hanging. It was, to say the least, not a very solemn affair.
The other case is that of John McCaffary in 1851. He drowned his wife in a barrel, was found guilty of murder, and consequently, a debate broke out across the state about the desirability of the death penalty in Wisconsin. Basically, the way the law was worded, the only sentence a judge could deliver to a guilty murderer was death. Not life imprisonment, not forty years, just death.
The desire to avoid tasteless public executions and “judicially murdered” men, as one newspaper editor put it, is what led to the abolishment of the capital punishment in Wisconsin. (Let’s not talk about the last referendum, huh?)
It’s kind of weird that the two men’s names sound so similar, though.
Actually Colma is virtually all cemeteries and is located near San Francisco. Earp and his late wife are indeed buried there in a Jewish cemetery as she was raised Jewish apparently.
The Port Chicago Naval Magazine Explosion, near San Francisco in 1944. Killed 320 people, 202 of whom were African American dock workers. 15% of the African-Americans who died in WW2 died at Port Chicago. 390 people were injured, and two liberty ships were destroyed. One of them was shattered into pieces no larger than a suitcase.
The White officers who ran the facility were given leave time to help them recover. The African American workers were told to get back to work, and rebelled, leading to many of them being court martialed.
Many NJ shore towns have huge victorian mansions set within 20-30 feet of the street, but giant properties for the backyard. The reason for this is that property taxes were assessed on the front yards only. The wealthier you were, the further back your house could be.
If the Viking sagas are correct, the first slaves brought into the New World by Europeans were Irish.
Not quite 20 years ago, the US had the F-21A “Lion” jet fighter in service. Never heard of it? Well, all 25 of them were leased Israeli Kfir-C1’s—basically an unlicenced copy of the French Mirage V—used for “aggressor” squadron training. All were returned by 1989.
You know who Nobuo Fujita is? Only the first man to fly an aerial attack against mainland North America, in 1942. From a seaplane launched from a submarine aircraft carrier.
This is a picture of the aftermath of the “Ruth” test from the Upshot-Knothole series of nuclear tests. That tower wasn’t a weapon effects test target—that’s the 300’ tower that the bomb was resting on. 2/3rds of it survived the blast.
(It hopefully goes without saying that this wasn’t the Earth-shattering kaboom that’d been hoped for.)
Apparently, the last man executed for burglary in the United States was one James Coburn of Alabama…in 1964.
