Calendar: February 7

Year: Day to Day Men: February 7

Late Morning Riser

The seventh of February in 1497, Shrove Tuesday, marks the day on which supporters of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola lit the bonfire of the vanities in the public square of Florence, Italy.

Born in the Duchy of Ferrara in September of 1452, Girolamo Savonarola was an ascetic Italian Dominican friar and an active preacher in Renaissance Florence. He was known for his prophecies of civic glory and his advocacy for the destruction of secular art and culture, as well as his denunciation of both clerical and papal corruption. Savonarola’s education was overseen by Michele Savonarola, his grandfather and a successful physician. He earned an arts degree at the University of Ferrara and prepared for medical school; however at some point, he decided on a life in religion.

In April of 1475, Savonarola traveled to Bologna and entered the Friary of San Domenico of the Order of Friars Preacher. After a year, he was ordained to the priesthood and studied scripture, logic, Aristotelian philosophy and Thomistic theology. In 1476, Savonarola was sent to the Dominican priory of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Ferrara as an assistant master of novices. Six years later, he was sent to the Convent of San Marco in Florence where, assigned as a teacher of logic, he wrote manuals on ethics, philosophy and prepared sermons. It was during this period that Savonarola, while studying scripture, became to broach apocalyptic themes.

Girolamo Savonarola lived for several years as an itinerant preacher with messages of repentance and reform. In 1490, he was again assigned to San Marco. Italian philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who due to his unorthodox views of the Church was living in Florence under the protection of Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici, persuaded de’ Medici to bring Savonarola to the city. Savonarola arrived in Florence in the middle of 1490 and began drawing large crowds with his preaching. He made pointed allusions to tyrants who usurped the people’s freedom and railed against the rich who exploited the poor.

Calling for repentance and renewal before the arrival of a divine scourge, Savonarola wanted to establish Florence as the New Jerusalem, the center of the Christian world. The people of Florence embraced his extreme moralistic campaign to rid the city of vices. New laws were passed against public drunkenness, sodomy, adultery, and other moral transgressions, including immodest dress and behavior. Savonarola saw sacred art as a tool for his worldview and, therefore, was opposed to secular art which he saw as worthless.

Pope Alexander VI for some time tolerated Savonarola’s criticism of the Church, an undercurrent theme that had slowly been increasing in Savonarola’s sermons over the years. After he refused to appear before the pope in Rome, the Vatican banned him from preaching. Seeing his influence wane, Savonarola resumed his sermons which were becoming more violent in tone. He attacked secret enemies at home whom he suspected in league with the papal Curia and condemned conventional Christians who were slow to respond to his callings. Savonarola held special Masses for the youth, processions, bonfires, and religious theater in San Marco.

The phrase “Bonfires of the Vanities” refers historically to the bonfire of the seventh of February in 1497 when Savonarola’s supporters gathered and burned thousands of objects in Florence’s public square. Held on Shrove Tuesday, an initial day of the religious observance Lent, the focus of this destruction was on objects that might tempt one to sin, including vanity items such as mirrors, cosmetics, fine dresses, playing cards and musical instruments. Other objects that burned in the bonfire included books Savonarola thought immoral, manuscripts of secular songs, and artworks including paintings and sculptures that were not sacred in nature. Anyone who raised objections against the destruction were forced to contribute by teams of Savonarola supporters.

Notes: Girolamo Savonarola, invited to Florence at the request of Lorenzo de’ Medici, eventually became one of the foremost enemies of the House of Medici and assisted in their downfall in 1494. Campaigning against what he saw as the excesses of Renaissance Italy, Savonarola’s power grew so much that he became the effective ruler of Florence with soldiers assigned for his protection.

In 1495, Savonarola refused to join Pope Alexander VI’s Holy League against the French. When summoned by the Vatican to Rome, he refused to go and continued preaching under a ban imposed by the Vatican. After describing the Church as a whore, Savonarola was excommunicated in May of 1497 for heresy and sedition. He was executed in May of 1498 in Florence’s Piazza della Signoria, the site of his bonfires of the vanities; his body was burnt. By papal authority, Savonarola’s writings were to be given to a papal agent within four days for destruction. Anyone who did not comply faced excommunication.

Calendar: February 5

Year: Day to Day Men: February 5

Hidden Face

The fifth day of February in 1924 marks the Royal Greenwich Observatory’s first broadcast of the hourly time signal known as the Greenwich Time Signal. Originally the idea of the Astronomer Royal Sir Frank Watson Dyson and the head of the BBC John Reith, the signal was originally controlled by two mechanical clocks with electrical contacts attached to their swinging pendulums. These sent a signal to the BBC which converted them to the oscillatory tone broadcast.

Situated on a hill in southeast London, the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, played a major role in the history of navigation and astronomy.The site of the observatory was established in 1851 by Sir George Airy as the Prime Meridian, the historic geographical reference line. By 1884, over two-thirds of all ships and tonnage were using it as the reference meridian on their charts and maps. Long symbolized by a brass strip in the observatory’s courtyard and later one of stainless steel, the Prime Meridian is now marked by a powerful green laser. As the Prime Meridian passes through its site, the Royal Observatory gave its name to what became Greenwich Mean Time, today known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

The Greenwich Time Signal (GTS) is a series os six short tones, or beeps, broadcast at one-second intervals by many BBC radio stations. Introduced in 1924, these tones have been generated by the BBC since 1990 to mark the precise start of each hour. The six short beeps occur on each of the five seconds leading to the hour and on the hour itself. Each beep is a one kilohertz tone, approximately a fifth of a semitone above musical B5. The first five beeps last a tenth of a second each; the final beep last half a second. The change of hour occurs at the beginning of the last beep.

The beeps for national radio stations are timed relative to the UTC, the primary time standard by which the world regulates its time. The UTC is based on International Atomic Time (TAI) which is maintained by an ensemble of atomic clocks around the world that measure time by monitoring the resonant frequency of atoms. Electron states in an atom are associated with different energy levels; in transitions between these states, they interact with a specific frequency of electromagnetic radiation. This phenomenon serves as the basis for the International System of Unit’s definition of a second, the basis for International Atomic Time.

Note: The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, has the International Astronomical Union’s code number ooo, the first on the list.

Calendar: February 3

Year: Day to Day Men: February 3

Thick Branches

The third day of February in 1923 marks the birth date of American zoologist, entomologist, educator and comparative psychologist Charles Henry Turner. He was one of the first scientists to examine whether animals display complex cognition through his studies of arthropods, specifically spiders and bees.

Born in Cincinnati to Thomas Turner and Addie Campbell, Charles Henry Turner entered the University of Cincinnati in 1896 and studied under comparative neurologist and geologist Clarence Luther Herrick, who had worked on the Natural History Survey of Minnesota. Graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Biology in 1891, Turner became the first African American to receive a graduate degree at the college. A summary of his undergraduate thesis was published in the journal “Science”, considered one of the world’s most prestigious academic journals.

Turner received his Master of Science from the University of Cincinnati in 1892. He remained at the university as an assistant instructor in its biological laboratory until 1893. Originally Tuner studied for his Doctorate at Ohio’s Denison University but the program was discontinued. He attained his Doctorate in Science at Atlanta’s Clark University where he served as Chair of the Science Department until 1905. Clark University’s Turner-Tanner Hall is named in his honor.

While teaching for a year as principal of Cleveland’s College Hill High School, Charles Turner continued his studies on insect behavior and pursued a doctorate degree at the University of Chicago which he achieved, magna cum laude, in 1907. Turner was among the first African Americans to receive a doctorate from that university. In 1907, he was a delegate for the Seventh International Zoological Congress held in Boston. There he met such eminent zoologists as Charles Whitman, Frank Lillie and Charles Child.

Turner published forty-nine papers on invertebrates, including “Psychological Notes on the Gallery Spider” and “Experiments on the Color Vision of Honeybees”, with three papers published in the journal “Science”. Turner was the first person to prove that insects can hear and distinguish pitch; he also discovered honeybees’ awareness of visual patterns and cockroaches’ trial and error learning. In doing his experiments, Turner advanced the studies of associative learning such as seen in stimulus substitution. He showed that a conditioning stimulus became a reliable predictor of reaction from an unconditioned stimulus.

Charles Turner’s studies were different from the majority of his contemporaries as he clearly adopted a cognitive perspective to analyze animal behavior. While most scientists believed that animals, such as insects, were driven by innate reactions to external stimuli, Turner used such concepts as memory, learning and expectation in his research. This view of animal cognition would be confirmed through later systematic observations by Edward Thorndike in the early 1900s.

Between 1898 and 1908, Turner applied for a position at the Tuskegee Institute but the Institute could not afford his salary. Unsuccessful at getting an appointment to the University of Chicago, he accepted a teaching position in 1908 at Summer High School in St. Louis, Missouri where he remained until his retirement in 1922 due to ill health. Charles Henry Turner died at the age of fifty-six in February of 1923 in Chicago, Illinois. He was interred at Lincoln Cemetery, a historically African American cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois.

Calendar: February 1

Year: Day to Day Men: February 1

A Pose for Spring

February 1st of 1884 marks the publishing of volume one of “The Oxford English Dictionary”, designed to provide an inventory of English words in use since the mid-twelfth century. The ten-volume set was not completely published until April of 1928. The definitions in the Oxford English Dictionary, mostly in order of historical occurrence, are illustrated with approximately two-million four-hundred thousand quotations from English-language literature and records.

In 1857, London’s Philological Society suggested the publication of the dictionary and the collection of materials quickly followed. With the appointment of Scottish lexicographer Sir James Murray as editor in chief, editorial work began in 1879. Murray, during his time as editor, was responsible for approximately half of the dictionary. This included all entries from the letter a through d, h through k, and all entries in the letters k,o,p and t. Three more editors succeeded Murray during the course of the printing: British philologist and lexicographer Henry Bradley, Scottish language and literature professor William Alexander Craigie, and Charles Talbut Onions who became an Oxford lecturer and held the post of Fellow Librarian.

The original inventory of English words was entitled “A New English Dictionary on Historical Principals”, a twelve volume set with a one volume supplement. The 1884-1928 ten-volume edition “The Oxford English Dictionary”, initially edited by Murray and others, was the corrected and updated revision of the original set. In 1933, “The Oxford English Dictionary” was reissued again as a twelve volume set accompanied by a one volume supplement. A four-volume “Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary” that treated new words in English use, was printed between 1972 and 1986.

The second full edition of “The Oxford English Dictionary”, known as OED2, was published in 1989 by the Oxford University Press. Two more volumes of additions were added in 1993 and 1997, and work was begun on a complete revision of the entire body of work for a projected third edition.

Calendar: January 31

Year: Day to Day Men: January 31

Stereoscopic Viewing

On January 31st in 1800, one of the earliest Native American literary writers, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, was born in Sault Ste. Marie located in the upper peninsula of the present state of Michigan. She was of Scottish-Irish and Ojibwe ancestry, born to John Johnston, a fur trader, and Ozhaguscodaywayquay, the daughter of Waubojeeg, a prominent Ojibwe war chief. Her parents were historically famous leaders in both the Ojibwe and Euro-American communities.

Jane Johnson Schoolcraft was fluent in the language and learned of both the English and Ojibwe cultures, which offered her a unique perspective for her creative work. She wrote poetry and traditional Ojibwe stores and translated many Ojibwe songs into English. Schoolcraft mostly wrote in English but published some poems in the Ojibwe language.

In her early twenties, Jane Johnston met Henry Schoolcraft, an American ethnologist and geographer who was conducting an expedition in the territory of present-day Michigan. They married in 1822 and began a relationship that proved significant for both of them. The marriage offered Jane a means to express her own literary talents; she also provided Henry insights on Ojibwe culture and language that aided his ethnological work.

Jane Schoolcraft’s poetry and translated Obijwe stories made noteworthy contributions to American literature. Her work is one of the earliest examples of Native American literature published in the United States. Schoolcraft’s influence is evident in many of the stories that Henry Schoolcraft collected; her translations and insights aided him in his later role as a government agent for Native Americans.

In 1826 and 1827, Schoolcraft’s writings were published in a handwritten magazine entitled “The Literary Voyager”, produced by Henry Schoolcraft. These issues were distributed widely to residents of Sault Ste. Marie as well as people in New York, Detroit and other cities. Her work also appeared in a six-volume study known as “Indian Tribes of the United States” that was commissioned in 1846 by the United States Congress.

In 1841, Henry and Jane Schoolcraft moved to New York City where Henry was employed by the state of New York to research Native American culture. After having suffered several illnesses, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft died at the age of forty-two in May of 1842 while visiting her married sister in Canada. She was buried at St. John’s Anglican Church in present-day Ancaster, Ontario. Schoolcraft is recognized as the first Native American literary writer, both as a woman and a poet, as well as the first to write out traditional Native American stories.

Notes: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s Ojibwe name was Bamewawagezhikaquay, the literary translation means “Woman of the Sound (that the stars make) Rushing Through the Sky”. Her writings began to attract interest in the 1990s as work by minority communities began to be more widely studied. In 2008, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft was inducted into the Michigan’s Women’s Hall of Fame.

Calendar: January 30

Year: Day to Day Men: January 30

Ginger on White

January 30th of 1910 marks the death of African-American inventor Granville Tailer Woods who registered nearly sixty patents in his lifetime and made vital contributions to the railroad industry. He also made improvements to technological devices such as the telephone, telegraph and phonograph.

Born in Columbus, Ohio in April of 1856, Granville Woods received little education as a young man. As a teenager, he was employed in a variety of work including as a steel mill worker and an engineer in both a railroad machine shop and onboard the British steamer, Ironsides. Between 1876 and 1878, Woods resided in New York City and took courses in engineering and electricity, subjects he knew were necessary for industry’s future.

Returning to Ohio in 1878, Woods was employed by the Springfield, Jackson and Pomeroy Railroad Company for eight months and later by the Dayton and Southeastern Railroad Company as an locomotive engineer for thirteen months. It was during this time that he began to form ideas for his later invention, the inductor telegraph. In the spring of 1880, Woods moved to Cincinnati where he founded the Woods Electric Company to develop, manufacture and sell electrical apparatus. In 1884, he filed his first patent for an improved steam boiler furnace; his later patents were predominantly for electrical devises.

Granville Wood’s 1885 patent for an improved telephone transmitter, which allowed a station to send voice as well as Morse code over a single wire, was purchased by the American Bell Telephone Company owned by Alexander Graham Bell. In 1887, he secured his patent for the creation of a magnetic coiled-wire field, that placed under a train, enabled communication between stations and moving trains by using the ambient static electricity of the existing telegraph lines. Challenged twice in court by Thomas Edison over the rights to this patent, Woods defeated Edison by proving there were no existing devices by which he could have relied on to make his device.

Woods manufactured a system of overhead electric conducting lines for railroads, an idea he modeled after a system developed by Charles van Depoele. Wood’s 1888 patent relied on wire brushes to make connections with metallic terminal heads, without exposing wires, through electrical contact rails. Once the train car had passed, the wires were no longer live and risk of injury was diminished. The invention was successfully tested in 1892 on the Figure Eight Roller Coaster in Coney Island. Patented in 1893, Woods sold the patent to General Electric in 1901.

In 1896, Granville Woods patented a system for controlling electrical lights in theaters, which became known as the safety dimmer. This device was safe and efficient and saved theaters forty per cent of electricity use. Between 1902 and 1907, Woods patented twelve devices that made improvements on the country’s railway system. Among these were devices that improved motor and vehicle control, automatic air brakes, and safety apparatus.

The first African American mechanical and electrical engineer after the Civil War, Granville Tailer Woods died of a cerebral hemorrhage at New York City’s Harlem Hospital on the 30th of January in 1910. His burial at St. Michael’s Cemetery in East Elmhurst, New York was without headstone or ceremony. In 1975 with donations from cooperations that used Woods’s patents, a headstone was erected at his grave site. In 2006, Granville T. Woods was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Alexandria, Virginia.

Calendar: January 28

Year: Day to Day Men: January 28

Skin and Fur

January 28th in 1896 was the day upon which the first person was charged with a speeding offense in the United Kingdom.

On the twenty-eighth of January in 1896, Walter Arnold drove his horseless carriage, a German-made Benz that he had imported to Britain the previous year, through the village of Paddock Wood, Kent, at more than four times the legal speed limit, a reckless thirteen kilometers per hour (eight miles per hour). A local constable on his regulation issue bicycle succeeded in catching him after a five kilometers pursuit (three miles).

The officer charged Arnold with four counts of breaking the law: using a locomotive without a horse on a public road, allowing said locomotive to be operated by fewer than three persons, traveling at a greater rate than three kilometers per hour (2 mph), and failing to display his name and address on the locomotive.

Walter Arnold appeared before a local magistrate on the thirtieth of January in 1896. In his defense, Arnold’s barrister Mr. Cripps stated that existing locomotive laws had not foreseen the type of vehicle Arnold was driving and mentioned several users of that type of vehicle including Sir David Salmons and the Honorable Evelyn Ellis, who were never charged when driving their vehicles. Cripps added that if the Bench considered the vehicle a locomotive within the existing acts, consideration should be given for a nominal fine.

Walter Arnold was found guilty on all four counts. He was fined 5 shillings for the first count, using a carriage without a locomotive horse, plus £2.0s.11d costs. On each of the other counts, Arnold was to pay 1 shilling fine and 9 shillings costs.

It should be noted that Arnold’s daredevil ride down Paddock Wood’s High Street could have been a publicity stunt. He was one of the earliest car dealers in the country and the local supplier for Benz vehicles. Arnold had set his own car company to begin providing a locally built variant of the Benz design. Marketing of the Arnold Motor Carriage began a few months after the incident.

Calendar: January 27

Year: Day to Day Men: January 27

Magic Mirror

On the twenty-seventh of January in 2003, the first fifty sound recordings for preservation in the National Recording Registry were announced by James Billington, the Librarian of Congress. This registry was established by the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000, which created the National Recording Preservation Board with membership appointed by the Librarian of Congress. Its members select the recordings for preservation on a yearly basis from a list of nominations.

The National Recording Preservation Act established a national program to guard and preserve America’s sound recording heritage. Recordings and collections of recordings to be preserved and maintained must meet the criteria for selection:

Recordings must be culturally, historically or aesthetically significant and/or inform or reflect culture in the United State.

Recordings will not be considered for inclusion in the Registry if no copy of the recording exists.

No recording is eligible for inclusion until ten years after the recording’s creation.

For the years 2003 to 2006, the National Recording Preservation Board selected fifty recordings for the Registry; in the following years, twenty-five have been selected each year. Public nominations are accepted for inclusion in each calendar year and are announced the following spring. Registry title works, either original or copies, are housed at the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus for Audio Video Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia. Among each year’s selections are a few recordings of significance that are housed in the National Archive’s audiovisual collection.

Among the six hundred and twenty-five recordings preserved in the Registry are:

—Jesse Walker Fewkes’s 1890 Pasamaquoddy Indians Field Recordings

—Scott Joplin’s 1916 Ragtime Compositions (Piano Rolls)

—George Gershwin’s 1924 Rhapsody in Blue

—Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933-1944 Fireside Chats Radio Broadcasts

—Abbott and Costello October 6, 1938 “Who’s on First” Radio Broadcast

—James Brown and The Famous Flames 1963 Live at the Apollo

—Russ Hodges’s Coverage of the October 3rd, 1951 National League Tiebreaker; New York Giants vs Brooklyn Dodgers

Calendar: January 26

Year: Day to Day Men: January 26

Clear Water

On the twenty-sixth of January in 1905, the Cullinan Diamond, the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found, was discovered at the Premier Number Two mine in Cullinan, South Africa. The diamond was named after Thomas Cullinan, a South African diamond magnate and owner of the Premier mine.

The Cullinan diamond, weighing 3,106 carats or 621.2 grams, was put on sale in London in April of 1905. Although there was considerable interest in the sale, it remained unsold until 1907 when the British-ruled Transvaal Colony purchased the diamond. The colony’s Prime Minister Louis Botha presented it to King Edward VII, who reigned over the territory. The Cullinan diamond was sent to Amsterdam where Joseph Asscher & Company were commissioned to cut it.

The Cullinan diamond produced stones of various sizes and cuts. The largest, Cullinan 1, was 530.4 carats, or 106 grams, was named the Great Star of Africa by Edward VII. This stone was mounted in the head of the Sovereign’s Scepter with Cross, a token of the King or Queen’s temporal power as head of state. The Scepter was redesigned in 1910 specifically to incorporate the Great Star of Africa, the largest clear cut diamond in the world. The gold clasps that hold the diamond can be opened, thus allowing the diamond to be worn as a pendant.

The second largest cut stone from the Cullinan diamond was named the Second Star of Africa. It weighs 317.4 carats or 41.7 grams, and is mounted in the Imperial State Crown which symbolizes the sovereignty of the British monarch. As with the Scepter, the Imperial State Crown was altered to accommodate the Second Star of Africa in 1909. The Imperial State Crown, at 31.5 cm tall, weighs 1.06 kilograms and has four fleurs-de-lis in the shape of lilies alternating with four crosses pattée, crosses with arms narrower at the center point. The purple velvet cap is trimmed with ermine. The gold, silver and platinum framework is decorated with diamonds, pearls, sapphires, emeralds and five rubies.

Seven other major diamonds cut from the Cullinan, weighing a total of 209.3 carats or 41.7 grams, were privately owned by Elizabeth II who inherited them from her grandmother, Queen Mary, in 1953. These were used in brooches and as part of the Coronation Necklace; the smallest at 4.39 carats was set in a platinum ring known as the Cullinan IX Ring.

The Cullinan was estimated to have been formed in the Earth’s mantle and reached the surface 1.18 billion years ago. It was found 5.5 meters below the surface at Premier Mine by Frederick Wells, the mine’s surface manager. It was three times the size of the 1898 Excelsior Diamond, the previous largest gem-quality rough diamond. As four of its eight surfaces were smooth, the blue-white hued Cullinan was once a part of a much larger stone that was broken up by natural forces. For a short period after its discovery, the diamond was on display at Johannesburg’s Standard Bank where it was seen by over eight thousand visitors.

After the period of display, London’s sale agent S. Neumann & Company created a diversionary tactic for the transport of the Cullinan diamond to London. Detectives were assigned to a steamboat that was rumored to be carrying the stone; the parcel, containing a fake diamond, was locked under great circumstance in the captain’s safe and guarded the entire voyage. The Cullinan Diamond was actually sent to London in a plain box by registered mail. When it arrived in London, the package was sent to Buckingham Palace for King Edward VII’s inspection.

Calendar: January 24

Year: Day to Day Men: January 24

Ginger and Blue Tiles

On the twenty-fourth day of January in 1848, carpenter James Wilson Marshall found nuggets of gold in California’s American River near the site of the sawmill he was constructing for John Sutter. The news of this discovery brought three-hundred thousand people to California in the hope of a new life. This sudden influx of population allowed California to quickly achieve statehood through the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise was a packet of five separate Congressional bills, one of which approved California’s request for statehood, that temporarily defused tensions between the free and slave states in the United States.

A New Jersey native who came to California in 1944, James Marshall had found the gold nuggets in the tailrace, essentially a water wheel for producing energy, attached to the lumber mill he was building for Swiss immigrant John Sutter. He brought the gold to Sutter and the men privately tested the nuggets. Assured it was gold, Sutter wanted to keep the news of the discovery private as he had plans for an agricultural empire on the site.

Having sworn all the workers at the mill to secrecy, Sutter sent one of the carpenters, former Dragoon soldier Charles Bennet. to Monterey which was acting as the functional capital of the territory. Bennet was to meet with Colonel Mason, the chief United States official, to secure mineral rights of the land upon which the mill was being built. However after stopping in the Bay Area city of Benicia, Bennet excitedly made remarks about Sutter’s gold discovery after hearing about a recent discovery of coal. In San Francisco, he made a second remark about the gold and, after Colonel Mason declined to make judgment on the mineral rights, revealed the secret a third time.

By March of 1848, the discovery of gold at the Sutter site was confirmed by newspaper publisher and merchant Samuel Brannan, who had hastily stocked his store with gold prospecting supplies and advertised the discovery throughout San Francisco. The New York Herald, a major news source on the eastern coast of the United States, reported the California gold discovery in its August 19th edition of 1848. On December 5th of the same year. President James Polk confirmed the discovery in an address to Congress and, with that, the gold rush began. As John Sutter had feared, his business plans were ruined, his workers left to pan for gold, and squatters took over his land and stole both his crops and his cattle.

While the sudden influx of gold into the money supply reinvigorated the American economy, it had severe effects on Native Californians and sped the Native American population’s decline from disease, starvation and genocide. Whole indigenous societies were attacked and pushed off their lands by the gold seekers. Dependent on traditional hunting, gathering and agriculture, Native Americans became victims as gravel, silt and toxic chemicals from prospecting operations killed fish and destroyed habitats. Game disappeared as settlements and mining camps were built amidst game and food gathering locations. Newly plowed farms to feed the miners took away more of land.

Systematic attacks against tribespeople living near mining districts occurred. The numbers of killings of California Native Americans by non-natives between 1846 and 1873 was estimated at between ninety-four hundred and sixteen thousand, most of which occurred in more than three hundred-seventy massacres. If Native people responded in retribution, large scale attacks would be made against entire Native villages. One such attack was the 1852 Bridge Gulch Massacre where a group of setters attacked a band of Wintu Indians; only three children survived the massacre.

California’s first governor, Peter Burnett, declared there were only two options towards the California Native population, removal or extermination. On the twenty-second of April in 1850, the California legislature passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians which allowed settlers to capture and use Native people as bonded workers, prohibited Native peoples’ testimony against settlers, and allowed the adoption of Native children by settlers, often for labor purposes. After the initial rapid economic growth had ended, laws and confiscatory taxes were imposed to drive out the remaining Native Americans, immigrants from China, Mexico, Chile and Latin America.

Calendar: January 23

Year: Day to Day Men: January 23

In a White Room

The twenty-third of January in 1570 marks the assassination of James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray. He was the regent of Scotland under his half-nephew, the infant King James VI. This was the first assassination of a head of government by the use of a firearm.

Born in 1531, James Stewart was the illegitimate child of King James V of Scotland and his mistress Lady Margaret Erskine, daughter of John Erskine, 5th Lord Erskine, and the wife of Sir Robert Douglas of Lochleven. On August 31st of 1536, Stewart received a royal charter that granted him the lands of Tantallon and its surrounding district. He later received an appointment in 1538 as Prior of St. Andrews, Fife, which supplied him with an annual income.

In 1558, Stewart attended the Paris wedding of his half-sister Mary, Queen of Scots, to the Dauphin of France, who became King Francis II of France. Stewart was a supporter of the Scottish Reformation, in which Scotland broke with the Papacy and became a predominantly Calvanist church; he was also a leader of the Protestant Lords of the Congregation, a group strongly in favor of a Scottish-English alliance. Despite differences in both politics and religion, Stewart became one of the chief advisors to his half-sister Mary after her return from France in 1561.

In 1562, Mary, Queen of Scots, made Stewart Earl of Moray, a new earldom for the kingdom. Included in the wealthy Earl of Moray title was Darnaway Castle with a large medieval hall; a smaller house often used by his father near Leuchars in Fife was also in Stewart’s possession. Now the Earl of Moray, he led Mary’s army and defeated a rebellion by George Gordon, 4th Earl of Huntly, at the Battle of Corrichie.

In July of 1565, Mary, Queen of Scots, married by Roman Catholic rites Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, who became king consort of Scotland. Lord Darnley was the second but eldest surviving son of Matthew Stewart, 4th Earl of Lennox, and his wife Lady Margaret Douglas. Mary and Darnley’s son James, the future King James VI of Scotland and King James I of England, was born on the nineteenth day of June in 1566 at Edinburgh Castle. In August, Moray was appointed Regent of Scotland for the infant King James; this was confirmed by Parliament in December.

By 1658, Scotland was in a state of civil war. Mary, Queen of Scots, had been forced by Parliamental decree to abdicate the throne and Moray, as Regent of Scotland. was leading his army against supporters of Mary. From 1668 to the end of 1659, Moray challenged and defeated almost all the northern Lords who were supporting Mary. On the 21st of January in 1570 while at Stirling Castle, he sent letters to summon Alexander Home, 5th Lord Home, and James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, to a meeting in Edinburgh.

In the midst of his travel to Edinburgh, James Stewart, Earl of Moray, was assassinated at the town of Linlithgow on the 23rd of January in 1570. James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh, a supporter of the abdicated Mary, fatally wounded him with a carbine shot from the window of his uncle Archbishop Hamilton’s house as Moray was passing in the main street below. Moray’s body was shipped to Leith and then taken to Holyrood Abbey. He was buried in St. Anthony’s aisle at St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh. Moray was succeeded by his oldest daughter and heir, Elizabeth Stewart, 2nd Countess of Moray.

Calendar: January 22

Year: Day to Day Men: January 22

The Bamboo Grove

The twenty-second of January in 1931 marks the birth date of American singer, songwriter and producer Samuel Cooke who, along with Ray Charles, became one of the most influential Black vocalists of the period after World War II.

Born Samuel Cook in Clarksdale, Mississippi, he was the fifth of eight children born to Reverend Charles Cook of the Church of Christ and Annie Mae Carroll. In 1933, the Cook family relocated to Chicago where Cooke attended Wendell Phillips Academy High School. At the age of six, Cooke sang in the choir of his father’s church and as a member of his siblings’ music group, the Singing Children. He joined the Highway Q. C.’s, an American gospel group, as lead singer at the age of sixteen.

In 1950 at age nineteen, Cooke replaced gospel tenor Robert H. Harris as lead singer of Harris’s gospel group The Soul Stirrers, who had just signed with Los Angeles’s Specialty Records. The group’s first recording under Cooke’s leadership was “Jesus Gave Me Water” in 1950. Other songs recorded by the group included Thomas Dorsey’s “Peace in the Valley” and Mollie Wilson’s “Jesus Paid the Debt”. Cooke was often credited with bringing a younger crowd of listeners to the genre of gospel music.

In 1957, Sam Cooke turned against the traditions of the Black musical community and decided to pursue pop music. To signal this new period in his life, he added the “e” to his surname. Cooke reinvented himself as smooth, romantic singer in the mold of Nat King Cole. He wrote many of his best songs, among which was his first hit “You Send Me” for Keen Records. In 1957, this song was number one on all the charts and established Cooke as a star. Between 1957 and 1964, Cooke had thirty songs in the top of the charts in the United States. Among these were “Chain Gang”, “Another Saturday Night”, “Wonderful World” and “A Change is Gonna Come”.

Cooke was one of the first Black performers and composers who administered the business side of music. He founded his own song publishing and management firm, Kags Music, in 1958 so he could own the copyrights to his music. Cooke also founded a record label, SAR Records, as a place where he could expand his artistic abilities and to give other struggling artists a venue to record. In 1963, he signed a five-year contract for businessman Alan Klein to manage both firms; Klein negotiated a deal with RCA Victor in which the company would get exclusive distribution rights in exchange for 6% royalty payments and payments for the recording sessions. Cooke, as a result, would receive preferred stock as an advance and yearly payments for the following four years.

Sam Cooke, however, was killed on December 11th of 1964 at the Hacienda Motel in South Central Los Angeles. Answering reports of shooting and a kidnapping, police found Cooke’s body with a gunshot wound to his chest, later determined to have pierced his heart. The motel owner, Bertha Franklin, said she shot Cooke in self-defense. There were no other witnesses on the scene; however, the hotel’s owner, Evelyn Carr, said she was talking to Franklin by phone at the time and had heard a conflict and gunshot.

As Carr’s testimony corroborated Franklin’s account and both passed polygraph tests, the coroner’s jury ultimately accepted both accounts and returned a verdict of justifiable homicide. With that verdict, the case was officially closed. Many of Cooke’s family and supporters rejected the verdict. Singer Etta James wrote that she had seen Cooke’s body before the funeral and questioned the accuracy of the official version due to the injuries she saw on Cooke’s body.

After two memorial services, one in Chicago and the second in Los Angeles, Samuel Cooke’s body was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. Cooke’s album “Shake” and two singles, “Shake” and “A Change is Gonna Come”, were released posthumously. Cooke received multiple posthumous awards which included a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and induction into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the National Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame. The title of his single “A Change is Gonna Come” is written on a wall of the Contemplative Court of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

Calendar: January 21

Year: Day to Day Men: January 21

The Small Silver Medallion

The twenty-first of January in 1598 marks the birth date of Matsudaira Tadamasa (松平忠昌), an early to mid-Edo period Japanese samurai and daimyō, a feudal lord. He was noted for his skill in the martial arts and distinguished himself in combat by his prowess with the spear.

Matsudaira Tadamasa was born in Osaka as the second son of Yūki Hideyasu (結城秀康), a respected samurai and daimyō of the Fukui Domain in Echizen. In 1607, he was received in an audience by his grandfather Tokugawa Ieyasu (徳川家康), the First Shōgun of the Tokugawa Shogunate of Japan, and his uncle Tokugawa Hidetada (徳川秀忠), Second Shōgun of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Hidetada arranged to raise the nine-year old Tadamasa in the Tokugawa household with Ieyasu’s tenth son Tokugawa Yorinobu (徳川頼宣), who was four years older.

In 1607, Tadamasa was assigned a fief of ten-thousand koku, and became First Daimyō of the Kazusa-Anegasaki Domain. He accompanied his uncle Hidetada during the 1614 Siege of Osaka; however, he was frustrated that, due to his youth, he was not allowed to participate in the battle. Tadamasa petitioned his uncle to perform his genpuku ceremony, a classical coming of age ceremony, before the start of the Osaka military campaign in the summer. Hidetada agreed and granted him a kanji, which is a script character for his name, and the court rank of Senior Fifth Rank, Lower Grade as well as the courtesy title of lyo-no-kami.

At the 1615 Battle of Osaka, Matsudaira Tadmasa proved his prowess with the spear; his weapon from that battle became an heirloom of the Echizen-Matsudaira clan. As a reward for his service in battle, he was given in 1615 a fief of thirty-thousand koku and transferred as Seventh Daimyō to the Shimotsuma Dormain in Hitachi Province. When Shōgun Matsudaira Tadateru (松平忠輝) was relieved of command and exiled, Tadamasa became Daimyō of the Matsushiro Domain in Fukui with a fief of five hundred-thousand koku.

In 1626, Tadamas’s rank was raised to Senior Fourth Rank, Lower Grade. He accompanied Shōgun Tokugawa Iemitsu (徳川家光), the Third Shōgun of the Tokugawa Shogunate, to Kyoto in 1634. During the Shimabara Rebellion in 1637, he was disappointed that he did not receive orders to lead his troops into battle; he visited the battle as a private citizen with twelve retainers. Tadamasa ordered construction work in 1643 for the rebuilding of the Mikuni Harbor as the main port for shipping in the Fukui Domain.

Matsudaira Tadamasa died at the age of forty-seven in September of 1648 at the domain’s residence in the city of Edo. Upon his death, seven of his senior retainers committed junshi, a honorific suicide ritual for the death of their lord. Matasudaira Tadamasa is buried at the Temple of Eihei-ji in Fukui.

Notes: The koku, a Chinese-based Japanese unit of volume, is equal to about one hundred-eighty liters or one hundred-fifty kilograms of rice. In the Edo period, one koku of rice was considered a sufficient quantity of rice to feed one person for a year.

Calendar: January 20

Year: Day to Day Men: January 20

The Passageway

The twentieth of January in 1929 marks the general release of Raoul Walsh and Irving Cumming’s pre-Code talkie “In Old Arizona”. This film was a major innovation for Hollywood as it was the first major Western to employ the newly developed sound technology and the first “talkie” to be filmed outdoors.

The 1928 film “In Old Arizona” was based on the character of the Cisco Kid in the 1907 story “The Cabellero’s Way” written by William Sydney Porter, better known by his pen name O. Henry. Originally a murderous criminal in O. Henry’s story, the Cisco Kid was depicted as a heroic Mexican caballero or horseman for radio, film and television adaptations.

Raoul Walsh was originally scheduled to play the role of the Cisco Kid; however, an accident on location caused the loss of one eye. Silent film actor Warner Baxter took on the lead role of the film with Edmund Lowe as Sergeant Dunn and Dorothy Burgess as Tonia Maria.

The cinematographers Arthur Edeson and Alfred Hansen extensively used authentic locations for the sets. Filming took place in Utah’s Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, the Mojave Desert area of California, and at the colonial Mission San Juan Capistrano. “In Old Arizona” was the film that began the iconic image of the singing cowboy as its star Warner Baxter does some incidental singing in this first Western talkie.

“In Old Arizona” premiered in Los Angeles on Christmas Day, December 25th of 1928. At the 2nd Academy Awards in 1930, the film was nominated for five awards: Outstanding Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Writing, and Best Cinematography. Warner Baxter won the Best Actor Award for his performance. In 2004, Walsh and Cumming’s “In Old Arizona” was preserved in the Academy Film Archive at the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study.

Calendar: January 17

Year: Day to Day Men: January 17

A Sunny Day

The seventeenth of January in the year 1761 marks the birth date of Sir James Hall of Dunglass, 4th Baronet, who was a Scottish geologist and geophysicist. He was the first to use an analogue modeling synthesizer to investigate the formation of folds in the earth’s layers. Hall’s discoveries in this field were published in 1815.

Born at Dunglass Castle in East Lothian, James Hall was the only son and heir of Sir John Hall, 3rd Baronet who had served on the Grand Jury for the 1748 Edinburgh trial of those involved in the 1745 Jacobite uprising. James Hall studied at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and the University of Edinburgh during the 1780s. At Edinburgh, he studied under Professor of Medicine and Chemistry Joseph Black and Regius Professor of Natural History John Walker, one of the main scientific consultants of his day.

From attending Walker’s courses, Hall learned how to use the chemical compositions of minerals to determine the relative age of the earth’s layers. Walker also emphasized in his classes the importance of chemistry to the study of geology. After his studies, Hall travelled Europe to seek book dealers who dealt in works on mineralogy, geology and chemistry. His travels to France brought him into contact with nobleman and chemist Antoine-Laurant de Lavoisier who wrote the first extensive list of elements. Lavoisier was also instrumental in the development of the metric system as well as the reformation of chemical nomenclature through a set of rules for the generation of systematic names.

Upon his return to his home in Scotland, Sir James Hall continued his studies in the fields of chemistry and geology. During the 1780s and 1790s, he was interested in geologist James Hutton’s ‘Theory of the Earth” which suggested that the strata of the planet was continually being worn or melted down, thus making the planet a giant system of circulating material. Hall traveled with Hutton and professor John Playfair in the spring of 1788 on a boat trip to Siccar Point on Scotland’s Berwickshire coast. At Siccar Point, they discovered a rock formation that became known as Hutton’s Unconformity. This geological phenomenon marked the location where rock formations, created at different times and by different forces, joined together. Other locations in Scotland were later identified by Hutton.

Initially skeptical of the chemical viability of Hutton’s theory, Hall soon published several papers on the chemical composition of the strata. He experimented on granite to prove that it was possible for molten rock to form a continuous sequence of deposits, typically in parallel layers. By melting basalt in an iron furnace, Hall demonstrated its return to the original form when cooled; his melted limestone proved that, melted under pressure, limestone did not decompose. These findings were published by Hall in the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s scientific journal “Transactions”.

Sir John Hall traveled throughout Europe to examine the geological formations of Mount Etna and the Alps mountain range, both areas formed from the collision of the planet’s tectonic plates. He also studied the similarity of lava flows in Italy to geological sites in Scotland. Hall, in addition to his works in the field of science, was also the author of various works on architecture among which was his 1797 “Essay on the Origins and Principles of Gothic Architecture”. Sir John Hall, 4th Baronet, died at home in the central area of Edinburgh survived by a wife and six children. He is buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard in central Edinburgh.