All posts in History

Galusha Pen­ny­packer¹ came from a long line of mil­i­tary men. His father had fought in the Mexican-American War and his grand­fa­ther in the Rev­o­lu­tion. At the out­break of the Civil War, Galusha was sched­uled to attend West Point. Instead he enlisted as a quar­ter­mas­ter in the 9th Penn­syl­va­nia Infantry Reg­i­ment. It was 1861.

He refused an appoint­ment of first lieu­tenant in his com­pany on account of his age (he was 16 at the time) and instead was made a non-commissioned staff-officer. Upon entry of his unit into the war he was pro­moted to cap­tain of Com­pany A, 97th Penn­syl­va­nia Vol­un­teers on August 22, 1861. Roughly a month later he was pro­moted again, this time to major.

He remained with the 97th for many years, where he was well respected and liked by his men. By the time 1864 rolled around, and after see­ing much action and com­bat, he had been pro­moted to colonel.

Pennypacker’s great­est moment of the war came at the sec­ond bat­tle of Fort Fisher² on Jan­u­ary 15, 1865, where he was severely wounded while cross­ing enemy lines. Because of his brav­ery in lead­ing his men and his wound­ing in the bat­tle he was awarded Con­gres­sional Medal of Honor with a cita­tion reading -

“He gal­lantly led the charge over a tra­verse and planted the col­ors of one of his reg­i­ments thereon; was severely wounded.”

After the bat­tle Pen­ny­packer was given a brevet³ pro­mo­tion to Brigadier Gen­eral on Jan­u­ary 15, 1865. After con­va­lesc­ing, he received a full pro­mo­tion to brigadier gen­eral at age 20, mak­ing him the youngest offi­cer to hold the rank of gen­eral in the United States Army to this day. He was brevet­ted, once again, to major gen­eral on March 13, 1865. He was not yet 21 years old.

1. I got most of the info for this piece from All Biogra­phies and the remain­ing info from Wikipedia. [↩]
2. Fort Fisher was a Con­fed­er­ate fort dur­ing the Amer­i­can Civil War. It pro­tected the vital trad­ing routes of the port at Wilm­ing­ton, North Car­olina, from 1861 until its cap­ture by the Union in 1865. The fort was located on one of Cape Fear River’s two out­lets to the Atlantic Ocean on what is today known as Plea­sure Island. [↩]
3. A brevet pro­mo­tion is a tem­po­rary autho­riza­tion for a per­son to hold a higher rank. It hap­pened fre­quently in the Civil War. [↩]

So we were sit­ting around our apart­ment in Waco, TX., circa 1993. Tay­lor was read­ing by the win­dow, I was work­ing on my Mac Clas­sic at the table, Joel was watch­ing tele­vi­sion, Alan was gone. A cat was meow­ing loudly out­side, very loudly, we could all hear it. That went on for a few min­utes until Tay­lor got fed up and got up to scare the cat away. He opened the back door of the apart­ment and freaked the cat out. The cat darted away from our door and out into the street where it was imme­di­ately squished by a truck.

The truck dri­ver stopped. “Was that your cat?”

Tay­lor replied, “No.”

The dri­ver nod­ded and started dri­ving again, leav­ing the squished cat in the street. We all went out­side to look at the flat cat and then called our friends to tell them what just hap­pened. Patrick, Josh and Willie were amazed by the story and how quickly it all happened.

Later I went with Patrick’s girl­friend Kim to find the Branch David­ian com­pound. The com­pound was out­side of town, not in Waco as so many news­cast­ers said. It was get­ting dark and you could see the spot­lights that the FBI was using from miles away. We started dri­ving, just fol­low­ing the lights. We never found exactly how to get to the com­pound, as the ranch was on sev­eral back coun­try roads, but we had fun just dri­ving around and look­ing for it.

Kim dropped me off at our apart­ment, and as I stepped up to the front door I noticed some­thing in the door­way. There, with string tied around its two front paws and taped up to the inside of the door­way so it stood up, was the dead cat. It’s squished lit­tle body no longer bleed­ing, there was a scrawled sign read­ing “YOU KILLED ME” in red ink made up to look like blood.

I stepped over the cat and went inside, find­ing Joel and Tay­lor. I showed them the cat and we knew imme­di­ately who’d done this — Patrick, Josh and Willie.

Joel and Tay­lor car­ried the cat out to the garbage, then we called Patrick, Josh and Willie. They feigned inno­cence of the whole mat­ter at first, but after hardly any inter­ro­ga­tion they fessed up and said that they had done it. They’d thought it would be funny for us to leave our apart­ment the next morn­ing on our ways to class and see the tiny crushed cat sit­ting there in our path.

It was about at that moment that we heard some bang­ing around out at the garbage. We opened the door, while still on the phone, and peeked out at the garbage. There, dump­ing bot­tles and cans into the garbage, were 3 men in a truck. They con­tin­ued to dump their trash until some­one sneezed or some­thing and they heard us. The 3 of them jumped into the truck and took off, very quickly. It was kind of strange, we thought.

And then we remem­bered the cat. We walked out to the garbage and, yes, the cat was gone. They’d taken a squished dead cat.

Prob­a­bly going to use it in some satanic rit­ual or some­thing, but the sickos had taken the dead cat.

In all mat­ters con­sti­tu­tional, the Supreme Court rules on the laws of the land. As of now, Chief Jus­tice John Roberts pre­sides over a court con­sist­ing of him­self, John Paul Stevens, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Gins­burg, Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito. It was under John Jay¹ that the first sub­stan­tial case was decided by the Court.

In 1792, Alexan­der Chisholm of South Car­olina, the execu­tor of the estate of Robert Far­quhar, attempted to sue the state of Geor­gia in the Supreme Court over pay­ments due them for goods that Far­quhar had sup­plied Geor­gia dur­ing the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War. In 1793, U.S. Attor­ney Gen­eral Edmund Ran­dolph argued the case for the plain­tiff before the Court in “Chisholm v. Geor­gia”. Geor­gia refused to appear, claim­ing that as a “sov­er­eign,” a state did not have to appear in court to hear a suit against it to which it did not consent.

The Court, in a 4–1 deci­sion, found in favor of the plain­tiff, with Chief Jus­tice Jay con­cur­ring with Jus­tices Blair, Wil­son, and Cush­ing², with Jus­tice James Iredell dis­sent­ing.³ The Court argued that Arti­cle 3, Sec­tion 2 of the Con­sti­tu­tion abro­gated the States’ sov­er­eign immu­nity and granted fed­eral courts the affir­ma­tive power to hear dis­putes between pri­vate cit­i­zens and States.

In 1795, largely as a result of the Chisolm deci­sion, the Eleventh Amend­ment was rat­i­fied, which removed fed­eral juris­dic­tion in cases where cit­i­zens of one state or for­eign coun­tries attempt to sue another state. How­ever, cit­i­zens of one state or for­eign coun­tries can still use the Fed­eral courts if the state con­sents to be sued or if Con­gress, pur­suant to a valid exer­cise of Four­teenth Amend­ment reme­dial pow­ers, abro­gates the states’ immu­nity from suit.⁴

1. Jay was nom­i­nated in 1789 by Pres­i­dent George Wash­ing­ton as the first Chief Jus­tice of the United States. He presided over the court until 1795 and was instru­men­tal in estab­lish­ing the inter­nal pro­ce­dures of the Supreme Court and set­ting legal prece­dents. [↩]
2. That would be John Blair, James Wil­son and William Cush­ing. [↩]
3. The Court has fluc­tu­ated in mem­ber­ship size over the course of the his­tory of the United States. The Judi­ciary Act of 1789 set the size orig­i­nally at 6, but it was as high as 10 in 1863. With the Cir­cuit Judges Act of 1869, the num­ber of Jus­tices was again set at nine (the Chief Jus­tice and eight Asso­ciate Jus­tices), where it has remained ever since. [↩]
4. The facts for this piece come from Ask Yahoo! and Oyez! The U.S. Supreme Court Media site. [↩]

Processed cheese, Amer­i­can cheese, what­ever you call it, is the dol­lar store of cheeses. Sure, it tastes good on a grilled cheese or on top of a burger, but it’s the chicken nugget of cheese.

Processed cheese, accord­ing to the FDA, is a “food prod­uct” made from reg­u­lar cheese and some­times other unfer­mented dairy ingre­di­ents, plus emul­si­fiers, extra salt, and food col­or­ings. It was devel­oped as a way of staving off the usual per­isha­bil­ity that all foods have. Processed cheese has the capa­bil­ity to last almost indefinitely.

Wal­ter Ger­ber was the first per­son to invent processed cheese in 1911 in Thun, Switzer­land, but James L. Kraft (of Kraft Foods), see­ing that the cheese hadn’t been patented, applied for an Amer­i­can patent in 1916. In 1917 he sup­plied to the US Armed forces the first batch of Kraft canned cheese for sol­diers fight­ing in Europe dur­ing World War I. In addi­tion, the Kraft Com­pany also devel­oped a process for pro­duc­ing sliced processed cheese and a machine that indi­vid­u­ally wrapped slices of cheese.¹

1. The info for this post came from Kraft’s web­site and from Wikipedia [↩]