June 24
I have a fair amount of experience with doctors, hospitals and disease but I was really taken by surprise by this next item. On the 24th in 1374, in Aachen, Germany there was the first spontaneous outbreak of St. John’s Dance. St. John’s dance caused those suffering from it to dance madly through whatever town they lived in, dancing, speaking in tongues and foaming at the mouth. This rather bizarre phenomena would continue to appear periodically well into the 17th century.
June 23
Reliable help is so darned hard to find. Explorer Henry Hudson had this point driven home with a vengeance when, on the 23rd in 1611, in the midst of his fourth voyage, Henry, his son and a handful of loyal crewmen were set adrift in an open boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
June 22
Stephen Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns is a somber little number. It had, however, a very successful introduction in the play A Little Night Music. Perhaps Sondheim should have considered writing a song more along the lines of Send in the Paramedics because on the 22nd in 1918 an unoccupied passenger train slammed into the caboose of a slow moving Circus train when the passenger train’s engineer fell asleep at the controls. This event remains the most catastrophic of any train accidents involving circuses.
June 21
The 21st is a day full of contradictions. It abounds with examples of both the depths to which humanity can sink as well as the heights it is capable of soaring to.
On the 21st in 1964, the Ku Klux Klan murdered three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner in Mississippi.
Forty years later, on the 21st in 2004, Dick Rutan’s Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne became the first privately funded space ship to reach orbital altitude. On October 4 Rutan’s team would go on to claim the $10 million Ansari X Prize.
June 20
Did you find the acquittal of O. J. Simpson troubling? Have you resigned yourself to the fact that Phil Spector will probably walk? Does it seem as if the vast majority of high profile violent crimes go unpunished? Incidents of this sort have been happening for a very long time. On the 20th in 1893 poor little orphan Lizzie Borden was acquitted after her jury deliberated less than one hour. While the prosecutor’s opening statement may have begun ‘Lizzie Borden took an axe…’ it is unclear if Lizzie’s defense counsel offered a cute little rhyming epigram as a rebuttal.
June 19
While the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in September 1862, it didn’t take effect until January 1, 1863. In our current time, when news is so readily available, it’s easy to think that everybody knows everything instantly. This was not always the case however. The news of the slaves receiving their freedom did not arrive in Galveston, Texas until the 19th in 1865.
June 18
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania has had a bad reputation and been the butt of poor jokes[i] for a very long time. While the city’s place in history is secure, what with the Liberty Bell and all that sort of stuff, it really is a rather grimy backwater today. Do you need further proof of the city’s undesirability? On the 18th in 1778, British troops, fighting the very new Americans, abandoned it, thus ceding even more territory to the rather annoying revolutionaries.
[i] Last week I went to Philadelphia but it was closed. –W. C. Fields
I have a fair amount of experience with doctors, hospitals and disease but I was really taken by surprise by this next item. On the 24th in 1374, in Aachen, Germany there was the first spontaneous outbreak of St. John’s Dance. St. John’s dance caused those suffering from it to dance madly through whatever town they lived in, dancing, speaking in tongues and foaming at the mouth. This rather bizarre phenomena would continue to appear periodically well into the 17th century.
