The Kingdom of Afghanistan had three kings (Amanullah Khan, Mohammed Nadir Shah and Mohammed Zahir Shah) from 1926 to 1973, when the monarchy was overthrown in a coup and replaced by an autocratic, one-party republic.
In 1972 and 1973, U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew was investigated by the Justice Department over corruption charges, stemming from a number of secret payments he received during his time as a public official in Maryland, as well as during his time as Vice President.
On October 10th, 1973, Agnew pled nolo contendere to one felony charge of tax evasion; he also resigned his post as Vice President on the same day.
Political commentator Rachel Maddow hosted a 2018 podcast, Bag Man, and two years later wrote a book of the same name, about Vice President’s Spiro Agnew’s political corruption, obstruction of a Federal investigation and eventual fall from power. She quoted Agnew’s comment, in an interview well after President Richard M. Nixon had also left office, that Agnew believed he might have been assassinated by order of the President if he had refused to resign.
And see: A long-secret 1973 memo on how to become President in a hurry
King Gustav III of Sweden was assassinated in 1792, aged 46, as part of a political conspiracy. The assassination, at a masked ball at Stockholm Palace, inspired Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Un Ballo in Maschera.
At age 42, Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest person to become US president. John F. Kennedy was 43 when he was elected president. Kennedy was 46 when he was assassinated, and that is the youngest end-of-tenure age for all presidents. AT 77, Ronald Reagan was the oldest president to leave office, but that mark will be eclipsed by Joe Biden at the end of his tenure.
Theodore Roosevelt made waves as a reform-minded Governor of New York after winning military glory during the Spanish-American War. He was offered the Vice Presidency in 1900 as William McKinley’s running mate, in part, at the behest of conservative New York Republican leaders who wanted to get him out of Albany. When McKinley was assassinated just six months after being sworn in for a second term, Ohio Republican leader and US Senator Marcus Hanna is said to have remarked, appalled, “Now look! That damn cowboy is President of the United States!”
The Stetson cowboy hat named “Boss of the Plains”, image here,
was designed by John B. Stetson in 1865 to be a waterproof, durable, and elegant lightweight, all-weather hat. It became so popular that this design and the term “Stetson” eventually became all-but-interchangeable with what later became known as the cowboy hat.
I missed the edit window to add this:
In 2006, when visiting the White House, the President of South Sudan, Salva Kiir Mayardit received a black Stetson as a gift from the then-U.S. President George W. Bush. He reportedly liked it so much that he purchased several. He now seldom makes public appearances without a black cowboy hat.
If one googles Salva Kiir Mayardit, many images show him in a black Stetson.
The term “ten-gallon hat” is sometimes used to describe a cowboy hat, though the origin of the term is unclear.
- While Stetson advertised their hats as waterproof, and once ran a print ad which depicted a cowboy using his hat to give water to his horse, a Stetson hat only holds about three quarts of water, far less than ten gallons
- It may be a misinterpretation/corruption of the Spanish term tan galán, which means “so fine,” as in un sombrero tan galán, meaning “such a fine hat”
- It may also be a misinterpretation of the Spanish term galón, a style of braided hatband
Stetson University is a private university with four colleges and schools located in central Florida. It was founded in 1883 in Deland, and was named Deland Academy after the principal founder of the town, Henry A. DeLand. The name was changed in 1889 to John B. Stetson University to honor the hat manufacturer who was a generous benefactor to the school.
Baldwin Institute, founded in Berea, Ohio in 1845, merged with nearby German Wallace College in 1913 to become Baldwin-Wallace College. In 2012, with addition of graduate programs to the curriculum, it became Baldwin Wallace (no hyphen) University. Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama are the two most recent Presidents of the United States to speak on campus during their terms in office.
The University of Virginia’s Miller Center’s website offers a selection of US Presidents’ famous speeches — Presidential Speeches | Miller Center.
British-American screenwriter David Seidler developed a stutter when he was three years old, during his family’s sea voyage to the U.S. during World War II. In the early 1980s, Seidler began to do research into King George VI, intending to write about how the king had overcome his own stuttering. Seidler wrote to Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (George’s widow), for permission to develop a script based on the topic, but Elizabeth requested that Seidler not pursue the subject during her lifetime.
Elizabeth passed away in 2002, at the age of 101, and Seidler resumed the project in 2005, which became the screenplay for the 2010 film The King’s Speech; Seidler won the Academy Award and the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay for the work.
George VI was the second son of King George V, who reigned from 1910 until his death in 1936. The firstborn of George V was King Edward VIII, who reigned for less than a year before abdicating the throne. There were four younger children in the family of George V, 3 more sons and a daughter. Edward, the firstborn, died in 1972, having outlived all but one of his younger siblings.
For one day, Ireland and the UK had different monarchs. While King Edward VIII’s abdication took effect on December 11, 1936 in the rest of the Commonwealth, it did not take effect in Ireland until December 12th.
On December 11, 2008, Bernie Madoff was arrested by FBI agents and charged with one count of securities fraud. Three months later, Madoff pled guilty to 11 federal felonies and admitted that his wealth management business was a massive Ponzi scheme. In June of 2009 he was sentenced to 150 years in prison; he died while in custody in April of 2021.
Out of play: I did not know this. It turns out to be a very interesting story.
The Emperor of Japan (now, in 2021, Naruhito, who took the throne on May 1, 2019 upon the abdication of his elderly father, Akihito) is widely considered, and treated as, head of state of Japan. However, under the postwar Constitution, he is not described as such, nor has he been so designated by statute. The Constitution does provide, in pertinent part, that
The Emperor shall be the symbol of the State and of the unity of the People, deriving his position from the will of the people with whom resides sovereign power… The advice and approval of the Cabinet shall be required for all acts of the Emperor in matters of state, and the Cabinet shall be responsible therefor. The Emperor shall perform only such acts in matters of state as are provided for in this Constitution and he shall not have powers related to government.
The time of Japanese Emperor Akihito’s reign (1989-2019) is referred to in Japan as the Heisei era; the word is defined as meaning “peace everywhere.”
By custom, upon Akihito’s death, he will be posthumously renamed Emperor Heisei.
The Hiroshima Peace Memorial (also known as the Genbaku Dome) is the only structure left standing near where the first atomic bomb which exploded on 6 August 1945. It was originally the Product Exhibition Hall building, designed by the Czech architect Jan Letzel. The design included a distinctive dome at the highest part of the building. It was completed in April 1915.
In 1996, the Genbaku Dome was registered on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Every year, on August 6, thousands gather at the dome in commemoration.