1971 : Gordo is born
Jeff Gordon, a stock-car driver known as "The Kid," was born on this day in 1971. Gordon raced onto the NASCAR scene in 1997 by winning the Winston Cup season points championship for a prestigious second time at the age of 26. "The Kid" was also the first driver to win the Southern 500, NASCAR's oldest race, three years in a row. His clean-cut California image was initially disliked by many racing fans, who tended to prefer the gritty personas of traditional stock-car drivers. However, Gordon had talent, an aggressive driving style, and a knack for publicity, which drew many new fans to the sport.
Story of the Day....
1944 : Anne Frank captured
Acting on tip from a Dutch informer, the Nazi Gestapo captures 15-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family in a sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse. The Franks had taken shelter there in 1942 out of fear of deportation to a Nazi concentration camp. They occupied the small space with another Jewish family and a single Jewish man, and were aided by Christian friends, who brought them food and supplies. Anne spent much of her time in the "secret annex" working on her diary. The diary survived the war, overlooked by the Gestapo that discovered the hiding place, but Anne and nearly all of the others perished in the Nazi death camps.
Annelies Marie Frank was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on June 12, 1929. She was the second daughter of Otto Frank and Edith Frank-HollÄnder, both of Jewish families that had lived in Germany for centuries. With the rise of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in 1933, Otto moved his family to Amsterdam to escape the escalating Nazi persecution of Jews. In Holland, he ran a successful spice and jam business. Anne attended a Montessori school with other middle-class Dutch children, but with the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 she was forced to transfer to a Jewish school. In 1942, Otto began arranging a hiding place in an annex of his warehouse on the Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam.
On her 13th birthday in 1942, Anne began a diary relating her everyday experiences, her relationship with her family and friends, and observations about the increasingly dangerous world around her. Less than a month later, Anne's older sister, Margot, received a call-up notice to report to a Nazi "work camp." Fearing deportation to a Nazi concentration camp, the Frank family took shelter in the secret annex the next day. One week later, they were joined by Otto Frank's business partner and his family. In November, a Jewish dentist--the eighth occupant of the hiding place--joined the group.
For two years, Anne kept a diary about her life in hiding that is marked with poignancy, humor, and insight. The entrance to the secret annex was hidden by a hinged bookcase, and former employees of Otto and other Dutch friends delivered them food and supplies procured at high risk. Anne and the others lived in rooms with blacked-out windows, and never flushed the toilet during the day out of fear that their presence would be detected. In June 1944, Anne's spirits were raised by the Allied landing at Normandy, and she was hopeful that the long-awaited liberation of Holland would soon begin.
On August 1, 1944, Anne made her last entry in her diary. Three days later, 25 months of seclusion ended with the arrival of the Nazi Gestapo. Anne and the others had been given away by an unknown informer, and they were arrested along with two of the Christians who had helped shelter them. They were sent to a concentration camp in Holland, and in September Anne and most of the others were shipped to the Auschwitz death camp in Poland. In the fall of 1944, with the Soviet liberation of Poland underway, Anne was moved with her sister Margot to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. Suffering under the deplorable conditions of the camp, the two sisters caught typhus and died in early March 1945. The camp was liberated by the British less than two months later.
Otto Frank was the only one of the 10 to survive the Nazi death camps. After the war, he returned to Amsterdam via Russia, and was reunited with Miep Gies, one of his former employees who had helped shelter him. She handed him Anne's diary, which she had found undisturbed after the Nazi raid. In 1947, Anne's diary was published by Otto in its original Dutch as Diary of a Young Girl. An instant best-seller and eventually translated into more than 50 languages, The Diary of Anne Frank has served as a literary testament to the nearly six million Jews, including Anne herself, who were silenced in the Holocaust.
The Frank family's hideaway at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam opened as a museum in 1960. A new English translation of Anne's diary in 1995 restored material that had been edited out of the original version, making the work nearly a third longer.
First of all, Happy Birthday Jeff Gordon!
Here are a few events out of the past that occurred on August 4th.
August 4th in History
1914: Britain declares war on Germany
1971: The US launches first satellite into lunar orbit from a manned spacecraft
1983: Italy elects first socialist prime minister since 1946
August 4th birthdays
1792: Percy Shelley, English poet
1900: Queen Elizabeth, British Queen Mother
Historical Events that happened on August 5th
Posted: Sun, 05 Aug 2007 09:03:36 -0400
1905Norway cuts diplomatic ties with Sweden
1914USA declares itself neutral as Germany declares war on the Soviet Union
1962Nelson Mandella arrested and then imprisoned
1963Nuclear Test Ban Agreement signed, allowing nuclear weapon to only be tested underground
August 5th Birthdays
Posted: Sun, 05 Aug 2007 09:03:36 -0400
1906John Huston, American film director
1930Neil Armstrong, First man on the Moon
On this day in 1962, Marilyn Monroe dies from an overdose of barbiturates. Her death was widely presumed to be suicide.
Monroe, born Norma Jean Mortensen and also known as Norma Jean Baker, had a tragic childhood. Her mother, a negative cutter at several film studios, was mentally unstable and was institutionalized when Norma Jean was five. Afterward, the little girl lived in a series of foster homes, where she suffered from neglect and abuse, and later lived in an orphanage. At 16, she quit high school and married a 21-year-old aircraft plant worker named Joe Dougherty.
In 1944, her husband was sent overseas with the military, and Monroe went to work as a paint sprayer in a defense plant. A photographer spotted her there, and she soon became a popular pin-up girl. She began working as a model and divorced her husband two years later. In 1946, 20th Century Fox signed her for $125 a week but dropped her after one film, from which her scenes were cut. Columbia signed her but also dropped her after one film. Unemployed, she posed nude for a calendar for $50; the calendar sold a million copies and made $750,000.
Monroe played a series of small film roles until 1950, when Fox signed her again. This time, they touted her as a star and began giving her leading roles in 1952 with films like Don't Bother to Knock and Monkey Business. Her star continued to rise during the next few years with hits like Gentleman Prefer Blondes (1953) and Some Like It Hot (1959). Her tremendous sex appeal and little-girl mannerisms made her enormously popular. In 1954, she married baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, but they divorced only nine months later.
After the divorce, Monroe searched for more serious roles and announced she would found her own studio. She began studying acting with the famous Lee Strasberg at the Actor's Studio in New York. She gave an impressive comic performance in Bus Stop in 1955. The following year, she married intellectual playwright Arthur Miller. Miller wrote a screenplay for her, The Misfits (1961), which was her last picture. She divorced him a week before the film opened. She attempted one more film, Something's Got to Give, but was fired for her frequent illnesses and absences from the set, which many believed to be related to drug addiction. In August 1962, she died of an overdose of sleeping pills at the age of 36. Since her death, her popularity and mystique have lingered, with numerous biographies published after her death. Her ex-husband Joe DiMaggio continued to send flowers to her grave every day for the rest of his life.
He might of freed the slave, but that bastard started the income tax!
1861 : Lincoln imposes first federal income tax
On this day in 1861, Lincoln imposes the first federal income tax by signing the Revenue Act. Strapped for cash with which to pursue the Civil War, Lincoln and Congress agreed to impose a 3 percent tax on annual incomes over $800.
As early as March 1861, Lincoln had begun to take stock of the federal government’s ability to wage war against the South. He sent letters to cabinet members Edward Bates, Gideon Welles and Salmon Chase requesting their opinions as to whether or not the president had the constitutional authority to "collect [such] duties." According to documents housed and interpreted by the Library of Congress, Lincoln was particularly concerned about maintaining federal authority over collecting revenue from ports along the southeastern seaboard, which he worried, might fall under the control of the Confederacy.
The Revenue Act’s language was broadly written to define income as gain "derived from any kind of property, or from any professional trade, employment, or vocation carried on in the United States or elsewhere or from any source whatever." According to the U.S. Treasury Department, the comparable minimum taxable income in 2003, after adjustments for inflation, would have been approximately $16,000.
Congress repealed Lincoln’s tax law in 1871, but in 1909 passed the 16th Amendment, which set in place the federal income-tax system used today. Congress ratified the 16th Amendment in 1913.
This Day in NASCAR History
By Bill Marx, The Sporting News,August 5
1979: Teenager Kyle Petty makes his Cup debut in the Talladega 500 and finishes ninth. Darrell Waltrip gets the win and Kyle’s dad, Richard Petty, finishes fourth. The Talladega 500 is one of five starts in 1979 for the 19-year-old. Kyle goes full time in 1981.
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This Day in NASCAR History
By Bill Marx, The Sporting News,August 6
1994: Jeff Gordon wins the first NASCAR race run at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, taking the Brickyard 400 by 0.53 seconds over Brett Bodine. More history in this race: Brothers Brett, Geoffrey and Todd Bodine all lead at least one lap, the first time in the Modern Era three brothers lead at least one lap in the same race.
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The United States becomes the first and only nation to use atomic weaponry during wartime when it drops an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Though the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan marked the end of World War II, many historians argue that it also ignited the Cold War.
Since 1940, the United States had been working on developing an atomic weapon, after having been warned by Albert Einstein that Nazi Germany was already conducting research into nuclear weapons. By the time the United States conducted the first successful test (an atomic bomb was exploded in the desert in New Mexico in July 1945), Germany had already been defeated. The war against Japan in the Pacific, however, continued to rage. President Harry S. Truman, warned by some of his advisers that any attempt to invade Japan would result in horrific American casualties, ordered that the new weapon be used to bring the war to a speedy end. On August 6, 1945, the American bomber Enola Gay dropped a five-ton bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. A blast equivalent to the power of 15,000 tons of TNT reduced four square miles of the city to ruins and immediately killed 80,000 people. Tens of thousands more died in the following weeks from wounds and radiation poisoning. Three days later, another bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, killing nearly 40,000 more people. A few days later, Japan announced its surrender.
In the years since the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, a number of historians have suggested that the weapons had a two-pronged objective. First, of course, was to bring the war with Japan to a speedy end and spare American lives. It has been suggested that the second objective was to demonstrate the new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviet Union. By August 1945, relations between the Soviet Union and the United States had deteriorated badly. The Potsdam Conference between U.S. President Harry S. Truman, Russian leader Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill (before being replaced by Clement Attlee) ended just four days before the bombing of Hiroshima. The meeting was marked by recriminations and suspicion between the Americans and Soviets. Russian armies were occupying most of Eastern Europe. Truman and many of his advisers hoped that the U.S. atomic monopoly might offer diplomatic leverage with the Soviets. In this fashion, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan can be seen as the first shot of the Cold War. If U.S. officials truly believed that they could use their atomic monopoly for diplomatic advantage, they had little time to put their plan into action. By 1949, the Soviets had developed their own atomic bomb and the nuclear arms race began.
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