So sorry for the incredibly long absence. Over the last few months I finished graduate school, started my own business, moved to Memphis, TN, and am now preparing to move again to New Orleans, LA. But I make this solemn oath to start up again, delivering daily historical tibits.

xo
-theamazingxxxty

Seen as a symbolic victory over Nazi Germany, Joe Louis defends his heavy weight championship by knocking out Max Schmeling in the first round at Yankee Stadium on June 22, 1938.

(The knockout)

Interesting facts:
-Nicknamed The Brown Bomber, Joe Lewis is considered to be one of the greatest heavyweights of all time
-During WWII Schmeling was a paratrooper with the German Air Force and participated in the Battle of Crete.
-Lewis weighed 11 pounds at birth. 11 POUNDS!!

Also special days:
On June 22, 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt asked his supporters to leave the floor of the Republican National Convention in Chicago, leaving to endorse the formation of a new progressive party. Though officially titled the Progressive Party, after Roosevelt stated that he felt as strong as a “bull moose” to reporters, it was then known as the Bull Moose Party.

On June 22, 1611, Henry Hudson, his teenage son, and seven supporters were set adrift in a small, open boat in present-day Hudson Bay, after a mutny on his ship the Discovery.

On June 21, 1964, Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney were killed by a Ku Klux Klan lynch mob near Meridian, Mississippi. The three young civil rights workers were working to register black voters in Mississippi, as part of the “Freedom Summer” project of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE.) Schwerner  and Goodman were college students from New York, and Chaney was a native of Meridian. On the night of June 21st, the three were arrested for an alleged traffic violation and taken to the jail in Neshoba County, but released later that night. On the way back to Meridian, they were stopped by two carloads of KKK members on a remote rural road. They shot and killed the men but not before chain-whipping and mutilating Chaney. Their bodies remained undiscovered for nearly two months. In 1966 trial a Federal trial of Edgar Ray Killen and 18 other men ended in a hung jury.  Almost forty years later, Killen was found guilty of recruiting the mob that carried out the killings.

Off on a magical road trip exploring the land and sites between New York and Georgia. So very excited! Be back sometime next week :)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ANDREW JACKSON

On March 15, 1767, future president Andrew Jackson was born the son of Irish immigrants in the Waxhaws region, which is on the border of North and South Carolina.

(image: Andrew Jackson portrait, attributed to Thomas Sully (1783-1872))

On March 14, 1794, Eli Whitney received a patent for his cotton gin, an machine that separated cotton fiber from seeds. There had been machines like that for centuries, but Whitney’s was the first to clean short-staple cotton and also produce up to fifty pounds of cleaned cotton in a day. This jump in production made cotton a profitable crop for the first time, and with each decade after 1800, the yield of raw cotton doubled.

(image: Eli Whitney’s Cotton Gin Patent Drawing, National Archives and Records Administration)

On March 10, 1876 Alexander Graham Bell summoned his assistant in another room with the first discernible speech transmitted over a telephone system, by saying “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.” In 1877, he formed the Bell Telephone Company (with two investors) and the first commercial applications of the telephone took place.

(image: Alexander Graham Bell’s notebook entry of 10 March 1876, The Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers, Library of Congress)

Christopher Wallace, a.k.a Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G., was shot to death at a stoplight in Los Angeles on March 9, 1997. Pour some out for one of the greatest rappers ever.

…and if you don’t know, now you know, nigga