1356 – Edward “the Black Prince” began a raid north from Aquitaine.

1815 – Napoleon Bonaparte set sail for St. Helena, in the South Atlantic. The remainder of his life was spent there in exile.

1844 – After the killing of Joseph Smith on June 27, Bringham Young was chosen to lead the Mormons.

1876 – Thomas Edison received a patent for the mimeograph. The mimeograph was a “method of preparing autographic stencils for printing.”

1899 – The refrigerator was patented by A.T. Marshall.

1900 – In Boston, the first Davis Cup series began. The U.S. team defeated Great Britain three matches to zero.

1911 – The number of representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives was established at 435. There was one member of Congress for every 211,877 residents. 

1940 – The German Luftwaffe began a series of daylight air raids on Great Britain.

1945 – The United Nations Charter was signed by U.S. President Truman. 

1945 – During World War II, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan.
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1953 – The U.S. and South Korea initiated a mutual security pact.

1956 – Japan launched an oil tanker that was 780 feet long and weighed 84,730 tons. It was the largest oil tanker in the world.

1966 – Michael DeBakey became the first surgeon to install an artificial heart pump in a patient. 

1974 – U.S. President Nixon announced that he would resign the following day. 

1978 – The U.S. launched Pioneer Venus II, which carried scientific probes to study the atmosphere of Venus.

1988 – It was announced that a cease-fire between Iraq and Iran had begun.

1989 – The space shuttle Columbia took off from Cape Canaveral, FL. The trip was said to be a secret five-day military mission.

1990 – American forces began positioning in Saudia Arabia.

1991 – John McCarthy, a British TV producer, was released by his Lebanese kidnappers. He had been held captive for more than five years. A rival group abducted Jerome Leyraud in retaliation and threatened to kill him if any more hostages were released.

1991 – The U.N. Security Council approved North and South Korea for membership.

1992 – The “Dream Team” clinched the gold medal at the Barcelona Summer Olympics. The U.S. basketball team beat Croatia 117-85.

1994 – The first road link between Israel and Jordan opened.

1994 – Representatives from China and Taiwan signed a cooperation agreement.

1995 – Saddam Hussein’s two eldest daughters, their husbands, and several senior army officers defected.

1999 – Wade Boggs (Tampa Bay Devil Rays) got his 3,000th hit of his major league baseball career.

2000 – The submarine H.L. Hunley was raised from ocean bottom after 136 years. The sub had been lost during an attack on the U.S.S. Housatonic in 1864. The Hunley was the first submarine in history to sink a warship.

Emiliano Zapata, a leader of peasants and Indigenous people during the Mexican Revolution, is born in Anenecuilco, Mexico.

Born a peasant, Zapata was forced into the Mexican army in 1908 following his attempt to recover village lands taken over by a rancher. After the revolution began in 1910, he raised an army of peasants in the southern state of Morelos under the slogan “Land and Liberty.” Demanding simple agrarian reforms, Zapata and his guerrilla farmers opposed the central Mexican government under Francisco Madero, later under Victoriano Huerta, and finally under Venustiano Carranza. Zapata and his followers never gained control of the central Mexican government, but they redistributed land and aided poor farmers within the territory under their control. On April 10, 1919, Zapata was ambushed and shot to death in Morelos by government forces.

Zapata’s influence has endured long after his death, and his agrarian reform movement, known as zapatismo, remains important to many Mexicans today. In 1994, a guerrilla group calling itself the Zapata Army of National Liberation launched a peasant uprising in the southern state of Chiapas.

Source: history.com

War Department, United States, federal executive department organized (1789) to administer the military establishment. It was reconstituted (1947) as the Dept. of the Army when the military administration was reorganized (see Defense, United States Department of ). During the American Revolution, military affairs were largely supervised

General Washington’s general orders of August 7, 1782, began: “The General ever desirous to cherish virtuous ambition in his soldiers, as well as to foster and encourage every species of Military merit, directs that whenever any singularly meritorious action is performed, the author of it shall be permitted to wear on his facings over the left breast, the figure of a heart in purple cloth

For the first time in history, recognition for meritorious service in time of war, was available to the common soldier. George Washington personally bestowed the Badge of Merit on only three non-commissioned officers, though evidence suggests that other such awards were bestowed by subordinate officers.
The Badge of Merit fell into disuse after the Revolution, though the award was never formally abolished.

In 1927, Army Chief of Staff General Charles Summerall directed that a bill be drafted and submitted to Congress, “To revive the Badge of Military Merit”. This badge of merit came to be known as the Purple Heart. General Douglas MacArthur, Summerall’s successor, began work on a new design for the medal in 1931. Elizabeth Will, heraldic specialist with the Quartermaster General’s office, created the design we see today.
A War Department circular dated February 22, 1932 authorized the award to soldiers who had been awarded the Meritorious Service Citation Certificate, Army Wound Ribbon, or were authorized to wear Wound Chevrons on or later than April 6, 1917, the day the United States entered WWI.

At that time, the Purple Heart was awarded not only for wounds received in action against enemy forces, but also for “meritorious performance of duty”.

The first Purple Heart was awarded to Douglas MacArthur himself.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9277 of December 3, 1942, discontinued the award for meritorious service, and broadened service-related injury eligibility requirements to include all armed services personnel.

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany in WWII, Military planners put their minds to the invasion of Imperial Japan. Knowing nothing of the atomic bombs which would put a quick end to the war that August, authorities ordered 500,000 purple hearts. To this day, American military forces have yet to use them all up. As of 2003, 120,000 of these Purple Heart medals, remained in inventory.
On November 22, 1944, Time Magazine reported the first Purple Heart awarded to an animal. “Chips“, a German Shepherd/Collie/Husky mix, also received the Distinguished Service Cross and Silver Star, for single “handedly” wiping out an Italian machine-gun nest, during the Allied invasion of Sicily.

Cape Cod Curmudgeon
Posted on
August 7, 2017
Categories
American History, Dogs
Tags
Purple Heart, TodayinHistory.blog

RIP to my brother walt, who gave his life to a career as a marine and honored with at least 2 purple hearts ….

The National Voting Rights Act of 1965 (42 U.S.C. § 1973–1973aa-6) outlawed discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement of African Americans in the United States.

Echoing the language of the 15th Amendment, the Act prohibited states from imposing any “voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure … to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” Specifically, Congress intended the Act to outlaw the practice of requiring otherwise qualified voters to pass literacy tests in order to register to vote, a principal means by which Southern states had prevented African-Americans from exercising the franchise. The Act was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, who had earlier signed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.