In late August 1814, in the middle of a
blazing hot summer, a British fleet under the command of Admiral Sir George Cockburn,
with military forces under the command of Major General Robert Ross, sailed
into the Patuxent River, disembarked and marched inland towards Washington. They inflicted the first ever defeat on an
American army in the field at the Battle of Bladensburg
on August 24th, then swanned into Washington. No-one was there to surrender the city. President James Madison was with his routed
troops. His wife, Dolley, had escaped
after supervising the evacuation of precious items from the White House,
including the Washington
portrait. Others, junior clerks in
the main, did what they could to save important state documents, including the
Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, international treaties, and the
correspondence of George Washington...".
Before they did anything, the British, hot and tired after their march
and the fight with the American army, helped themselves to the food and drink
laid out for the president and his anticipated guests in the White House dining
room. Then they set fire to the White
House, the Capitol and other government buildings – the Navy Yards had already
been fired by the retreating Americans to keep the stores out of British hands.
Private property was scrupulously
preserved, however, and the Patent Office was also saved, through the
intervention of William Thornton, the superintendent of patents, who persuaded
the British that the record of inventions contained in the building was too
valuable to be lost. Then there were the books in the Library of Congress – some 3000 of them
(as against the more than 18 million volumes now in the library's collection),
all of them painstakingly acquired with scarce, hard-won funds, mostly since
the move to the new capital; most of them, ironically, published in Great
Britain. They would, if still extant, in
the words of one scholar, be worth "an oil sheik's ransom." As far as is known only a single one of these
volumes survived the fire – and it was not returned until 1940. Read more about looting and find some titles
of the original 1814 collection of the Library of Congress at: http://www.llrx.com/features/librcongresswar1812.htm
The culture of North America changed forever in the year 1513. In April, the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de
Leon landed while searching for the fabled isle of Bimini. The exact landing spot where Ponce and his men
came ashore remains unknown, but it was apparently somewhere between the Cape
Canaveral area and the mouth of the St. Johns River. Searching for this historic site,
archeologists have conducted numerous "digs" at the Fountain of Youth,
a National Archeological Park, where a Timucuan Indian village called Seloy was
located and where the city of St. Augustine had its beginning. Ponce de Leon was on a mission of
exploration, not settlement, and his visit to northeast Florida was brief. Because he arrived during the Easter season,
known as the Pascua Florida, Ponce named his new discovery La Florida – a name
still used today. Besides naming the
land and claiming it for Spain, Ponce de Leon made a discovery that was to lead
to the creation of St. Augustine. Sailing
along the Florida coastline, Ponce de Leon realized that a strong current was
carrying his ships rapidly northward. This
would aid in quickly returning Spanish ships home and was later called the Gulf
Stream. http://www.augustine.com/history/ponce-leon.php
With the support of a grant from The Homeland Foundation, the Florence Griswold
Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut ulitizes EmbARK, an image-based software program
to organize its collections and make them readily available to the public. To date, the Museum has entered information on
over 6,000 objects in its permanent collection.
You are invited to explore and tour the Museum's extensive collections
of American art and history, including the recently acquired Hartford Steam
Boiler Collection. Visitors can search
individual or groups of collection items by using specific keywords. http://collections.flogris.org/
The Olympic motto is the hendiatris Citius,
Altius, Fortius, which is Latin for "Faster, Higher, Stronger". The motto was proposed by Pierre de Coubertin on the creation of the International Olympic Committee in
1894. De Coubertin borrowed it from his
friend Henri
Didon, a Dominican priest who, amongst other things, was an
athletics enthusiast. The motto was
introduced in 1924 at the Olympic Games in Paris. The symbol of the Olympic Games is
composed of five interlocking rings, coloured blue, yellow, black, green, and
red on a white field. This was
originally designed in 1912 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern
Olympic Games. According to de
Coubertin, the ring colours with the white background stand for those colors
that appeared on all the national flags that competed in the Olympic games at
that time. The 1914 Congress had to be
suspended because of the outbreak of World War I, but the symbol and flag were
later adopted. They would first
officially debut at the Games of the VII Olympiad in Antwerp,
Belgium in 1920. The symbol's
popularity and widespread use began during the lead-up to the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Carl Diem,
president of the Organizing Committee of the 1936 Summer Olympics, wanted to hold a
torchbearers' ceremony in the stadium at Delphi, site of the
famous oracle, where the Pythian Games were also held. For this reason he ordered construction of a
milestone with the Olympic rings carved in the sides, and that a torchbearer
should carry the flame along with an escort of three others from there to
Berlin. The ceremony was celebrated but
the stone was never removed. Later, two
British authors Lynn and Gray Poole when visiting Delphi in the late 1950s saw
the stone and reported in their "History of the Ancient Games" that
the Olympic rings design came from ancient Greece. This has become known as "Carl Diem's
Stone". This created a myth that
the symbol had an ancient Greek origin. The
current view of the International Olympic Committee
(IOC) is that the symbol "reinforces the idea" that the Olympic
Movement is international and welcomes all countries of the world to join. As can be read in the Olympic
Charter, the Olympic symbol represents the union of the five regions of the
world and the meeting of athletes from throughout the world at the Olympic
Games. However, no continent is
represented by any specific ring. The
Olympic flag was created by Pierre De Coubertin in 1914. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_symbols
The International Day of the World's Indigenous People is observed on August 9 each
year to promote and protect the rights
of the world’s indigenous population. This event also recognizes the achievements
and contributions that indigenous people make to improve world issues
such as environmental protection. It was first pronounced by the General
Assembly of the United Nations in December 1994, marking the day of the first
meeting of the UN Working Group on Indigenous
Populations of the Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human
Rights, in 1982. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Day_of_the_World%27s_Indigenous_People
August 9 events
1173 – Construction of
the campanile
of the cathedral
of Pisa (now known
as the Leaning Tower of Pisa) begins; it will take
two centuries to complete.
1854 – Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden.1892 – Thomas Edison receives a patent for a two-way telegraph.
1945 – World War II: Nagasaki is devastated when an atomic bomb, Fat Man, is dropped by the United States B-29 Bockscar. 39,000 people are killed outright.
1945 – World War II: The Soviet Union declares war on Japan and begins the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation.
1965 – Singapore is expelled from Malaysia and becomes the first and only country to date to gain independence unwillingly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_9
On August 9, 2012 Singaporeans are encouraged to show their patriotic fervor by displaying
their country's flag proudly, sharing snapshots of their favorite local foods
and dancing along to a fresh new national theme song. But
there is another, distinctly unofficial, national song in Singapore these days.
It is asking locals to try something
else on their country's big day: Make
love for Singapore. The soulful rap,
which is part of a new ad campaign to promote Mentos mints, is called
"National Night," and it exhorts Singaporeans to "do their civic
duty" to help solve the city-state's low birthrate by making a baby on
Aug. 9. "It's National Night, let's
make Singapore's birthrate spike," a female vocalist sings over jittery
synthesizers and drumbeats, as her male counterpart shouts phrases like
"that's right" and "the birthrate won't spike itself!" "Singapore's
population, it needs some increasin', so forget waving flags, August 9th we be
freaking," the rap continues. Shibani
Mahtani http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443545504577567052477900124.html?mod=ITP_AHED
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