Yuri Gagarin - The First Spaceman

 12 April 1961

The people of the United States share with the people of the Soviet Union their satisfaction for the safe flight of the astronaut in man's first venture into space. We congratulate you and the Soviet scientists and engineers who made this feat possible. It is my sincere desire that in the continuing quest for knowledge of outer space our nations can work together to obtain the greatest benefit to mankind.

John F. Kennedy

Kennedy's telegram to president  Khrushchev after Vostok 1 mission

Yuri Gagarin was born in the Smolensk region of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). His family was displaced during World War II (1939-1945) and moved to the town of Gzhatsk in the northeastern part of Smolensk. In 1949 Gagarin began his higher education at a manufacturing trade school in Lyubertsy, a town outside of Moscow. In 1951 he trained as a metalworker at the industrial technical school in Saratov, which is southeast of Moscow. While he was in Saratov, he joined a flying club and learned to fly airplanes. His instructor recommended him to the air force, and Gagarin began attending the Soviet Air Force cadet training school at Chkalov (now Orenburg) in Russia in 1955. He graduated from the academy with high distinction in 1957, shortly after the launch of Sputnik 1.

Yuri Gagarin (1934 - 1968)

Gagarin applied for the six-week cosmonaut screening process in 1960 with just 230 hours of flying experience. He and 19 others were selected to become cosmonauts. Of these 20 men, 12 eventually completed space flights. Gagarin and fellow cosmonaut Gherman Titov, front-runners in their class, were both contenders for the Vostok 1 flight.

The Blackface Minstrels

The practice of actors "blacking up" is no longer seen as amusing or acceptable. The once highly popular television series "The Black and White Ministrel Show", which featured blackened-up singing and dancing routines from 1958, notoriously fell out of favour and finally went off the air in 1978.

A hundred yers ago, however, the blackface minstrel tradition was a popular variety show genre. It had originated as an American entertainment in the 19th century, and was performed by white people in blackface greasepaint. It often lampooned black people, with stock characters such as "the dandy" and "the mammy",

and presented black people as ignorant, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious, joyous, and musical.

Blackface minstrelsy was the first distinctly American theatrical form. In the 1830s and 1840s, it was at the core of the rise of an American music industry, and for several decades it provided the lens through which white America saw black America. On the one hand, it had strong racist aspects; on the other, it afforded white Americans a singular and broad awareness of significant aspects of black-American culture.

Hernán Cortés' Service to the Country

Hernán Cortés or Cortez, Hernando (1485-1547), Spanish explorer and conqueror of the Aztec Empire of Mexico, was born in Medellín, Extremadura. He studied law at the University of Salamanca but cut short his university career in 1501 and decided to try his fortune in the Americas. Cortés sailed for Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) in the spring of 1504. In 1511 he joined Spanish soldier and administrator Diego Velázquez in the conquest of Cuba and subsequently became alcalde (mayor) of Santiago de Cuba. In 1518 Cortés persuaded Velázquez, who had become governor of Cuba, to give him the command of an expedition to Mexico. The mainland had been discovered the year before by Spanish soldier and explorer Francisco Fernández de Córdoba and subsequently by Juan de Grijalva, nephew of Velázquez.

 
On February 19, 1519, Cortés, with a force of some 600 men, fewer than 20 horses, and 10 field pieces, set sail from Cuba. He left despite the cancellation of his commission by Velázquez, who had become suspicious that Cortés, once in a position to establish himself independently, would refuse to recognize his authority. Cortés sailed along the coast of Yucatán and in March 1519 landed in Mexico, subjugating the town of Tabasco. From the native inhabitants of Tabasco, Cortés learned of the Aztec Empire and its ruler, Montezuma II.

Cold War paranoia

"Don't brag about your job" poster

The poster Don't Brag About Your Job was displayed in government and military offices dealing with sensitive material in the early 1960s. It is a strange cousin of the public health campaigns produced by the Central Office of Information, the government's communications agency after the Second World War. Using a genial cartoon style like that which encouraged children to cross the road with care or smokers to give up, this breezy design alluded to a period of deep anxiety when the Cold War seemed to be getting hotter by the day.

The designers, Reginald Mount and Eileen Evans, had tuned their skills during the Second World War with witty, economical images that delivered government messages without preaching or alarming their viewers. As their colleague Abram Games put it: "maximum impact with minimum means“. Don't Brag About Your Job reminded employees of the interest that Britain's enemies might have in this information. While not explicitly anti-communist, it captures the fear of infiltration and espionage that fuelled Cold War paranoia.

The poster dates from a period punctuated by notorious cases of espionage. In early 1963 British spy Kim Philby - one of the 'Cambridge Five' - defected to the Soviet Union. Within weeks, the Profumo Affair exploded when the British secretary of state for war was linked to a naval attache in the Soviet embassy through their shared attraction to Christine Keeler. The image of the spy infiltrated British popular culture, as Ian Fleming and Len Deighton's novels testify. Mount and Evans's charactet was, however. no James Bond: he was the office show off, no doubt a far more commonplace character.

Winchester Round Table - The Mystery Unveild

More so than any other medieval monarch, King Edward I loved to travel. He travelled all around the Britain, as well as much of Europe and even the Holy Land.At first glance, therefore, his arrival in Winchester in 1287 might seem unremarkable. In actual fact, this was the occasion for a great chivalric festivity, long since forgotten, but which probably explains the creation of one of the most intriguing of all medieval artifacts - the Winchester Round Table, "King Arthur's Round Table". 

A giant disc of solid oak, 18 feet in diameter and over a ton in weight, it now hangs at the end of the Great Hall of what was once Winchester Castle.Obviously, the table has nothing to do with a real King Arthur (whisper it quietly - he never existed). It is scientifically proved that it was made in the second half of the 13th century, and thus most likely dates from the reign of Edward I (1272 - 1307).

Winchester Round Table illustration

Claudius I - The Wisest Fool in Rome

"What an artist the world is losing in me!"

 Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (August 1, 10 B.C.E. – October 13, 54) 

As news of Caligula's assassination spread, the senate gathered in haste, several of them ready to press their own claims to the succession, other urged that the moment had come to restore the republic.
Though the praetorian guard had its own ideas as to who should take the throne. Claudius, Caligula's feeble-minded uncle, had been dragged from his hiding place in the palace to the praetorian camp, where he was promptly hailed as emperor, and then marched back to the senate, who had no choice but to confirm their decision.
But the soldiers had chosen better than they knew. Claudius had spent his life the almost forgotten, half-witted brother of the great Germanicus. But now in office he proved extremely conscientious. His intentions were excellent, and his political theory, if derived wholly from books, was intelligent. He was 'the wisest fool' in Rome, but he kept his wisdom for the state, while his domestic follies made him a figure of contempt to his contemporaries and ridiculous to posterity. 

Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (August 1, 10 B.C.E. – October 13, 54)

On this day - 27th May

1647   Achsah Young, a resident of Windsor, CT, was executed for being a "witch." It was the first recorded American execution of a "witch."

1907   The Bubonic Plague broke out in San Francisco.

1931   Piccard and Knipfer made the first flight into the stratosphere, by balloon

1941   The German battleship Bismarck was sunk by British naval and air forces. 2,300 people were killed

1985   In Beijing, representatives of Britain and China exchanged instruments of ratification on the pact returning Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997

1996   Russian President Boris Yeltsin negotiated a cease-fire to the war in Chechnya in his first meeting with the leader of the rebels