Fair enough. Have you seen The Dynasty That Almost Was, about the 1990s Cleveland Indians? I thought it was great, and the Indians should’ve won it all. In 1995 and 1997. The José Mesa - Omar Vizquel thing. Your thoughts on the video?
The first team in the history of the American League ever to win 100 games in a season that had fewer than 154 games was the 1995 Cleveland Indians. The season started 18 games late because the previous season’s strike carried over. In the 144 season, the Indians went 100-44 for an amzing 0.694. Unfortunately the Indians lost that World Series to the Atlanta Braves. That remains the only Atlanta championship in the four major pro sports of NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL.
Miami is the world’s largest city to have been founded by a woman. In the aftermath of the Great Freeze of 1895, which extended into the Everglades, Julia Tuttle sent a fresh orange blossom from her inherited land holdings on Biscayne Bay to railroad magnate Henry Flagler at his winter home in iced-over Palm Beach. He accepted the offer she sent with it to give him some of her land if he’d extend the railroad there and build another of his resort hotels, and she would develop the rest to be a city supporting it.
That’s the legend. There is evidence that one of Flagler’s railroad men actually sent him the orange blossom, but it makes a better story if Tuttle did it. More of the story is that Flagler was stunned by the immediate widespread destitution left by the death of the citrus crop, and wanted to help restore the local economy.
Henry Flagler founded FEC, the Florida East Coast Railway. FEC is well known for building the railroad to Key West. This was completed in 1912. When the FEC’s line from the mainland to Key West was heavily damaged by the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, the State of Florida purchased the remaining right-of-way and bridges south of Dade County, and they were rebuilt into road bridges for vehicle traffic and became known as the Overseas Highway.
Key West, then the largest city in Florida, was the only city in the Confederacy to remain under Union military control throughout the Civil War. Capturing it would have been infeasible geographically and militarily, and to make sure, the commander of the US Navy base there made regular shows of force in the streets to show he’d put up with none of this *secesh *nonsense.
Fort Jefferson (image - pretty), on Garden Key (formerly Bush Key) and about 70 miles from Key West, is part of Dry Tortugas National Park. Construction began in 1846 and was completed in 1847. Fort Jefferson can be reached by a daily ferry from Key West. It takes a little over 2 hours to get there.
The best known prisoner held at Fort Jefferson was Dr. Samuel Mudd, who escaped the death penalty for his involvement in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination by one vote. He was sentenced to life imprisonment but was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson in 1869.
There have been numerous attempts by his descendants to prove his innocence; they claim that Mudd was innocent of any wrongdoing and that he was imprisoned merely for treating a man who came to his house late at night with a fractured leg. However, historians have found that Mudd met with John Wilkes Booth several times in the months before the assassination, that he had links with Confederate agents and that he hid evidence of Booth’s identity. Booth most probably did not go to Mudd’s house by chance; he had stayed there overnight 4 months before and had also sent supplies there in preparation for the assassination.
The domed Volkshalle, designed by Albert Speer for a site behind the Brandenburg Gate in World Capital Germania, the former Berlin, would have been the largest masonry structure in Germany, large enough to have its own weather inside.
Berlin is called a smoker’s paradise. Many bars and restaurants allow smoking, as do discos/dance halls, cultural institutions, hospitals, and government agencies. By some counts, some nearly 3 billion cigarette butts litter Berlin streets every year.
Berlin has a population of approximately 3.7 million. Its coat of arms features a black bear standing on its hind legs (but no cigarette): Berlin - Wikipedia
The morale of Polish troops in WW2 was boosted by Wojtek the bear, a 500-to-600-pound brown bear that was essentially adopted by the 22nd Transport Company’s Artillery Division in the Polish 2nd Corps.
Despite being effectively destroyed in 1939, the Polish armed forces did not give up the fight, forming Divisions to help the French in 1940 and, after the French defeat, aided the English in the defense of Britain. They even helped the Russians (once Hitler invaded Russia) by forming an army of nearly 80,000 men to relieve Russian formations in Iran and eventually forming the core of the Polish II Corps.
Amor Towles’s critically-acclaimed 2016 novel A Gentleman in Moscow is about a Russian nobleman and amateur poet who is placed under house arrest in a swanky Moscow hotel in 1922 by the new Bolshevik government.
The Russian socialist movement split in 1903 at the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (literally, majority and minority) factions, following a dispute between Julius Martov and Vladimir Lenin. While both factions believed that a proletariat revolution was necessary, the Mensheviks generally tended to be more moderate and were more positive towards the liberal opposition and the dominant peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary party. Menshevism was finally made illegal after the Kronstadt Uprising of 1921.
The term “silent majority” in current usage means an unspecified large group of people who do not express their opinions publicly. This meaning was popularized by U.S. President Richard Nixon in a November 3, 1969, speech in which he said, “And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.”
In the 1800s, the term usually referred to the dead; phrases such as “gone to a better world”, “gone before”, and “joined the silent majority” served as euphemisms for “died”.
Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson and US Senator John Sparkman (Alabama) lost the 1952 Presidential election to General Dwight D. Eisenhower and US Senator Richard Nixon (California).
