Today in History (August 30th):
30 BC: Cleopatra, queen of Egypt and lover of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, committed suicide following the defeat of her forces by Octavian, the future first emperor of Rome.
1780: Gen. Benedict Arnold betrayed the United States when he promised secretly to surrender the fort at West Point to the British army. He fled to England and died in poverty.
1797: Birthdays: English author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein);
1893: Birthdays: Louisiana Gov. Huey Long;
1901: Birthdays: Journalist/author John Gunther; Civil rights leader Roy Wilkins;
1896: Birthdays: Actor Raymond Massey;
1898: Birthdays: Actor Shirley Booth;
1906: Birthdays: Actor Joan Blondell;
1908: Birthdays: Actor Fred MacMurray;
1918: Birthdays: Baseball Hall of Fame member Ted Williams;
1919: Birthdays: Country music singer Kitty Wells;
1930: Birthdays: Businessman Warren Buffett;
1935: Birthdays: Singer John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas;
1939: Birthdays: Actor Elizabeth Ashley;
1941: German forces began the 900-day siege of Leningrad. When it ended, the Russian city lay in ruins and hundreds of thousands of people had died.
1943: Birthdays: French Olympic champion skier Jean-Claude Killy; Cartoonist Robert Crumb;
1944: Birthdays: Newspaper columnist Molly Ivins;
1946: Birthdays: Actor Peggy Lipton;
1948: Birthdays: Comedian Lewis Black;
1953: Birthdays: Basketball Hall of Fame member Robert Parish;
1951: Birthdays: Actor Timothy Bottoms;
1963: Birthdays: Actor Michael Chiklis;
1966: Birthdays: Actor Michael Michele;
1967: The nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court was confirmed. Marshall was the first African-American to sit on the court.
1972: Birthdays: Actor Cameron Diaz;
1982: Birthdays: Tennis player Andy Roddick.
1983: Guion Bluford became the first black astronaut in space.
1992: At least 15 people were killed and 31 wounded when an artillery shell exploded in a crowded Sarajevo market.
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1994: The Lockheed and Martin Marietta corporations agreed to a merger that would create the largest U.S. defense contractor.
2003: More than 120 people, including prominent Shiite cleric Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, were killed in a bombing attack on Iraq’s Imam Ali Mosque.
2004: At least 240 people were arrested during a New York anti-Bush demonstration two days before the National Republican convention.
2005: On the day after Hurricane Katrina struck, 80 percent of New Orleans was under water. Electric, water, sewage, communication and transportation systems were out. Three-fourths of all houses were reported damaged or destroyed. Thousands were rescued, many plucked from rooftops and some sought shelter in the Superdome. In other areas along the Gulf of Mexico, meanwhile, Katrina flattened much of Gulfport and Biloxi, Miss., flooded Mobile, Ala., and heavily damaged smaller towns in between. The death toll report eventually would top 1,800, most of the deaths in New Orleans, with more than $100 billion in damage.
2008: An estimated 2 million people from Texas to Alabama fled the Gulf Coast as Hurricane Gustav bore down on the area. The mass evacuation included many residents of New Orleans who had just observed the third anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina onslaught. Thousands of residents of Mexico City, Tijuana and other cities in Mexico took to the streets to protest an epidemic of drug-related killings and kidnappings and the Mexican government’s apparent inability to stop them.
2009: The federal government’s cash for clunkers program, which offered rebates for those who traded in gas-guzzling cars and trucks for newer, more gas-efficient models, convinced American consumers to buy more than 690,000 vehicles. With the economy dropping and unemployment rising, Japan’s ruling political party for about half a century, the Liberal Democrats, was routed in parliamentary elections by the Democratic Party of Japan.
2011: Two senior U.S. Justice Department officials charged with overseeing the failed government gun smuggling sting operation dubbed Fast and Furious were replaced amid bitter congressional criticism of the mission. The plan was to pass thousands of weapons to suspected Mexican gun smugglers and trace them to drug leaders. But hundreds of firearms were lost, some showing up at crime scenes, including the 2010 slaying of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Quotes
“Of all our faults, the one that we excuse most easily is idleness.” – La Rochefoucauld
“Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.” – Francis Bacon
“I have learnt silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to these teachers.” – Kahlil Gibran, mystic, poet, and artist (1883-1931)
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851) English writer:
“A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind.”
“And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words, which found no true echo in my heart.”
“Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.”
“I am very averse to bringing myself forward in print, but as my account will only appear as an appendage to a former production, and as it will be confined to such topics as have connection with my authorship alone, I can hardly accuse myself of a personal intrusion.”
“I do not wish them to have power over men, but over themselves.”
“I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.”
“I shall live to improve myself, to take care of my child and to render myself worthy to join him. Soon my weary pilgrimage will begin.”
“I thought and pondered – vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations.”
Vocabulary