Monday July 21, 2014

KALW | By Joe Burke

Published July 21, 2014 at 6:04 AM PDT

On This Day
1831 --- Belgium became independent as Leopold I was proclaimed King of the Belgians.

1861 --- It isn’t often that people are invited to a picnic to watch a war; but that’s what happened 153 years ago. It was the first major battle of the Civil War between the North and the South. U.S. Federal troops under the leadership of Major General Irwin McDowell attacked Confederate troops led by General Beauregard. It was the Battle of Bull Run Creek at Manassas Junction, Virginia. The

Confederates, with the help of General E. Kirby Smith and General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, held back the Union troops like a stone wall. Many folks, dressed in their Sunday best, came to watch and picnic as 60,000 men fought for over ten hours. When a shell destroyed a wagon blocking the main road of retreat, panic sent Union troops and picnickers scurrying back to Washington D.C.

1873 --- The first train robbery in America was pulled off by Jesse James and his gang. They took $3,000 from the Rock Island Express at Adair, IA. The gang initially planned to stop the train but decided on de-railing it.
1904 --- The Trans-Siberian Railway was completed, linking European Russia with the Russian Pacific Coast.
1925 --- Schoolteacher John T. Scopes is convicted of violating Tennessee's law against teaching evolution in public schools. The case debated in the so-called "Trial of the Century"

was never really in doubt; the jury only conferred for a few moments in the hallway before returning to the courtroom with a guilty verdict. Nevertheless, the supporters of evolution won the public relations battle that was really at stake. (The conviction was later overturned.)

1931 --- CBS aired the first regularly scheduled program to be simulcast on radio and television. The show featured singer Kate Smith, composer George Gershwin and New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker.

1957 --- Althea Gibson became the first black woman to win a major U.S. tennis title when she won the Women’s National clay-court singles competition.
1959 --- A U.S. District Court judge in New York City ruled that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not a dirty book. The ruling was upheld in U.S. appeals court one year later. The book, incidentally, has been called a literary work of art.
1969 --- Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin blasted off from the moon aboard the lunar module.
1969 --- Duke Ellington and a portion of his band performed a 10-minute composition on ABC-TV titled, "Moon Maiden." The event took place just one day after Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon.

1973 --- Bad, Bad Leroy Brown reached the top spot on the Billboard pop-singles chart, becoming Jim Croce’s first big hit. Croce died in a plane crash two months later (September 20, 1973).
1990 --- Some 250,000 people celebrated at the site where the Berlin Wall once stood in East Berlin. Included in the benefit concert was an all-star cast performing Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Artists who performed: The Band, The Scorpions, Ute Lemper, Thomas Dolby, Sinead O'Connor, Joni Mitchel, James Galway, Brian Adams, Jerry Hall, Van Morrison, Marianne Faithfull, Albert Finney. Pink Floyd founder Roger Waters (organizer of the concert) performed together with his group The Bleeding Heart Band. “Organizing this show was certainly a lot of hard work,” Waters said, “but it was excellent to work with Bryan Adams, Van Morrison, Cyndi Lauper and all the others.”

2004 --- White House officials were briefed on the September 11 commission's final report. The 575-page report concluded that hijackers exploited "deep institutional failings within our government." The report was released to the public the next day.
2005 --- Terrorists attempt to attack the London transit system by planting bombs on three subways and on one bus; none of the bombs detonate completely. The attempted attack came exactly two weeks after terrorists killed 56 people, including themselves, and wounded 700 others in the largest attack on Great Britain since World War II. The previous attack also targeted three subways and one bus.

2007 --- "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," the final volume in the book series by J.K. Rowling, went on sale.
2008 --- Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, one of the world's top war crimes fugitives, was arrested in a Belgrade suburb by Serbian security forces.
2011 --- NASA’s space shuttle program completes its final, and 135th, mission, when the shuttle Atlantis lands at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. During the program’s 30-year history, its five orbiters—Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour—carried more than 350 people into space and flew more than 500

million miles, and shuttle crews conducted important research, serviced the Hubble Space Telescope and helped in the construction of the International Space Station, among other activities. NASA retired the shuttles to focus on a deep-space exploration program that could one day send astronauts to asteroids and Mars.

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