Calendar: February 12

Year: Day to Day Men: February 12

Construction Site

The twelfth of February in the year 1554 marks the death of Lady Jane Grey, also known as Lady Jane Dudley after her marriage and as the ‘Nine Days’ Queen. A first cousin once removed of Edward VI, King of England and Ireland, Lady Grey was an English noblewoman who claimed the throne of England and Ireland from the tenth to the nineteenth of July in 1553.

Lady Jane Grey was the great-granddaughter of King Henry VII through his daughter Mary Tudor and was thus a grandniece of King Henry VIII. She was well educated in the humanities and considered one of the most learned women of her time. In May of 1553, Lady Grey married Lord Guildford Dudley, one of the younger sons of King Edward VI’s chief minister John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland.

In June of 1553, the dying King Edward VI wrote his will and testament in which he nominated Lady Jane Grey and her male heirs as successors to the Crown. Edward VI, who had laid the foundation for the reformed Church of England, removed his half-sister Mary Tudor from the succession, partly due to the fact she was Catholic, and nominated Lady Grey, a committed Protestant who would support the reformed church.

King Edward VI’s will and testament also removed Elizabeth I, the only surviving child of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife. Elizabeth had been declared illegitimate after Anne’s marriage to Henry was annulled. Although Elizabeth had been reinstated under the Third Succession Act of 1543, King Edward ignored those statutes of reinstatement in favor of Lady Grey as successor.

After Edward VI’s death on the sixth of July in 1553, Lady Jane was officially proclaimed Queen on the tenth of July and waited for her coronation in the Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London. Jane’s father-in-law John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, made an attempt to consolidate his power through the capture of Mary Tudor on the fourteenth of July. The attempt failed and Dudley was accused of treason; he was executed less than a month later.

Support for Mary Tudor grew rapidly and most of Lady Jane’s supporters abandoned her. The Privy Council of England, a body of advisors to the sovereign, gave their support to Mary Tudor and proclaimed her queen on the nineteenth of July. Lady Jane and her husband Lord Guildford Dudley were arrested and held prisoner in the Tower of London. Queen Mary I originally had decided to spare Lady Jane’s life; however she was soon viewed as a threat to the Crown. Lady Jane’s fate was sealed after her father, Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Suffolk, led a rebellion against the marriage of Queen Mary and King Phillip II of Spain.

Referred to by the court as Jane Dudley, wife of Guildford, Lady Jane was charged with hight treason as were her husband, two of his brothers, and the former archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. They were tried on the thirteenth of November in 1553 at London’s Guildhall. As expected, all were found guilty and sentenced to death. Jane was guilty of treason as she had assumed the title and power of the monarch, as presented in the documents she had signed as Queen. Her sentence was to be beheaded or burned alive on Tower Hill as the Queen pleases.

Scheduled for the ninth of February in 1554, Lady Jane’s execution was postponed for three days to give her a chance to convert to the Catholic faith. On the morning of the twelfth of February, Lord Guildford Dudley was beheaded and the remains were brought inside the tower where Jane was staying. Lady Jane was taken outside to the Tower Green where she blindfolded herself and was beheaded with one stroke. At the time of her death, Jane was no more than seventeen years old.

Lady Jane Grey and her husband Lord Guildford Dudley are buried in the Chapel of Saint Peter ad Vincula on the north side of the Tower Green. No marker was ever erected on their gravesite. Her father Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, was executed for treason on the twenty-third of February in 1554, eleven days after his daughter and son-in-law.

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 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 25

A Year: Day to Day Men: January 25

Honor Among Men

January 25, 1924 marks the opening date of the first Winter Olympics held at Chamonix, in the French Alps.

In 1911, the IOC (International Olympic Committee) proposed the staging of a separate winter competition for the 1912 Stockholm Games, but Sweden, wanting to protect the popularity of the Nordic Games, declined. Germany planned a Winter Olympics to precede the 1916 Berlin Summer Games, but World War I forced the cancellation of both. Soon after the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Belgium, an agreement was reached with Scandinavians to stage the IOC-sanctioned International Winter Sports Week.

On January 25, 1924, the ‘first Winter Olympics’ took off in style at Chamonix in the French Alps. Spectators were thrilled by the ski jump and bobsled as well as 12 other events involving a total of six sports. The “International Winter Sports Week,” as it was known, was a great success. It was so popular among the 16 participating nations that, in 1925, the IOC formally created the Winter Olympics, retroactively making Chamonix the first. In 1928 the International Olympic Committee (IOC) officially designated the Winter Games, staged in St. Moritz, Switzerland, as the second Winter Olympics.

At the Chamonix games, Scandinavians dominated the speed rinks and slopes, and Norway won the unofficial team competition with 17 medals. The United States came in third, winning its only gold medal with Charles Jewtraw’s victory in the 500-meter speed-skating event. Canada won another hockey gold, scoring 110 goals and allowing just three goals in five games. Of the nearly 300 athletes, only 13 were women, and they only competed in the figure-skating events.

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 9

Year: Day to Day Men: January 9

Betty Boop Coffee

On the ninth of January in 1839, French painter and physicist Louis Daguerre presented a full description of his daguerreotype process to a meeting of the Academy of Sciences held by the eminent astronomer and physicist François Arago, the man who proved the wave theory of light.

The first permanent photograph from nature was made by French inventor Nicéphore Niépee in 1826 through his heliographic process; however, the quality of the image was poor and the process required an exposure time of eight hours. Daguerre’s daguerreotype process, the first practical process of photography, improved the quality of the image and reduced to exposure time to thirty minutes.

Born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, in November of 1787, Louis Daguerre apprenticed in theater design, architecture and panoramic painting under Pierre Prévost. He was originally a revenue officer and later a scene painter for opera sets. In 1822, Daguerre opened the Diorama, an exhibition venue in Paris which presented three-dimensional pictorial views that changed with various lighting effects. He later opened a second establishment in London’s Regent Park.

Born in Chalon-sur-Saône in March of 1765, Nicéphore Niépee initially began experimenting in 1813 in the recently developed printing technique, lithography. Unskilled in drawing and unable to obtain a proper lithographic stone, he sought a way to make images automatically. Niépee made experiments and developed the heliographic process of using light and light-sensitive supports to produce images. He initially used a substrate of light-sensitive bitumen of Judea, which hardened on exposure to light, to obtain an image on glass. With the use of a camera in 1826, he was able to fix an image on a metal plate made of pewter. However, Niépee was unable to reduce the exposure time by either optical or chemical means.

In 1829, Nicéphore Niépee agreed to the repeated requests by Louis Daguerre for a partnership to perfect and exploit his heliography process. After four years of working without any advancement, Niépee died in July of 1833. Deguerre, building upon Niépee’s discoveries, eventually succeeded in greatly reducing the exposure time. He also discovered that exposing an iodized silver plate in a camera would result in a lasting image if the latent image on the plate was developed by exposure to fumes of mercury and then made permanent by a solution of common salt.

For this discovery, Louis Daguerre was appointed an officer of the Legion of Honor. In 1839, he and the heir of Nicéphore Niépee were assigned annuities of six-thousand and four-thousand Francs, respectively, in return for their photographic process.

Notes: Lithography was invented circa 1796 in Germany by the Bavarian playwright Alois Senefelder. By chance, he discovered the ability to duplicate his scripts by writing then in greasy crayon on slabs of limestone and them printing them with rolled-on ink. As the local limestone retained the crayon marks on its surface, multiple images, called lithographs meaning in Latin stone marks, could be printed in large quantities. It was not until 1820 that lithography became commercially popular.

Calendar: January 8

Year: Day to Day Men: January 8

Man on Deck

The eighth of January in 1877 marks the Battle of Wolf Mountain, known by the Northern Cheyenne as the Battle of Belly Butte, a confrontation between the United States Army and warriors from both the Lakota Sioux and Northern Cheyenne. Occurring during the Great Sioux War of 1876, the battle was fought in southern Montana Territory near the Tongue River.

Following Lieutenant Colonel George Custer’s defeat in the Battle of Little Bighorn, a large number of Army reinforcements were sent by the government into the Montana Territory. In autumn of 1876, a few bands of Sioux and Cheyenne tribes were returning to the reservations and agencies, now managed by the army instead of civilian contractors, to acquire food and annuity goods for the winter. These provisions had been promised to the tribes after the government demanded that they cede the Black Hills area to it.

By December, General Nelsen Miles had led a mixed force of infantry, artillery and calvary after Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull’s band and effectively defeated them. Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie defeated the Northern Cheyenne under Chief Morning Star after a destructive raid, known as the Dull Knife Fight, that left two hundred lodges destroyed, seven hundred livestock captured, and most of the Cheyenne forced to surrender. The surviving warriors trekked through snow and icy conditions to join the camp of Chief Crazy Horse in the Tongue River Valley.

Concerned about the approaching winter and the situation of the remaining Cheyenne band, Chief Crazy Horse decided to negotiate a peace with the army. However, a group of United States Army Crow scouts murdered Crazy Horse’s delegation. In retaliation, a series of small raids by the Cheyenne tried to draw out Colonel Nelson Miles’s troops from the Tongue River army post. In December of 1876, Miles led most of nine companies from the army post in pursuit of Crazy Horse at Tongue River Valley. On the seventh of January, Miles captured a few Northern Cheyennes and camped with a force of four hundred-thirty six men along the Tongue River. That night fresh snow fell and the temperatures dropped.

After early morning shots were fired. Colonel Miles set up a defensive perimeter along a ridge on the knoll later called Battle Butte. The defensive position had two pieces of artillery beside it and a clear line of fire in front. At seven in the morning, Crazy Horse and Cheyenne Chief Two Moon began a series of attacks. Due the the army’s firepower, the warriors had to regroup and attack several times; however, these attacks failed when Miles shifted his reserves. Miles’s Fifth Infantry units struggled to take the hills occupied by the warriors; despite the deep snow, the units secured seven of the hills, forcing the Sioux and Cheyenne to withdraw.

Although a draw in many aspects, the Battle of Wolf Mountain was a strategic victory for the U.S. Army as the Sioux and Cheyenne saw they were not safe from the army even in winter’s harsh conditions. Many members of the tribes returned to the reservations. By May of 1877, Chief Crazy Horse had led his surviving band to Camp Robinson to surrender.

Notes: Chief Crazy Horse was a Lakota war leader of the Oglala band; his Lakota name was Tȟašúŋke Witkó, literal translation “His Horse is Crazy”. After his surrender, he resided in his village near the Red Cloud Agency, located by Fort Robinson, Nebraska. Crazy Horse had promised he would remain in peace with the army. Due to mistranslation by an Indian interpreter, the army felt that he was a threat and eventually arrested and placed in the guardhouse. Once inside, Crazy Horse attempted to escape and was stabbed with a bayonet by one of the guards. He was tended by the assistant post surgeon but died late on the night of September fifth in 1877. The identification of the guard remains questioned. Crazy Horse’s remains were handed over to his elderly parents; his final resting place remains unknown.

Chief Morning Star was a great chief of the Northern Cheyenne people and the headchief of the Notameohmésêhese band on the northern Great Plains. Known also as Chief Dull Knife, his Lakota Sioux name was Tȟamílapȟéšni. He died in 1883 and is interred at Lame Deer Cemetery on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in southeastern Montana.

Calendar: January 7

Year: Day to Day Men: January 7

Sending a Message

The seventh of January in 1927 marks the placement of the first official transatlantic telephone call. The call, transmitted by radio waves, was held between Walter S. Gifford, the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), and Sir Evelyn P. Murray, the head of the British General Post Office.

The telephone call between Walter S. Gifford in New York City and Sir Evelyn P. Murray in London was a shared communication of prepared statements on the significance of the new technology with regards to facilitating business and fostering better understanding. The line was then opened for personal and business-related calls. By the day’s end, a news dispatch had been sent from Europe to America and over six million dollars worth of business had been transacted. The Gifford-Murray call was recorded for its historical significance and resides in the collection of the Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Before the telephone, long distance communication was conducted through letters, early models of fax machines, and telegraphs. Over a period of several years, the telephone was developed by inventors and businessmen; however, the definitive inventor of the telephone is still a matter of controversy. In 1840, American electrical experimenter and professor Charles Grafton Page discovered a way to use electricity passing through a wire to make sound. During the 1850s, Italian inventor Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci developed a voice-communication apparatus that connected his Staten Island, New York, laboratory to his second-floor bedroom.

In 1871, Antonio Meucci submitted a patent caveat, the required legal document, for his telephonic device to the United States Patent Office; however, there was no mention of electromagnetic transmission of voice sound in his granted patent request. In 1876, Scottish-born Canadian-American inventor Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the electromagnetic transmission by vocal sound through undulatory electric current. Elisha Gray, an American electrical engineer who co-founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, also played an important part in the development of the telephone with his creation of the liquid transmitter, an important component of Alexander Graham Bell’s patent.

On the morning 14th of February in 1876, Elisha Gray’s lawyer submitted to the U.S. Patent Office a signed and notarized patent caveat that described a telephone using a liquid transmitter. In the same morning, a lawyer for Alexander Graham Bell submitted Bell’s application. The question of whose patent application had precedence became controversial. When proof of Bell’s invention of the liquid transmitter idea was required, Bell pointed to an earlier application which used mercury as a circuit breaker. This argument was accepted as proof even though mercury would not have worked in a telephone transmitter. Bell’s amendment to his claim enabled him to acquire U. S. patent 174, 465 on the 7th of March in 1876 for the invention of the telephone.

Calendar: January 6

Year: Day to Day Men: January 6

Just Slightly Peeking

On the sixth of January in 1501, construction began on Portugal’s Jerónimos Monastery in the parish of Belém of the Lisbon Municipality. This monastery became the necropolis of the Portuguese royal dynasty, the House of Aviz, in the sixteenth-century until its secularization in December of 1833 by state decree. Its ownership was then transferred to the Real Casa Pia de Lisboa, a charitable institution.

The Jerónimos Monastery was designed by architect Diogo de Boitaca, an influential architect and engineer of some of the most important buildings in Portugal. In this church, he continued his concept of a nave, the central part of the church, and two side aisles of equal height which unified the inner space as in a hall church. The richly ornate vaulting in the main chapel shows ribs with the shape of a twisted rope, a common theme of the Manueline style which incorporated maritime elements. The Jerónimos Monasteryis considered the most prominent of the late Portuguese Gothic Manueline style of Lisbon architecture.

The Jerónimos Monastery was erected near the Tagus River launch point of Vasco de Gama’s first journey; its construction was funded by a five percent tax on the profits of the yearly Portuguese India Armadas. With the influx of such riches as imported spices and the redirection of funds from other proposed monasteries, Diogo de Boitaca was not limited to small-scale plans. He chose calcário de lioz, a gold-colored limestone for its construction. During his span of overseeing the construction, De Boitaca was responsible for drawing the plans and contracting work on the monastery, the sacristy and the refectory.

Architect Juan de Castillo succeeded Diogo de Boitaca in 1517. He moved from the Manueline to the Spanish Plateesque style, an ornamentation that included decorative features constructed of silverware, plata. With the death of King Manuel I, construction halted until 1550, at which time architect Diogo de Torralva was in charge. He was followed by Jérôme de Rouen who added some classical elements. Throughout the following years, construction was halted several more times before the monastery’s completion, a span of work that lasted over one hundred years.

The Jerónimos Monastery became in 1640 a burial place for the Portuguese royal families. Among those entombed within the monastery were four of the eight children of John IV, King Alfonso VI, the Infanta Joana, and Catarina de Bragança. In 1880, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s remains and those of poet Luís de Camões, who wrote “The Lusiad, a celebration of da Gama’s first voyage, were moved to newly carved tombs in the monastery’s nave, just a few feet from the tombs of Kings Manuel I and John III, who da Gama served. The monastery is classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

New Year’s Eve

Scotland: Festival of Hogmanay, New Year’s Eve

Every December 31st in Scotland, there is held an annual festival “Festival of Hogmanay”. Almost all adult males become festival participants, and they were paraded through the main streets, holding torches. As a result, balls of fire fill the Scotland air throughout the new year’s eve. This Festival is a tradition from generation to generation since the days of the Vikings gained control of Scandinavia.

An example of a local Hogmanay custom is the fireball swinging that takes place in Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, in northeast Scotland. This involves local people making up “balls” of chicken wire filled with old newspaper, sticks, rags, and other dry flammable material up to a diameter of 2 feet (0.61 m), each attached to about 3 feet (0.91 m) of wire, chain or nonflammable rope. As the Old Town House bell sounds to mark the new year, the balls are set alight and the swingers set off up the High Street from the Mercat Cross to the Cannon and back, swinging the burning balls around their heads as they go.

At the end of the ceremony, any fireballs that are still burning are cast into the harbour. Many people enjoy this display, and large crowds flock to see it, with 12,000 attending the 2007/2008 event. In recent years, additional attractions have been added to entertain the crowds as they wait for midnight, such as fire poi, a pipe band, street drumming and a firework display after the last fireball is cast into the sea. The festivities are now streamed live over the Internet.