“We don’t read and write poetry because its cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is full of passion.”
~Robin Williams, as John Keating in ‘Dead Poets Society’
1865 – In an event that is generally regarded as marking the end of the Civil War, Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith, commander of Confederate forces west of the Mississippi, signed the surrender terms offered by Union negotiators.
With Smith’s surrender, the last Confederate army ceased to exist, bringing a formal end to the bloodiest four years in U.S. history. A total of 620,000 Union and Confederate were dead.
1924 – With Congressional passage of the Indian Citizenship Act signed by President Calvin Coolidge, the government of the United States conferred citizenship on all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the country.
The Act did not include citizens born before the effective date of the 1924 act, or outside of the United States as an indigenous person, however, and it was not until the Nationality Act of 1940 that all born on U.S. soil were citizens.
1941 – Baseball Hall of Fame legend Lou Gehrig died at the age of 37 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, an incurable neuromuscular illness now commonly referred to as “Lou Gehrig’s disease”.
He was an All-Star seven consecutive times, American League Most Valuable Player twice, and a member of six World Series champion teams, all with the New York Yankees. He had a career .340 batting average, hit 493 home runs and had 1,995 runs batted in.
In 1939, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame and was the first Major League player to have his uniform number (4) retired by a team.
1944 – American bombers of the Fifteenth Air Force launched Operation Frantic, a series of bombing raids over Central Europe, Taking off from air bases in southern Italy, the bomber landed at bases in Poltava, in the Soviet Union, in an exercise called “shuttle bombing”.
The Fifteenth was recruited by a desperate Joseph Stalin to help the Red Army in its campaign in Romania. In exchange for the Fifteenth’s assistance, Stalin allowed the American bombers to land at airbases within the Soviet Union as they carried out Operation Frantic, a plan to devastate German industrial regions in occupied Silesia, Hungary, and Romania.
1953 – Queen Elizabeth II was formally crowned monarch of the United Kingdom in a lavish ceremony steeped in traditions that date back a millennium.
A thousand dignitaries and guests attended the coronation at London’s Westminster Abbey, and hundreds of millions listened on radio and for the first time watched the proceedings on live television.
Millions of rain-drenched spectators then cheered the 27-year-old queen and her husband, the 30-year-old duke of Edinburgh, as they passed along a five-mile procession route in a gilded horse-drawn carriage.
Elizabeth had actually been proclaimed Britain’s new monarch in February 1952 upon the death of her father, King George VI. She remained in seclusion for the first three months of her reign as she mourned her father. During the summer of 1952, she began to perform routine duties of the sovereign, and in November she carried out her first state opening of the Parliament.
1967 – Capt. Howard Levy, 30, a dermatologist from Brooklyn, was convicted by a general court-martial in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, of willfully disobeying orders and making disloyal statements about U.S. policy in Vietnam.
Levy had refused to provide elementary instruction in skin disease to Green Beret medics because he believed the Green Berets would use medicine as “another tool of political persuasion” in Vietnam.
Levy, invoked the so-called “Nuremberg defense,” justifying his refusal on grounds that the Green Berets would use the training for criminal purposes. Levy’s civilian attorney also argued that training the Green Berets compelled him to violate canons of medical ethics.
The court was not persuaded and the ten-officer jury found him guilty on all charges, sentencing him to three years at hard labor and dismissal from the service.
1977 – Actor Stephen Boyd died of a massive heart attack at the of 45. He appeared in over 60 films, most notably as Messala in 1959’s Ben-Hur, a role that earned him the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor. He received his second Golden Globe Award nomination for Billy Rose’s Jumbo in 1962.
1989 – Dead Poets Society, a boys’ prep school drama starring Robin Williams, was released in selected U.S. theaters.
Set in 1959 at a fictional all-male preparatory school called Welton Academy, the film starred Williams as John Keating, a charismatic English teacher who encourages his students to “seize the day” (“carpe diem” in Latin) and embrace the passion for life expressed by great poets.
Williams was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, one of four nominations the film would receive, including Best Director and Best Picture. It won in one category, for Best Original Screenplay.
1990 – Sir Reginald “Rex” Harrison died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 82.
Harrison appeared in numerous films, including Anna and The King of Siam, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Cleopatra, and played the title role in Doctor Dolittle. He was best known for his portrayal of Professor Henry Higgins in the 1964 film version of My Fair Lady, for which Harrison won the Academy Award for Best Actor.
1997 – Timothy McVeigh, a former U.S. Army soldier, was convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy for his role in the 1995 terrorist bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City which killed 168 people.
Compiled by Ray Lemire ©2018 RayLemire.com. / Streamingoldies.com. All Rights Reserved.