POPnews - April 14th

[Shortly after noon on this day in 1935 a cloud of dust traveling 100 kilometres (60 miles) an hour came swirling out of the American West over the Great Plains... Not the first - and by no means the last - by 1940 dust storms such as this one had forced 2.5 million people to flee what was left of their farms for greener pastures, while an untold quantity of the once-fertile topsoil that had once upon a time made those farms bountiful ended up at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.]

43 BCE - At the Battle of Forum Gallorum Mark Antony - while besieging Julius Caesar's assassin Decimus Junius Brutus in Mutina - defeated the forces of the consul Pansa, who was killed.

1434 - The foundation stone of Cathedral St. Peter and St. Paul in Nantes was laid by John, Duke of Brittany and Jean de Malestroit, Bishop of Nantes; the first architect on the site was Guillaume de Dammartin, who was later replaced by Mathurin Rodier.

1471 - In England, Yorkist forces under Edward IV defeated their Lancastrian opponents under the Earl of Warwick at the Battle of Barnet, during which Warwick was killed and following which the deposed monarch was able to resume his throne - the first and only English King to do so*.

*Charles II technically became King upon the removal of his father Charles I's head in January 1649, but since Parliament under Oliver Cromwell had abolished the monarchy as it abolished its monarch, technically the succession was broken - at least in England.

1775 - The first abolition society in the North America - the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage - was established in Philadelphia by Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush.

1846 - The Donner Party of pioneers departed for California from Springfield, Illinois, on what would become a year-long journey of hardship, cannibalism, and survival.

1865 - US Secretary of State William H. Seward and his family were attacked in his home by Lewis Powell at the same time as President Abraham Lincoln was being shot at Ford's Theatre by John Wilkes Booth; a third attack, against Vice President Andrew Johnson - meant to be carried out by George Atzerodt - was not.

1881 - The Four Dead in Five Seconds Gunfight erupted in El Paso, Texas.

1894 - Thomas Edison demonstrated the kinetoscope - a device for peep-show viewing using photographs that flip in sequence, a precursor to movies.

1912 - The British passenger liner RMS Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic just before midnight; the so-called un-sinkable ship sank within hours, with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.

1927 - The first Volvo rolled off the assembly line in Gothenburg.

1931 - The Spanish Cortes deposed King Alfonso XIII and proclaimed the 2nd Spanish Republic.

1935 - 'Black Sunday' - arguably the single worst dust storm of the US Dust Bowl - reduced visibility to five feet in some places, smothering wild and domesticated animals and people alike in its relentless advance; stretching from the Dakotas to Texas, drought coupled with unwise farming methods and a lack of understanding about conservation almost brought the once-rich agricultural output of the nation to a standstill.

1943 - James Boarman, Fred Hunter, Harold Brest and Floyd G. Hamilton took part in an attempted escape from Alcatraz. Boarman was shot in the water and is presumed dead; although his body was never found, his accomplices were all recaptured.

1958 - The Soviet satellite Sputnik 2 fell from orbit after a mission duration of 162 days.

1968 - At the 41st Academy Awards, an unprecedented tie between Katharine Hepburn (for The Lion in Winter) and Barbra Streisand (for Funny Girl) resulted in the two sharing that year's Best Actress Oscar.

1978 - At a series of demonstrations in Tbilisi, thousands of Georgians protested against the attempt by the Soviet authorities to change the constitutional status of their language.

1994 - In a friendly fire incident during Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq, two US Air Force aircraft mistakenly shot down two US Army helicopters, killing 26 people.

2002 - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez returned to office two days after being ousted and arrested by his country's military.

2005 - The Oregon Supreme Court nullified nearly 3,000 marriage licenses issued to gay couples a year earlier by Multnomah County.

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"Let's Stay Together" by Al Green

Birthday wishes go out today to Al Green, purveyor of much smooth soul music over the years, including this classic - Let's Stay Together, which was later covered with much success by Tina Turner. While a horrifying incident in October 1974* caused him to become essentially born-again - effectively halting his recording career - he emerged from semi-retirement** in 1988, and in 1995 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

*After refusing to marry his girlfriend, Mary Woodson White - who, it must be stated, was herself already married - she poured a pan of hot grits on him, giving Green third-degree burns on his back, stomach, and arms. She then proceeded to commit suicide in his home.
**During which time he'd served as pastor at the Full Gospel Tabernacle in Memphis and recorded mainly gospel music.
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Remembering... Madalyn Murray O'Hair

For attempting to secure the separation of church and state in the US - thanks to the legal action of Murray v. Curlett - Madalyn Murray O'Hair (born on this day in 1919) became known as 'the most hated woman in America'.

As with many odd stories, it all started in Baltimore... Her son Bill refused to take part in classroom Bible readings and found himself the victim of schoolyard violence because of it. Since that's what Jesus would have done. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and to give one a sense of how the country has changed since 1963 the highest court in the land found 8-1 in her favour, effectively throwing prayer out of public schools.

Following O'Hair's victory she founded the group American Atheists; for years employed as a psychiatric social worker, she also lectured on birth control, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s gave several high profile interviews relating details of threatening mail she'd received, stonings of her house, and even the killings of her children's pets. Since that's what Jesus would have done. Most famously she was the first-ever guest on The Phil Donahue Show in November 1967, when it was still being syndicated out of Dayton, Ohio.

In 1980 William J. Murray - the very same Bill for whom O'Hair had gone to all the trouble - became a born-again Christian, at which time his mother disowned him; at the time she likened it to a 'postnatal abortion'. Her opinion of him is kind and caring compared to his opinion of her; the picture he paints makes her out to be no better than a televangelist, only serving herself instead of pretending to serve some version of God or other.

In August 1995 Madalyn Murray O'Hair, her son Garth, and her son Bill's daughter Robin (whom O'Hair had legally adopted, making Robin her daughter and granddaughter) disappeared; leaving only a note indicating they'd been called away on business, they seemingly vanished. Over the years theories abounded, from kidnapping and murder to embezzlement and exile; if alive, they were expected to be living in New Zealand, based on research done for the American magazine Vanity Fair and published in March 1997. It later turned out that O'Hair, her son, and her granddaughter (as well as an accomplice named Danny Fry) had been murdered in September 1995 by their former employee, David Roland Waters, who himself died of lung cancer in January 2003 while in federal custody.

A play about these events, entitled The Last Days of Madalyn Murray O'Hair in Exile was written by Dave Foley of The Kids in the Hall.
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Pop History Moment: Poitier Earns Oscar Gold

At the 36th Academy Awards - handed out on this day in 1964 - Sidney Poitier became the first black man to win a Best Actor Oscar for his role in the film Lilies of the Field. The ceremony gave white liberals - still reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 - the chance to make it look like they were doing something for the nation's blacks. Said Poitier to the New York Times, 'I'd like to think [my winning] will help someone, but I don't believe my Oscar will be a sort of magic wand that will wipe away restrictions on job opportunities for Negro actors.'

In 1939 Hattie McDaniel became Oscar's first black alumnus when she won Best Supporting Actress for Gone With the Wind; after Poitier's win the next (at least among actors) would be a Best Supporting Actor trophy for Louis Gossett, Jr. in 1982's An Officer and a Gentleman.
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Adams vs. Jefferson: The 1800 Election Gets Personal

I found this bit of whimsy while researching the previous piece; it concerns the 1800 election and some of the claims made by the Federalists (looking to reelect President John Adams) against the Democratic-Republican Party candidate Thomas Jefferson.

You know, just to show you that nothing really changes except clothes and hairstyles.

SPOILER ALERT: Owing to a glitch in the Constitution, regarding the Electoral College, there was a tie between Jefferson and Aaron Burr over which should be President and which should be Vice-President. Most of the Federalist Congress favoured Burr; after a week of squabbling the tie was broken by Alexander Hamilton, in Jefferson's favour. This vote was one of the factors involved in the July 1804 duel between Burr and Hamilton which cost the former his career and the latter his life. The Twelfth Amendment was later passed to clear up this conundrum.
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In Memoriam: Thomas Jefferson

Few presidential legacies are as troubled as that of Thomas Jefferson; on one hand he was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence which famously declared that 'all men are created equal', on the other he was a holder of slaves. One of only two people* to date to hold the so-called Triple Crown - having served as President, Vice-President, and Secretary of State - as well as doubling the size of the country thanks to the Louisiana Purchase and providing for its exploration by the Lewis and Clark Expedition, recent evidence that he may have fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings points to a snarl of hypocrisy and ambivalence at the centre of an otherwise elegantly wired mind.

Born on this day in 1743 to a prominent Virginia family, Jefferson inherited the estate that would become Monticello when he was 14. At sixteen he entered The College of William & Mary, earning highest honours upon his graduation just two years later. While at university he was a member of the Flat Hat Club, a secret society that was not unlike a fraternity, except that their meetings tended to involve philosophical discussions rather than binge drinking.

In 1772 Jefferson married his distant cousin, the 23-year-old widow Martha Wayles Skelton; during the decade of their marriage she bore him six children - Martha Jefferson Randolph (1772–1836), Jane Randolph (1774–1775), a stillborn or unnamed son (1777), Mary Wayles (1778–1804), Lucy Elizabeth (1780–1781), and Elizabeth (1782–1785) - dying after the birth of the last. She had also had a son from her previous marriage who died at the time of her engagement to Jefferson. After his wife's death he never remarried and in fact persisted during the earliest years of his political triumph both as governor of Virginia and Founding Father despite suffering from a deep depression.

Jefferson's method for overcoming his grief seems to have involved becoming a workaholic; although this tendency first asserted itself at a young age, it would remain constant throughout his life. An active role in politics from the early days of his marriage led to his appointment to the Continental Congress as a representative of the Commonwealth of Virginia, then to his service as governor of Virginia, and thence his appointment as Minister to France (thanks to which he missed such highlights of the American Revolution as the Philadelphia Convention) although he seems to have consoled himself by having an affair with the married artist Maria Cosway while there.

He returned to the US to serve as the country's first Secretary of State under George Washington, during which time he sparred with Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton over fiscal policy, a clash between two polymathic geniuses that alas wouldn't be likely to occur in the modern-day District of Columbia. Between 1793 and 1796 Jefferson was out of office, during which time he cared for his estate and wrote. Despite Washington's urging to the contrary, political parties began to form at this time; the country's long descent into divisive partisanship had its beginnings as long ago as that, with Alexander Hamilton and his flunky Vice-President Adams representing the Federalists, Jefferson and his successor James Madison the Democratic-Republican Party. Jefferson is also considered the father of American exceptionalism, a way of thinking that was entirely valid in the days when the country was young, but which becomes less so with each passing year.

In 1796 Jefferson became Vice-President to John Adams, and following the disputatious 1800 election was appointed President by Congress (at about the same time Rembrandt Peale painted the portrait of him, shown above). For his first Vice-President Jefferson chose Aaron Burr; following the duel at which Burr fatally wounded Alexander Hamilton, he was dropped in favour of George Clinton.

Jefferson's presidency was the first to begin and end in the White House (then called the Presidential or Executive Mansion) and was concerned principally with defending the fledgling nation from British and French incursions against its sovereignty, as well as with expansionism and exploration. Jefferson favoured small government, considering it the basis of freedom.

Following his retirement, Jefferson went on to found - as well as design and execute - the University of Virginia, one of the first with a campus centered on a library rather than a church, in keeping with his deeply held faith in the separation of church and state; in fact, his original designs made no accommodation whatsoever for a chapel. Following the burning of the Library of Congress by the British in August 1814, Jefferson offered his personal holdings (some 6,487 books) to begin rebuilding it, for which he was paid $23,950.

Thomas Jefferson died on the Fourth of July 1826, fifty years to the day after his Declaration of Independence was adopted; he is buried at Monticello and commemorated throughout the United States in place names, on Mount Rushmore, and within the nation's capital itself**. Likewise his portrait adorns the little used US $2 bill and the nickel. He's also been portrayed on the silver screen by Nick Nolte (an improbable bit of casting) in the 1995 film Jefferson in Paris by James Ivory, a heavily fictionalized account.

*The other was Martin Van Buren.
**300 years after leaving office Thomas Jefferson and his legacy are still making news; references to the 3rd president have been struck from Texas school books, a move expected to see him removed from the curricula across the country.
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POPnews - April 13th

[Designed by John Russell Pope and built by John McShain on a commanding site in West Potomac Park, construction on the Jefferson Memorial began in December 1938 (and was completed by the architectural firm of Eggers & Higgins amid some controversy following Pope's death); the main sculptor was Rudulph Evans, with Adolph A. Weinman selected to sculpt the pediment relief above the entrance. The bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson it contains - also by Evans - was added in 1947. Jefferson wasn't the first choice for a memorial on the site, however. As early as 1901 the McMillan Commission had proposed a similar structure to house numerous sculptures of the nation's most illustrious men; nothing came of that plan, nor of a memorial - proposed in 1925 - to honour the recently deceased Theodore Roosevelt. It was another Roosevelt, FDR, who consulted with the Commission of Fine Arts in 1934 about erecting the colossal shrine to his idol, which stands today amidst thousands of sakura donated to the United States by Japan in both 1912 and 1965.]

1111 - Henry V was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Paschal II at St. Peter's Basilica.

1598 - France's King Henri IV issued the Edict of Nantes, allowing freedom of religion to the country's minority Protestant Huguenots and ending the French Wars of Religion.

1742 - George Frideric Handel's oratorio Messiah premiered at the Music Hall in Dublin.

1861 - At the outset of the American Civil War, Fort Sumter surrendered to Confederate forces following a 33-hour siege.

1868 - The Abyssinian War ended as British and Indian troops under Robert Napier captured Magdala from forces loyal to Emperor Tewodros II, who committed suicide as his fortress was taken.

1870 - New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art was founded; its doors opened in February 1872, with the core of its collection donated by railroad tycoon John Taylor Johnston.

1873 - The Colfax Massacre took place in Colfax, Louisiana; more than a hundred black men were killed by white supremacists belonging to groups such as the White League while attempting to vote.

1919 - At the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre British troops shot and killed at least 379 unarmed demonstrators in Amritsar.

1921 - The Spanish Communist Workers' Party was founded.

1939 - India's Hindustani Lal Sena (Indian Red Army) was formed on the twentieth anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, vowing to engage in armed struggle against the British.

1943 - The Jefferson Memorial was dedicated in Washington, DC, on the 200th anniversary of Thomas Jefferson's birth.

1948 - A British soldier and 79 Jewish doctors, nurses, and medical students from Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus were massacred by Arabs in Sheikh Jarra, near Jerusalem, when their convoy of two Haganah escort cars, two ambulances and two buses were attacked. So badly burnt were the bodies that only 31 of them could be identified; the rest were buried in a mass grave at Sanhedria Cemetery. The attack was said to have been ordered by Abdul Kader Husseini in retaliation for the Deir Yassin Massacre.

1953 - CIA director Allen Dulles launched a mind-control program known as MKULTRA.

1969 - Brisbane's tramway network closed, likely because some oil company executive managed to buy himself a local politician or two; all trams were then replaced by - surprise! - diesel buses.

1970 - An oxygen tank aboard Apollo 13 exploded, putting the crew into deadly peril, as dramatized in Ron Howard's 1995 film Apollo 13 as well as 1974's Houston, We've Got a Problem.

1974 - Western Union (in cooperation with NASA and Hughes Aircraft) launched America's first commercial geosynchronous communications satellite, Westar 1.

1975 - An attack by Lebanon's Phalangist resistance resulted in the so-called Bus Massacre, in which 26 members of Palestine's P.F.L. were killed, marking the start of the 15-year Lebanese Civil War.

1976 - The US Treasury Department reintroduced the two-dollar bill as a Federal Reserve Note on Thomas Jefferson's 233rd birthday as part of the United States Bicentennial celebration.

1992 - The Great Chicago Flood occurred when the damaged wall of a utility tunnel beneath the Chicago River opened into a breach which flooded basements and underground facilities throughout the Chicago Loop with an estimated 250 million gallons of water.

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"Now We Are Free" by Lisa Gerrard (with Hans Zimmer)

Fans of Dead Can Dance have known for years the power that's in the voice of Lisa Gerrard (who was born on this day in 1961); it took Ridley Scott, though, to bring her powerful gift to the widest possible audience...

Pairing her with Hans Zimmer, the two composed a haunting soundtrack for Scott's 2000 film Gladiator, for which they received a Golden Globe and were Oscar-nominated.
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Remembering... Josephine Baker

Ernest Hemingway called her '... the most sensational woman anyone ever saw...' and he must have meant it because it wasn't like Papa to gush; yet her daring wasn't just confined to the stage, it seasoned her whole outlook on life. Whether shaking her banana-adorned booty at the Folies Bergères or secreting papers out of France for the Resistance, all her life Josephine Baker lived it and loved it right on the edge.

Born in St. Louis in June 1906, she dropped out of school at 12 to become a street performer; at 15 she traveled the US in vaudeville, which landed her in New York City at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. Awarded the coveted spot of last girl in the chorus line* at the Plantation Club, she parlayed her cabaret success into roles on Broadway, in such revues as Shuffle Along (1921) and The Chocolate Dandies (1924).

Predictably, the offensive titles of these shows were the least offensive things about them; tired of American bigotry she set her sights on brighter lights - an entire City of Lights, in fact. Opening in Paris in October 1925 she soon became the toast of Europe. Initially a dancer, once out from under the thumb of Jim Crow she found her voice as well; eventually she added movies to her resume, starring in three perfect gems: the silent Siren of the Tropics (1927), Zouzou (1934) and her final film Princess Tam Tam (1935).

Following this success she attempted a return to the United States, appearing in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936; it was a flop, and before the run had ended she was replaced by Gypsy Rose Lee. She returned to France, disgusted, and stayed away for years - she simply refused to play to a segregated audience, and later it would be her appearances in Las Vegas that helped integrate audiences there.

After her personal triumph over the Nazis in German-occupied Paris she continued to funnel money back to the US to support civil rights organizations; in fact, she was the only woman to speak at the March on Washington in August 1963. Putting her heart where her money is with regards to integration, years before anyone had ever heard of Mia Farrow or Angelina Jolie, Baker proceeded to adopt 12 orphans of various ethnicities, housing them at her home, the Château de Milandes.

Her final performance came on the occasion of her fiftieth anniversary on the Parisian etage; booked into Bobino nightclub in 1975 - with the high-profile patronage of Prince Rainier, Princess Grace, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis - she gave a performance which had those in attendance (jaded jet-setters all) tripping over each other to find a superlative that was superlative enough to describe it.

Two days later she was discovered, unconscious, in her dressing room, surrounded by glowing reviews; two days after that, on this day in 1975, Josephine Baker died at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.

*The last girl in the chorus line typically performed the complicated choreography required of the entire line in a comically haphazard fashion, following which she would perform it in an even more elaborate form for the encore; it was a signal honour to be awarded this spot in the line up, and earned Baker the epithet of 'highest paid chorus girl in vaudeville'.

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"Hug My Soul" by Saint Etienne

Birthday wishes go out today to Sarah Cracknell, one third of Saint Etienne (along with Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs) whose wistful 1960s-inspired electronica dominated the UK pop scene in the early 1990s; while their biggest hit was arguably a cover of Neil Young's 1970 classic Only Love Can Break Your Heart, the band actually released 7* albums between 1991 and 2005.

Hug My Soul was the third single from the band's third album Tiger Bay, and originally appeared in 1994, following the singles Pale Movie and Like a Motorway. The last release from their original label, Heavenly Records, it - along with the album - was re-released in 1996 by their new record label, Creation Records, featuring different artwork and a slightly shuffled track listing.

*Or eight, depending upon whether or not one counts Fairfax High, which was only sold as as a bonus disc with 1998's Good Humor.
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Pop History Moment: The Death of FDR

To those who led it - as much as to those who fought it - World War II was an unimaginable strain; at the head of the American effort was an extraordinary man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. First elected President in November 1932 as the Great Depression was beginning to deepen, things had just started to lift during his second term (thanks as much to the machinations of the military-industrial complex as to the New Deal) but as his third election loomed Hitler's thugs marched into Poland in September 1939. A much more worldly figure than many of his recent predecessors in the Presidency, FDR foresaw the threat to world democracy should the powers of Europe crumble under tyranny. That threat was finally brought home following the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 at which point the United States finally entered the war; even then the President adamantly insisted on a policy of Europe First to aid British and French allies.

For guiding the United States towards war against Fascism the President nobly suffered the very worst name-calling available to his foes, many of whom already felt him a traitor to his class for deigning to assist the working class in the first place. In that reductive way which is second nature to the Republican Party they likewise turned the Second World War into being all about Jews - and why would anybody, even the man they vilified as 'President Rosenveld', want to help them? For all their subsequent posturing about how unpatriotic it is to criticize a Republican President during wartime, they attacked FDR now as savagely as Hitler attacked Holland, Belgium, Denmark, the United Kingdom...

Yet Roosevelt remained stalwart, infuriating his domestic foes by ignoring them as surely as he made his foreign foes irate with rhetoric. Following the Yalta Conference in February 1945, FDR traveled the Arabic world and Northern Africa, holding meetings with Egypt's King Farouk I, Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, and King Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia; he then had what would be his final meeting with Winston Churchill, and thereafter met with US ambassadors in Algiers.

When he addressed Congress in March (on the subject of the Yalta Conference) those assembled were shocked by his gaunt appearance. Formerly a sportsman who - despite his crippled legs - had a robust upper body, he was now a frail old man with a haggard face and the complexion of a ghost. He spent the month of March at his desk in the Oval Office - mostly chiding Stalin - but by the end of the month (having already won his record-setting fourth election) he was persuaded to take a break, and so went to his favourite spa, Georgia's Warm Springs, in advance of a proposed address to the founding conference of the United Nations.

On this day in 1945, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to his bed, complaining of a headache; he never returned from it. He'd had, in fact, a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and died there at 3:55 PM, his former mistress Lucy Mercer by his side; his daughter Anna Roosevelt Boettiger had arranged for her to take care of him in her absence (her son was sick as well). When FDR was first taken ill First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had wanted to come, but was urged to keep her afternoon speaking engagement with the Sulgrave Club so as to not arouse suspicion. During a performance by pianist Evelyn Tyner she was called away and told by telephone to return to the White House as soon as possible. She watched the rest of the performance and left to thunderous applause; as soon as the new President was sworn in at 7 PM she left for Georgia.

The President's body was borne back to Washington by train, and all along the track Americans of every age and colour stood silently to watch it pass, many with tears streaming down their faces. Following a state funeral he was thence removed to his home at Hyde Park, New York, where he is interred at Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site. Less than a month after FDR's death Adolf Hitler took a pistol and scurried, rat-like, beneath the rubble of Berlin, where he did the only right thing he ever did and ended the war. Roosevelt's Vice-President - now President Harry Truman - dedicated the V-E Day festivities to a man who, as much as any enlisted soldier, gave his life to keep his country free.
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POPnews - April 12th

[While few people had even heard of Terry Fox when he began the Marathon of Hope on this day in 1980, within weeks he was a national celebrity; by now - nearly thirty years after he was forced to quit his run just 143 days in, or at halfway across the country - he is Canada's greatest hero.]
467 CE - Anthemius was elevated to Emperor of the Western Roman Empire.

1204 - The Fourth Crusade captured Constantinople, thus ending the Byzantine Empire, if only temporarily.

1557 - The city of Cuenca in Ecuador was founded by Gil Ramírez Dávalos.

1606 - The Union Jack was adopted as the flag of Great Britain - although it's only called a Union Jack when it's flying from a ship's mast. At all other times it's called the Union flag.

1861 - The American Civil War began when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston.

1864 - During the American Civil War, Confederate forces under Nathan Bedford Forrest and James R. Chalmers massacred most of the African American soldiers who'd surrendered to them at Tennessee's Fort Pillow.

1917 - During World War I, Canadian forces successfully took Vimy Ridge from the Germans; the victory - at the end of three days of fierce fighting (and at a cost of 3,598 killed with 7,004 wounded on the Canadian side alone) - is considered to have been a pivotal moment in the emergence of Canada as a world power. The battle is commemorated at the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France (which was rededicated by the Queen of Canada in 2007) and is the subject of Pierre Berton's aptly-titled work of populist history, Vimy.

1927 - Believing a Communist takeover of China to be imminent, Chiang Kai-shek purged them from the ranks of the Kuomintang; untold hundreds were killed and untold thousands went missing during the April 12 Incident. The massacre ended China's First United Front yet only postponed the Communist onslaught by a generation.

1934 - The strongest surface wind gust in history - 231 mph - was measured by the staff of the Mount Washington Observatory on the summit of New Hampshire's Mount Washington.

1935 - The Bristol Blenheim had its maiden flight.

1937 - English aviator and inventor Sir Frank Whittle ground-tested the first jet engine designed to power an aircraft, at Rugby.

1961 - Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into outer space, on board the Soviet Union's Vostok 1; the event is still commemorated the world over as Yuri's Night.

1968 - Following an accident involving VX nerve gas at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah's Skull Valley, 4,372 sheep died - of which 2,150 had to be euthanized, and a further 1,877 were rendered unsalable due to their exposure - during what came to be known as the Dugway sheep incident.

1980 - Terry Fox began his Marathon of Hope run across Canada in aid of cancer research by dipping his artificial leg into the Atlantic Ocean at St. John's, Newfoundland.

1981 - Columbia's STS-1 mission became the first for NASA's Space Shuttle program.

1992 - Disneyland Resort Paris - more commonly called Euro Disney - opened in the eastern suburbs of Paris, and was the second international Disney resort property (the first being Tokyo Disney Resort).

1994 - The legal firm of Canter & Siegel - husband Laurence Canter and wife Martha Siegel - posted the Internet's first commercial mass spam mailing on over 6,000 Usenet groups; entitled Green Card Lottery - Final One? and using a script written by a programmer known only as 'Jason', their actions set in motion a near crippling of the Internet. Not only does spam cost US business alone $13 billion it results in a slower service all around, and is rightly reviled as a practice despite being virtually unstoppable.

2002 - Pedro Carmona became interim President of Venezuela during a coup attempt against Hugo Chávez.

2007 - The Kremlin vetoed an investigation into the March 1968 death of Yuri Gagarin, who was - as previously noted - the first man in space.
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Remembering... Jane Bolin

As will happen when somebody is first at something, they soon find a lot of other firsts piled at their feet; at least that was the case with Jane Bolin...

Aside from being fourth of her siblings - born on this day in 1908 - everything else Jane Bolin did was first: she was the first black woman to receive a law degree from Yale Law School (in 1931), the first to join the New York City Bar Association, and the first to join the city's law department. In 1939 she became the first black woman to serve as a judge in the United States when she was sworn in to the bench of the New York City Domestic Relations Court, having been appointed to the position at the age of just 31 by Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.

Her position was renewed three times, and when she was finally forced to retire at the age of 70 she'd served the families of New York for 40 years. In that time she strove to racially integrate city services. She also served on the boards of the NAACP and the National Urban League, and was awarded honorary degrees from Tuskeegee Institute, Williams College, Hampton University, Western College for Women and Morgan State University.

Bolin died in January 2007 at the age of 98, and was survived by her son, Yorke B. Mizelle.
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"Down In The Depths" by Lisa Stansfield

As performed by birthday gal Lisa Stansfield - in a video directed by Phillippe Gautier - Down in the Depths retains all of the power inherent in the performance of its originator, Ethel Merman, but without the latter's trademark bombast; as a result, you may or may not like this version, which Stansfield recorded for the 1990's AIDS relief album Red Hot + Blue, and which itself was named for Cole Porter's 1936 musical Red, Hot and Blue in which this song premiered.

Got that?
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"All Around The World" by Lisa Stansfield

Lisa Stansfield was a middling pop star and children's television presenter when All Around the World rocketed her to international stardom in 1989, and along with it her debut solo album Affection; with a smoky, smooth voice ideally suited to blue-eyed soul she offered a version of Cole Porter's Down in the Depths (on the tribute/charity album Red Hot + Blue) so torchy it was a threat to curtains. She also did her part to raise the roof on Wembley Stadium during her duet with George Michael on These Are the Days of Our Lives at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert.

Thanks to one of my rare relationships, I'll always have half a claim on this as being 'my song', since once upon a time it had been 'our song'; thanks as well to a thriving sense of nostalgia (which seems especially strong in these, my twilight years) the song is once again on heavy rotation in my iPod nearly 20 years after it became too painful to listen to when that adolescent love affair - as these things will - inevitably came to an end...
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Pop History Moment: Rock Song Proves Prophetic

London's Brixton neighbourhood erupted in violence on this day in 1981, in an eerie echo of the song The Guns of Brixton, by The Clash. Although the song was written and released in December 1979 for their third album, London Calling, it spoke of discontent then brewing between Metropolitan Police and the largely black population there.

The 1981 riot began when police arrested a black youth on Railton Road under the aegis of Operation Swamp 81, which was aimed at reducing street crime in the area; needless to say, given the outcome, it failed miserably. More than 300 police and 65 civilian injuries were reported following the fracas, while 100 vehicles - including 56 belonging to police - were burned, along with 30 buildings. Another 150 buildings were damaged, mainly by looters. Of the 5,000 people involved, the 1,000 police present made just 82 arrests.

A public inquiry into the riot was made by Lord Scarman; his findings were published in November 1981.
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POPnews - April 11th

[Architect Adolf Leonard van Gendt found his inspiration for the Concertgebouw in Leipzig's Neue Gewandhaus, which was later destroyed during World War II; located in the Amsterdam suburb of Amstelveen - and built on some 2,186 twelve to thirteen meter (forty to forty-three foot) long pilings - the Concertgebouw is considered to have some of the best acoustics in the world.]
491 CE - Flavius Anastasius became Byzantine Emperor, with the name of Anastasius I, following the death of Zeno.

1079 - Stanislaus, Bishop of Krakow, was executed by order of Poland's Duke Bolesław II. Maybe. Then again, it might have been on May 8th. Anyway, for his trouble he would be canonized by Pope Innocent IV in September 1253.

1241 - Mongolian warlord and founder of the Blue Horde, Batu Khan defeated Hungary's Béla IV at the Battle of Muhi.

1689 - William III and Mary II were crowned as joint sovereigns of Great Britain; in order to accommodate the unprecedented arrangement special coronation regalia was made, including two pieces now known as the Queen's Orb and Sceptre.

1814 - The Treaty of Fontainebleau ended the War of the Sixth Coalition against Napoleon Bonaparte, forcing him to abdicate unconditionally for the first time.

1828 - The Argentinian city of Bahia Blanca was established as a fortress by Ramón Estomba upon the orders of Juan Manuel de Rosas, governor of Buenos Aires.

1865 - President Abraham Lincoln made his last public speech, at the gates of the White House, during which he spoke in favour of black suffrage. In the modestly-sized crowd that day was a certain John Wilkes Booth, whose reaction to Lincoln's announcement was to reverberate for generations... 'That is the last speech he will ever give,' he said, to his companion Lewis Powell, as they walked away.

1888 - Amsterdam's Concertgebouw was inaugurated with a concert in which an orchestra of 120 musicians and a chorus of 500 singers participated, performing works of Wagner, Handel, Bach, and Beethoven.

1919 - The International Labour Organization was founded.

1951 - The Stone of Scone - the stone upon which Scottish monarchs were (and British monarchs since Edward II in February 1308 have been) traditionally crowned - was found on the site of the altar of Arbroath Abbey; it had been taken from within St. Edward's Chair in Westminster Abbey in December 1950 by four Scottish nationalist students (Ian Hamilton, Gavin Vernon, Kay Matheson and Alan Stuart) who also damaged it in the pilfering, whereupon it was repaired by Glasgow stonemason Robert Gray and returned to London.

That's the chair there, with the Stone of Scone safely thereunder ensconced; of course, since November 1996 the Stone has actually resided at Edinburgh Castle.

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1955 - Air India's Kashmir Princess crashed as a result of a bomb blast in a failed assassination attempt on Zhou Enlai by the Kuomintang; while it has always been explained that the Chinese Premier missed the flight due to an emercency appendectomy, recent intelligence indicates he may have been aware of the plot and sacrificed those on board for some reason known only to him. In all sixteen passengers and crew died in the crash - including seven journalists and Raymond Wong, the Hong Kong branch director of Xinhua News Agency - while three survived.

1961 - The war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann began, in Jerusalem.

1965 - During the Palm Sunday tornado outbreak fifty-one tornadoes touched down in six Midwestern states, killing 256 people.

1968 - US President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing.

1970 - Apollo 13 was launched.

1979 - Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was deposed.

1987 - The London Agreement was secretly signed between Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Shimon Peres and Jordan's King Hussein.

2002 - An attempted coup d'état aimed at toppling Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez began.

2007 - A pair of bombings in the Algerian capital of Algiers killed 33 people and wounded 222 others.

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"Do You Want Crying" by Katrina and the Waves

Birthday wishes go out today to Katrina Leskanich, front woman for the Anglo-American band Katrina and the Waves, who would have been a one-hit wonder for their 1985 monster hit Walking on Sunshine were it not for this, the band's second single; in fact, Katrina and the Waves were still making music a dozen years later when they won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1997 with Love Shine a Light, in support of which they appeared an unprecedented four weeks in a row on Top of the Pops. *
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Pop History Moment: "The Great Gatsby" Is Published

F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece of the Jazz Age - The Great Gatsby - was first published on this day in 1925 by Scribner's; its iconic cover was designed by Francis Cugat prior to publication, and was said to have influenced the finished novel. The novel takes place during the summer of 1922, and concerns the dissipation of a group of new money swells at the outset of Prohibition.

A flop upon its initial release, it has morphed into a classic with the passage of the years.

The most famous adaptation of The Great Gatsby for film was made by Jack Clayton in 1974, and starred Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby, Mia Farrow as the object of his affection Daisy Buchanan, and Sam Waterston as Nick Carraway; previously made in 1949 and subsequently remade for television in 2000 (starring Mira Sorvino as Daisy), a silent version made in 1926 has long been considered lost.
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"Murder On The Dancefloor" by Sophie Ellis Bextor

Birthday wishes go out today to the UK's Nu-Disco phenom Sophie Ellis-Bextor, who is herself the offspring of a show business marriage; her father, Robin Bextor, is an award-winning director - most notably with The Earl of Wessex's ill-fated Ardent Productions - while her mother, Janet Ellis, is a sometime actress and former presenter on kids' TV stalwart Blue Peter.

Murder on the Dancefloor originally appeared on Ellis-Bextor's 2001 album Read My Lips; as a follow up to her hugely popular cover version of Take Me Home (originally recorded in 1974, by Cher) Murder on the Dancefloor certainly did its job... It remains her biggest hit to date.
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POPnews - April 10th

[Due to the efforts of Julius Sterling Morton, as many as a million trees were planted in Nebraska on the first Arbor Day; curiosity has me wondering how many of them might still be standing. Certainly this one no longer is...]

1606 - The Charter of the Virginia Company of London was given by England's King James I with the purpose of establishing colonial settlements in North America.

1815 - Following several centuries of dormancy Mount Tambora, a volcano on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, began to erupt - a period of eruption that would last more than three months.

1821 - Following that year's Easter Sunday Mass Constantinople's Patriarch Gregory V was removed from the Patriarchal Cathedral by the Turks and hanged from the main gate of the Patriarchate, following which his body was thrown into the Bosphorus; the corpse was later recovered by Greek sailors, and is today interred in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens.

1856 - The Theta Chi Fraternity was founded, at Vermont's Norwich University.

1864 - Austrian Archduke Maximilian was elected Emperor of Mexico; his reign was unpopular both in Mexico and the rest of the world right from the start, and would struggle to last three years - after which time he was summarily executed.

1866 - The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) was founded in New York City by Henry Bergh.

1874 - The first Arbor Day was celebrated, in Nebraska City; a holiday designed to honour trees, its importance - like them - ought to be growing with each passing year. Yet with up to a quarter of urban tree cover at risk due to real estate development, and an ongoing soil erosion issue which threatens ground water levels in both rural and urban settings, promising an increase in drought - and let's not forget the wholesale destruction of rain forests in South America (due to cutting) and North America (due to the mountain pine beetle)! - each successive Arbor Day promises to be a hotter, drier, nastier one than any of those that came before.

1912 - The 'unsinkable' RMS Titanic left port in Southampton on her first and only voyage.

1919 - Mexican Revolution leader Emiliano Zapata was ambushed and shot dead by government forces in Morelos.

1941 - Europe's Axis Powers established the Independent State of Croatia from occupied Yugoslavia, with Ante Pavelić's Ustase fascist insurgents in power.

1944 - Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from Birkenau dressed in Dutch clothing; once safely across the Polish-Slovakian border they dictated a 32-page dossier - now known as the Vrba-Wetzler Report and published by Dr Oscar Krasniansky - which became the first-ever first-hand account of the goings-on inside a Nazi death camp.

1953 - Warner Bros premiered House of Wax - the first 3-D film to be accompanied by sterephonic sound; the film starred Vincent Price and Carolyn Jones (the future Morticia Addams).

1959 - Japan's Crown Prince Akihito, future Emperor of Japan, wed commoner Michiko Shōda at a solemn Shinto ceremony in Tokyo - despite the objection of Empress Kōjun, and other conservatives in the Imperial Household.

1963 - 129 people died when the submarine USS Thresher sank at sea off Cape Cod.

1968 - The TEV Wahine - a ferry connecting Lyttelton to Wellington across Cook Strait in New Zealand - foundered on Barrett Reef and capsized at Steeple Rock near the entrance to Wellington Harbour; of the 610 passengers and 123 crew on board, 53 people lost their lives.

1970 - Paul McCartney announced the break up of The Beatles, a week before the release of his debut solo album McCartney.

1972 - 20 days after he was kidnapped in Buenos Aires, Paraguayan businessman Oberdan Sallustro was executed by communist guerrillas from the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo.

1991 - The Italian ferry Moby Prince collided with an oil tanker in dense fog off Livorno, killing 140.

1998 - The Belfast Agreement was signed.
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