Daily Glimpse of History

[BladesNBarrels]

Among American men during the Civil War era, grandiose facial hair was the fashion.
In contrast to the time of the Revolution, when nearly all men were clean-shaven, during the Civil War nearly every notable leader was bearded and/or mustachioed, often creatively.
One of the most famous displays of facial hair was that worn by Federal General Ambrose Burnside.
Men began calling his outrageous muttonchops sideburns, a word that remains in our vocabulary to this day.
General Burnside was not the only Federal commanding general to inspire a new word in the English language.
His successor Joseph Hooker also contributed a word to our vocabulary.
His was in honor of the enterprising women who followed his army around, and who came to be known as hookers.
Today is the birthday of Ambrose Burnside, born on May 23, 1824.

[fj605]

On this day in 1934, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were ambushed and killed in Bienville Parish, Louisiana.

[BladesNBarrels]

Cornelius Vanderbilt had no education, could barely spell, and was reputed to know no math beyond the most basic arithmetic.
But what he lacked in education he made up with business acumen.
A ruthless competitor, he acquired a huge fortune in the railroad and shipping business, becoming one of the wealthiest men in American history.
His net worth in todays dollars would be over $215 billion.
In 1872 Vanderbilt donated $1 million, a massive sum at the time, to the newly founded Central University of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Nashville.
At the time it was made, it was the largest charitable gift in American history.
In appreciation the school renamed itself Vanderbilt University.
During his life Vanderbilt was referred to as the Commodore, which explains the origin of the schools mascot and sports-team nickname the Commodores.
Vanderbilt well encapsulated his philosophy when he said, The public good consists in every individual pursuing his own interest as aggressively as possible.
Cornelius Vanderbilt was born on Staten Island, New York on May 27, 1794, two hundred twenty-eight years ago today.

[BladesNBarrels]

During the time of the French Revolution, the revolutionaries tried to erase all public evidence of France's monarchical past.
All across France, hundreds of statues and monuments of kings and royalty were removed or destroyed.
In one particularly absurd episode, in October 1793 a Paris mob tied ropes around the 500-year-old statues of the biblical kings of Israel on the facade of the Notre Dame Cathedral, pulled them down, and beheaded them.
In Paris alone over 1400 street names were changed (all that had been named for kings or saints).
People who shared a name with a monarch or saint changed their name.
They changed their children's names.
They changed the names of the chess pieces, to eliminate kings, queens, and bishops.
They changed the names of playing cards--no more kings and queens.
They even changed the name of the queen bee to the "laying bee."
Of course these zealots look ridiculous to us today, but in their zeal they had come to believe that allowing a statue of a historical figure to remain standing was somehow to endorse monarchy or injustice.
But each purge would eventually leave the revolutionaries unsatisfied and, like addicts needing ever stronger doses of a drug, they would ratchet up their radicalism.
Eventually they turned on their own, attacking those deemed insufficiently radical.
Finally, the people of France became disgusted with it all, and there was a reactionary backlash.
In due course they ended up with Napoleon.
In many French churches and cathedrals today there are empty pedestals in the chapels, where statues that were destroyed during the Revolution or during the iconoclastic frenzy of the Reformation once stood.
Fortunately some of them have been restored or replaced.
In 1977 workers on a construction project in Paris discovered the heads of the biblical kings toppled from Notre Dame nearly two hundred years earlier.
After the mob left a priest had gathered them up and buried them to protect them from further violence.
Today they are on display at the Cluny Museum in Paris.

[BladesNBarrels]

In 1842, at age 33, Abraham Lincoln sent two letters to the local Springfield newspaper, criticizing a political opponent. Calling the man, among other things, a fool and a liar, he signed the letters ?Rebecca.? Lincoln was courting young Mary Todd at the time, and she was aware of Lincoln?s letters. Thinking such a thing to be great fun, Mary began sending her own ?Rebecca? letters to the paper, poking fun at the man mercilessly and ridiculing him for being unmarried. In due course the man felt things had gone too far and he stormed into the newspaper office demanding to know if Abraham Lincoln was the author of the letters. When told that the letters had indeed come from Lincoln, the man challenged Lincoln to a duel.
The man Lincoln had been prodding was not a man to be trifled with. James Shields was a fiery-tempered Irishman, who was serving as the Illinois state auditor. He would go on to serve as a general in the Mexican American War (where he was twice wounded) and is the only man in American history to have been elected to the U.S. Senate from three different states. His challenge put Lincoln in a bind. He couldn?t admit to writing the letters Mary Todd had sent, but to pass the blame to a young woman would make him appear to be a coward. So, he reluctantly accepted Shields? challenge.
As the challenged party, Lincoln got to choose the weapons and set the rules for the duel. Duels were normally fought with pistols, but Lincoln knew that he would likely be killed if he fought Shields with pistols. So instead, he chose broadswords as the weapons, and he set rules that assured he would win the fight. Under Lincoln?s rules, he and Shields were to stand on opposite sides of a board, ten feet from each other. If either man stepped closer than that, the penalty was death. Being seven inches taller than Shields, Lincoln?s rules assured that he would be able to reach Shields with his sword, but that Shields would be unable to touch Lincoln. While Lincoln?s conditions were unsporting, he was within his rights to set them.
Shields saw of course that Lincoln had set conditions designed to make it impossible for Lincoln to lose the fight. But Shields was no coward and on the morning of the duel he arrived ready to go forward, whatever the consequences.
As was the norm in such affairs, the men the combatants had chosen as ?seconds? tried to negotiate an honorable resolution before the duel began. Exactly why Shields relented is unclear. By some accounts, while the seconds were negotiating Lincoln reached up and lopped off a large branch of a tree in a single swipe, convincing Shields that he ought to compromise. By other accounts, Lincoln?s second intimated to Shields?s man that Lincoln had been forced into the duel to protect the honor of a young lady, causing Shields to be satisfied with a toned-down apology. Whatever the reason, Lincoln agreed to admit writing the first letter, adding that he never intended to harm Shields?s character, a sort-of apology that Shields accepted. The duel was called off before Lincoln?s long arms had to go into action.
Lincoln later told a confidant that he felt confident he could have disarmed Shields, and that he no intention of killing him. He found the whole episode profoundly embarrassing and for the rest of his life refused to discuss it. When asked by an army officer years later if the rumor that he had once nearly dueled James Shields was true, Lincoln replied that he would not deny it, but that if the officer wished to remain his friend, he would never speak of it again.
Lincoln and Shields patched up their differences and had a cordial relationship afterwards. During the Civil War, Shields was a general in the Federal army and his commander in chief was the man he once nearly fought with broadswords on an island in the Mississippi.
Abraham Lincoln and James Shields met on Bloody Island, Missouri on the morning of September 22, 1842, one hundred eighty years ago today, to fight a duel, which fortunately was averted.

[BladesNBarrels]

n December 1942, President Roosevelt ordered nationwide rationing of gasoline, after calls for voluntary decreases in consumption had been perceived to be ineffective. Although the rationing was motivated partially by the need to conserve gasoline, the primary motivation was the need to conserve rubber.
At the outbreak of World War II, the U.S. rubber supply came entirely from the Dutch East Indies, which had been quickly invaded and seized by Japan in the weeks following the attack on Pearl Harbor. The government hoped that by rationing gasoline it would not only conserve gasoline, but also reduce driving and therefore extend the life of tires.
As part of the effort to save tires and reduce gas consumption, in May 1942 and continuing to the end of the war, the government established a ?Victory Speed,? a nationwide maximum speed limit of 35 miles per hour.
The images are of World War II gasoline rationing stamps and a 1942 cartoon by Dr. Suess, depicting a "U.S. Joyrider" "giving a lift to the Axis."

[Joe_K]

https://archive.org/details/DancingI...mode/1up?q=IDF

FOIA FBI Report that should be read by anyone expressing America Second views when it comes to foreign aid to Americas alleged bestest All-lies.