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Post by dreamer on Dec 26, 2011 6:49:22 GMT -5
Dec. 26th American Revolution Washington wins first major U.S. victory at Trenton, 1776 Automotive Carmaker Preston Tucker dies, 1956 Civil War Possible war between U.S. and Britain is averted, 1861 Cold War Porgy and Bess opens in Leningrad, 1955 Crime Bathory's torturous escapades are exposed, 1610 Disaster Tsunami devastates Indian Ocean coast, 2004 General Interest Jack Johnson wins heavyweight title, 1908 Churchill addresses Congress, 1941 Bugsy Siegel opens Flamingo Hotel, 1946 The first Kwanzaa, 1966 Tsunami wreaks havoc on Southeast Asia, 2004 Hollywood The Exorcist opens, 1973 Literary King Lear performed at Court, 1606 Music Jimi Hendrix writes "Purple Haze", 1966 Old West Moses Austin asks Spanish for Texas colony, 1820 Presidential Truman dies, 1972 Sports Jack Johnson wins heavyweight boxing title, 1908 Vietnam War Laos says communists launched an offensive, 1967 U.S. jets strike North Vietnam, 1971 World War I U.S. government takes over control of nation's railroads, 1917 World War II Britain surprises German attacker in the Arctic, 1943 Patton relieves Bastogne, 1944 ******************** 1946: Bugsy Siegel opens Flamingo HotelOn December 26, 1946, in Las Vegas, Nevada, mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel opens The Pink Flamingo Hotel & Casino at a total cost of $6 million. The 40-acre facility wasn't complete and Siegel was hoping to raise some revenue with the grand opening. Well-known singer and comedian Jimmy Durante headlined the entertainment, with music by Cuban band leader Xavier Cugat. Some of Siegel's Hollywood friends, including actors George Raft, George Sanders, Sonny Tufts and George Jessel were in attendance. The grand opening, however, was a flop. Bad weather kept many other Hollywood guests from arriving. And because gamblers had no rooms at the hotel, they took their winnings and gambled elsewhere. The casino lost $300,000 in the first week of operation. Siegel and his New York "partners" had invested $1 million in a property already under construction by Billy Wilkerson, owner of the Hollywood Reporter as well as some very popular nightclubs in the Sunset Strip. Wilkerson had wanted to recreate the Sunset Strip in Las Vegas, with a European style hotel with luxuious rooms, a spa, health club, showroom, golf course, nightclub and upscale restaurant. But he soon ran out of money due to the high cost of materials immediately after the war. Siegel, who held a largest interest in the racing publication Trans America Wire, was drawn to Las Vegas in 1945 by his interest in legalized gambling and off-track betting. He purchased The El Cortez hotel for $600,000 and later sold it for a $166,000 profit. Siegel and his organized crime buddies used the profits to influence Wilkerson to accept new partners. Siegel took over the project and supervised the building, naming it after his girlfriend Virginia Hill, whose nickname was "The Flamingo" because of her red hair and long legs. Two weeks after the grand opening, the Flamingo closed down. It re-opened March 1, 1947, as The Fabulous Flamingo. Siegel forced Wilkerson out in April, and by May, the resort reported a profit, but it wasn't enough to save Siegel. Convinced that Siegel wasn't giving them a "square count," it is widely believed that his partners in organized crime had him killed while he was reading the paper June 20, 1947, at Hill's Beverly Hills mansion. Hill was in Paris, having flown the coop after a fight with Siegel 10 days prior. The crime remains unsolved to this day. Surviving a series of name and ownership changes, the hotel is known today as The Flamingo Las Vegas, owned and operated by Harrah's Entertainment. The property offers 3,626 hotel rooms and a 77,000-square-foot casino. www.history.com/this-day-in-history
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Post by dreamer on Dec 27, 2011 6:19:28 GMT -5
Dec. 27th Radio City Music Hall opens, 1932 American Revolution Americans raid Hammonds Store, 1780 Automotive Office of Price Administration begins to ration automobile tires, 1941 Civil War Confederate General Hood's army crosses the Tennessee River, 1864 Cold War Soviets take over in Afghanistan, 1979 Crime Carry Nation smashes bar, 1900 Disaster Coal mine explodes in India, 1975 General Interest HMS Beagle departs England, 1831 Apollo 8 returns to Earth, 1968 Spanish king ratifies democratic constitution, 1978 Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto assassinated, 2007 Hollywood Agnes Nixon, “Queen of Modern Soap Opera,” born, 1927 Literary Peter Pan, by James Barrie, opens in London, 1904 Music The legend of "Stagger Lee" is born, 1895 Old West Doniphan's Thousand takes El Paso, 1846 Presidential FDR seizes control of Montgomery Ward, 1944 Sports Peyton Manning breaks single-season touchdown pass record, 2004 Vietnam War U.S. and South Vietnamese troops attack Viet Cong stronghold, 1966 U.S. and North Vietnamese forces battle near Loc Ninh., 1969 World War I Poles take up arms against German troops in Poznan, 1918 World War II Germans form the Smolensk Committee to enlist Soviet soldiers, 1942 ******************** 1932: Radio City Music Hall opensAt the height of the Great Depression, thousands turn out for the opening of Radio City Music Hall, a magnificent Art Deco theater in New York City. Radio City Music Hall was designed as a palace for the people, a place of beauty where ordinary people could see high-quality entertainment. Since its 1932 opening, more than 300 million people have gone to Radio City to enjoy movies, stage shows, concerts, and special events. Radio City Music Hall was the brainchild of the billionaire John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who decided to make the theater the cornerstone of the Rockefeller Complex he was building in a formerly derelict neighborhood in midtown Manhattan. The theater was built in partnership with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and designed by Donald Deskey. The result was an Art Deco masterpiece of elegance and grace constructed out of a diverse variety of materials, including aluminum, gold foil, marble, permatex, glass, and cork. Geometric ornamentation is found throughout the theater, as is Deskey's central theme of the "Progress of Man." The famous Great Stage, measuring 60 feet wide and 100 feet long, resembles a setting sun. Its sophisticated system of hydraulic-powered elevators allowed spectacular effects in staging, and many of its original mechanisms are still in use today. In its first four decades, Radio City Music Hall alternated as a first-run movie theater and a site for gala stage shows. More than 700 films have premiered at Radio City Music Hall since 1933. In the late 1970s, the theater changed its format and began staging concerts by popular music artists. The Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular, which debuted in 1933, draws more than a million people annually. The show features the high-kicking Rockettes, a precision dance troupe that has been a staple at Radio City since the 1930s. In 1999, the Hall underwent a seven-month, $70 million restoration. Today, Radio City Music Hall remains the largest indoor theater in the world. www.history.com/this-day-in-history
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Post by dreamer on Dec 28, 2011 6:22:02 GMT -5
Dec. 28th First commercial movie screened, 1895 American Revolution British post troops on John's Island, 1781 Automotive Silent-film star and inventor of mechanical turn signal dies, 1938 Civil War Confederate General William Booth Taliaferro is born, 1822 Cold War Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago published, 1973 Crime An American hero is arrested in France, 1793 Disaster Earthquake rocks Sicily, 1908 General Interest Calhoun resigns vice presidency, 1832 America's first Labor Day, 1869 Worst European earthquake, 1908 Dubcek returns to public office, 1989 Hollywood Denzel Washington born, 1954 Literary Argentine novelist Manuel Puig is born, 1932 Music Nine killed in a stampede outside a hip-hop celebrity basketball game, 1991 Old West Carry Nation attacks a Kansas saloon, 1900 Presidential Woodrow Wilson born in Staunton, Virginia, 1856 Sports Central Red Army defeats New York Rangers at MSG, 1975 Vietnam War South Vietnamese win costly battle at Binh Gia, 1964 Hanoi announces return to the Paris peace talks, 1972 World War I Woodrow Wilson is born, 1856 World War II Request made for creation of construction battalions, 1941 ******************** 1895: First commercial movie screenedOn this day in 1895, the world's first commercial movie screening takes place at the Grand Cafe in Paris. The film was made by Louis and Auguste Lumiere, two French brothers who developed a camera-projector called the Cinematographe. The Lumiere brothers unveiled their invention to the public in March 1895 with a brief film showing workers leaving the Lumiere factory. On December 28, the entrepreneurial siblings screened a series of short scenes from everyday French life and charged admission for the first time. Movie technology has its roots in the early 1830s, when Joseph Plateau of Belgium and Simon Stampfer of Austria simultaneously developed a device called the phenakistoscope, which incorporated a spinning disc with slots through which a series of drawings could be viewed, creating the effect of a single moving image. The phenakistoscope, considered the precursor of modern motion pictures, was followed by decades of advances and in 1890, Thomas Edison and his assistant William Dickson developed the first motion-picture camera, called the Kinetograph. The next year, 1891, Edison invented the Kinetoscope, a machine with a peephole viewer that allowed one person to watch a strip of film as it moved past a light. In 1894, Antoine Lumiere, the father of Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis (1864-1948), saw a demonstration of Edison's Kinetoscope. The elder Lumiere was impressed, but reportedly told his sons, who ran a successful photographic plate factory in Lyon, France, that they could come up with something better. Louis Lumiere's Cinematographe, which was patented in 1895, was a combination movie camera and projector that could display moving images on a screen for an audience. The Cinematographe was also smaller, lighter and used less film than Edison's technology. The Lumieres opened theaters (known as cinemas) in 1896 to show their work and sent crews of cameramen around the world to screen films and shoot new material. In America, the film industry quickly took off. In 1896, Vitascope Hall, believed to be the first theater in the U.S. devoted to showing movies, opened in New Orleans. In 1909, The New York Times published its first film review (of D.W. Griffith's "Pippa Passes"), in 1911 the first Hollywood film studio opened and in 1914, Charlie Chaplin made his big-screen debut. In addition to the Cinematographe, the Lumieres also developed the first practical color photography process, the Autochrome plate, which debuted in 1907. www.history.com/this-day-in-history
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Post by dreamer on Dec 29, 2011 6:16:56 GMT -5
Dec. 29th U.S. Army massacres Indians at Wounded Knee, 1890 American Revolution British capture Savannah, Georgia, 1778 Automotive Actor Christian Slater arrested for drunk driving, 1989 Civil War Union is thwarted at the Battle of Chickasaw Bluffs, 1862 Cold War United States prepares new strategic plan for Middle East, 1956 Crime The "Railway Rapist" commits his first murder, 1985 Disaster Bridge collapses in Ohio, 1876 General Interest The making of an English martyr, 1170 Texas enters the Union, 1845 Worst air raid on London, 1940 Hollywood Cheers star Ted Danson born, 1947 Literary Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is published, 1916 Music Pat Boone earns second #1 hit with "April Love", 1957 Old West U.S. Army massacres Sioux at Wounded Knee, 1890 Presidential Andrew Johnson is born, 1808 Sports Cuban professional baseball league holds first game, 1878 Vietnam War Saigon announces success of strategic hamlet program, 1962 Johnson Administration responds to Harrison Salisbury's charges, 1966 World War I French government gives land for British war cemeteries, 1915 World War II Germans raid London, 1940 ******************** 1890: U.S. Army massacres Indians at Wounded KneeOn this day in 1890, in the final chapter of America's long Indian wars, the U.S. Cavalry kills 146 Sioux at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Throughout 1890, the U.S. government worried about the increasing influence at Pine Ridge of the Ghost Dance spiritual movement, which taught that Indians had been defeated and confined to reservations because they had angered the gods by abandoning their traditional customs. Many Sioux believed that if they practiced the Ghost Dance and rejected the ways of the white man, the gods would create the world anew and destroy all non-believers, including non-Indians. On December 15, 1890, reservation police tried to arrest Sitting Bull, the famous Sioux chief, who they mistakenly believed was a Ghost Dancer, and killed him in the process, increasing the tensions at Pine Ridge. On December 29, the U.S. Army's 7th cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers under the Sioux Chief Big Foot near Wounded Knee Creek and demanded they surrender their weapons. As that was happening, a fight broke out between an Indian and a U.S. soldier and a shot was fired, although it's unclear from which side. A brutal massacre followed, in which it's estimated almost 150 Indians were killed (some historians put this number at twice as high), nearly half of them women and children. The cavalry lost 25 men. The conflict at Wounded Knee was originally referred to as a battle, but in reality it was a tragic and avoidable massacre. Surrounded by heavily armed troops, it's unlikely that Big Foot's band would have intentionally started a fight. Some historians speculate that the soldiers of the 7th Cavalry were deliberately taking revenge for the regiment's defeat at Little Bighorn in 1876. Whatever the motives, the massacre ended the Ghost Dance movement and was the last major confrontation in America's deadly war against the Plains Indians. Conflict came to Wounded Knee again in February 1973 when it was the site of a 71-day occupation by the activist group AIM (American Indian Movement) and its supporters, who were protesting the U.S. government's mistreatment of Native Americans. During the standoff, two Indians were killed, one federal marshal was seriously wounded and numerous people were arrested. www.history.com/this-day-in-history
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Post by dreamer on Dec 30, 2011 5:44:31 GMT -5
Dec. 30th USSR established, 1922 American Revolution Francis Lewis dies, 1803 Automotive Sit-down strike begins in Flint, 1936 Civil War U.S.S. Monitor sinks, 1862 Cold War Acheson calls for renewed effort to meet communist threat, 1950 Crime An anti-abortion activist goes on a murder spree, 1994 Disaster Fire breaks out in Chicago theater, 1903 General Interest Southern U.S. border established, 1853 Rasputin murdered, 1916 Marcos inaugurated, 1965 Hollywood Cheers co-creator and famed TV director James Burrows born, 1940 Literary Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin wed, 1816 Music Led Zeppelin captured live for the first time in Spokane gym, 1968 Old West Former Idaho governor Steunenberg assassinated, 1905 Presidential Rutherford B. Hayes marries Lucy Webb, 1852 Sports OSU fires coach Woody Hayes for attacking an opposing player, 1978 Vietnam War U.S. Navy transfers some responsibility to South Vietnamese, 1970 Negotiations to resume in Paris, 1972 World War I Rasputin is murdered, 1916 World War II Tojo is born, 1884 ******************** 1922: USSR establishedIn post-revolutionary Russia, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) is established, comprising a confederation of Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, and the Transcaucasian Federation (divided in 1936 into the Georgian, Azerbaijan, and Armenian republics). Also known as the Soviet Union, the new communist state was the successor to the Russian Empire and the first country in the world to be based on Marxist socialism. During the Russian Revolution of 1917 and subsequent three-year Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik Party under Vladimir Lenin dominated the soviet forces, a coalition of workers' and soldiers' committees that called for the establishment of a socialist state in the former Russian Empire. In the USSR, all levels of government were controlled by the Communist Party, and the party's politburo, with its increasingly powerful general secretary, effectively ruled the country. Soviet industry was owned and managed by the state, and agricultural land was divided into state-run collective farms. In the decades after it was established, the Russian-dominated Soviet Union grew into one of the world's most powerful and influential states and eventually encompassed 15 republics--Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Belorussia, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. In 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved following the collapse of its communist government. www.history.com/this-day-in-history
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Post by dreamer on Dec 31, 2011 6:42:58 GMT -5
Dec. 31stAmerican Revolution Patriots are defeated at Quebec, 1775 Automotive Henry Ford publishes the last issue of the Dearborn Independent, 1927 Civil War Confederate General Forrest escapes capture at Parker's Crossroads, 1862 Cold War United States ends official relations with Nationalist China, 1978 Crime Subway vigilante turns himself in, 1984 Disaster Baseball star dies in plane crash, 1972 General Interest Charter granted to the East India Company, 1600 Patriots defeated at Quebec, 1775 Edison demonstrates incandescent light, 1879 Soviets test supersonic airliner, 1968 Panama Canal turned over to Panama, 1999 Hollywood Anthony Hopkins born, 1937 Literary Pete Hamill quits drinking, 1972 Music Rick Nelson dies in a plane crash, 1985 Old West John Denver born in New Mexico, 1943 Presidential Kennedy and Khrushchev exchange holiday greetings, 1961 Sports Plane carrying Roberto Clemente crashes, 1972 Vietnam War Bloodiest year of the war ends, 1968 U.S. annual casualty figures down, 1971 U.S. and communist negotiators prepare to return to the Paris talks, 1972 World War I American general and diplomat George C. Marshall is born, 1880 World War II Hungary declares war on Germany, 1944 ******************** 1999: Panama Canal turned over to PanamaOn this day in 1999, the United States, in accordance with the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, officially hands over control of the Panama Canal, putting the strategic waterway into Panamanian hands for the first time. Crowds of Panamanians celebrated the transfer of the 50-mile canal, which links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and officially opened when the SS Arcon sailed through on August 15, 1914. Since then, over 922,000 ships have used the canal. Interest in finding a shortcut from the Atlantic to the Pacific originated with explorers in Central America in the early 1500s. In 1523, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V commissioned a survey of the Isthmus of Panama and several plans for a canal were produced, but none ever implemented. U.S. interest in building a canal was sparked with the expansion of the American West and the California gold rush in 1848. (Today, a ship heading from New York to San Francisco can save about 7,800 miles by taking the Panama Canal rather than sailing around South America.) In 1880 a French company run by the builder of the Suez Canal started digging a canal across the Isthmus of Panama (then a part of Colombia). More than 22,000 workers died from tropical diseases such as yellow fever during this early phase of construction and the company eventually went bankrupt, selling its project rights to the United States in 1902 for $40 million. President Theodore Roosevelt championed the canal, viewing it as important to America's economic and military interests. In 1903, Panama declared its independence from Colombia in a U.S.-backed revolution and the U.S. and Panama signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, in which the U.S. agreed to pay Panama $10 million for a perpetual lease on land for the canal, plus $250,000 annually in rent. Over 56,000 people worked on the canal between 1904 and 1913 and over 5,600 lost their lives. When finished, the canal, which cost the U.S. $375 million to build, was considered a great engineering marvel and represented America's emergence as a world power. In 1977, responding to nearly 20 years of Panamanian protest, U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Panama's General Omar Torrijos signed two new treaties that replaced the original 1903 agreement and called for a transfer of canal control in 1999. The treaty, narrowly ratified by the U.S. Senate, gave America the ongoing right to defend the canal against any threats to its neutrality. In October 2006, Panamanian voters approved a $5.25 billion plan to double the canal's size by 2015 to better accommodate modern ships. Ships pay tolls to use the canal, based on each vessel's size and cargo volume. In May 2006, the Maersk Dellys paid a record toll of $249,165. The smallest-ever toll--36 cents--was paid by Richard Halliburton, who swam the canal in 1928. www.history.com/this-day-in-history
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