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History… February 28


1827 – The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad became the first railroad incorporated for commercial transportation of people and freight.

1844 – Several people were killed aboard the USS Princeton when a 12-inch gun exploded.

1849 – Regular steamboat service to California via Cape Horn arrived in San Francisco for the first time. The SS California had left New York Harbor on October 6, 1848. The trip took 4 months and 21 days.

1854 – The Republican Party was organized in Ripon, WI. About 50 slavery opponents began the new political group.

1861 – The U.S. territory of Colorado was organized.

1881 – Thomas Edison hired Samuel Insull as his private secretary.

1883 – The first vaudeville theater opened.

1885 – AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) was incorporated. The company was capitalized on only $100,000 and provided long distance service for American Bell.

1893 – Edward G. Acheson showed his patent for Carborundum.

1900 – In South Africa, British troops relieved Ladysmith, which had been under siege since November 2, 1899.

1911 – Thomas A. Edison, Inc. was organized.

1940 – The first televised basketball game was shown. The game featured Fordham University and the University of Pittsburgh from Madison Square Gardens in New York.

1948 – Bud Gartiser set a world record when he cleared the 50-yard low hurdles in 6.8 seconds.

1951 – A Senate committee issued a report that stated that there were at least two major crime syndicates in the U.S.

1953 – In a Cambridge University laboratory, scientists James D. Watson and Francis H.C. Crick discovered the double-helix structure of DNA.

1954 – In San Francisco “Birth of a Planet” was aired. It was the first American phase-contrast cinemicrography film to be presented on television.

1956 – A patent was issued to Forrester for a computer memory core.

1962 – The John Glenn for President club was formed by a group of Las Vegas republicans.

1974 – The U.S. and Egypt re-established diplomatic relations after a break of seven years.

1979 – Mr. Ed, the talking horse from the TV show “Mr. Ed”, died.

1983 – “M*A*S*H” became the most watched television program in history when the final episode aired.

1986 – Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated in Stockholm.

1993 – U.S. Federal agents raided the compound of an armed religious cult in Waco, TX. The ATF had planned to arrest the leader of the Branch Davidians, David Koresh, on federal firearms charges. Four agents and six Davidians were killed and a 51-day standoff followed.

1994 – NATO made its first military strike when U.S. F-16 fighters shot down four Bosnian Serb warplanes in violation of a no-fly zone over central Bosnia.

1995 – The Denver International Airport opened after a 16-month delay.

1998 – Serbian police began a campaign to wipe out “terrorist gangs” in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo.

2001 – The Northwest region of the U.S., including the state of Washington, was hit by an earthquake that measured 6.9 on the Richter Scale. There were no deaths reported.

2002 – In Ahmadabad, India, Hindus set fire to homes in a Muslim neighborhood. At least 55 people were killed in the attack.

2002 – Sotheby’s auction house announced that it had identified Peter Paul Reubens as the creator of the painting “The Massacre of the Innocents.” The painting was previously thought to be by Jan van den Hoecke.

2002 – It was announced that John Madden would be replacing Dennis Miller on “Monday Night Football.” Madden signed a four-year $20 million deal with ABC Sports.

2007 – NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made a gravitational slingshot against Jupiter to change the planned trajectory towards Pluto.

2013 – Benedict XVI resigned as pope. He was the first pope to resign since Gregory XII in 1415 and the first to resign voluntarily since Celestine V in 1294.

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Black History, ~ politics petitions pollution and pop culture

James Baldwin


James Baldwin, in full James Arthur Baldwin, (born August 2, 1924, New York, New York—died December 1, 1987, Saint-Paul, France), American essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him an important voice, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the United States and, later, through much of western Europe.

The eldest of nine children, he grew up in poverty in the Black ghetto of Harlem in New York City. From age 14 to 16 he was active during out-of-school hours as a preacher in a small revivalist church, a period he wrote about in his semi-autobiographical first and finest novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), and in his play about a woman evangelist, The Amen Corner (performed in New York City, 1965).

After graduation from high school, he began a restless period of ill-paid jobs, self-study, and literary apprenticeship in Greenwich Village, the Bohemian quarter of New York City. He left in 1948 for Paris, where he lived for the next eight years. (In later years, from 1969, he became a self-styled “transatlantic commuter,” living alternatively in the south of France and in New York and New England.) His second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), deals with the white world and concerns an American in Paris torn between his love for a man and his love for a woman. Between the two novels came a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955).

In 1957 he returned to the United States and became an active participant in the civil rights struggle that swept the nation. His book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961), explores Black-white relations in the United States. This theme also was central to his novel Another Country (1962), which examines sexual as well as racial issues.

The New Yorker magazine gave over almost all of its November 17, 1962, issue to a long article by Baldwin on the Black Muslim separatist movement and other aspects of the civil rights struggle. The article became a best seller in book form as The Fire Next Time (1963). His bitter play about racist oppression, Blues for Mister Charlie (“Mister Charlie” being a Black term for a white man), played on Broadway to mixed reviews in 1964.

Though Baldwin continued to write until his death—publishing works including Going to Meet the Man (1965), a collection of short stories; the novels Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979); and The Price of the Ticket (1985), a collection of autobiographical writings—none of his later works achieved the popular and critical success of his early work.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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