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Bez
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CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS:

October 22, 1962

In a televised speech of extraordinary gravity, President John F. Kennedy announces that U.S. spy planes have discovered Soviet missile bases in Cuba. These missile sites--under construction but nearing completion--housed medium-range missiles capable of striking a number of major cities in the United States, including Washington, D.C. Kennedy announced that he was ordering a naval "quarantine" of Cuba to prevent Soviet ships from transporting any more offensive weapons to the island and explained that the United States would not tolerate the existence of the missile sites currently in place. The president made it clear that America would not stop short of military action to end what he called a "clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace."

What is known as the Cuban Missile Crisis actually began on October 15, 1962--the day that U.S. intelligence personnel analyzing U-2 spy plane data discovered that the Soviets were building medium-range missile sites in Cuba. The next day, President Kennedy secretly convened an emergency meeting of his senior military, political, and diplomatic advisers to discuss the ominous development. The group became known as ExCom, short for Executive Committee. After rejecting a surgical air strike against the missile sites, ExCom decided on a naval quarantine and a demand that the bases be dismantled and missiles removed. On the night of October 22, Kennedy went on national television to announce his decision. During the next six days, the crisis escalated to a breaking point as the world tottered on the brink of nuclear war between the two superpowers.

On October 23, the quarantine of Cuba began, but Kennedy decided to give Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev more time to consider the U.S. action by pulling the quarantine line back 500 miles. By October 24, Soviet ships en route to Cuba capable of carrying military cargoes appeared to have slowed down, altered, or reversed their course as they approached the quarantine, with the exception of one ship--the tanker Bucharest. At the request of more than 40 nonaligned nations, U.N. Secretary-General U Thant sent private appeals to Kennedy and Khrushchev, urging that their governments "refrain from any action that may aggravate the situation and bring with it the risk of war." At the direction of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, U.S. military forces went to DEFCON 2, the highest military alert ever reached in the postwar era, as military commanders prepared for full-scale war with the Soviet Union.

On October 25, the aircraft carrier USS Essexand the destroyer USS Gearing attempted to intercept the Soviet tanker Bucharest as it crossed over the U.S. quarantine of Cuba. The Soviet ship failed to cooperate, but the U.S. Navy restrained itself from forcibly seizing the ship, deeming it unlikely that the tanker was carrying offensive weapons. On October 26, Kennedy learned that work on the missile bases was proceeding without interruption, and ExCom considered authorizing a U.S. invasion of Cuba. The same day, the Soviets transmitted a proposal for ending the crisis: The missile bases would be removed in exchange for a U.S. pledge not to invade Cuba.

The next day, however, Khrushchev upped the ante by publicly calling for the dismantling of U.S. missile bases in Turkey under pressure from Soviet military commanders. While Kennedy and his crisis advisers debated this dangerous turn in negotiations, a U-2 spy plane was shot down over Cuba, and its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson, was killed. To the dismay of the Pentagon, Kennedy forbid a military retaliation unless any more surveillance planes were fired upon over Cuba. To defuse the worsening crisis, Kennedy and his advisers agreed to dismantle the U.S. missile sites in Turkey but at a later date, in order to prevent the protest of Turkey, a key NATO member.

On October 28, Khrushchev announced his government's intent to dismantle and remove all offensive Soviet weapons in Cuba. With the airing of the public message on Radio Moscow, the USSR confirmed its willingness to proceed with the solution secretly proposed by the Americans the day before. In the afternoon, Soviet technicians began dismantling the missile sites, and the world stepped back from the brink of nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis was effectively over. In November, Kennedy called off the blockade, and by the end of the year all the offensive missiles had left Cuba. Soon after, the United States quietly removed its missiles from Turkey.

The Cuban Missile Crisis seemed at the time a clear victory for the United States, but Cuba emerged from the episode with a much greater sense of security. A succession of U.S. administrations have honored Kennedy's pledge not to invade Cuba, and the communist island nation situated just 80 miles from Florida remains a thorn in the side of U.S. foreign policy. The removal of antiquated Jupiter missiles from Turkey had no detrimental effect on U.S. nuclear strategy, but the Cuban Missile Crisis convinced a humiliated USSR to commence a massive nuclear buildup. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union reached nuclear parity with the United States and built intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of striking any city in the United States.
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23rd October



1971 Disney World opens



Walt Disney World opens in Orlando, Florida, 16 years after Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California. Disney World, featuring rides and characters from Disney's beloved movies, would later include EPCOT Center (which opened in 1982), based on Walt Disney's vision of a Utopian planned community. (EPCOT stands for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.) The Walt Disney Company launched a real planned community, Celebration, Florida, in 1996.
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BURTON BUYS LIZ A DIAMOND:

October 24, 1969

Movie star Richard Burton dazzles wife Elizabeth Taylor--and their legions of fans--when he buys her a 69-carat Cartier diamond ring costing $1.5 million. It was just another chapter in a tempestuous marriage that began on the Ides of March and continued thereafter in the public eye.

Taylor and Burton met and fell in the love during the filming of Cleopatra (1963). She was a 30-year-old American starlet who was already on her fourth marriage, and he was a former British stage actor, also married but known to fool around and drink on the set. Cleopatra made them both superstars, and on March 15, 1964, they were married at the Ritz in Montreal. As one of the most famous married couples in the world, they commanded high salaries to appear in nearly a dozen movies together. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and The Taming of the Shrew (1967) were the only two to receive critical acclaim.

The couple's stormy private life often drew more attention than their movie roles, and their extravagance was legendary. During the 1960s, they earned a combined $88 million and spent more than $65 million. They bought a fleet of Rolls Royces, whole floors of luxury hotels, a private jet, a helicopter, and a multimillion-dollar yacht. They were American royalty, and the world watched as their lives began to fall apart. Taylor appropriated Burton's alcohol-abuse problem and also mixed drugs into the stew. By 1969, their marriage was a constant cycle of verbal and physical battles that was only interrupted by the mutual presentation of expensive gifts. The famous Cartier diamond was the product of a fight they had in a restaurant one night. Burton called Taylor's hands large and ugly, and she responded that in that case, he'd better buy her the 69-carat ring she wanted so that her hands looked smaller and more attractive.

The flawless, pear-shaped diamond had 58 facets and was unearthed from the Premier mine of South Africa in 1966. It went up for auction in October 1969 and was bought by the Cartier jewelry firm for $1.05 million. The very next day, on October 24, Burton bought the diamond for an estimated $1.5 million; although the exact sum was undisclosed. The diamond--christened the "Taylor-Burton"--remained at Cartier for several days before Burton took it home and presented it to Taylor. Thousands of people lined the street outside Cartier every day to view it.

Taylor and Burton became estranged in 1970, in 1973 they formally separated, and in 1974 they divorced. They remarried in 1975 but stayed together just a few months. The next year, they divorced for the second and last time. Three years later, Taylor put the Taylor-Burton diamond up for auction. The jeweler Henry Lambert bought it for $3 million and then sold it to an anonymous buyer in Saudi Arabia. Elizabeth Taylor went on to have two more husbands, both of whom she divorced. She is currently single. Richard Burton died of a brain aneurysm in 1984.
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PARLIAMENT ENACTS THE STAMP ACT:

November 1, 1765

In the face of widespread opposition in the American colonies, Parliament enacts the Stamp Act, a taxation measure designed to raise revenue for British military operations in America.

Defense of the American colonies in the French and Indian War (1754-63) and Pontiac's Rebellion (1763-64) were costly affairs for Great Britain, and Prime Minister George Grenville hoped to recover some of these costs by taxing the colonists. In 1764, the Sugar Act was enacted, putting a high duty on refined sugar. Although resented, the Sugar Act tax was hidden in the cost of import duties, and most colonists accepted it. The Stamp Act, however, was a direct tax on the colonists and led to an uproar in America over an issue that was to be a major cause of the Revolution: taxation without representation.

Passed without debate by Parliament in March 1765, the Stamp Act was designed to force colonists to use special stamped paper in the printing of newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and playing cards, and to have a stamp embossed on all commercial and legal papers. The stamp itself displayed an image of a Tudor rose framed by the word "America" and the Latin phrase Honi soit qui mal y pense--"Shame to him who thinks evil of it."

Outrage was immediate. Massachusetts politician Samuel Adams organized the secret Sons of Liberty organization to plan protests against the measure, and the Virginia legislature and other colonial assemblies passed resolutions opposing the act. In October, nine colonies sent representatives to New York to attend a Stamp Act Congress, where resolutions of "rights and grievances" were framed and sent to Parliament and King George III. Despite this opposition, the Stamp Act was enacted on November 1, 1765.

The colonists greeted the arrival of the stamps with violence and economic retaliation. A general boycott of British goods began, and the Sons of Liberty staged attacks on the customhouses and homes of tax collectors in Boston. After months of protest and economic turmoil, and an appeal by Benjamin Franklin before the British House of Commons, Parliament voted to repeal the Stamp Act in March 1766. However, the same day, Parliament passed the Declaratory Acts, asserting that the British government had free and total legislative power over the colonies.

Parliament would again attempt to force unpopular taxation measures on the American colonies in the late 1760s, leading to a steady deterioration in British-American relations that culminated in the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775.
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November 3

1900 America's First Car Show Begins

On this day, the first significant car show in the United States began in New York City. The week-long event, held in Madison Square Garden, was organized by the Automobile Club of America. Fifty-one exhibitors displayed 31 automobiles along with various accessories. Among the fathers of the automobile present at the "Horseless Carriage Show" was automaker James Ward Packard, who had completed his first car the year before, and brought three of his Packards to exhibit to the public. In addition to Packard, the show introduced a number of other fledgling automobile companies that became significant industry players in the coming decades, although none of the makes present would still be in business by 1980. The event also featured automotive demonstrations, such as braking and starting contests, and a specially built ramp to measure the hill-climbing ability of the various automobiles. Spectators paid 50¢ each to attend the event.

1995 British Soldiers Break Bridge-Building Record

On this day, a team of British soldiers from the 21st Engineer Regiment broke all speed records in the construction of a bridge capable of transporting military vehicles. The British soldiers, based in Nienberg, Germany, built the bridge across a 26-foot, three-inch gap located in Hameln, Germany. Their five-bay single-story medium-girder bridge was completed in eight minutes and 44 seconds.
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Bez wrote: PARLIAMENT ENACTS THE STAMP ACT:

November 1, 1765

In the face of widespread opposition in the American colonies, Parliament enacts the Stamp Act, a taxation measure designed to raise revenue for British military operations in America.

Defense of the American colonies in the French and Indian War (1754-63) and Pontiac's Rebellion (1763-64) were costly affairs for Great Britain, and Prime Minister George Grenville hoped to recover some of these costs by taxing the colonists. In 1764, the Sugar Act was enacted, putting a high duty on refined sugar. Although resented, the Sugar Act tax was hidden in the cost of import duties, and most colonists accepted it. The Stamp Act, however, was a direct tax on the colonists and led to an uproar in America over an issue that was to be a major cause of the Revolution: taxation without representation.

Passed without debate by Parliament in March 1765, the Stamp Act was designed to force colonists to use special stamped paper in the printing of newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and playing cards, and to have a stamp embossed on all commercial and legal papers. The stamp itself displayed an image of a Tudor rose framed by the word "America" and the Latin phrase Honi soit qui mal y pense--"Shame to him who thinks evil of it."

Outrage was immediate. Massachusetts politician Samuel Adams organized the secret Sons of Liberty organization to plan protests against the measure, and the Virginia legislature and other colonial assemblies passed resolutions opposing the act. In October, nine colonies sent representatives to New York to attend a Stamp Act Congress, where resolutions of "rights and grievances" were framed and sent to Parliament and King George III. Despite this opposition, the Stamp Act was enacted on November 1, 1765.

The colonists greeted the arrival of the stamps with violence and economic retaliation. A general boycott of British goods began, and the Sons of Liberty staged attacks on the customhouses and homes of tax collectors in Boston. After months of protest and economic turmoil, and an appeal by Benjamin Franklin before the British House of Commons, Parliament voted to repeal the Stamp Act in March 1766. However, the same day, Parliament passed the Declaratory Acts, asserting that the British government had free and total legislative power over the colonies.

Parliament would again attempt to force unpopular taxation measures on the American colonies in the late 1760s, leading to a steady deterioration in British-American relations that culminated in the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775.


Yeah, isn't that a hoot!! We broke away from Britain to get away from taxation. Now we're being taxed to death!!! :confused:
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November 4

1939 The first air-conditioned car

On this day, the 40th National Automobile Show opened in Chicago, Illinois, with a cutting-edge development in automotive comfort on display: air-conditioning. A Packard prototype featured the expensive device, allowing the vehicle's occupants to travel in the comfort of a controlled environment even on the most hot and humid summer day. After the driver chose a desired temperature, the Packard air-conditioning system would cool or heat the air in the car to the designated level, and then dehumidify, filter, and circulate the cooled air to create a comfortable environment. The main air-conditioning unit was located behind the rear seat of the Packard, where a special air duct accommodated two compartments, one for the refrigerating coils and one for the heating coils. The capacity of the air-conditioning unit was equivalent to 1.5 tons of ice in 24 hours when the car was driven at highway driving speeds. The innovation received widespread acclaim at the auto show, but the expensive accessory would not be within the reach of the average American for several decades. However, when automobile air-conditioning finally became affordable, it rapidly became a luxury that U.S. car owners could not live without.

1965 Mrs. Breedlove breaks 300MPH barrier

Lee Ann Roberts Breedlove, wife of land speed record-holder Craig Breedlove, became the first female driver to exceed 300mph when she sped to 308.50mph in the Spirit of America - Sonic 1 vehicle over the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. The Sonic 1 was a four-wheel vehicle powered by a J79 jet engine. A few hours after Lee Ann jet-powered across the one-mile course, Craig Breedlove shattered his own record from the previous year when he reached 555.49mph in the Spirit of America.
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November 5

1911 Roy Rogers born

Leonard Slye, later known as Roy Rogers, is born in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Rogers first came to Hollywood in the 1920s as a migrant fruit picker. In the early 1930s, he joined a singing group called Uncle Tom Murray's Hollywood Hillbillies, which first sang on the radio in 1931. Rogers went on to sing with other similar groups, including the Sons of the Pioneers, which recorded hits like "Tumbling Tumbleweeds." The Sons of the Pioneers group was recruited for low-budget western films, and Rogers was soon playing bit parts for Republic Pictures, the same studio where cowboy star Gene Autry worked. When Autry quit over a dispute with the studio in 1937, Rogers gained more exposure. Starring with his trick horse, Trigger, and his frequent co-star Dale Evans, Rogers soon became one of the Top 10 moneymakers in Hollywood.

Rogers also followed Autry into the radio medium, launching The Roy Rogers Show in 1944. The show, a mix of music and drama, always closed with the song "Happy Trails," which became known as Rogers' theme song.

After Rogers' wife died in 1946, he married co-star Dale Evans. His radio program ran until 1955. In 1951, a TV version of the program debuted and ran until 1957. Rogers became one of the wealthiest men in Hollywood by diversifying his money: His empire included a TV production studio, real estate, cattle, horses, a rodeo show, and a restaurant chain. Roy Rogers died in 1998.



1913 Vivien Leigh born

Actress Vivien Leigh is born in Darjeeling, India. Leigh is best remembered for playing Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939), for which she received her first Best Actress Oscar. In 1940, Leigh married actor Laurence Olivier. She won a second Best Actress Oscar in 1951, for her role as Blanche du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire.



1930 Norma Shearer wins Best Actress Oscar

Norma Shearer wins the Best Actress Academy Award for her role in The Divorcee.

Shearer was born in Montreal, Canada, and studied piano and dance as a child. When her father's business collapsed during World War I, her mother brought Norma and her sisters to New York, where Shearer found work as a model and bit-part actress. Budding movie mogul Irving Thalberg caught a glimpse of her in The Stealers in 1920 and tracked her down three years later. By 1925, she was playing leading roles in such films as Pretty Ladies. She married Thalberg, the head of production at MGM, in 1927.

With Thalberg's guidance, Shearer became a superstar; films for which she received an Academy Award nomination included Romeo and Juliet (1936) and Marie Antoinette (1938). She won the Best Actress Oscar in 1930 for her role in The Divorcee.

After Thalberg died of pneumonia in 1936, Shearer's popularity declined. In 1942, she retired from acting and married a ski instructor. Norma Shearer died in 1983.
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November 6

1963 General Minh takes over leadership of South Vietnam

In the aftermath of the November 1 coup that resulted in the murder of President Ngo Dinh Diem, Gen. Duong Van Minh, leading the Revolutionary Military Committee of the dissident generals who had conducted the coup, takes over leadership of South Vietnam.

U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge cabled President Kennedy, "We could neither manage nor stop once it got started...It is equally certain that the ground in which the coup seed grew into a robust plant was prepared by us, and that the coup would not have happened [as] it did without our permission." Lodge's words were more than a little disingenuous since he had long been a proponent of removing Diem from power.

Following Diem's death, a Buddhist named Nguyen Ngoc Tho became premier, but the real power was held by the Revolutionary Military Committee headed by General Minh. The new government earned U.S. approval in part by pledging not to become a dictatorship and announcing, "The best weapon to fight communism is democracy and liberty." However, Minh was unable to form a viable government and he himself was overthrown in a bloodless coup led by Gen. Nguyen Khanh in January 1964.



1970 South Vietnamese forces attack into Cambodia

South Vietnamese forces launch a new offensive into Cambodia, advancing across a 100-mile-wide front in southeastern Cambodia. The new offensive was aimed at cleaning out border sanctuaries and blocking North Vietnamese forces from moving through Cambodia into South Vietnam. The 6,000-man South Vietnamese task force pulled out on November 11 after failing to find new Communist troop sanctuaries. Forty-one enemy soldiers were reportedly killed in the operation.
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November 7

1951 Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra marry

Hollywood stars Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra marry. Gardner had already been married twice-to Mickey Rooney and band leader Artie Shaw-and Sinatra had been married once, to Nancy Barbato, mother of his three children. His divorce from Barbato became final just days before he married Gardner. The couple stayed together until 1957.

Sinatra, the New Jersey-born son of an Italian fireman, formed a singing quartet in his teens. The group won a popular radio talent show in 1935 and began touring small nightclubs. In 1940, Sinatra joined the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and began topping the charts.

Sinatra soon became a popular screen actor, but after his vocal chords suffered damage in 1952, his career took a drastic downturn. His talent agency dropped him, and he had to plead for roles. For the paltry sum of $8,000, he agreed to play a supporting role in From Here to Eternity (1953)-for which he won an Academy Award. He went on to receive an Oscar nomination for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), for his portrayal of a drug addict. His career gained steam as he aged; his voice recovered and his songs became more popular than ever. After his marriage to Gardner, he was married two more times, to Mia Farrow and then to Barbara Marx, the widow of one of the Marx brothers.

Gardner, Hollywood's reigning glamour queen in the late 1940s and early 1950s, came from North Carolina, one of six children of a poor farmer. She planned to become a secretary, but at age 18 a picture taken by her brother-in-law accidentally landed in MGM's casting department, and the studio signed her. Gardner's career reached its peak in the early 1950s. She was nominated for an Oscar in 1953 for Mogambo, in which she competed with Grace Kelly for Clark Gable's interest. She continued to make film and TV appearances throughout the early 1980s and appeared on the TV series Knots Landing in 1985. Gardner died in 1990 and Sinatra died in 1998.



1943 Joni Mitchell born

Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell is born in Fort MacLeod, Canada. Mitchell grew up in Saskatchewan and suffered polio as a child; she recovered despite her doctors' prediction that she would never walk again. Mitchell taught herself guitar and began playing folk music in college and later in Toronto, then Detroit, where her folk music became a hit. In 1965, she married folksinger Chuck Mitchell, but the couple later divorced.

Mitchell signed a record contract and began publishing songs. In 1968, Judy Collins hit the charts with "Both Sides Now" by Mitchell, and other artists recorded her songs "Eastern Rain" and "The Circle Game." Mitchell's debut album, Joni Mitchell, came out in 1968. Her next two albums, Clouds (1969) and Ladies of the Canyon (1970), both sold well, and by 1971 she was releasing Top 20 albums, including Blue (1971). Her folk style evolved and expanded throughout the decades as she flirted with fusion jazz, pop-rock, and a cappella elements that brought mixed reviews. Her albums in the 1990s, including Night Ride Home (1991) and Turbulent Indigo (1994), were critical hits. All hit the Top 50 in the years they were released.
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BIRTH OF THE U.S. MARINES CORPS:

November 10, 1775

During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress passes a resolution stating that "two Battalions of Marines be raised" for service as landing forces for the recently formed Continental Navy. The resolution, drafted by future U.S. president John Adams and adopted in Philadelphia, created the Continental Marines and is now observed as the birth date of the United States Marine Corps.

Serving on land and at sea, the original U.S. Marines distinguished themselves in a number of important operations during the Revolutionary War. The first Marine landing on a hostile shore occurred when a force of Marines under Captain Samuel Nicholas captured New Province Island in the Bahamas from the British in March 1776. Nicholas was the first commissioned officer in the Continental Marines and is celebrated as the first Marine commandant. After American independence was achieved in 1783, the Continental Navy was demobilized and its Marines disbanded.

In the next decade, however, increasing conflict at sea with Revolutionary France led the U.S. Congress to establish formally the U.S. Navy in May 1798. Two months later, on July 11, President John Adams signed the bill establishing the U.S. Marine Corps as a permanent military force under the jurisdiction of the Department of Navy. U.S. Marines saw action in the so-called Quasi-War with France and then fought against the Barbary pirates of North Africa during the first years of the 19th century. Since then, Marines have participated in all the wars of the United States and in most cases were the first soldiers to fight. In all, Marines have executed more than 300 landings on foreign shores.

Today, there are more than 200,000 active-duty and reserve Marines, divided into three divisions stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina; Camp Pendleton, California; and Okinawa, Japan. Each division has one or more expeditionary units, ready to launch major operations anywhere in the world on two weeks' notice. Marines expeditionary units are self-sufficient, with their own tanks, artillery, and air forces. The motto of the service is Semper Fidelis, meaning "Always Faithful" in Latin.
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WORLD WAR I ENDS:

November 11, 1918

At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the Great War ends. At 5 a.m. that morning, Germany, bereft of manpower and supplies and faced with imminent invasion, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside Compiégne, France. The First World War left nine million soldiers dead and 21 million wounded, with Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France, and Great Britain each losing nearly a million or more lives. In addition, at least five million civilians died from disease, starvation, or exposure.

On June 28, 1914, in an event that is widely regarded as sparking the outbreak of World War I, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, was shot to death with his wife by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Ferdinand had been inspecting his uncle's imperial armed forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, despite the threat of Serbian nationalists who wanted these Austro-Hungarian possessions to join newly independent Serbia. Austria-Hungary blamed the Serbian government for the attack and hoped to use the incident as justification for settling the problem of Slavic nationalism once and for all. However, as Russia supported Serbia, an Austro-Hungarian declaration of war was delayed until its leaders received assurances from German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany would support their cause in the event of a Russian intervention.

On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the tenuous peace between Europe's great powers collapsed. On July 29, Austro-Hungarian forces began to shell the Serbian capital, Belgrade, and Russia, Serbia's ally, ordered a troop mobilization against Austria-Hungary. France, allied with Russia, began to mobilize on August 1. France and Germany declared war against each other on August 3. After crossing through neutral Luxembourg, the German army invaded Belgium on the night of August 3-4, prompting Great Britain, Belgium's ally, to declare war against Germany.

For the most part, the people of Europe greeted the outbreak of war with jubilation. Most patriotically assumed that their country would be victorious within months. Of the initial belligerents, Germany was most prepared for the outbreak of hostilities, and its military leaders had formatted a sophisticated military strategy known as the "Schlieffen Plan," which envisioned the conquest of France through a great arcing offensive through Belgium and into northern France. Russia, slow to mobilize, was to be kept occupied by Austro-Hungarian forces while Germany attacked France.

The Schlieffen Plan was nearly successful, but in early September the French rallied and halted the German advance at the bloody Battle of the Marne near Paris. By the end of 1914, well over a million soldiers of various nationalities had been killed on the battlefields of Europe, and neither for the Allies nor the Central Powers was a final victory in sight. On the western front--the battle line that stretched across northern France and Belgium--the combatants settled down in the trenches for a terrible war of attrition.

In 1915, the Allies attempted to break the stalemate with an amphibious invasion of Turkey, which had joined the Central Powers in October 1914, but after heavy bloodshed the Allies were forced to retreat in early 1916. The year 1916 saw great offensives by Germany and Britain along the western front, but neither side accomplished a decisive victory. In the east, Germany was more successful, and the disorganized Russian army suffered terrible losses, spurring the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917. By the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia and immediately set about negotiating peace with Germany. In 1918, the infusion of American troops and resources into the western front finally tipped the scale in the Allies' favor. Germany signed an armistice agreement with the Allies on November 11, 1918.

World War I was known as the "war to end all wars" because of the great slaughter and destruction it caused. Unfortunately, the peace treaty that officially ended the conflict--the Treaty of Versailles of 1919--forced punitive terms on Germany that destabilized Europe and laid the groundwork for World War II.
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30 years ago today, September 10th, 1975, The Edmund Fitzgerald plunged to the bottom of Lake Superior, killing all 29 crew members.... immortalized by Gordon Lightfoot's ballad...
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greydeadhead wrote: 30 years ago today, September 10th, 1975, The Edmund Fitzgerald plunged to the bottom of Lake Superior, killing all 29 crew members.... immortalized by Gordon Lightfoot's ballad...Grey i was just about to post a thread about it!! you have ESP too?? :thinking:
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bwahahahahahaha... indeed be careful what you think.....:D
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November 13

1949 Whoopi Goldberg is born

Caryn Johnson, later known as Whoopi Goldberg, is born in New York City.

Goldberg began acting at age eight in children's theater productions. She dropped out of high school during her freshman year, later citing a learning disability that teachers mistook for retardation. She began using drugs but later cleaned up and resumed her interest in acting. She married her substance abuse counselor and had a daughter. She started winning small roles in Broadway shows including Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair. Her marriage ended, and she moved with her daughter to California, where she began performing with improv groups in San Diego and San Francisco while earning money as a bank teller, makeup artist, and other odd jobs.

Goldberg launched a comedy act with comedian Don Victor but was soon performing a hit solo act called "Spook Show." She toured the country with her comedy, eventually ending up on Broadway.

In 1985, three days after her 36th birthday, she made her movie debut in The Color Purple, also starring Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover. She earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. She later appeared in numerous comedies, including Jumpin' Jack Flash (1986), and won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as a psychic in Ghost (1990). Her 1993 comedy, Sister Act, was such a phenomenal hit that she earned $8 million for Sister Act II, which made her one of the industry's highest-paid actresses. She briefly had her own talk show and guest-starred regularly on Star Trek: The Next Generation. She has been married several times and has several grandchildren.





1940 Fantasia premieres

Walt Disney's Fantasia opens. The unusual animated film had no plot--it was an ambitious, artistic attempt to marry music and animation in a new way. The film's many animated sequences ranged from Mickey Mouse in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" to dancing hippos in "The Dance of the Hours." The film attracted interest from serious film fans, boosting Disney's reputation. In 1999, the film was updated and re-released as Fantasia 2000, with new sequences to music including Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue."
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WALESA RELEASED FROM JAIL:

November 14, 1982

Lech Walesa, leader of communist Poland's outlawed Solidarity movement, returns to his apartment in Gdansk after 11 months of internment in a remote hunting lodge near the Soviet border. Two days before, hundreds of supporters had begun a vigil outside his home upon learning that the founder of Poland's trade union movement was being released. When Walesa finally did return home, on November 14, he was lifted above the jubilant crowd and carried to the door of his apartment, where he greeted his wife and then addressed his supporters from a second-story window.

Walesa, born in 1943, was an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk when he was fired for union agitation in 1976. When protests broke out in the Gdansk shipyard over an increase in food prices in August 1980, Walesa climbed the shipyard fence and joined the thousands of workers inside. He was elected leader of the strike committee, and three days later the strikers' demands were met. Walesa then helped coordinate other strikes in Gdansk and demanded that the Polish government allow the free formation of trade unions and the right to strike. On August 30, the government conceded to the strikers' demands, legalizing trade unionism and granting greater freedom of religious and political expression.

Millions of Polish workers and farmers came together to form unions, and Solidarity was formed as a national federation of unions, with Walesa as its chairman. Under Walesa's charismatic leadership, the organization grew in size and political influence, soon becoming a major threat to the authority of the Polish government. On December 13, 1981, martial law was declared in Poland, Solidarity was outlawed, and Walesa and other labor leaders were arrested.

In November 1982, overwhelming public outcry forced Walesa's release, but Solidarity remained illegal. In 1983, Walesa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Fearing involuntary exile, he declined to travel to Norway to accept the award. Walesa continued as leader of the now-underground Solidarity movement, and he was subjected to continual monitoring and harassment by the communist authorities.

In 1988, deteriorating economic conditions led to a new wave of labor strikes across Poland, and the government was forced to negotiate with Walesa. In April 1989, Solidarity was again legalized, and its members were allowed to enter a limited number of candidates in upcoming elections. By September, a Solidarity-led government coalition was in place, with Walesa's colleague Tadeusz Mazowiecki as premier. In 1990, Poland's first direct presidential election was held, and Walesa won by a landslide.

President Walesa successfully implemented free-market reforms, but unfortunately he was a more effective labor leader than president. In 1995, he was narrowly defeated in his reelection by former communist Aleksander Kwasniewski, head of the Democratic Left Alliance.
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November 15

1956 Elvis' first film opens

Love Me Tender, Elvis Presley's first movie, opens at the Paramount Theater in New York. The movie earned back its $1 million cost in just three days. During the next 13 years, Elvis appeared in 33 movies.

Elvis began recording in 1954, when a song he recorded for his mother's birthday caught the attention of studio executive Sam Phillips, who asked Presley to audition for him. Presley started the audition with country-western standards, but when he felt Phillips' interest wane he belted out a rhythm-and-blues song called "That's All Right." Impressed, Phillips recorded the song, and a week later it became No. 4 on the country-western charts in Memphis.

That summer, Phillips brought Presley together with guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, both country-western artists, and one of the songs the trio recorded was played on a Memphis radio station. The song was a hit with listeners and led to Presley's first radio interview. He made his one and only appearance at the Grand Ole Opry on September 25 and soon began appearing regularly on the radio. He made his television debut on a Memphis show in March 1955, and that September scored his first No. 1 country record, a rendition of Junior Parker's "Mystery Train."

RCA purchased Presley's contract from Sun Records for an unprecedented $35,000, plus a $5,000 advance for Presley, which he used to buy a pink Cadillac for his mother. He made his first records in Nashville in 1956, including "I Got a Woman," "Heartbreak Hotel," and "I Was the One."

On January 28, 1956, television audiences saw Presley on the Dorsey Brothers' Stage Show. All his singles released that year went gold.

In 1967, Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu, who had moved into Presley's mansion, Graceland, as a teenager six years earlier. The couple divorced in 1973. The "King of Rock and Roll" gave his final live performance on June 25, 1977. Six weeks later, on August 16, 1977, his girlfriend found him dead in a bathroom at Graceland. Congestive heart failure was initially cited as the cause of death, but drug abuse was suspected as a contributing factor. He was buried at Graceland beside his parents, and his estate was passed on to his daughter, Lisa Marie Presley. Nine years after his death, he was one of the first 10 people inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He had earned 94 gold singles and more than 40 gold LPs.
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for you Bez! :cool:
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1932, Born on this day, Petula Clark, UK singer, (1961 UK No.1 single 'Sailor', 1967 UK No.1 single 'This Is My Song', plus over 15 other UK Top 40 singles. 1965 US No.1 'Downtown', the first UK female singer to score a No.1 single in the US).
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lady cop wrote: for you Bez! :cool:


1956...I was 10 yrs old......big sigh....he looks sooooo young in this piccy
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November 16

1960 Clark Gable dies

Actor Clark Gable, best known for his role as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, dies.

Gable was born in Ohio in 1901, the son of a farmer who later became an oil driller. Gable went to work at a tire factory in Akron, Ohio, at age 14. He began attending theater and started working as a backstage runner in the evenings but moved to Oklahoma with his father in his late teens to drill for oil. At age 21, he joined a traveling theater troupe, then worked as a lumberjack and salesman in Oregon before joining another troupe. He married the head of the troupe, who was 14 years his senior, in 1924, and the couple moved to Hollywood. Gable occasionally worked as a film extra but had no luck landing bigger roles, so he returned to live theater. He was cast in several successful Broadway productions, played a lead role in the Los Angeles production of a hit play in 1930, and landed a screen test-which he failed. He and his wife divorced the same year.

Finally, in 1931, he was cast as a villain in a western called The Painted Desert, and MGM signed him immediately. He stole the show in A Free Soul, with Norma Shearer and Lesley Howard, and married his second wife, a rich Texas socialite some 17 years his senior, the same year. In 1934, against his wishes, MGM lent him to Columbia to star in It Happened One Night with Claudette Colbert. Both Colbert and Gable won Oscars for the film.

The following year, Gable began seeing actress Carole Lombard shortly after he separated from his second wife. The couple married in 1939. Gable's career flourished during this period, and he won his greatest role, as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, in 1939. Lombard was killed in a plane crash in 1942, returning from a war-bond drive. Gable joined the air force shortly after her death, rose to the rank of major, and won several medals.

Later, Gable returned to Hollywood in Adventure (1945), but his career had cooled. He allegedly began drinking heavily, and MGM dropped his contract. His last film, The Misfits (1961), seemed to promise a comeback, but he died of a heart attack before its release-and before the birth of his only child, John Gable, who was born to Gable's fifth wife, Kay Spreckles, in 1960, shortly after Gable's death.
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Bez wrote: 1956...I was 10 yrs old......big sigh....he looks sooooo young in this piccy
What a hunk..............

*psst, I stole his newspaper once, off his Bel Air estate, don't tell LC, butler chased us away but we still got it..............*

*sigh*
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Pelè scores 1,000th goal

November 19, 1969

Brazilian soccer great Pelè scores his 1,000th professional goal in a game, against Vasco da Gama in Rio de Janeiro's Maracana stadium. It was a major milestone in an illustrious career that included three World Cup championships.

Pelè, considered one of the greatest soccer players ever to take the field, was born Edson Arantes do Nascimento in Tres Coracos, Brazil, in 1940. He acquired the nickname Pelè during his childhood though the name has no meaning in his native Portuguese. When he was a teenager, he played for a minor league soccer club in Bauru in Sao Paulo state and in 1956 joined the major league Santos Football Club in the city of Sao Paulo, playing inside left forward. Two years later, he led the Brazilian national team to victory in the World Cup. Pelè, who was only 17 years old, scored two goals to defeat Sweden in the final.

Pelè was blessed with speed, balance, control, power, and an uncanny ability to anticipate the movements of his opponents and teammates. Although just five feet eight inches tall, he was a giant on the field, leading Santos to three national club championships, two South American championships, and the world club title in 1963. Under Pelè's leadership, Brazil won the World Cup in 1958, 1962, and 1970. In 1970, Brazil was granted permanent possession of the World Cup's Jules Rimet Trophy as a tribute to its dominance. On November 19, 1969, Pelè scored his 1,000th goal on a penalty kick against Vasco da Gama. Eighty thousand adoring fans in Maracana stadium cheered him wildly, even though Santos was the opposing team.

Pelè announced his retirement in 1974 but in 1975 accepted a $7 million contract to play with the New York Cosmos. He led the Cosmos to a league championship in 1977 and did much to promote soccer in the United States. On October 1, 1977, in Giants Stadium, he played his last professional game in a Cosmos match against his old team Santos.

During his long career, Pelè scored 1,282 goals in 1,363 games. In 1978, Pelè was given the International Peace Award and in 1993 he was inducted into the National Soccer Hall of Fame. Since retiring, he has acted as an international ambassador for his sport and has worked with the United Nations and UNICEF to promote peace and international reconciliation through friendly athletic competition.
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20th November ....On This Day..



1962 Jodie Foster born



Actress Jodie Foster is born in Los Angeles. Foster made her show business debut in 1969, on the TV series Mayberry, R.F.D. Foster grew up to become one of Hollywood's most respected actresses. She won Oscars for her roles in The Accused (1988) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991). She also began directing films in 1991 with Little Man Tate.





1959 The British Anglia Comes To America

In 1911, the Ford Motor Company, which had been importing Ford Model Ts for several years, opened its first overseas plant at Trafford Park in Manchester, England. In 1920, after a decade of brisk sales in Britain and all over Europe, Ford was faced with a crisis--a new British law established higher tax penalties for larger-engine cars, and Ford's market share was suffering. Ford of England responded by developing several prototypes for a Ford automobile small enough to avoid British tax penalties. Designers also predicted that the citizens of dense European cities would prefer a car smaller than the standard American Ford. The resulting Model Y Ford "8" went into production in 1932, and after a strong first year Ford's British market share began to rapidly expand. In 1938, the Ford E93A Prefect was introduced, the first marque in the United States--the first British Ford to be marketed to Americans on a large scale. Internally, the compact 105E Anglia had a brand new overhead-valve engine and a four-speed gearbox, and externally, it was like nothing else on the road with it distinctive rear-sloping back window, frog-like headlights, and stylish colors: light green and primrose yellow. Despite appreciation for the well-designed car by a few automobile enthusiasts in America, the Anglia, which was a best-seller on the world's markets, failed to make a noticeable impact in the general U.S. market.
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November 21st



1934 Anything Goes opens



The hit musical Anything Goes, starring Ethel Merman, opens on Broadway. The show, with music by Cole Porter and lyrics by P.G. Wodehouse, became the biggest hit of the season, boasting songs like "You're the Tops" and "I Get a Kick Out of You." The show was made into a movie starring Bing Crosby in 1936.

The show's original plot, about a cast of shipwrecked passengers, had to be scrapped when a cruise liner sank shortly before the show's opening. Cole Porter and P.G. Wodehouse were not available to rewrite the story, so the show's director, Howard Lindsay, worked with former journalist Russel Crouse to craft a new plot using the show's existing songs, sets, and actors. The new plot featured a bar hostess, a would-be master criminal, an English lord, and various other kooky characters locked in a tangle of unrequited affections on a sea voyage from New York to London. The new plot was so successful that that Lindsay and Crouse went on to create more hit shows together, including the play Life with Father (produced in 1939).



1995 Toy Story released

Toy Story, the first entirely computer-animated feature, is released. Actors Tim Allen and Tom Hanks provided the voices for the two main characters, a cowboy doll and a spaceman toy. The movie, produced by Pixar and released by Disney, grossed $300 million in one year.
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Stories From 22 Nov

1963: Kennedy shot dead in Dallas

1995: Life sentence for Rosemary West

1990: Thatcher quits as prime minister

2003: England win Rugby World Cup

1997: Michael Hutchence found dead in hotel
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BILLY THE KID BORN:

November 23, 1859

The infamous Western outlaw known as "Billy the Kid" is born in a poor Irish neighborhood on New York City's East Side. Before he was shot dead at age 21, Billy reputedly killed 27 people in the American West.

Billy the Kid called himself William H. Bonney, but his original name was probably Henry McCarty. Bonney was his mother Catherine's maiden name, and William was the first name of his mother's longtime companion--William Antrin--who acted as Billy's father after his biological father disappeared. Around 1865, Billy and his brother traveled west to Indiana with their mother and Antrin, and by 1870 the group was in Wichita, Kansas. They soon moved farther west, down the cattle trails, and in 1873 a legally married Catherine and William Antrin appeared on record in New Mexico territory. In 1874, Billy's mother died of lung cancer in Silver City.

Billy soon left his brother and stepfather and took off into the New Mexico sagebrush. He worked as a ranch hand and in 1876 supposedly killed his first men, a group of reservation Apache Indians, in the Guadalupe Mountains. According to legend, it was not long before Billy killed another man, a blacksmith in Camp Grant, Arizona. Billy the Kid, as people began calling him, next found work as a rancher and bodyguard for John Tunstall, a English-born rancher who operated out of Lincoln, New Mexico. When members of a rival cattle gang killed Tunstall, in 1878, Billy became involved in the so-called Lincoln County War.

Enraged at Tunstall's murder, Billy became a leader of a vigilante posse of "regulators" sent to arrest the killers. No arrests were made, however. Two of the murderers were shot dead by Billy's posse, and a worsening blood feud soon escalated into all-out warfare. After Billy's gang shot dead Lincoln Sheriff Bill Brady, who had sanctioned Tunstall's murder, Billy's enemies conspired with the territorial authorities to do away with the regulators.

In July 1878, the rival gang surrounded the house where Billy and his gang were staying just outside of town. The siege stretched on for five days, and a U.S. Army squadron from nearby Fort Stanton was called in. Still, Billy and his gang refused to surrender. Suddenly, the regulators made a mass escape, and Billy and several of the other regulators miraculously managed to shoot their way out of town.

After more than two years on the run, Billy was arrested by Lincoln Sheriff Pat Garrett, a man Billy had previously befriended before Garrett became a lawman. In April 1881, Billy was found guilty of the murder of Sheriff Brady and was sentenced to hang. On April 28, two weeks before his scheduled execution, Billy wrested a gun from one of his jailers and shot him and another deputy dead in a daring escape that received considerable national attention.

On the night of July 14, 1881, Garrett finally tracked Billy down at a ranch near Fort Sumner, New Mexico. He gained access to the house where Billy was visiting a girlfriend and then surprised him in the dark. Before the outlaw could offer resistance, Garret fired a bullet into his chest. Billy the Kid was dead at age 21.
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November 26

1872 The Great Diamond Hoax is exposed

The Great Diamond Hoax, one of the most notorious mining swindles of the time, is exposed with an article in the San Francisco Evening Bulletin.

Fraudulent gold and silver mines were common in the years following the California Gold Rush of 1849. Swindlers fooled many eager greenhorns by "salting" worthless mines with particles of gold dust to make them appear mineral-rich. However, few con men were as daring as Kentucky cousins Philip Arnold and John Slack, who convinced San Francisco capitalists to invest in a worthless mine in the northwestern corner of Colorado.

Arnold and Slack played their con perfectly. They arrived in San Francisco in 1872 and tried to deposit a bag of uncut diamonds at a bank. When questioned, the two men quickly disappeared, acting as if they were reluctant to talk about their discovery. Intrigued, a bank director named William Ralston tracked down the men. Assuming he was dealing with unsophisticated country bumpkins, he set out to take control of the diamond mine. The two cousins agreed to take a blindfolded mining expert to the site; the expert returned to report that the mine was indeed rich with diamonds and rubies.

Joining forces with a number of other prominent San Francisco financiers, Ralston formed the New York Mining and Commercial Company, capitalized at $10 million, and began selling stock to eager investors. As a show of good faith, Arnold and Slack received about $600,000-small change in comparison to the supposed value of the diamond mine. Convinced that the American West must have many other major deposits of diamonds, at least 25 other diamond exploration companies formed in the subsequent months.

Clarence King, the then-little-known young leader of a geographical survey of the 40th parallel, finally exposed the cousins' diamond mine as a hoax. A brilliant geologist and mining engineer, King was suspicious of the mine from the start. He correctly deduced the location of the supposed mine, raced off to investigate, and soon realized that the swindlers had salted the mine--some of the gems he found even showed jewelers-cut marks.

Back in San Francisco, King exposed the fraud in the newspapers and the Great Diamond Hoax collapsed. Ralston returned $80,000 to each of his investors, but he was never able to recover the $600,000 given to the two cousins. Arnold lived out the few remaining years of his life in luxury in Kentucky before dying of pneumonia in 1878. Slack apparently squandered his share of the money, for he was last reported working as a coffin maker in New Mexico. King's role in exposing the fraud brought him national recognition--he became the first director of the United States Geological Survey.
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November 27

1942 Jimi Hendrix born

Guitar legend Jimi Hendrix is born in Seattle. Hendrix grew up playing guitar, imitating blues greats like Muddy Waters as well as early rockers. He joined the army in 1959 and became a paratrooper but was honorably discharged in 1961 after an injury that exempted him from duty in Vietnam. In the early 1960s, Hendrix worked as a pickup guitarist, backing musicians including Little Richard, B.B. King, Ike and Tina Turner, and Sam Cooke. In 1964, he moved to New York and played in coffeehouses, where bassist Bryan Chandler of the British group the Animals heard him. Chandler arranged to manage Hendrix and brought him to London in 1966, where they created the Jimi Hendrix Experience with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell. The band's first single, "Hey Joe," hit No. 6 on the British pop charts, and the band became an instant sensation.

In 1967, the Jimi Hendrix Experience made its first U.S. appearance, at the Monterey Pop Festival. Hendrix made a splash by burning his guitar and was quickly established as a rock superstar. In the next two years, before the band broke up in 1969, it had released such classic songs as "Purple Haze," "Foxy Lady," and "The Wind Cries Mary." The band's albums included Are You Experienced? (1967), Bold as Love (1969), and Electric Ladyland (1969).

After the band dissolved because of creative tensions, Hendrix made his famous appearance at Woodstock, playing a masterful, intricate version of "The Star Spangled Banner." Later that year, he put together a new group called the Band of Gypsies, which debuted on New Year's Eve in 1969. The band put out only one album, Band of Gypsies (1969). (A second album, Band of Gypsies II, was released in 1986.) Hendrix then recorded another album, without the band, called The Cry of Love, which was released in 1971.

Hendrix, one of the most innovative guitar players of the rock era, established an advanced recording studio in New York called the Electric Lady, boasting 46-track recording technology. The studio opened in August 1970, shortly before Hendrix died in London in September 1970, following a drug overdose. He was 28.



1940 Bruce Lee born

Lee Yuen Kam, later known as Bruce Lee, is born in San Francisco. Lee spent much of his childhood in Hong Kong, where he appeared in several films. After graduating from the University of Washington, Lee returned to film, starring in numerous martial arts films, many of which were filmed in Hong Kong. Lee died mysteriously of a brain edema at age 32. Twenty years later, his son, action-film actor Brandon Lee, died when a gun supposedly containing blanks fired a real bullet instead during the shooting of a movie.
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LADY ASTOR BECOMES MP:

November 28, 1919



American-born Nancy Astor, the first woman ever to sit in the House of Commons, is elected to Parliament with a substantial majority. Lady Astor took the Unionist seat of her husband, Waldorf Astor, who was moving up to an inherited seat in the House of Lords.

Born in Danville, Virginia, in 1879, she was the daughter of a former Confederate officer who became a wealthy tobacco auctioneer. She married Robert Gould Shaw II, a Bostonian, in 1897, and they had one son before divorcing in 1903. Soon after, she visited England, where she met and fell in love with Waldorf Astor, the great-great-grandson of the American fur trader John Jacob Astor. In 1906, they married. Nancy Astor became an influential society hostess, presiding at the Astor country estate of Cliveden. The "Cliveden set," as the Astors' social clique became known, came to exercise considerable political influence in a number of fields, especially foreign affairs.

In 1910, Waldorf Astor was elected to the House of Commons as a conservative, and the Astors moved to his constituency of Plymouth. Nine years later, Waldorf's father died, and he succeeded to his viscountcy and seat in the House of Lords. Nancy Astor decided to campaign for his vacant seat in the House of Commons and ran a flamboyant campaign that attracted international attention. On November 28, 1919, she won a resounding victory in the election and subsequently became the first woman ever to sit in the House of Commons. (She was not, however, the first woman to be elected to the Commons; in 1918 the Irish nationalist Constance Markiewicz was elected as an MP for a Dublin constituency but refused to go to London as a protest against the British government.)

Although regarded as a conservative, Lady Astor took an individual approach to politics, saying, "If you want a party hack, don't elect me." Her impassioned speeches on women's and children's rights, her modest black attire, and her occasional irreverence won her a significant following. Repeatedly reelected by her constituency in Plymouth, she sat in the House of Commons until her retirement in 1945
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November 29

1986 Cary Grant dies

Actor Cary Grant dies of a stroke at the age of 82. In a film career spanning more than 30 years, Grant distinguished himself as a sophisticated and debonair leading man.

Grant was born Archibald Leach to a poor family in England in 1904. He left home at age 13, singing, dancing, and sometimes juggling with an acrobatic troupe. He traveled the country and came to New York with the troupe in 1920, where he found work as a lifeguard in Coney Island. He returned to England in 1923 and began appearing in musical comedies. He caught the attention of American producers who brought him to Broadway and later Hollywood.

Grant made his first screen appearance in 1932, and before the year was out he was playing opposite stars like Marlene Dietrich and Mae West. It wasn't until the late 1930s, though, that he found his ideal character type-a suave, witty leading man in screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby (1938). Among his many classic films are Topper (1937), The Philadelphia Story (1941), Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), and Indiscreet (1958). He retired from film in 1966. Although he never won an Oscar, he received a special award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1970 for his contribution to film.



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MCCARTHY CONDEMNED BY SENATE:

December 2, 1954

The U.S. Senate votes 65 to 22 to condemn Senator Joseph R. McCarthy for conduct unbecoming of a senator. The condemnation, which was equivalent to a censure, related to McCarthy's controversial investigation of suspected communists in the U.S. government, military, and civilian society.

What is known as "McCarthyism" began on February 9, 1950, when McCarthy, a relatively obscure Republican senator from Wisconsin, announced during a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, that he had in his possession a list of 205 communists who had infiltrated the U.S. State Department. The unsubstantiated declaration, which was little more than a publicity stunt, thrust Senator McCarthy into the national spotlight. Asked to reveal the names on the list, the opportunistic senator named just one official who he determined guilty by association: Owen Lattimore, an expert on Chinese culture and affairs who had advised the State Department. McCarthy described Lattimore as the "top Russian spy" in America.

These and other equally shocking accusations prompted the Senate to form a special committee, headed by Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland, to investigate the matter. The committee found little to substantiate McCarthy's charges, but McCarthy nevertheless touched a nerve in the American public, and during the next two years he made increasingly sensational charges, even attacking President Harry S. Truman's respected former secretary of state, George C. Marshall.

In 1953, a newly Republican Congress appointed McCarthy chairman of the Committee on Government Operations and its Subcommittee on Investigations, and McCarthyism reached a fever pitch. In widely publicized hearings, McCarthy bullied defendants under cross-examination with unlawful and damaging accusations, destroying the reputations of hundreds of innocent officials and citizens.

In the early months of 1954, McCarthy, who had already lost the support of much of his party because of his controversial tactics, finally overreached himself when he accused several U.S. Army officers of communist subversion. Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed for an investigation of McCarthy's charges, and the televised hearings exposed the senator as a reckless and excessive tyrant who never produced proper documentation for any of his claims.

A climax of the hearings came on June 9, when Joseph N. Welch, special attorney for the army, responded to a McCarthy attack on a member of his law firm by facing the senator and tearfully declaring, "Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency?" The crowded hearing room burst into spontaneous applause.

On December 2, after a heated debate, the Senate voted to condemn McCarthy for conduct "contrary to senatorial traditions." By the time of his death from alcoholism in 1957, the influence of Senator Joseph McCarthy in Congress was negligible.
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December 4

1921 Hung jury for Arbuckle

The manslaughter trial for actor and director Fatty Arbuckle ends in a hung jury.

Born Roscoe Arbuckle in 1887 in Kansas, Arbuckle worked as a plumber's assistant before launching his performing career. After appearing on the vaudeville circuit, Arbuckle--nicknamed "Fatty" for his generous physique--began appearing in short comedies. He signed with production company Keystone in 1913 and appeared regularly as a Keystone Kop-the bumbling, slapstick police force that appeared in many Keystone movies between 1914 and the early 1920s. Arbuckle made various other silent comedies with prominent co-stars, including Charlie Chaplin. In 1916, he began writing and directing his own movies, and in 1917 he discovered comedian Buster Keaton, who became one of the most sought after film comedians of the 1920s and '30s.

In 1921, Arbuckle was accused of manslaughter after the death of starlet Virginia Rappe. Rappe died of a ruptured bladder several days after an alleged sexual assault by the 350-pound Arbuckle at a wild drinking party in San Francisco. After two hung juries, Arbuckle was acquitted in 1922, but his films were banned and his career seemed finished. However, in 1925 he began directing under the pseudonym William Goodrich, and worked with such stars as Marion Davies and Eddie Cantor. An attempt to rehabilitate his acting career in 1932 with a live European tour failed. He died the following year at the age of 46.



1936 Tallulah Bankhead tests for Scarlett

Actress Tallulah Bankhead auditions unsuccessfully for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.

Searching for the right Scarlett, producer David O. Selznick auditioned scores of actresses during a two-year period. Among them were Lana Turner, Susan Hayward, and Jean Arthur. Filming finally began in December 1938, but without an actress to play Scarlett. Several days after the shoot began, English actress Vivien Leigh auditioned and won the part.
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1925 Johnny Weissmuller sets world record

Future Tarzan actor Johnny Weissmuller sets the world record for the 150-yard freestyle swim. Already a gold medallist from the 1924 Olympics, Weissmuller competed again in 1928, taking five gold medals in all. In 1931, MGM cast Weissmuller to play the title role in Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). He continued playing Tarzan in films through the late 1940s. The film series moved to television in 1966. Though Weissmuller didn't star in the TV shows, he did contribute the famous Tarzan yell that was used on the program.
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SLAVERY ABOLISHED IN AMERICA:

December 18, 1865

Following its ratification by the requisite three-quarters of the states earlier in the month, the 13th Amendment is formally adopted into the U.S. Constitution, ensuring that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude... shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Before the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and other leaders of the anti-slavery Republican Party sought not to abolish slavery but merely to stop its extension into new territories and states in the American West. This policy was unacceptable to most Southern politicians, who believed that the growth of free states would turn the U.S. power structure irrevocably against them. In November 1860, Lincoln's election as president signaled the secession of seven Southern states and the formation of the Confederate States of America. Shortly after his inauguration in 1861, the Civil War began. Four more Southern states joined the Confederacy, while four border slave states in the upper South remained in the Union.

Lincoln, though he privately detested slavery, responded cautiously to the call by abolitionists for emancipation of all American slaves after the outbreak of the Civil War. As the war dragged on, however, the Republican-dominated federal government began to realize the strategic advantages of emancipation: The liberation of slaves would weaken the Confederacy by depriving it of a major portion of its labor force, which would in turn strengthen the Union by producing an influx of manpower. With 11 Southern states seceded from the Union, there were few pro-slavery congressmen to stand in the way of such an action.

In 1862, Congress annulled the fugitive slave laws, prohibited slavery in the U.S. territories, and authorized Lincoln to employ freed slaves in the army. Following the major Union victory at the Battle of Antietam in September, Lincoln issued a warning of his intent to issue an emancipation proclamation for all states still in rebellion on New Year's Day.

That day--January 1, 1863--President Lincoln formally issued the Emancipation Proclamation, calling on the Union army to liberate all slaves in states still in rebellion as "an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity." These three million slaves were declared to be "then, thenceforward, and forever free." The proclamation exempted the border slave states that remained in the Union and all or parts of three Confederate states controlled by the Union army.

The Emancipation Proclamation transformed the Civil War from a war against secession into a war for "a new birth of freedom," as Lincoln stated in his Gettysburg Address in 1863. This ideological change discouraged the intervention of France or England on the Confederacy's behalf and enabled the Union to enlist the 180,000 African American soldiers and sailors who volunteered to fight between January 1, 1863, and the conclusion of the war.

As the Confederacy staggered toward defeat, Lincoln realized that the Emancipation Proclamation, a war measure, might have little constitutional authority once the war was over. The Republican Party subsequently introduced the 13th Amendment into Congress, and in April 1864 the necessary two-thirds of the overwhelmingly Republican Senate passed the amendment. However, the House of Representatives, featuring a higher proportion of Democrats, did not pass the amendment by a two-thirds majority until January 1865, three months before Confederate General Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

On December 2, 1865, Alabama became the 27th state to ratify the 13th Amendment, thus giving it the requisite three-fourths majority of states' approval necessary to make it the law of the land. Alabama, a former Confederate state, was forced to ratify the amendment as a condition for re-admission into the Union. On December 18, the 13th Amendment was officially adopted into the Constitution--246 years after the first shipload of captive Africans landed at Jamestown, Virginia, and were bought as slaves.

Slavery's legacy and efforts to overcome it remained a central issue in U.S. politics for more than a century, particularly during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era and the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.
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December 18

1946 Steven Spielberg born

Director Steven Spielberg is born in Cincinnati.

As a boy, Spielberg moved to New Jersey and then Arizona with his parents, an electrical engineer and a concert pianist. Spielberg was a shy youngster and expressed himself by making home movies. By age 12, he was making scripted movies with actors. He won a contest with a 40-minute home movie at age 13 and made a feature-length amateur film at age 17.

Spielberg studied filmmaking at California State College. In 1969, the Atlanta Film Festival screened his short film Amblin', which landed him a job at Universal Studios. He directed his first feature, The Sugarland Express, in 1974. The following year, he helped make movie history with Jaws, a blockbuster that grossed $260 million (the film cost $8.5 million to make).

Spielberg followed Jaws with a succession of megahits, including Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which grossed $128 million; Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), grossing $242 million; and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, which took in nearly $400 million.

Spielberg formed an independent company, Amblin Entertainment, in 1984 and began producing such films as Gremlins (1984) and Back to the Future (1985). He took a turn toward more serious subject matter in 1985, directing the critically acclaimed The Color Purple. In 1987, he won the prestigious Irving G. Thalberg Award, which recognized his body of work, at the Academy Awards. However, he didn't win the Oscar for Best Director until 1993, for Schindler's List, a black-and-white drama about Jews working in a Polish factory during World War II.

In 1994, Spielberg teamed up with Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen to form Dreamworks SKG. He has been married twice, first to Amy Irving and then to Kate Capshaw, who starred with Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.



1916 Betty Grable born

Betty Grable is born in St. Louis, Missouri. Grable, trained as an actress and dancer, began appearing in Hollywood musicals in her teens. She signed with RKO, where she played in B movies until she moved to Paramount in 1937. During World War II, she suddenly became a top box office draw and was voted "favorite pin-up girl" by American servicemen. Paramount famously insured her legs for $1 million and featured her in movies titled "Million Dollar Legs" and "Pin-Up Girl." She continued to make movies until the mid 1950s and later appeared in nightclubs and Broadway musicals. She died in 1973.
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Hey, Bez, how are you?
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Hiya...I'm well. Been a busy day what with Christmas coming up, but I've been looking after my 7week old grandson while his mum went christmas shopping, so it's been a great day..how about you?
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December 19

1915 Edith Piaf born

Internationally renowned French singer Edith Piaf is born on this day in Paris in 1915. Known for her earthy, melancholy cabaret songs, Piaf had an extremely difficult childhood. Her mother was a teenage drug addict and her father, a street acrobat twice her mother's age, was away fighting in World War I until Edith was two.

Edith's mother abandoned the family when Edith was still a toddler, and Edith was raised by her paternal grandmother, a cook at a bordello in Normandy. While still a child, Edith lost her vision for four years, but it mysteriously returned after a visit to a shrine.

As a teenager, Edith began performing as a singer with her father. The pair traveled Europe, but hard times continued: In 1934 Edith gave birth to a beloved daughter, who later died of meningitis. Her father was murdered in 1935. Only 20, Edith supported herself with street singing and prostitution until a nightclub owner discovered her, dubbing her "la mome piaf" ("the waif sparrow"). Edith adopted the last name as her own.

Her hard life gave a unique edge to her songs about sex, love, drugs, and death. She began performing on the radio in 1936 and within a decade she was one of France's best-loved singers. She made the first of 10 U.S. tours in 1947 and topped the U.S. charts in 1959 with "The Three Bells." In addition to her signature song, "La Vie en Rose," Piaf's other well-known works include "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien," "What Can I Do?," and "I'll Remember Today." Piaf died in 1963.



1971 A Clockwork Orange opens

Director Stanley Kubrick's controversial film A Clockwork Orange opens. The film, which ponders the excessive violence and subsequent "cure" of a young British gang member in the near future, was rated X for its exceptional violence.
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December 20

1932 Al Jolson records "April Showers"

Al Jolson, the most famous singer of his day, records one of his best-known songs, "April Showers."

Jolson's family immigrated to the United States when he was a child. The son of a cantor, Jolson sang in synagogue and considered becoming a cantor himself. Instead, he turned to show business, performing as a child singer on the vaudeville circuit and creating a whistling act with his brother. He also began performing in blackface, a common theatrical convention at the time in which white men would blacken their faces and impersonate African American minstrels. The style, condemned for its demeaning racial stereotypes, went out of favor after the early 20th century. However, at the time, Jolson's blackface music and comedy made him immensely popular, especially when he dropped to one knee to belt out signature songs like "Mammy" and "Swanee" with a swell of emotion.

In 1927, Jolson starred in the first talkie feature, The Jazz Singer. The movie was not really a talkie at all but a mostly silent film with musical numbers and a few snippets of dialogue, including Jolson's famous line, "You ain't heard nothin' yet!" Jolson starred in several other hit pictures, including Mammy (1930) and Swanee River (1940). He also had his own radio show from 1932 to 1949.

Jolson's career began fading in the mid 1940s until the release of The Jolson Story, a hit movie tracing Jolson's rise to stardom. Although Larry Parks portrayed the singer, Jolson dubbed his own songs. A sequel, Jolson Sings Again, followed in 1949. Jolson was married four times, once to actress Ruby Keeler. He died of a heart attack in 1950.



December 20

1803 The French surrender Orleans to the U.S.

Without a shot fired, the French hand over New Orleans and Lower Louisiana to the United States.

In April 1803, the United States purchased from France the 828,000 square miles that had formerly been French Louisiana. The area was divided into two territories: the northern half was Louisiana Territory, the largely unsettled (though home to many Indians) frontier section that was later explored by Lewis and Clark; and the southern Orleans Territory, which was populated by Europeans.

Unlike the sprawling and largely unexplored northern territory (which eventually encompassed a dozen large states), Orleans Territory was a small, densely populated region that was like a little slice of France in the New World. With borders that roughly corresponded to the modern state of Louisiana, Orleans Territory was home to about 50,000 people, a primarily French population that had been living under the direction of a Spanish administration.

These former citizens of France knew almost nothing about American laws and institutions, and the challenging task of bringing them into the American fold fell to the newly appointed governor of the region, twenty-eight-year-old William Claiborne. Historians have found no real evidence that the French of Orleans Territory resented their transfer to American control, though one witness claimed that when the French tri-color was replaced by the Stars and Stripes in New Orleans, the citizens wept. The French did resent that their new governor was appointed rather than elected, and they bridled when the American government tried to make English the official language and discouraged the use of French.

It didn't help matters that young Claiborne knew neither French nor Spanish. Claiborne soon found himself immersed in a complex sea of ethnic tensions and political unrest that he little understood, and in January he wrote to Thomas Jefferson that the population was "uninformed, indolent, luxurious-in a word, ill-fitted to be useful citizens for a Republic." To his dismay, Claiborne found that most of his time was spent not governing, but dealing with an unrelenting procession of crises like riots, robberies, and runaway slaves.

Despite his concerns, Claiborne knew that somehow these people had to be made into American citizens, and over time he gradually made progress in bringing the citizenry into the Union. In December 1804 he was happy to report to Jefferson that "they begin to view their connexion with the United States as permanent and to experience the benefits thereof." Proof of this came eight years later, when the people of Orleans Territory drafted a constitution and successfully petitioned to become the eighteenth state in the Union. Despite Claiborne's doubts about whether the French would ever truly fit into their new nation, the approval of that petition meant that the people of Louisiana were officially Americans.
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December 21

1968 Apollo 8 departs for moon's orbit

Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, is successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, with astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, Jr., and William Anders aboard.

On Christmas Eve, the astronauts entered into orbit around the moon, the first manned spacecraft ever to do so. During Apollo 8's 10 lunar orbits, television images were sent back home, and spectacular photos were taken of Earth and the moon from the spacecraft. In addition to being the first human beings to view firsthand their home world in its entirety, the three astronauts were also the first to see the dark side of the moon.

On Christmas morning, Apollo 8 left its lunar orbit and began its journey back to Earth, landing safely in the Pacific Ocean on December 27. On July 20 of the next year, Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, astronauts of the Apollo 11 mission, became the first men to walk on the moon.







1975 Carlos the Jackal attacks OPEC headquarters

In Vienna, Austria, Carlos the Jackal leads a raid on a meeting of oil ministers from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). German and Arab terrorists stormed in with machine guns, killed three people, and took 63 people hostage, including 11 OPEC ministers. Calling his group the "Arm of the Arab Revolution," Carlos demanded that an anti-Israeli political statement be broadcast over radio, and that a bus and jet be provided for the terrorists and their hostages. Austrian authorities complied, and all the hostages were released in Algeria unharmed. OPEC did not hold another summit for 25 years.

In 1949, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez was born the son of a millionaire Marxist lawyer in Caracas, Venezuela, and attended Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, where he became involved with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. During the 1970s and early 1980s, he acted as a freelance terrorist for various Arab groups and is suspected to have killed as many as 80 people in a chain of bombings, hijackings, and assassinations.

Nearly apprehended on several occasions, Carlos the Jackal managed to evade international authorities until 1994, when French agents captured him hiding in the Sudan. Secretly extradited to France, he was sent to a French prison, where he lived for three years before being put on trial in 1997 for the 1975 Paris murders of two French counterintelligence officers and a pro-Palestinian Lebanese who had turned informant. On December 23, 1997, a French jury found Sánchez guilty and sentenced him to life imprisonment.
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1937 Jane Fonda born

Actress Jane Fonda is born on this day in 1937. The daughter of actor Henry Fonda and sister of actor Peter Fonda, Jane began modeling and acting in the late 1950s. She was nominated for Oscars for They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) and Julia (1977), and took home the Best Actress award in 1978 for Coming Home. She continued to win Oscar nominations, for The China Syndrome (1979); On Golden Pond (1981), her first on-screen appearance with her father; and The Morning After (1986).







1937 Snow White opens

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs debuts. The film, created by Walt Disney's animation company, was the first feature-length animated movie. The film became a classic, and box office receipts recouped the film's cost of $1.5 million by the end of the film's first year in circulation.
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December 22

1949 Robin and Maurice Gibb born

Twin brothers Robin and Maurice Gibb are born on this day. Together with their brother Barry, they later formed the Bee Gees (for "Brothers Gibb") and scored a record-breaking number of hits.

The Australian brothers began performing together as children in the late 1950s. They signed with Festival Records of Australia in 1962, when Barry, the oldest, was 15 and his twin brothers were 13. They released two albums during the next five years, writing all their own material. The brothers hosted an Australian television show, but their music didn't become famous until they moved to England in 1967 and added drummer Cohn Peterson, bassist Vince Melouney, and manager Robert Stigwood. The group began racking up such hits as "To Love Somebody" (1967), "Holiday" (1967), "Words" (1968), and "I've Got to Get a Message to You" (1968).

In 1969, the non-family members left the band, and the brothers began fighting. Robin branched off into a solo career while Barry and Maurice recorded duos. The three reunited for a few more hits, then recorded a series of duds. In the mid 1970s, the group hired a new producer, moved to Miami, and altered their style into a funkier R&B-type sound just in time for the rise of disco. In 1978, the group recorded music for the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, which sold 30 million copies. The album won the Best Album Grammy in 1978, and the Bee Gees won the Best Pop Group Grammy. They scored three consecutive No. 1 hits from the album. Meanwhile, their 18-year-old brother, Andy Gibb, also climbed the charts in 1977 and 1978 with songs like "I Just Want to Be Your Everything" and "Love Is Thicker than Water," written with help from his brothers.

By 1979, the Bee Gees had recorded five platinum albums and some two-dozen hit singles. They again pursued individual ventures when the band's popularity began to wane, but they reunited and released another album in 1987. When Andy Gibb died in 1988 of a heart condition purportedly brought on by drug and alcohol abuse, the devastated Bee Gees retired temporarily. They began releasing albums again in the early 1990s and also wrote and produced songs for other artists, including Kenny Rogers, Diana Ross, and Barbra Streisand. During a history spanning more than 30 years, the group achieved nine No. 1 hits, more than any other rock group in history except the Beatles and the Supremes, and received Lifetime Achievement awards from the American Music Awards, Brit Awards, German Bambi Awards, Australian Record Industry, and World Music Awards.





1972 Joni Mitchell goes gold

Joni Mitchell's album For the Roses goes gold.

Mitchell was born in 1943 in Fort MacLeod, Canada, and began publishing songs in the late 1960s. In 1968, Judy Collins hit the charts with "Both Sides Now" by Mitchell, and other artists recorded Mitchell's songs "Eastern Rain" and "The Circle Game."

Mitchell's own debut album, Joni Mitchell, came out in 1968. Her next two albums, Clouds (1969) and Ladies of the Canyon (1970), both sold well, and by 1971 she was releasing Top 20 albums, including the acclaimed Blue (1971). For the Roses included several hits, including "You Turn Me On (I'm a Radio)." Her folk style evolved and expanded throughout the decades as she flirted with fusion jazz, pop-rock, and a cappella elements that brought mixed reviews. Her albums in the 1990s, including Night Ride Home (1991) and Turbulent Indigo (1994), were critical hits--all hit the Top 50 in the years they were released.
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December 29

1890 U.S. Army massacres Sioux at Wounded Knee

In the tragic final chapter of America's long war against the Plains Indians, the U.S. Cavalry kills 146 Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

Tensions had been running high on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota for months because of the growing popularity of a new Indian spiritual movement known as the Ghost Dance. Many of the Sioux at Pine Ridge had only recently been confined to reservations after long years of resistance, and they were deeply disheartened by the poor living conditions and deadening tedium of reservation life. The Ghost Dance movement taught that the Indians were defeated and confined to reservations because they had angered the gods by abandoning their traditional ways. If they practiced the Ghost Dance ritual and rejected white ways, many Sioux believed the gods would create the world anew, destroy the unbelievers, and bring back murdered Indians and the giant herds of bison.

By late 1890, Pine Ridge Indian agent James McLaughlin was alarmed by the movement's increasing influence and its prediction that all non-believers--presumably including whites--would be wiped out. McLaughlin telegraphed a warning to Washington, D.C. that: "Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy. We need protection now." While waiting for the cavalry to arrive, McLaughlin attempted to arrest Sitting Bull, the famous Sioux chief, who he mistakenly believed was a Ghost Dance supporter. U.S. authorities killed Sitting Bull during the arrest, increasing the tensions at Pine Ridge rather than defusing them.

On December 29, the 7th Cavalry under Colonel James Forsyth surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers under the Sioux Chief Big Foot near Wounded Knee Creek and demanded they surrender their weapons. Big Foot and his followers had no intentions of attacking anyone, but they were distrustful of the army and feared they would be attacked if they relinquished their guns. Nonetheless, the Sioux agreed to surrender and began turning over their guns. As that was happening, a scuffle broke out between an Indian and a soldier, and a shot was fired. Though no one is certain which side fired it, the ensuing melee was quick and brutal. Without arms and outnumbered, the Sioux were reduced to hand-to-hand fighting with knives, and they were cut down in a withering rain of bullets, many coming from the army's rapid-fire repeating Hotchkiss guns. By the time the soldiers withdrew, 146 Indians were dead (including 44 women and 18 children) and 51 wounded. The 7th Cavalry had 25 dead and 39 wounde!

d.

Although sometimes referred to as a battle, the conflict at Wounded Knee is best seen as a tragic and avoidable massacre. Surrounded by heavily armed troops, it is highly unlikely that Big Foot's band would have deliberately sought a confrontation. Some historians speculate that the soldiers of Custer's old 7th Cavalry were deliberately taking revenge for the regiment's defeat at Little Bighorn in 1876. Whatever the motives, the army's massacre ended the Ghost Dance movement and was the final major confrontation in America's deadly war against the Plains Indians.
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December 30

1985 Rick Nelson dies in plane crash

Rock musician Rick Nelson is killed in a plane crash. Nelson got his start by starring in his parents' TV series, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.

Nelson was born in 1940 to famous parents: His father, Ozzie Nelson, was a bandleader, and his mother, Harriet, was a singer and actress. When Ricky was four years old, his parents launched their radio series, playing themselves, with actors playing their young sons. Five years later, Ricky and his older brother, David, suggested that they, like their parents, play themselves on the series. In 1952, the series moved to TV.

Nelson attended Hollywood High School and showed little interest in music until his girlfriend raved to him about Elvis. He boasted that he was about to cut a record himself. His father let him cut a demo with his orchestra; Nelson claimed he chose to cover Fats Domino's "I'm Walkin'" because it relied heavily on the two guitar chords Nelson knew how to play.

When Nelson played the song on the TV series, he became an overnight sensation. His first album, released in November 1957, topped the Billboard charts, and Nelson became one of the best-selling male singers of the 1950s, with 53 Hot 100 hits, 17 in the Top 10. Nelson later changed his name from Ricky to Rick. He also appeared in several movies, including Rio Bravo with John Wayne and Dean Martin in 1959 and The Wackiest Ship in the Army in 1960.

After Ozzie and Harriet went off the air in 1966, Nelson's music career fizzled until he discovered the emerging style of country rock. On two albums, he covered country material and scored a few hits in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although he would never be a superstar again, he continued touring aggressively, performing more than 200 nights a year. He put together a new band in 1985 and signed a new record deal, but on December 31, en route to a concert in Texas, he died in a plane crash at age 45. The last song he performed live was a cover of "Rave On" by Buddy Holly, who also died in a plane crash.
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December 31

1969 Jimi Hendrix's new band debuts

Jimi Hendrix's new group, the Band of Gypsies, debuts with its first album, Band of Gypsies. Hendrix's former band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, had dissolved after several productive years together.

Hendrix was born in Seattle in 1942. He grew up playing guitar, imitating blues greats like Muddy Waters as well as early rockers. He joined the army in 1959 and became a paratrooper but was honorably discharged in 1961 after an injury, which exempted him from duty in Vietnam. In the early 1960s, Hendrix worked as a pickup guitarist, backing up musicians including Little Richard, B.B. King, Ike and Tina Turner, and Sam Cooke. He moved to New York in 1964 and played in coffeehouses, where bassist Bryan Chandler of the British group the Animals heard him. Chandler arranged to manage Hendrix and in 1966 brought him to London, where they created the Jimi Hendrix Experience with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell. The band's first single, "Hey Joe," hit No. 6 on the British pop charts, and the band became an instant sensation.

In 1967, the Jimi Hendrix Experience made its first U.S. appearance, at the Monterey Pop Festival. Hendrix made a splash by burning his guitar and was quickly established as a rock superstar. In the next two years, before the band broke up in 1969, it had released such classic songs as "Purple Haze," "Foxy Lady," and "The Wind Cries Mary." The band's albums included Are You Experienced? (1967), Bold as Love (1969), and Electric Ladyland (1969).

After the band dissolved over creative tensions, Hendrix made his famous appearance at Woodstock, playing a masterful, intricate version of "The Star Spangled Banner." Later that year, he put together a new group called the Band of Gypsies, which debuted on New Year's Eve in 1969. The band put out only one album, Band of Gypsies (1969). (A second album, Band of Gypsies II, was released in 1986.) Hendrix then recorded another album, without the band, called The Cry of Love, released in 1971.

Hendrix played his last concert in August 1970, at the Isle of Wight Festival in Britain. He died in London in September 1970, having choked on his own vomit following a drug overdose. He was 28 years old when he died.



1947 Roy Rogers and Dale Evans marry

America's favorite Western couple gets married. Roy Rogers, star of numerous westerns and television and radio shows, wed his co-star Dale Evans. Rogers and Evans had performed together for years but didn't marry until a year after Rogers' wife passed away.



1954 The Shadow ends

Radio mystery program The Shadow airs its last episode. The show, which debuted in 1930, drew a listening audience of some 15 million a week during its peak. The show featured a crime-fighting superhero, the Shadow, played by three different actors during the show's 25 years, including Orson Welles from 1937 to 1938. The show became famous for its trademark opening line: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows..."
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NEW YEAR'S DAY:

January 1, 45 B.C.

In 45 B.C., New Year's Day is celebrated on January 1 for the first time in history as the Julian calendar takes effect.

Soon after becoming Roman dictator, Julius Caesar decided that the traditional Roman calendar was in dire need of reform. Introduced around the seventh century B.C., the Roman calendar attempted to follow the lunar cycle but frequently fell out of phase with the seasons and had to be corrected. In addition, the pontifices, the Roman body charged with overseeing the calendar, often abused its authority by adding days to extend political terms or interfere with elections.

In designing his new calendar, Caesar enlisted the aid of Sosigenes, an Alexandrian astronomer, who advised him to do away with the lunar cycle entirely and follow the solar year, as did the Egyptians. The year was calculated to be 365 and 1/4 days, and Caesar added 67 days to 45 B.C., making 46 B.C. begin on January 1, rather than in March. He also decreed that every four years a day be added to February, thus theoretically keeping his calendar from falling out of step. Shortly before his assassination in 44 B.C., he changed the name of the month Quintilis to Julius (July) after himself. Later, the month of Sextilis was renamed Augustus (August) after his successor.

Celebration of New Year's Day in January fell out of practice during the Middle Ages, and even those who strictly adhered to the Julian calendar did not observe the New Year exactly on January 1. The reason for the latter was that Caesar and Sosigenes failed to calculate the correct value for the solar year as 365.242199 days, not 365.25 days. Thus, a 11-minute-a-year error added seven days by the year 1000, and 10 days by the mid-15th century.

The Roman church became aware of this problem, and in the 1570s Pope Gregory XIII commissioned Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius to come up with a new calendar. In 1582, the Gregorian calendar was implemented, omitting 10 days for that year and establishing the new rule that only one of every four centennial years should be a leap year. Since then, people around the world have gathered en masse on January 1 to celebrate the precise arrival of the New Year.
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Bez
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On This Day......

Post by Bez »

POL POT OVERTHROWN:

January 7, 1979

On January 7, 1979, Vietnamese troops seize the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, toppling the brutal regime of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge.

The Khmer Rouge, organized by Pol Pot in the Cambodian jungle in the 1960s, advocated a radical Communist revolution that would wipe out Western influences in Cambodia and set up a solely agrarian society. In 1970, aided by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops, Khmer Rouge guerrillas began a large-scale insurgency against Cambodian government forces, soon gaining control of nearly a third of the country.

By 1973, secret U.S. bombings of Cambodian territory controlled by the Vietnamese Communists forced the Vietnamese out of the country, creating a power vacuum that was soon filled by Pol Pot's rapidly growing Khmer Rouge movement. In April 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, overthrew the pro-U.S. regime, and established a new government, the Kampuchean People's Republic.

As the new ruler of Cambodia, Pol Pot set about transforming the country into his vision of an agrarian utopia. The cities were evacuated, factories and schools were closed, and currency and private property was abolished. Anyone believed to be an intellectual, such as someone who spoke a foreign language, was immediately killed. Skilled workers were also killed, in addition to anyone caught in possession of eyeglasses, a wristwatch, or any other modern technology. In forced marches punctuated with atrocities from the Khmer Rouge, the millions who failed to escape Cambodia were herded onto rural collective farms.

Between 1975 and 1978, an estimated two million Cambodians died by execution, forced labor, and famine. In 1978, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia, capturing Phnom Penh in early 1979. A moderate Communist government was established, and Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge retreated back into the jungle.

In 1985, Pol Pot officially retired but remained the effective head of the Khmer Rouge, which continued its guerrilla actions against the government in Phnom Penh. In 1997, however, he was put on trial by the organization after an internal power struggle ousted him from his leadership position. Sentenced to life imprisonment by a "people's tribunal," which critics derided as a show trial, Pol Pot later declared in an interview, "My conscience is clear." Much of the international community hoped that his captors would extradite him to stand trial for his crimes against humanity, but he died of apparently natural causes while under house arrest in 1998
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