Post by farmgal on Sept 14, 2012 22:48:39 GMT -5
September 16th is the 260th day of this leap year in the Gregorian calendar.
There are 106 days remaining until the end of the year.
Days until Election Day, Tuesday November 6, 2012: 51
Countdown until Obama leaves Office www.obamaclock.org/
U.S. Debt Clock: www.usdebtclock.org/
681 The Third Council of Constantinople adjourned, having settled the Monothelite controversy in the Eastern Church. Monothelites, who believed Christ had only “one will,” were condemned as heretics by the council, which proclaimed the orthodox belief of two wills in Christ: divine and human.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Council_of_Constantinople
Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor by William Halsall (1882)
1620 - Mayflower departs England. The Mayflower sails from Plymouth, England, bound for the New World with 102 passengers. The ship was headed for Virginia, where the colonists--half religious dissenters and half entrepreneurs--had been authorized to settle by the British crown. However, stormy weather and navigational errors forced the Mayflower off course, and on November 21 the "Pilgrims" reached Massachusetts, where they founded the first permanent European settlement in New England in late December.
Thirty-five of the Pilgrims were members of the radical English Separatist Church, who traveled to America to escape the jurisdiction of the Church of England, which they found corrupt. Ten years earlier, English persecution had led a group of Separatists to flee to Holland in search of religious freedom. However, many were dissatisfied with economic opportunities in the Netherlands, and under the direction of William Bradford they decided to immigrate to Virginia, where an English colony had been founded at Jamestown in 1607.
The Separatists won financial backing from a group of investors called the London Adventurers, who were promised a sizable share of the colony's profits. Three dozen church members made their way back to England, where they were joined by about 70 entrepreneurs--enlisted by the London stock company to ensure the success of the enterprise. In August 1620, the Mayflower left Southampton with a smaller vessel--the Speedwell--but the latter proved unseaworthy and twice was forced to return to port. On September 16, the Mayflower left for America alone from Plymouth.
In a difficult Atlantic crossing, the 90-foot Mayflower encountered rough seas and storms and was blown more than 500 miles off course. Along the way, the settlers formulated and signed the Mayflower Compact, an agreement that bound the signatories into a "civil body politic." Because it established constitutional law and the rule of the majority, the compact is regarded as an important precursor to American democracy. After a 66-day voyage, the ship landed on November 21 on the tip of Cape Cod at what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts.
After coming to anchor in Provincetown harbor, a party of armed men under the command of Captain Myles Standish was sent out to explore the area and find a location suitable for settlement. While they were gone, Susanna White gave birth to a son, Peregrine, aboard the Mayflower. He was the first English child born in New England. In mid-December, the explorers went ashore at a location across Cape Cod Bay where they found cleared fields and plentiful running water and named the site Plymouth.
The expedition returned to Provincetown, and on December 21 the Mayflower came to anchor in Plymouth harbor. Just after Christmas, the pilgrims began work on dwellings that would shelter them through their difficult first winter in America.
In the first year of settlement, half the colonists died of disease. In 1621, the health and economic condition of the colonists improved, and that autumn Governor William Bradford invited neighboring Indians to Plymouth to celebrate the bounty of that year's harvest season. Plymouth soon secured treaties with most local Indian tribes, and the economy steadily grew, and more colonists were attracted to the settlement. By the mid 1640s, Plymouth's population numbered 3,000 people, but by then the settlement had been overshadowed by the larger Massachusetts Bay Colony to the north, settled by Puritans in 1629.
The term "Pilgrim" was not used to describe the Plymouth colonists until the early 19th century and was derived from a manuscript in which Governor Bradford spoke of the "saints" who left Holland as "pilgrimes." The orator Daniel Webster spoke of "Pilgrim Fathers" at a bicentennial celebration of Plymouth's founding in 1820, and thereafter the term entered common usage.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayflower
1662 John Flamsteed sees solar eclipse.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Flamsteed
The Battle of Harlem Heights, September 16, 1776
1776 - Battle of Harlem Heights restores American confidence. On this day in 1776, General George Washington arrives at Harlem Heights, on the northern end of Manhattan, and takes command of a group of retreating Continental troops. The day before, 4,000 British soldiers had landed at Kip’s Bay in Manhattan (near present-day 34th Street) and taken control of the island, driving the Continentals north, where they appeared to be in disarray prior to Washington’s arrival.
In the early morning hours of September 16, 1776, General Washington ordered the Continentals to hold their line at Harlem Heights while he sent Captain Thomas Knowlton and a volunteer group of Rangers to scout British movements and possibly lure the British into combat. While Captain Knowlton and the Rangers engaged the British in a frontal assault, Washington sent a second force of Patriots to attack the British from their right flank. During the short but intense fighting that ensued, the Americans were able to force a small British retreat from their northern positions.
Despite the American failure to stop the British invasion of New York City the previous day at Kip’s Bay, the successful Battle of Harlem Heights restored public confidence in the American troops and lifted the spirits of the Continental Army. The Americans and British each lost approximately 70 troops in the fighting. One of the Americans lost was the Ranger leader, Captain Thomas Knowlton.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Harlem_Heights
1779 American Revolutionary War: The Franco-American Siege of Savannah begins.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Savannah
1810 Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla begins Mexican revolt against Spain (National Day)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Hidalgo_y_Costilla
1835 - British naturalist Charles Darwin aboard the ship HMS Beagle,arrived at the Galapagos archipelago, a cluster of islands on the equator 600 miles west of South America. During his five weeks studying the fauna in the Galapagos, Darwin found the giant tortoises there greatly differed from one another according to which island they came from. Moreover, many islands developed their own races of iguanas. These observations contributed to his theory of "natural selection," that species evolved over thousands of millions of years.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin
1840 Scottish pastor Robert Murray McCheyne wrote in a letter: 'Grace fills us with very different feelings from the possession of anything else. If you have tasted the grace of the Gospel, the irresistible longing of your hearts will be, "Oh, that all the world might taste its regenerating waters."'
1863 Robert College of Istanbul-Turkey, the first American educational institution outside the United States, is founded by Christopher Robert, an American philanthropist.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_College
1878 The first African American parochial school was opened in Little Rock, Arkansas, as part of the Synodical Conference mission effort.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synodical_Conference
1880 The Cornell Daily Sun prints its first issue in Ithaca, New York. The Sun is the nation's oldest, continuously-independent college daily in the United States.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cornell_Daily_Sun
1881 - Iowa's earliest measurable snow of record fell over western sections of the state. Four to six inches was reported between Stuart and Avoca. (The Weather Channel)
1884 - Cocaine was first used as a local anaesthetic to immobilize a patient's eye for eye surgery by Carl Koller. His success initiated the modern era of local anesthesia, with cocaine also quickly adopted for nose and throat surgery and for dentistry. For Koller, a Czech-born American ophthalmologist, the clue for this use was when he noticed that cocaine had a numbing effect on the tongue. He made many experiments on animals before introducing its use on humans. Cocaine was isolated in 1859 and was synthesized in 1885. It was later found with high doses or repeated use, it caused erosion of the corneal epithelium in high doses and it was replaced by less toxic, synthetic local anesthetics such as tetracaine and proparacaine.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Koller
1893 Settlers race to claim land. On this day in 1893, the largest land run in history begins with more than 100,000 people pouring into the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma to claim valuable land that had once belonged to Native Americans. With a single shot from a pistol the mad dash began, and land-hungry pioneers on horseback and in carriages raced forward to stake their claims to the best acres.
Ironically, not many years before that same land had once been considered worthless desert. Early explorers of Oklahoma believed that the territory was too arid and treeless for white settlement, but several suggested it might be the perfect place to resettle Indians, whose rich and fertile lands in the southeast were increasingly coveted by Americans. The U.S. government later took this advice and began removing eastern Indian tribes like the Cherokee and Choctaw to Oklahoma Territory in 1817. No more eager than the whites to leave their green and well-watered lands for the arid plains, some Indians resisted and had to be removed by force-most tragically, the 4,000 Cherokee who died during the brutal overland march known appropriately as the "Trail of Tears."
By 1885, a diverse mixture of Native American tribes had been pushed onto reservations in eastern Oklahoma and promised that the land would be theirs "as long as the grass grows and the water runs." Yet even this seemingly marginal land did not long escape the attention of land-hungry Americans. By the late nineteenth century, farmers had developed new methods that suddenly made the formerly reviled Plains hugely valuable. Pressure steadily increased to open the Indian lands to settlement, and in 1889, President Benjamin Harrison succumbed and threw open large areas of unoccupied Indian lands to white settlement. The giant Cherokee Strip rush was only the largest of a series of massive "land runs" that began in the 1890s, with thousands of immigrants stampeding into Oklahoma Territory and establishing towns like Norman and Oklahoma City almost overnight.
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/settlers-race-to-claim-land
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_Outlet
1919 The American Legion is incorporated.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legion
1920 The Wall Street bombing: a bomb in a horse wagon explodes in front of the J. P. Morgan building in New York City – 38 are killed and 400 injured.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_bombing
1928 - Hurricane San Felipe, a monster hurricane, which left 600 dead in Guadeloupe, and 300 dead in Puerto Rico, struck West Palm Beach FL causing enormous damage, and then headed for Lake Okeechobee. When the storm was over, the lake covered an area the size of the state of Delaware, and beneath its waters were 2000 victims. The only survivors were those who reached large hotels for safety, and a group of fifty people who got onto a raft to take their chances out in the middle of the lake. (David Ludlum)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1928_Okeechobee_hurricane
1941 World War II: Concerned that Reza Pahlavi the Shah of Persia is about to ally his petroleum-rich empire with Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union invade Iran in late August and force the Shah to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
1951 The Lutheran Building at 210 North Broadway in Saint Louis was dedicated as the first formal headquarters of the Missouri Synod.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Synod
1959 The first successful photocopier, the Xerox 914, is introduced in a demonstration on live television from New York City.
1961 The United States National Hurricane Research Project drops eight cylinders of silver iodide into the eyewall of Hurricane Esther. Wind speed reduces by 10%, giving rise to Project Stormfury.
1976 In Minneapolis, Minnesota, the 65th triennial General Convention of the Episcopal Church officially approved the ordination of women. This allowed the official recognition of fifteen women previously ordained in Philadelphia and Washington. Three and a half months later Jacqueline Means of Indianapolis, Indiana, became the first woman ordained into the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. after its official sanction.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episcopal_Church_(United_States)#Recent_history_.281976_to_the_present.29
1983 Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes a US citizen
1984 "Miami Vice" premiers.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Vice
1987 - Overnight rains soaked Arkansas, with 5.25 inches reported at Bismarck. In the town of Malvern, up to four feet of water was reported over several downtown streets, with water entering some homes and businesses. Thunderstorms in Texas drenched Lufkin with 4.30 inches of rain in just three hours. Evening thunderstorms produced severe weather in Missouri. A small tornado near Kirksville lifted a barn thirty feet into the air and then demolished it. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1987 The Montreal Protocol is signed to protect the ozone layer from depletion.
1988 - Hurricane Gilbert moved ashore into Mexico. The hurricane established an all-time record for the western hemisphere with a barometric reading of 26.13 inches. Winds approached 200 mph, with higher gusts. Gilbert devastated Jamaica and the Yucatan Peninsula. (The Weather Channel) Hurricane Gilbert made landfall 120 miles south of Brownsville TX during the early evening. Winds gusted to 61 mph at Brownsville, and reached 82 mph at Padre Island. Six foot tides eroded three to four feet off beaches along the Lower Texas Coast, leaving the waterline seventy-five feet farther inland. Rainfall totals ranged up to 8.71 inches at Lamar TX. Gilbert caused three million dollars damage along the Lower Texas Coast, but less than a million dollars damage along the Middle Texas Coast. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1989 - Showers and thunderstorms, respresenting what remained of Hurricane Octave, brought locally heavy rains to California, impeding the drying process for raisins and other crops. Sacramento CA was soaked with 1.53 inches of rain in six hours. At Phoenix AZ, the afternoon high of 107 degrees marked a record seventy-six days with afternoon highs 105 degrees or above. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1990 Iraq televises an 8 minute uncensored speech from George Bush
Births
1804 - Squire Whipple (d 1888) U.S. civil engineer, inventor, and theoretician who provided the first scientifically based rules for bridge construction. His design of the Whipple truss bridge was the model for hundreds of bridges that crossed the Erie Canal in the late 19-th century. Before developing his design, Whipple worked for several years on surveys, estimates, and reports for the enlargement of the Erie Canal, and in 1840 he patented a scale for weighing canal boats. He later built the first weighing lock scale constructed on the Erie Canal. The invention of the steam engine required bridges which could support heavy live loads and this motivated Squire to turn his attention to bridges. In 1853, he completed a 146-ft span iron railroad bridge near West Troy (now Watervliet), N.Y.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squire_Whipple
1822 Charles Crocker (d 14 Aug 1888) American railroad executive who founded the Central Pacific Railroad, which constructed the westernmost portion of the first transcontinental railroad, and took control with partners of the Southern Pacific Railroad.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Crocker
1832 George Washington Custis Lee Confederate General. The eldest son and the second of seven children, Custis Lee, as his family called him, followed his father's footsteps to West Point. At age 16, Custis had been denied entry into the military academy, but his father wrote an appeal to General Winfield Scott and so he was admitted the following year. Though he had needed his father's influence to gain admission, once in West Point Lee made the most of his opportunity. He graduated first in his class of 46 in 1854. For the last two years of his studies, his father was superintendent of the academy.
Lee served in the Engineering Corps until 1860, primarily in California. When Fort Sumter, South Carolina, fell in April 1861, he was stationed in Washington, D.C. Lee resigned his commission on May 2, 1861, about two weeks after his father resigned from the U.S. Army, and became a captain in the Confederate Army, assisting in the construction of fortifications for Richmond, Virginia.
In August 1861, Confederate President Jefferson Davis selected Lee to serve as his aide-de-camp, and he was soon promoted to colonel. Custis Lee spent the next three years in this position, gathering military information for Davis and conferring with him on a wide variety of military issues. For his service, he was promoted to brigadier general in 1863.
During the Gettysburg campaign, when his father's army was in Pennsylvania, Lee commanded part of the force defending Richmond, and he oversaw the Richmond defenses during Union General Ulysses S. Grant's Virginia campaign of 1864. He also assumed leadership of a division in October 1864, but his command saw action only when the Confederates evacuated Richmond in March 1865. He and his force were captured at Sayler's Creek, Virginia, a few days before his father surrendered the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865.
After the war, Custis Lee taught engineering at the Virginia Military Institute. In 1871, he replaced his late father as president of Washington College (later renamed Washington and Lee University). Custis Lee retired from that post in 1897, and died in Fairfax County, Virginia, on February 18, 1913.
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/confederate-general-custis-lee-is-born
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custis_Lee
1876 - Ellsworth Huntington (d 1947) Geographer, explored the influence of climate on civilization.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsworth_Huntington
1877 - Jacob Schick (d 1937) American inventor and manufacturer of the first successful electric dry razor. He started in the razor business in 1925 to design and manufacture his invention of the Magazine Repeating Razor. By 1926, he was selling clips of blades that could be loaded into a safety razor without touching the blade to avoid cuts during handling. While this product was successful, he turned his attention to developing a dry razor. By 1927 he had designed a dry razor with a reciprocating head powered by a flexible drive shaft to an external motor. Although he marketed this model from 1929, it was not until 1931 that he had improved the idea as a new one-handed electric shaver with self-contained motor that sales took off. He lived only six year after that.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Schick
1885 - Karen Horney (d 1952) (née Danielsen) German-born American psychoanalyst who departed from some of the basic principles of Sigmund Freud, suggesting that environmental and social conditions, rather than biological drives, determine much of individual personality and are the chief causes of neuroses and personality disorders. While she recognized the importance of early childhood experiences in determining neurotic conflicts, she contended that the analyst must also be aware of current fears and impulses. She also stressed the necessity of understanding the environmental context in which neurotic conflicts are expressed. Her view of human beings allowed much more scope for development and rational adaptation than Freudian determinism permitted.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Horney
1906 J. B. (John Bertram) Phillips, Anglican clergyman and translator of the New Testament in Modern English. (d 21 Jul 1982).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bertram_Phillips
1919; Marvin P. Middlemark (d 1989) American inventor of the TV "rabbit ear" antenna among his many patents (1956-68) for consumer electronics (and lesser ideas like a water-driven potato peeler).He became a self-made millionaire. When he died, he left a a Long Island mansion surrounded by vinyl tube fencing stuffed with used tennis balls, housing eight dogs, "nine miniature horses and eight miniature donkeys, 18 Chinese tractors, dozens of cement statues of Greek gods, stained glass windows of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein, and 1,000 pairs of woolen gloves (one size fits all)."
1942 Beverly Elaine Aadland (d 5 Jan 2010) American film actress. She appeared in films including South Pacific. As a teenager, she co-starred in Errol Flynn's Cuban Rebel Girls and had been considered for the role of Lolita, opposite Flynn in a planned production of Lolita, although it was James Mason who was cast in the lead, in part due to previous allegations of statutory rape that had been filed against Flynn.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Aadland
Deaths
1087 Pope Victor III (b ca 1026).
1498 Tomás de Torquemada, the first Spanish Inquisitor General, (b 1420). Torquemada. To English ears, the very name sounds tortured and cruel. And Tomás de Torquemada was that. He was a most intolerant man in an age of intolerant men. A Jew, born into a family of converts, he turned most of his fury against his own people.
With energy and connections, it was inevitable that Torquemada should rise to power. After studying theology at the Dominican convent of San Pablo in Valladolid, he became prior of Santa Cruz convent in Segovia. He also became confessor to the royal court. There he whispered in the ears of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that many Jewish converts were secretly practicing Judaic rites while outwardly pretending to be Christians.
He helped the royal couple draft a request for an inquisition into this matter. The request was granted. In 1483, Torquemada was made grand inquisitor.
Torquemada developed an oppressive network of spies and secret police. His courts summoned thousands of individuals. Most of them were completely at a loss as to what they were supposed to have done. One third were tortured. The three most common tortures were to be hung by the arms until they were pulled from their sockets; to be forced to swallow gallons of water; and to be racked.
The inquisition kept records of interrogations, and these show people begging to be told what to admit so they could escape their agony. "I have said that I did all that the witnesses say. Señores, release me, for I do not remember it. . . . for God's sake have mercy on me," pleaded one woman. A man undergoing the torture insisted he was a good Catholic. If they wanted him to say he was a heretic, he would because of the torture. "Señor Inquisidor, what does your lordship want me to say?" Another: "I don't know what to say. . . . Oh God, Oh God there's no mercy, Oh God help me, help me!"
Worse than the tortures was the fear of immolation. Torquemada burned over 2,000 "guilty" victims. Naturally, with such a record he was loathed. He found it necessary to go about with bodyguards. Even the Pope could not stop his cruel work. When Sixtus IV in a bull absolved all the Conversos of any wrong they might have done, Ferdinand refused to be bound by the bull. Torquemada continued the persecution and Sixtus backed down. Torquemada extended his reach. He had all unconverted Jews expelled from Spain.
Paradoxically and tragically, this brutal business was done in the name of Christ, who never raised a finger to hurt anybody but willingly gave his own life for others. However, death reaches us all. On this date, September 16, 1498, at the stout age of 78, Torquemada died. If Spain hoped with his death for a cessation of brutality, they hoped in vain. His apparatus lived on after him, crushing new victims long after he was gone.
www.christianity.com/ChurchHistory/11629905/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%C3%A1s_de_Torquemada
1672 Anne Bradstreet, Puritan, America's first noteworthy poet, (b ca 1612).
In 1650, Master Stephen Bowtell, a London publisher and bookseller, published a book of poems titled THE TENTH MUSE Lately Sprung up in AMERICA, OR Severall Poems... The book is a milestone in English and American literature. For one thing, The Tenth Muse contained the first verses by an American that could stand beside England's poetry. But The Tenth Muse is important for more than its place of origin. It was the first volume of enduring English language poetry produced by a woman. The author was Anne Bradstreet.
Anne Bradstreet was a Puritan, the daughter of Thomas Dudley, who would serve as a governor of Massachussetts Bay Colony. When just sixteen, she wed Simon Bradstreet, and sailed with him for the New World. Life was hard, not only because the New World was untamed, but because she was often ill, lost her home in a fire, saw a daughter die at four, and was separated from her beloved husband for extended periods when duty took him to England. These experiences, viewed through the lens of faith, found their way into her finest poems.
Written in spite of bouts of illness, blows of personal tragedy, and the tedium of household chores (she reared four sons and four daughters) her poems nonetheless show originality and craftsmanship, their themes often religious, the spelling quaint, the meanings plain:
"Lord, be thou Pilott to the ship,
And send them prosperous gailes;
In storms and sickness, Lord, preserve.
Thy goodness never failes."
Anne's God was real and she cried out to him, "My Fathers God, be God of me and mine." In a short autobiography of her religious experiences she wrote, "Among all my experiences of God's gracious dealings with me, I have constantly observed this--that he has never suffered me long to sit loose from him, but by one affliction or other has made me look home and search what was amiss."
Christ was the center of her devotion: "...there is but one Christ, who is the Sun of Righteousness, in the midst of an innumerable company of saints and angels; those saints have their degrees even in this life, some are stars of the first magnitude, and some of lesser degree; and others (and indeed the most in number), but small and obscure, yet all receive their luster (be it more or less) from that glorious sun that enlightens all in all..."
On this day, September 16, 1672, the voice of the Tenth Muse was silenced by consumption. Her son wrote that she "wasted to skin and bone," was tortured by rheumatism and had a leaking sore that disfigured her arm. Sick and weary, she had looked forward to death. "Now I can wait, looking every day when my Savior shall call for me...O let me ever see you who are invisible, and I shall not be unwilling to come, though by so rough a messenger."
Anne Bradstreet was no Dante or Milton. Yet her poems, rich in Biblical allusions, rose above mere jingles and ditties. Their images anticipated the Romantic movement of a century later.
www.christianity.com/ChurchHistory/11630153/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Bradstreet
1796 William Augustus Muhlenberg, (d 8 Apr 1877) great-grandson of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711–1787), Episcopal clergyman and hymnist, was born in Philadelphia. He founded the Flushing Institute, New York, in 1828, and St. Luke’s Hospital in 1855. He also founded The Evangelical Catholic, a church newspaper, and was instrumental in getting the Episcopal church to expand its use of hymns in worship. His works include: Church Poetry (Lancaster, Pennsylvania: S. Potter and Company, 1823) and Hymns for Church and Home, 1861. Mühlenberg also served on the committee that produced the 1828 Protestant Episcopal hymnal.
www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/m/u/h/muhlenberg_wa.htm
1819 - John Jeffries (b 1744) American physician and scientist who financed two balloon flights for himself and a Frenchman, Jean Pierre Blanchard, with experience in balloon flight. Jeffries wished to make scientific and meteorological observations. The first flight took place in London on 30 Nov 1784. Jeffries had provided himself with thermometer, barometer, electrometer, hygrometer and timepiece. He took air samples at different elevations for Cavendish, who subsequently made a chemical analysis of the air. The twelve observations of temperature, pressure, and humidity that Jeffries made were the first scientific data for free air, to a height of 9,309 feet. The values agree closely with modern determinations. On 7 Jan 1785, they made the first balloon crossing of the English Channel.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jeffries
1903 - Luther Crowell (b 1840) American inventor who obtained over 280 patents for printing press improvements as well as designing a machine for making the square-bottomed paper bag (U.S. Patent No.123,811 issued 20 Feb 1872) still familiar in grocery stores. His creativity began with developing an aerial machine he patented 3 Jun 1862, but abandoned upon the business failure of his chief backer. He also had a previous patent for a paper bag machine in 1867. By 1873, he had devised a sheet-delivery and folding mechanism adopted two years later by the Boston Herald, as the first rotary folding machine that delivered newspapers complete and folded. Therafter, he joined R. Hoe & Company, and perfected new printing machinery
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_bag
1907 - James Carroll (b 1854) English-American physician who served on the Yellow fever Commission. Army Surgeon-General Sternberg assigned Carroll to the medical faculty of the Army Medical Museum in Washington, where he and Walter Reed worked together in bacteriology research. In 1899, Sternberg appointed Carroll and Reed to investigate the bacillus icteroides, the microbe that Italian bacteriologist Giuseppe Sanarelli had identified as the cause of yellow fever. Their work helped disprove Sanarelli’s theory and catapulted Carroll and Reed into the yellow fever debate. In 1900, Carroll was promoted to Acting Asst. Surgeon in the Army Medical Corps and placed him second-in-command on the Yellow Fever Commission with Reed as officer-in-charge.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Carroll_(scientist)
1875 James Cash Penney (d 1971) His father was a Baptist minister who supported his family by farming, taking no salary from his church. An astute businessman, Penny moved steadily up in the business world, opening his first store on April 14, 1902. He sought to run his business on Biblical principles, giving each customer only quality merchandise at a fair price, operating only on what he felt would be a fair profit. Penny loved the Lord and faithfully used the tithe as the minimum for his giving.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cash_Penney
1973 - Leonard Carmichael (b 1898) U.S. psychologist and educator who was among the first scientists to study and catalogue the earliest development of children. Of his many books, Manual of Child Psychology, is a classic. From 1953-64 he was the 11th secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Responsible for the modernization of the "nation's attic," he guided the creation of the Museum of History and Technology, and the addition of two new wings on to the Museum of Natural History. In 1964, Carmichael became the Vice-President for Research and Exploration at the National Geographic Society where he sponsored exciting and ground-breaking projects such as the work of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, or the Leakeys in East Africa, or Jane Goodall's work on the behaviour of primates.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Carmichael
2005 - Gordon Gould (b 1920) American physicist who coined the word "laser" from the initial letters of "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation." Gould was inspired from his youth to be an inventor, wishing to emulate Marconi, Bell, and Edison. He contributed to the WWII Manhattan Project, working on the separation of uranium isotopes. On 9 Nov 1957, during a sleepless Saturday night, he had the inventor's inspiration and began to write down the principles of what he called a laser in his notebook. Although Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow, also successfully developed the laser, eventually Gould gained his long-denied patent rights.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Gould
Holidays and observances
Christian Feast Day:
Curcodomus
Cyprian (Roman Catholic Church)
Edith of Wilton
Euphemia
Ninian
Pope Cornelius
Ludmila
September 16 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Saints
Great-martyr Euphemia the All-praised (304)
Martyrs Victor and Sosthenes at Chalcedon (304)
Martyr Sebastiana, disciple of Saint Paul the Apostle, martyred at Heraclea (1st century)
Martyr Melitena of Marcianopolis (2nd century)
Saint Dorotheus, hermit of Egypt (4th century)
Martyr and Saint Ludmila, grandmother of Saint Wenceslas of Bohemia, the prince of Czechs (927)
Saint Cyprian, Metropolitan of Kiev (1406)
Saint Procopius, abbot, of Sázava monastery in Bohemia (1053)
Martyrs Isaac and Joseph of Georgia (808)
Saint Cyprian of Serbia
Other commemorations
Icon of the Mother of God Support of Humble, near Pskov
www.weatherforyou.com/cgi-bin/weather_history/today2S.pl
www.todayinsci.com/9/9_16.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_16_(Eastern_Orthodox_liturgics)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_16
www.lutheranhistory.org/history/tih0916.htm
www.christianity.com/HistoryByDay/0916/
www.history.com/
www.daysuntil.com/Election-Day/index.html
www.amug.org/~jpaul/sep16.html
There are 106 days remaining until the end of the year.
Days until Election Day, Tuesday November 6, 2012: 51
Countdown until Obama leaves Office www.obamaclock.org/
U.S. Debt Clock: www.usdebtclock.org/
681 The Third Council of Constantinople adjourned, having settled the Monothelite controversy in the Eastern Church. Monothelites, who believed Christ had only “one will,” were condemned as heretics by the council, which proclaimed the orthodox belief of two wills in Christ: divine and human.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Council_of_Constantinople
Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor by William Halsall (1882)
1620 - Mayflower departs England. The Mayflower sails from Plymouth, England, bound for the New World with 102 passengers. The ship was headed for Virginia, where the colonists--half religious dissenters and half entrepreneurs--had been authorized to settle by the British crown. However, stormy weather and navigational errors forced the Mayflower off course, and on November 21 the "Pilgrims" reached Massachusetts, where they founded the first permanent European settlement in New England in late December.
Thirty-five of the Pilgrims were members of the radical English Separatist Church, who traveled to America to escape the jurisdiction of the Church of England, which they found corrupt. Ten years earlier, English persecution had led a group of Separatists to flee to Holland in search of religious freedom. However, many were dissatisfied with economic opportunities in the Netherlands, and under the direction of William Bradford they decided to immigrate to Virginia, where an English colony had been founded at Jamestown in 1607.
The Separatists won financial backing from a group of investors called the London Adventurers, who were promised a sizable share of the colony's profits. Three dozen church members made their way back to England, where they were joined by about 70 entrepreneurs--enlisted by the London stock company to ensure the success of the enterprise. In August 1620, the Mayflower left Southampton with a smaller vessel--the Speedwell--but the latter proved unseaworthy and twice was forced to return to port. On September 16, the Mayflower left for America alone from Plymouth.
In a difficult Atlantic crossing, the 90-foot Mayflower encountered rough seas and storms and was blown more than 500 miles off course. Along the way, the settlers formulated and signed the Mayflower Compact, an agreement that bound the signatories into a "civil body politic." Because it established constitutional law and the rule of the majority, the compact is regarded as an important precursor to American democracy. After a 66-day voyage, the ship landed on November 21 on the tip of Cape Cod at what is now Provincetown, Massachusetts.
After coming to anchor in Provincetown harbor, a party of armed men under the command of Captain Myles Standish was sent out to explore the area and find a location suitable for settlement. While they were gone, Susanna White gave birth to a son, Peregrine, aboard the Mayflower. He was the first English child born in New England. In mid-December, the explorers went ashore at a location across Cape Cod Bay where they found cleared fields and plentiful running water and named the site Plymouth.
The expedition returned to Provincetown, and on December 21 the Mayflower came to anchor in Plymouth harbor. Just after Christmas, the pilgrims began work on dwellings that would shelter them through their difficult first winter in America.
In the first year of settlement, half the colonists died of disease. In 1621, the health and economic condition of the colonists improved, and that autumn Governor William Bradford invited neighboring Indians to Plymouth to celebrate the bounty of that year's harvest season. Plymouth soon secured treaties with most local Indian tribes, and the economy steadily grew, and more colonists were attracted to the settlement. By the mid 1640s, Plymouth's population numbered 3,000 people, but by then the settlement had been overshadowed by the larger Massachusetts Bay Colony to the north, settled by Puritans in 1629.
The term "Pilgrim" was not used to describe the Plymouth colonists until the early 19th century and was derived from a manuscript in which Governor Bradford spoke of the "saints" who left Holland as "pilgrimes." The orator Daniel Webster spoke of "Pilgrim Fathers" at a bicentennial celebration of Plymouth's founding in 1820, and thereafter the term entered common usage.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayflower
1662 John Flamsteed sees solar eclipse.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Flamsteed
The Battle of Harlem Heights, September 16, 1776
1776 - Battle of Harlem Heights restores American confidence. On this day in 1776, General George Washington arrives at Harlem Heights, on the northern end of Manhattan, and takes command of a group of retreating Continental troops. The day before, 4,000 British soldiers had landed at Kip’s Bay in Manhattan (near present-day 34th Street) and taken control of the island, driving the Continentals north, where they appeared to be in disarray prior to Washington’s arrival.
In the early morning hours of September 16, 1776, General Washington ordered the Continentals to hold their line at Harlem Heights while he sent Captain Thomas Knowlton and a volunteer group of Rangers to scout British movements and possibly lure the British into combat. While Captain Knowlton and the Rangers engaged the British in a frontal assault, Washington sent a second force of Patriots to attack the British from their right flank. During the short but intense fighting that ensued, the Americans were able to force a small British retreat from their northern positions.
Despite the American failure to stop the British invasion of New York City the previous day at Kip’s Bay, the successful Battle of Harlem Heights restored public confidence in the American troops and lifted the spirits of the Continental Army. The Americans and British each lost approximately 70 troops in the fighting. One of the Americans lost was the Ranger leader, Captain Thomas Knowlton.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Harlem_Heights
1779 American Revolutionary War: The Franco-American Siege of Savannah begins.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Savannah
1810 Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla begins Mexican revolt against Spain (National Day)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Hidalgo_y_Costilla
1835 - British naturalist Charles Darwin aboard the ship HMS Beagle,arrived at the Galapagos archipelago, a cluster of islands on the equator 600 miles west of South America. During his five weeks studying the fauna in the Galapagos, Darwin found the giant tortoises there greatly differed from one another according to which island they came from. Moreover, many islands developed their own races of iguanas. These observations contributed to his theory of "natural selection," that species evolved over thousands of millions of years.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin
1840 Scottish pastor Robert Murray McCheyne wrote in a letter: 'Grace fills us with very different feelings from the possession of anything else. If you have tasted the grace of the Gospel, the irresistible longing of your hearts will be, "Oh, that all the world might taste its regenerating waters."'
1863 Robert College of Istanbul-Turkey, the first American educational institution outside the United States, is founded by Christopher Robert, an American philanthropist.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_College
1878 The first African American parochial school was opened in Little Rock, Arkansas, as part of the Synodical Conference mission effort.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synodical_Conference
1880 The Cornell Daily Sun prints its first issue in Ithaca, New York. The Sun is the nation's oldest, continuously-independent college daily in the United States.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cornell_Daily_Sun
1881 - Iowa's earliest measurable snow of record fell over western sections of the state. Four to six inches was reported between Stuart and Avoca. (The Weather Channel)
1884 - Cocaine was first used as a local anaesthetic to immobilize a patient's eye for eye surgery by Carl Koller. His success initiated the modern era of local anesthesia, with cocaine also quickly adopted for nose and throat surgery and for dentistry. For Koller, a Czech-born American ophthalmologist, the clue for this use was when he noticed that cocaine had a numbing effect on the tongue. He made many experiments on animals before introducing its use on humans. Cocaine was isolated in 1859 and was synthesized in 1885. It was later found with high doses or repeated use, it caused erosion of the corneal epithelium in high doses and it was replaced by less toxic, synthetic local anesthetics such as tetracaine and proparacaine.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Koller
1893 Settlers race to claim land. On this day in 1893, the largest land run in history begins with more than 100,000 people pouring into the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma to claim valuable land that had once belonged to Native Americans. With a single shot from a pistol the mad dash began, and land-hungry pioneers on horseback and in carriages raced forward to stake their claims to the best acres.
Ironically, not many years before that same land had once been considered worthless desert. Early explorers of Oklahoma believed that the territory was too arid and treeless for white settlement, but several suggested it might be the perfect place to resettle Indians, whose rich and fertile lands in the southeast were increasingly coveted by Americans. The U.S. government later took this advice and began removing eastern Indian tribes like the Cherokee and Choctaw to Oklahoma Territory in 1817. No more eager than the whites to leave their green and well-watered lands for the arid plains, some Indians resisted and had to be removed by force-most tragically, the 4,000 Cherokee who died during the brutal overland march known appropriately as the "Trail of Tears."
By 1885, a diverse mixture of Native American tribes had been pushed onto reservations in eastern Oklahoma and promised that the land would be theirs "as long as the grass grows and the water runs." Yet even this seemingly marginal land did not long escape the attention of land-hungry Americans. By the late nineteenth century, farmers had developed new methods that suddenly made the formerly reviled Plains hugely valuable. Pressure steadily increased to open the Indian lands to settlement, and in 1889, President Benjamin Harrison succumbed and threw open large areas of unoccupied Indian lands to white settlement. The giant Cherokee Strip rush was only the largest of a series of massive "land runs" that began in the 1890s, with thousands of immigrants stampeding into Oklahoma Territory and establishing towns like Norman and Oklahoma City almost overnight.
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/settlers-race-to-claim-land
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_Outlet
1919 The American Legion is incorporated.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legion
1920 The Wall Street bombing: a bomb in a horse wagon explodes in front of the J. P. Morgan building in New York City – 38 are killed and 400 injured.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_bombing
1928 - Hurricane San Felipe, a monster hurricane, which left 600 dead in Guadeloupe, and 300 dead in Puerto Rico, struck West Palm Beach FL causing enormous damage, and then headed for Lake Okeechobee. When the storm was over, the lake covered an area the size of the state of Delaware, and beneath its waters were 2000 victims. The only survivors were those who reached large hotels for safety, and a group of fifty people who got onto a raft to take their chances out in the middle of the lake. (David Ludlum)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1928_Okeechobee_hurricane
1941 World War II: Concerned that Reza Pahlavi the Shah of Persia is about to ally his petroleum-rich empire with Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union invade Iran in late August and force the Shah to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
1951 The Lutheran Building at 210 North Broadway in Saint Louis was dedicated as the first formal headquarters of the Missouri Synod.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Synod
1959 The first successful photocopier, the Xerox 914, is introduced in a demonstration on live television from New York City.
1961 The United States National Hurricane Research Project drops eight cylinders of silver iodide into the eyewall of Hurricane Esther. Wind speed reduces by 10%, giving rise to Project Stormfury.
1976 In Minneapolis, Minnesota, the 65th triennial General Convention of the Episcopal Church officially approved the ordination of women. This allowed the official recognition of fifteen women previously ordained in Philadelphia and Washington. Three and a half months later Jacqueline Means of Indianapolis, Indiana, became the first woman ordained into the Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. after its official sanction.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Episcopal_Church_(United_States)#Recent_history_.281976_to_the_present.29
1983 Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes a US citizen
1984 "Miami Vice" premiers.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_Vice
1987 - Overnight rains soaked Arkansas, with 5.25 inches reported at Bismarck. In the town of Malvern, up to four feet of water was reported over several downtown streets, with water entering some homes and businesses. Thunderstorms in Texas drenched Lufkin with 4.30 inches of rain in just three hours. Evening thunderstorms produced severe weather in Missouri. A small tornado near Kirksville lifted a barn thirty feet into the air and then demolished it. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1987 The Montreal Protocol is signed to protect the ozone layer from depletion.
1988 - Hurricane Gilbert moved ashore into Mexico. The hurricane established an all-time record for the western hemisphere with a barometric reading of 26.13 inches. Winds approached 200 mph, with higher gusts. Gilbert devastated Jamaica and the Yucatan Peninsula. (The Weather Channel) Hurricane Gilbert made landfall 120 miles south of Brownsville TX during the early evening. Winds gusted to 61 mph at Brownsville, and reached 82 mph at Padre Island. Six foot tides eroded three to four feet off beaches along the Lower Texas Coast, leaving the waterline seventy-five feet farther inland. Rainfall totals ranged up to 8.71 inches at Lamar TX. Gilbert caused three million dollars damage along the Lower Texas Coast, but less than a million dollars damage along the Middle Texas Coast. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1989 - Showers and thunderstorms, respresenting what remained of Hurricane Octave, brought locally heavy rains to California, impeding the drying process for raisins and other crops. Sacramento CA was soaked with 1.53 inches of rain in six hours. At Phoenix AZ, the afternoon high of 107 degrees marked a record seventy-six days with afternoon highs 105 degrees or above. (The National Weather Summary) (Storm Data)
1990 Iraq televises an 8 minute uncensored speech from George Bush
Births
1804 - Squire Whipple (d 1888) U.S. civil engineer, inventor, and theoretician who provided the first scientifically based rules for bridge construction. His design of the Whipple truss bridge was the model for hundreds of bridges that crossed the Erie Canal in the late 19-th century. Before developing his design, Whipple worked for several years on surveys, estimates, and reports for the enlargement of the Erie Canal, and in 1840 he patented a scale for weighing canal boats. He later built the first weighing lock scale constructed on the Erie Canal. The invention of the steam engine required bridges which could support heavy live loads and this motivated Squire to turn his attention to bridges. In 1853, he completed a 146-ft span iron railroad bridge near West Troy (now Watervliet), N.Y.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squire_Whipple
1822 Charles Crocker (d 14 Aug 1888) American railroad executive who founded the Central Pacific Railroad, which constructed the westernmost portion of the first transcontinental railroad, and took control with partners of the Southern Pacific Railroad.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Crocker
1832 George Washington Custis Lee Confederate General. The eldest son and the second of seven children, Custis Lee, as his family called him, followed his father's footsteps to West Point. At age 16, Custis had been denied entry into the military academy, but his father wrote an appeal to General Winfield Scott and so he was admitted the following year. Though he had needed his father's influence to gain admission, once in West Point Lee made the most of his opportunity. He graduated first in his class of 46 in 1854. For the last two years of his studies, his father was superintendent of the academy.
Lee served in the Engineering Corps until 1860, primarily in California. When Fort Sumter, South Carolina, fell in April 1861, he was stationed in Washington, D.C. Lee resigned his commission on May 2, 1861, about two weeks after his father resigned from the U.S. Army, and became a captain in the Confederate Army, assisting in the construction of fortifications for Richmond, Virginia.
In August 1861, Confederate President Jefferson Davis selected Lee to serve as his aide-de-camp, and he was soon promoted to colonel. Custis Lee spent the next three years in this position, gathering military information for Davis and conferring with him on a wide variety of military issues. For his service, he was promoted to brigadier general in 1863.
During the Gettysburg campaign, when his father's army was in Pennsylvania, Lee commanded part of the force defending Richmond, and he oversaw the Richmond defenses during Union General Ulysses S. Grant's Virginia campaign of 1864. He also assumed leadership of a division in October 1864, but his command saw action only when the Confederates evacuated Richmond in March 1865. He and his force were captured at Sayler's Creek, Virginia, a few days before his father surrendered the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia on April 9, 1865.
After the war, Custis Lee taught engineering at the Virginia Military Institute. In 1871, he replaced his late father as president of Washington College (later renamed Washington and Lee University). Custis Lee retired from that post in 1897, and died in Fairfax County, Virginia, on February 18, 1913.
www.history.com/this-day-in-history/confederate-general-custis-lee-is-born
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custis_Lee
1876 - Ellsworth Huntington (d 1947) Geographer, explored the influence of climate on civilization.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellsworth_Huntington
1877 - Jacob Schick (d 1937) American inventor and manufacturer of the first successful electric dry razor. He started in the razor business in 1925 to design and manufacture his invention of the Magazine Repeating Razor. By 1926, he was selling clips of blades that could be loaded into a safety razor without touching the blade to avoid cuts during handling. While this product was successful, he turned his attention to developing a dry razor. By 1927 he had designed a dry razor with a reciprocating head powered by a flexible drive shaft to an external motor. Although he marketed this model from 1929, it was not until 1931 that he had improved the idea as a new one-handed electric shaver with self-contained motor that sales took off. He lived only six year after that.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Schick
1885 - Karen Horney (d 1952) (née Danielsen) German-born American psychoanalyst who departed from some of the basic principles of Sigmund Freud, suggesting that environmental and social conditions, rather than biological drives, determine much of individual personality and are the chief causes of neuroses and personality disorders. While she recognized the importance of early childhood experiences in determining neurotic conflicts, she contended that the analyst must also be aware of current fears and impulses. She also stressed the necessity of understanding the environmental context in which neurotic conflicts are expressed. Her view of human beings allowed much more scope for development and rational adaptation than Freudian determinism permitted.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Horney
1906 J. B. (John Bertram) Phillips, Anglican clergyman and translator of the New Testament in Modern English. (d 21 Jul 1982).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bertram_Phillips
1919; Marvin P. Middlemark (d 1989) American inventor of the TV "rabbit ear" antenna among his many patents (1956-68) for consumer electronics (and lesser ideas like a water-driven potato peeler).He became a self-made millionaire. When he died, he left a a Long Island mansion surrounded by vinyl tube fencing stuffed with used tennis balls, housing eight dogs, "nine miniature horses and eight miniature donkeys, 18 Chinese tractors, dozens of cement statues of Greek gods, stained glass windows of Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein, and 1,000 pairs of woolen gloves (one size fits all)."
1942 Beverly Elaine Aadland (d 5 Jan 2010) American film actress. She appeared in films including South Pacific. As a teenager, she co-starred in Errol Flynn's Cuban Rebel Girls and had been considered for the role of Lolita, opposite Flynn in a planned production of Lolita, although it was James Mason who was cast in the lead, in part due to previous allegations of statutory rape that had been filed against Flynn.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Aadland
Deaths
1087 Pope Victor III (b ca 1026).
1498 Tomás de Torquemada, the first Spanish Inquisitor General, (b 1420). Torquemada. To English ears, the very name sounds tortured and cruel. And Tomás de Torquemada was that. He was a most intolerant man in an age of intolerant men. A Jew, born into a family of converts, he turned most of his fury against his own people.
With energy and connections, it was inevitable that Torquemada should rise to power. After studying theology at the Dominican convent of San Pablo in Valladolid, he became prior of Santa Cruz convent in Segovia. He also became confessor to the royal court. There he whispered in the ears of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that many Jewish converts were secretly practicing Judaic rites while outwardly pretending to be Christians.
He helped the royal couple draft a request for an inquisition into this matter. The request was granted. In 1483, Torquemada was made grand inquisitor.
Torquemada developed an oppressive network of spies and secret police. His courts summoned thousands of individuals. Most of them were completely at a loss as to what they were supposed to have done. One third were tortured. The three most common tortures were to be hung by the arms until they were pulled from their sockets; to be forced to swallow gallons of water; and to be racked.
The inquisition kept records of interrogations, and these show people begging to be told what to admit so they could escape their agony. "I have said that I did all that the witnesses say. Señores, release me, for I do not remember it. . . . for God's sake have mercy on me," pleaded one woman. A man undergoing the torture insisted he was a good Catholic. If they wanted him to say he was a heretic, he would because of the torture. "Señor Inquisidor, what does your lordship want me to say?" Another: "I don't know what to say. . . . Oh God, Oh God there's no mercy, Oh God help me, help me!"
Worse than the tortures was the fear of immolation. Torquemada burned over 2,000 "guilty" victims. Naturally, with such a record he was loathed. He found it necessary to go about with bodyguards. Even the Pope could not stop his cruel work. When Sixtus IV in a bull absolved all the Conversos of any wrong they might have done, Ferdinand refused to be bound by the bull. Torquemada continued the persecution and Sixtus backed down. Torquemada extended his reach. He had all unconverted Jews expelled from Spain.
Paradoxically and tragically, this brutal business was done in the name of Christ, who never raised a finger to hurt anybody but willingly gave his own life for others. However, death reaches us all. On this date, September 16, 1498, at the stout age of 78, Torquemada died. If Spain hoped with his death for a cessation of brutality, they hoped in vain. His apparatus lived on after him, crushing new victims long after he was gone.
www.christianity.com/ChurchHistory/11629905/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom%C3%A1s_de_Torquemada
1672 Anne Bradstreet, Puritan, America's first noteworthy poet, (b ca 1612).
In 1650, Master Stephen Bowtell, a London publisher and bookseller, published a book of poems titled THE TENTH MUSE Lately Sprung up in AMERICA, OR Severall Poems... The book is a milestone in English and American literature. For one thing, The Tenth Muse contained the first verses by an American that could stand beside England's poetry. But The Tenth Muse is important for more than its place of origin. It was the first volume of enduring English language poetry produced by a woman. The author was Anne Bradstreet.
Anne Bradstreet was a Puritan, the daughter of Thomas Dudley, who would serve as a governor of Massachussetts Bay Colony. When just sixteen, she wed Simon Bradstreet, and sailed with him for the New World. Life was hard, not only because the New World was untamed, but because she was often ill, lost her home in a fire, saw a daughter die at four, and was separated from her beloved husband for extended periods when duty took him to England. These experiences, viewed through the lens of faith, found their way into her finest poems.
Written in spite of bouts of illness, blows of personal tragedy, and the tedium of household chores (she reared four sons and four daughters) her poems nonetheless show originality and craftsmanship, their themes often religious, the spelling quaint, the meanings plain:
"Lord, be thou Pilott to the ship,
And send them prosperous gailes;
In storms and sickness, Lord, preserve.
Thy goodness never failes."
Anne's God was real and she cried out to him, "My Fathers God, be God of me and mine." In a short autobiography of her religious experiences she wrote, "Among all my experiences of God's gracious dealings with me, I have constantly observed this--that he has never suffered me long to sit loose from him, but by one affliction or other has made me look home and search what was amiss."
Christ was the center of her devotion: "...there is but one Christ, who is the Sun of Righteousness, in the midst of an innumerable company of saints and angels; those saints have their degrees even in this life, some are stars of the first magnitude, and some of lesser degree; and others (and indeed the most in number), but small and obscure, yet all receive their luster (be it more or less) from that glorious sun that enlightens all in all..."
On this day, September 16, 1672, the voice of the Tenth Muse was silenced by consumption. Her son wrote that she "wasted to skin and bone," was tortured by rheumatism and had a leaking sore that disfigured her arm. Sick and weary, she had looked forward to death. "Now I can wait, looking every day when my Savior shall call for me...O let me ever see you who are invisible, and I shall not be unwilling to come, though by so rough a messenger."
Anne Bradstreet was no Dante or Milton. Yet her poems, rich in Biblical allusions, rose above mere jingles and ditties. Their images anticipated the Romantic movement of a century later.
www.christianity.com/ChurchHistory/11630153/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Bradstreet
1796 William Augustus Muhlenberg, (d 8 Apr 1877) great-grandson of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (1711–1787), Episcopal clergyman and hymnist, was born in Philadelphia. He founded the Flushing Institute, New York, in 1828, and St. Luke’s Hospital in 1855. He also founded The Evangelical Catholic, a church newspaper, and was instrumental in getting the Episcopal church to expand its use of hymns in worship. His works include: Church Poetry (Lancaster, Pennsylvania: S. Potter and Company, 1823) and Hymns for Church and Home, 1861. Mühlenberg also served on the committee that produced the 1828 Protestant Episcopal hymnal.
www.hymntime.com/tch/bio/m/u/h/muhlenberg_wa.htm
1819 - John Jeffries (b 1744) American physician and scientist who financed two balloon flights for himself and a Frenchman, Jean Pierre Blanchard, with experience in balloon flight. Jeffries wished to make scientific and meteorological observations. The first flight took place in London on 30 Nov 1784. Jeffries had provided himself with thermometer, barometer, electrometer, hygrometer and timepiece. He took air samples at different elevations for Cavendish, who subsequently made a chemical analysis of the air. The twelve observations of temperature, pressure, and humidity that Jeffries made were the first scientific data for free air, to a height of 9,309 feet. The values agree closely with modern determinations. On 7 Jan 1785, they made the first balloon crossing of the English Channel.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jeffries
1903 - Luther Crowell (b 1840) American inventor who obtained over 280 patents for printing press improvements as well as designing a machine for making the square-bottomed paper bag (U.S. Patent No.123,811 issued 20 Feb 1872) still familiar in grocery stores. His creativity began with developing an aerial machine he patented 3 Jun 1862, but abandoned upon the business failure of his chief backer. He also had a previous patent for a paper bag machine in 1867. By 1873, he had devised a sheet-delivery and folding mechanism adopted two years later by the Boston Herald, as the first rotary folding machine that delivered newspapers complete and folded. Therafter, he joined R. Hoe & Company, and perfected new printing machinery
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_bag
1907 - James Carroll (b 1854) English-American physician who served on the Yellow fever Commission. Army Surgeon-General Sternberg assigned Carroll to the medical faculty of the Army Medical Museum in Washington, where he and Walter Reed worked together in bacteriology research. In 1899, Sternberg appointed Carroll and Reed to investigate the bacillus icteroides, the microbe that Italian bacteriologist Giuseppe Sanarelli had identified as the cause of yellow fever. Their work helped disprove Sanarelli’s theory and catapulted Carroll and Reed into the yellow fever debate. In 1900, Carroll was promoted to Acting Asst. Surgeon in the Army Medical Corps and placed him second-in-command on the Yellow Fever Commission with Reed as officer-in-charge.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Carroll_(scientist)
1875 James Cash Penney (d 1971) His father was a Baptist minister who supported his family by farming, taking no salary from his church. An astute businessman, Penny moved steadily up in the business world, opening his first store on April 14, 1902. He sought to run his business on Biblical principles, giving each customer only quality merchandise at a fair price, operating only on what he felt would be a fair profit. Penny loved the Lord and faithfully used the tithe as the minimum for his giving.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cash_Penney
1973 - Leonard Carmichael (b 1898) U.S. psychologist and educator who was among the first scientists to study and catalogue the earliest development of children. Of his many books, Manual of Child Psychology, is a classic. From 1953-64 he was the 11th secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Responsible for the modernization of the "nation's attic," he guided the creation of the Museum of History and Technology, and the addition of two new wings on to the Museum of Natural History. In 1964, Carmichael became the Vice-President for Research and Exploration at the National Geographic Society where he sponsored exciting and ground-breaking projects such as the work of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, or the Leakeys in East Africa, or Jane Goodall's work on the behaviour of primates.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Carmichael
2005 - Gordon Gould (b 1920) American physicist who coined the word "laser" from the initial letters of "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation." Gould was inspired from his youth to be an inventor, wishing to emulate Marconi, Bell, and Edison. He contributed to the WWII Manhattan Project, working on the separation of uranium isotopes. On 9 Nov 1957, during a sleepless Saturday night, he had the inventor's inspiration and began to write down the principles of what he called a laser in his notebook. Although Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow, also successfully developed the laser, eventually Gould gained his long-denied patent rights.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Gould
Holidays and observances
Christian Feast Day:
Curcodomus
Cyprian (Roman Catholic Church)
Edith of Wilton
Euphemia
Ninian
Pope Cornelius
Ludmila
September 16 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Saints
Great-martyr Euphemia the All-praised (304)
Martyrs Victor and Sosthenes at Chalcedon (304)
Martyr Sebastiana, disciple of Saint Paul the Apostle, martyred at Heraclea (1st century)
Martyr Melitena of Marcianopolis (2nd century)
Saint Dorotheus, hermit of Egypt (4th century)
Martyr and Saint Ludmila, grandmother of Saint Wenceslas of Bohemia, the prince of Czechs (927)
Saint Cyprian, Metropolitan of Kiev (1406)
Saint Procopius, abbot, of Sázava monastery in Bohemia (1053)
Martyrs Isaac and Joseph of Georgia (808)
Saint Cyprian of Serbia
Other commemorations
Icon of the Mother of God Support of Humble, near Pskov
www.weatherforyou.com/cgi-bin/weather_history/today2S.pl
www.todayinsci.com/9/9_16.htm
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_16_(Eastern_Orthodox_liturgics)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_16
www.lutheranhistory.org/history/tih0916.htm
www.christianity.com/HistoryByDay/0916/
www.history.com/
www.daysuntil.com/Election-Day/index.html
www.amug.org/~jpaul/sep16.html