history | Ain't Complicated

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.

January 4

1486 — To guard against impure literature Berthold of Henneberg (Archbishop and Elector of Mainz) establishes in his diocese the first known censorship of the press.

1493 -– That “white European non-female” Christopher Columbus leaves the New World, ending his first journey.

1528 — Ferdinand of Austria, younger brother to “Holy” Roman Emperor Charles the Fifth, issues the first secular mandate forbidding the Anabaptist religious movement.

1949 -– A silent disc-shaped object circles Hickam Field near Honolulu (Hawaii) at 2:07 pm. It blinks once every second and flies away climbing into the northeast sky. The sighting is listed by the US Air Force as an “unknown.”

1952 — My good friend and ex-fellow-missionary JoeM is born.

1965 -– President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaims the Great Society during his State of the Union address.

1974 -– President Richard Nixon refuses to hand over materials subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee.

1975 -– Elizabeth Ann Seton becomes the first American-born saint. (I don’t know when she was born, but I can assert with confidence that there were thousands — if not millions — of American-born saints before.)

2007 -– Nancy Pelosi is elected the first female Speaker of the House in US history.

December 13

1571 — Hans Misel is martyred for his faith after refusing to recant his Anabaptist beliefs. According to Martyr’s Mirror, when the executioner brought him to the place where he was to be executed, he said to him, that if he would recant, he still had authority to let him go. But he refused, and would there seal his faith with his blood, and so far as he was concerned, he said, he might proceed. Thus he was beheaded and then burnt, and as they could not burn him quickly enough, they cut him into pieces and burned the pieces. When the executioner had struck off his head, so that the same lay on the ground, his body still remained erect, with the hands uplifted, as though he were praying, till the executioner pushed him over with his foot. It was also said that his head and hair could not be burned, but that it was found entire and undisfigured in the ashes, and was thus buried.

(Being an Anabaptist, that is of particular interest to me. Thanks to Google Alerts and Voice of the Martyrs for the info.)

In other news…

1545 — The first session of the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent opens. Responding to the spread of Protestantism and the drastic need for moral and administrative reforms within the Roman Catholic church, it met on and off for 18 years.

1949 — The Knesset votes to move the capital of Israel to Jerusalem.

1972 — Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt begin the third and final moonwalk of Apollo 17. This was the last manned mission to the moon.

1981 — General Wojciech Jaruzelski declares martial law in Poland to prevent dismantling of the communist system by Solidarity.

2006 — The Baiji (aka Chinese River Dolphin) is announced as extinct.

October 14

1656 — Massachusetts enacts the first punitive legislation against the Quakers.

1773 — The East India Company tea ships’ cargo is burned at Annapolis.

1789 — President George Washington proclaims the first Thanksgiving Day.

1884 — George Eastman patents paper-strip photographic film.

1916 — Paul Robeson is excluded from the Rutgers football team when Washington and Lee University refused to play against a black person.

1926 — A. A. Milne’s book Winnie-the-Pooh is first published.

1933 — Nazi Germany withdraws from The League of Nations.

1943 -– US Air Force loses 60 B-17 Flying Fortresses during an assault on Schweinfurt. (Today’s America likely would have called it quits after such losses.)

1960 — The idea of a Peace Corps is first suggested by Presidential candidate John F Kennedy at the University of Michigan.

1962 — A U-2 flight over Cuba takes photos of Soviet nuclear weapons being installed, thus getting the Cuban Missile Crisis under way.

1964 — Martin Luther King Jr wins the Nobel Peace Prize. And Leonid Brezhnev ousts Nikita Khrushchev as leader of the Soviet Union.

1986 — Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel wins the Nobel Peace Prize.

1991 — Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi wins the Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle to achieve democracy in her homeland.

1994 — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

2009 — The price of gold spikes to a record high of $1,072 per ounce. The dollar slumps to a 14-month low against the euro (1.49:1). Crude oil futures go above $75 per barrel for the first time in a year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average passes 10,000 for the first time in a year before closing at 9988.