Archive for January, 2007

You know sev­eral mem­bers of the First Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress from school — John Adams, John Jay, Patrick Henry, and George Wash­ing­ton. If you drink beer, you know another mem­ber — Samuel Adams. But there were more, 50 more.

The idea of a meet­ing such as this was floated a year ear­lier by Renais­sance man Ben­jamin Franklin, but it took the clos­ing of Boston Har­bor by the British and the fol­low­ing Boston Tea Party¹ to get the ball really rolling. The First Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress met in Philadelphia’s Car­pen­ters Hall on Sep­tem­ber 5, 1774. Of the 12 colonies, only 12 sent del­e­gates, as Geor­gia was beset by prob­lems with Indi­ans and needed help from the British mil­i­tary to put down the problems.

So…you know those few men that you had to know for school, but what about the other ones? Here they are from the First Con­ti­nen­tal Congress -

From the Province of New Hamp­shire
Nathaniel Folsom

From the Province of Mass­a­chu­setts Bay
John Adams
Samuel Adams
Thomas Cush­ing
Robert Treat Paine

From the Colony of Rhode Island and Prov­i­dence Plan­ta­tions
Stephen Hop­kins
Samuel Ward

From the Con­necti­cut Colony
Silas Deane
Eliphalet Dyer
Roger Sherman

From the Province of New York
John Alsop
James Duane
John Jay
Philip Liv­ingston
Isaac Low
County of Kings
Simon Boerum
County of Orange
John Har­ing
Henry Wis­ner
County of Suf­folk
William Floyd

From the Province of New Jer­sey
Stephen Crane
John De Hart
James Kin­sey
William Liv­ingston
Richard Smith

From the Province of Penn­syl­va­nia
Edward Bid­dle
John Dick­in­son
Joseph Gal­loway
Charles Humphreys
Thomas Mif­flin
John Mor­ton
Samuel Rhoads
George Ross

From New Cas­tle, Kent, and Sus­sex, on Delaware
Thomas McK­ean
George Read
Cae­sar Rodney

From Mary­land
Samuel Chase
Robert Golds­bor­ough
Thomas John­son
William Paca
Matthew Tilghman

From the Colony and Domin­ion of Vir­ginia
Richard Bland
Ben­jamin Har­ri­son V
Patrick Henry
Richard Henry Lee
Edmund Pendle­ton
Pey­ton Ran­dolph
George Washington

From the Province of North Car­olina
Richard Caswell
Joseph Hewes
William Hooper

From the Province of South Car­olina
Christo­pher Gads­den
Thomas Lynch, Jr.
Henry Mid­dle­ton
Edward Rut­ledge
John Rutledge

Pos­si­bly next — the mem­bers of the Sec­ond Con­ti­nen­tal Con­gress.²

1. To protest the The Stamp Act of 1765 and the Town­shend Acts of 1767, a secret group call­ing them­selves the Sons of Lib­erty, orga­nized by future Con­gress mem­ber Samuel Adams, qui­etly boarded 3 ships (The Dart­mouth, the Elenor and the Beaver) on Decem­ber 16, 1773 and threw most of the con­tents of each ship into the har­bor. It totaled around £10,000 worth of mer­chan­dise. [↩]
2. The list of these men can pretty much be found any­where, but for lit­tle tid­bits about this piece I got a few facts from U-S-History.com. [↩]

“The Gold­bergs” was a live radio pro­gram that was even­tu­ally trans­lated for tele­vi­sion and became the first sit­com broad­cast on Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion in 1949.

It fol­lowed the lives of the Molly and Jake Gold­berg and their fam­ily as they made their way through their every­day lives in Brooky­lyn, NY. Gertrude Berg, the writer-producer behind the show, por­trayed Molly and Philip Loeb por­trayed her hus­band Jake. Also on the show were Roslyn Sil­ber and Alfred Ryder Molly and Jake’s chil­dren Ros­alie and Sammy.

Dur­ing the first sea­son on CBS, the show was the third most pop­u­lar pro­gram on the air. It was such a pop­u­lar show that per­form­ers from other fields desired to be on the show, like Jan Peerce of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera.

It went on to be the 3rd high­est rated show for CBS dur­ing that time. It even­tu­ally went from CBS to NBC to a now none-existent net­work known as the Dumont net­work where it ended its run in 1955.¹

1. Parts of this piece came from infor­ma­tion from the Inter­net Movie Data­base, Wikipedia and the always enter­tain­ing TV Party site. [↩]

They’ve tried, and failed, to run for the high­est office in the land. I’m not talk­ing about the Lib­er­tar­ian Party, even though that descrip­tion fits them, too. I’m talk­ing about the ladies.

Many women have made a run for the pres­i­dency. Who were they?

Vic­to­ria Wood­hull, 1872: The first woman to run for pres­i­dent, Wood­hull was an Equal Rights Party can­di­date. Ulysses S. Grant won the 1872 elec­tion as a Republican.

Belva Ann Lock­wood, 1884 and 1888: Lock­wood, who also ran on the Equal Rights Party ticket, even­tu­ally became the first woman lawyer to prac­tice before the Supreme Court. In 1884, Demo­c­rat Grover Cleve­land was elected pres­i­dent; in 1888, Cleve­land lost to Repub­li­can Ben­jamin Harrison.

Mar­garet Chase Smith, 1964: Smith, a Maine Repub­li­can, was the first woman to run on a major party ticket, enter­ing pri­maries in New Hamp­shire, Illi­nois, Mass­a­chu­setts, Texas and Ore­gon, among oth­ers. She with­drew after the first round of vot­ing at the Repub­li­can National Con­ven­tion. Sen. Barry Gold­wa­ter won the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion and lost in a land­slide to the incum­bent, Lyn­don B. Johnson.

Shirley Chisholm, 1972: The first black woman to run for pres­i­dent, Chisholm ran as a Demo­c­rat and received more than 150 votes at the Demo­c­ra­tic National Con­ven­tion. She was also the first black woman to serve in Con­gress; New York sent her to the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives in 1968. George McGov­ern won the Demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­na­tion that year and lost to the incum­bent, Richard M. Nixon.

Patsy Mink, 1972: A con­gress­woman from Hawaii, Mink ran in the Ore­gon Demo­c­ra­tic pri­mary as an anti-war candidate.

Pat Schroeder, 1988: Schroeder’s headline-grabbing cam­paign never got off the ground after the Demo­c­ra­tic con­gress­woman from Col­orado could not raise enough money. The party’s nom­i­na­tion went to Michael Dukakis and the elec­tion to Repub­li­can George H.W. Bush. Schroeder was first elected to the House in 1972, where she served for 24 years.

Eliz­a­beth Dole, 2000: Dole announced her pres­i­den­tial bid in Jan­u­ary 1999 and dropped out of the race nine months later. Repub­li­cans even­tu­ally nom­i­nated George W. Bush, who defeated Demo­c­rat Al Gore for the pres­i­dency. Dole’s hus­band, for­mer Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., was the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­nee in 1996, when he lost to Bill Clin­ton. Mrs. Dole is now North Carolina’s senior sen­a­tor, elected in 2002.

And last, but cer­tainly not least–

Carol Mose­ley Braun, 2004: The first black woman to serve in the Sen­ate, Braun was one of 10 can­di­dates to seek the Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion in the last pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. Pri­mary vot­ers even­tu­ally tapped Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., as the nom­i­nee. He lost to George W. Bush.¹

1. This list, nat­u­rally, came from that invalu­able fount of knowl­edge, Wikipedia. [↩]

The first Eng­lish casu­al­ties to be suf­fered in an air raid didn’t come from Messer­schmitts or any of Hitler’s Vengeance weapons dur­ing World War II, but from Ger­man blimps, or zep­pelins, in 1915.

The tiny town of Great Yarmouth was bom­barded by a 3 zep­pelins of the Ger­man Navy near the begin­ning of World War I. The zep­pelins, des­ig­nated as L3, L4, and L6, left the north­ern Ger­man coast on the morn­ing of Jan­u­ary 19, 1915 for, what was cryp­ti­cally called “a dis­tant mis­sion to the west”. If it can be believed, these mis­sions were not to include bomb­ing Lon­don, as Kaiser Wil­helm had decreed -

“Tar­gets not to be attacked in Lon­don but rather docks and mil­i­tary estab­lish­ments in the Lower Thames and on the Eng­lish coast.”

The first mis­sion was to encom­pass bomb­ings in the areas of the Thames estu­ary, the mouths of the Hum­ber and Tyne, and the East Anglian ports of Har­wich, Low­est­oft and Yarmouth.

Fre­gat­tenkap­i­tan Peter Strasser, the leader of the mis­sion, lifted off from the Ger­man coast aboard his zep­pelin, the L6, at 9:30 that morn­ing, but his par­tic­i­pa­tion in the raid was to be short-lived, as his zep­pelin devel­oped engine trou­ble off the Dutch coast and was forced to return to Ger­many. Despite the loss of their cap­tain, the remain­ing 2 zep­pelins, com­manded by Kap­i­tan­leut­nant Hans Fritz on L3, and L4, skip­pered by Kap­i­tan­leut­nant Mag­nus von Platen-Hallermund, floated on to England.

Prob­lems began to arise for the remain­ing 2 zep­pelins were blown off course and they made sep­a­rate land­falls over the coast of Nor­folk. With­out radio con­tact between the 2 zep­pelins and with the weather being bad, nei­ther knew where the other was. Locals, on the other hand, began report­ing sight­ings of var­i­ous air­craft to authorities.

Finally, at 8:20 pm, L3 sighted Yarmouth and began its bomb­ing run over the town, trav­el­ing from north to south. Dur­ing the next 10 min­utes L3 is thought to have dropped eight bombs, three of which failed to det­o­nate, and two incen­di­ary devices, caus­ing an esti­mated dam­age and killing or wound­ing a hand­ful of inno­cent bystanders.

Because of the bewil­der­ment of the locals on the ground, the zep­pelins encoun­tered almost no resis­tance, with reports of only one sen­try fir­ing on L3 as it flew overhead.

As for the bomb­ing raids, they achieved lit­tle in mil­i­tary terms. The dam­age was almost all done to pri­vate prop­erty, but psy­cho­log­i­cally the dam­age was huge. No longer were the British Isles immune to attack, with their pow­er­ful navy. Now the enemy could bypass that obsta­cle entirely by just fly­ing over it. This attack, while small, was pri­mar­ily a trial run for larger attacks that would come later on Lon­don, which began on May 31 of that same year. Sev­eral hun­dred peo­ple were killed in sub­se­quent raids that even­tu­ally declined as the British devel­oped incen­di­ary ammu­ni­tion which helped to bring down the zep­pelins and once again regain con­trol of Eng­lish air­space.¹

1. Almost all of the infor­ma­tion for this piece came from an excel­lent write-up on Nor­folk Roots 24. Other details came from The World­wide School site. [↩]