On This Day

September 27

Welcome, blue Monday! Or maybe it’s green. Or yellow. Or a rainbow. Whatever it is, I’m glad it is.

So, on this day in history, a few events selected as outstanding if not notable….

1777 — Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is the capital of the United States for one whole day. (For all that I know, it may still be the capital of “Mennonitism.”)

1821 — Mexico gains its independence from Spain…and borrowed from its 47-year-old northern neighbor’s name: Estados Unidos Mexicanos.

1905 — The journal Annalen der Physik publishes Albert Einstein’s paper “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?”, introducing the equation E=mc2.

1928 — The United States recognizes the Republic of China. Would it still recognize it today?

1933 — Baby Carol was born. Many years later I became her nephew. Happy Birthday, Aunt Carol!

1939 — Warsaw (Poland) surrenders to both the Nazis and the Communists?!

1964 — The Warren Commission releases its (in)famous report concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in assassinating President John F. Kennedy. Maybe so.

1979 — The United States Department of Education becomes the thirteenth US Cabinet agency. How lucky is that?!

1994 — More than 350 Republican congressional candidates gather on the steps of the US Capitol to sign the “Contract with America.” How did that hope and change work out?

2010 — Mark and Ruby Roth relocate their sleeping quarters to their next place to live. (At posting time, this is a predicted plan and not an accomplished reality.)

August 31

Doesn’t it seem like it was just yesterday…?

1939 — Germany invades Poland, marking the beginning of World War II.

1969 — Muammar al-Qaddafi (27) launches a coup against Libya’s King Idris I.

1983 — Korean Air Flight 007 is shot down by a Soviet Union jet fighter. All 269 on board perish.

1985 — Some French and American guys (and gals?) find the RMS Titanic about 400 miles east of Newfoundland.

2010 — President Obama declares an end to US combat operations in Iraq.

June 25

Today. Long ago. (And not so long ago.)

1942 — About 1,000 British Royal Air Force bombers raid Bremen, Germany. 1000 bombers?!! Imagine the outcry today!

1948 — The Berlin Airlift begins.

1950 — The Korean War begins with the invasion of South Korea by North Korea.

1962 — The Supreme Court, in Engel v. Vitale, rules that recital of a state-sponsored prayer in New York State public schools was unconstitutional. What’s a state-sponsored prayer?

1997 — The Supreme Court strikes down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, designed to limit the government’s ability to regulate religious practices. So that means the government does have the ability to regulate religious practices? Isn’t that state-sponsored something-or-other?

1998 — The Supreme Court rejects a 1997 line-item veto law as unconstitutional.

2007 — A Washington (DC) judge rules in favor of a dry cleaner sued by a dissatisfied customer who was demanding $54 million for his missing pants. I remember that. I wonder if the judge lost his pants at a dry cleaner once upon a time.

2010 — Closing VBS program at Hopewell Mennonite Church. Also, Mark Roth places his first CraigsList ad (in which he casts out a low-hope lure for a place to rent).

April 19

1529 — At the Second Diet of Speyer, a group of rulers and independent cities protests the reinstatement of the Edict of Worms, beginning the Protestant Reformation.

1775 — The American Revolutionary War begins with the battles of Lexington and Concord.

1919 — Leslie Irvin makes the first successful voluntary free-fall parachute jump using a new kind of self-contained parachute.

1961 — The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba ends in success for the defenders.

1971 — Charles Manson is sentenced to death for the Sharon Tate murders. (As far as I know, that was never carried out.)

1993 — The 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian building outside Waco (Texas) ends when a fire breaks out. Eighty-one people die.

1995 — The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City is bombed, killing 168. (Timothy McVeigh has since been tried, convicted, and executed. See 1971 entry above for perspective.)

2005 – Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger is elected Pope Benedict XVI on the second day of the Papal conclave.

2010 — US Supreme Court justices seem to split sharply on whether a law school can deny recognition to a Christian student group because it won’t let gays join.

Lest We Forget

January 27 is the day established by the United Nations as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Amazingly, today is only the fifth observance of International Holocaust Remembrance Day! What was the UN’s hurry?!

Anyway, here are excerpts from two stories I read/scanned a few minutes ago:

Survivors and world leaders gathered in the bitter chill at Auschwitz on Wednesday to remember the hundreds of thousands who perished in one of Nazi Germany’s infamous concentration camps, 65 years to the day since troops of the Red Army liberated the camp.

[…]

Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau of Tel Aviv, a holocaust survivor, recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer of mourning, and sirens wailed across the barracks and barbed wire where an estimated 1.1 million people died.

Source: Holocaust Memorial Day marked on Auschwitz liberation anniversary

Here’s one other article excerpt:

During the Holocaust, 6 million Jews and millions of others were systematically murdered in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Yet many lived to tell their stories.

Arthur Berger, spokesman for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, said the first-hand accounts are important, especially in the Internet age when misinformation is easily spread. Those memories must be documented as much as possible, Berger said, in the hope that, by preserving the truth about what happened, future atrocities can be prevented.

Source: Victims, survivors honored International Holocaust Remembrance Day

According to Wikipedia, on this day in 1945, “The Red Army liberates the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.”

In case you forgot, I titled this post “Lest We Forget.” So I ask, Have the world’s powers that be forgotten Nazi Germany as Iran’s leaders make their anti-Israel, anti-Jew comments and threats? We shall see.

January 20

250 — Emperor Decius begins widespread persecution of Christians in Rome.

1885 — L.A. Thompson patents the roller coaster.

1920 — The American Civil Liberties Union is founded.

1937 — Franklin Roosevelt is inaugurated for a second term as President of the United States. Thanks to the 20th Amendment to the US Constitution, this is the first inauguration scheduled on January 20 (previous inaugurations were scheduled on March 4).

1942 — At Berlin’s Wannsee Conference, senior Nazi German officials decided on the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”, accelerating The Holocaust.

1945 — Hungary agrees to an armistice with the Allies.

1961 — John F. Kennedy is inaugurated as the youngest man, and first-ever Roman Catholic, to become elected President of the United States.

1981 — Ronald Reagan is inaugurated as US President, the oldest man to be inaugurated at 69. (Iran releases 52 American hostages twenty minutes later!)

1986 — For the first time, Martin Luther King, Jr. day is celebrated as a federal holiday in the USA.

1991 — Sudan’s government imposes Islamic law nationwide, worsening the civil war between the country’s Muslim north and Christian south.

2001 — George W. Bush is inaugurated to his first term as the second George Bush to become President of the United States.

2009 — Barack Obama is inaugurated, becoming the United States’ first African-American President.

2010 — Scott Brown begins his first day as Senator-elect (MA), elected to finish out Edward Kennedy’s term of office. Already there’s wonderment if he’s GOP presidential timber for 2012. 🙄

2010 A powerful aftershock (5.9?) adds to the trauma of a nation (Haiti) stunned by an apocalyptic quake eight days ago.

Above all, love God!