History on Air

Happy Birthday Danica Patrick

Today we continue the theme of beautiful women on historyonair.com. Yesterday we mourned the loss of the beautiful and talented Elizabeth Taylor. Today we celebrate the birth of Danica Patrick who today is 29. Why am I writing a post about her? Have you seen her? No, but really she is a very talented woman. She has broken through many barriers to get to where she is.

In 2005, which was her debut season, she won the award for IndyCar Rookie of the Year. From 2005 to 2007 and again in 2009 she won IndyCar Most Popular Driver.

Today she will turn 29. She was born in Beloit, Wisconsin. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona with …her husband, sorry guys. She started racing professionally in IndyCar, but in February 2010, she had her first professional nascar race. Patrick has hosted several TV shows on SpikeTV. She was featured on Sports Illustrated on June 6, 2005 (image below). That was the first time that a Indianapolis 500 driver on the cover since Al Unser in 1987.

She was (of course) a cheerleader in high school, but later dropped out. She did later get her GED. Interesting side notes: Patrick owns a Mercedes-Benz ML 63 AMG, and a Lamborghini Gallardo. She has received two speeding tickets in her hometown of Scottsdale, Arizona. The first, in 2007, was for driving 57 mph in a 40 mph zone, for which she was ordered to attend traffic school; the second, in 2008, was for going 54 mph in a 35 mph zone, and she paid a $196 fine.

Further Learning:

Danica–Crossing the Line

FAME: Danica Patrick

Ah, the benefits of having your own blog and choosing the history you want to cover! This was a fun one to cover for a Friday. Happy Birthday Danica and thanks for making my Friday a bit brighter!

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Planned Website Maintenance

My website hosting company has informed me that they will physically be moving the server that historyonair.com resides on. This will happen between 9 PM, March 23rd and 5 AM March 24th (MDT). The website will be down for this entire period. I apologize for any inconvenience.

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Elizabeth Taylor Biography

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor passed away yesterday, Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at the age of 79. The two-time Oscar winner was admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in February for symptoms of heart failure. Taylor is one of the most recognized film stars of recent history. She has been in around 50 films and also appeared numerous times in television programs. She is widely known for her 8 marriages and work with AIDS research fundraising.

Elizabeth was born with a mutation that caused double rows of eyelashes, which enhanced her appearance on camera.

Taylor was born in London, England on February 27, 1932 to her American parents Francis and Sara Taylor. Her father was an art dealer with a business in London. Her mother was an actress. Two years before her birth, her brother Howard was born. In 1939 the family moved back to the states, were Taylor began her career as a child actress. She would appear in her first movie, There’s One Born Every Minute at the age of 9.

She is most well known for her roles in:

• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• Giant
• All My Children

Taylor helped raise tens of millions of dollars for AIDS research during her life. She created the Elizabeth Taylor Aids Foundation. Elizabeth had four children with three of her husband’s. She won Oscars for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and BUtterfield 8. She was nominated for three other Oscars. She won the Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute in 1993.

“Though her loss is devastating to those of us who held her so close and so dear, we will always be inspired by her enduring contribution to our world. Her remarkable body of work in film, her ongoing success as a businesswoman, and her brave and relentless advocacy in the fight against HIV/AIDS, all make us all incredibly proud of what she accomplished,” says her son, Michael Wilding.

Further Learning:

• Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century
• How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood
• Elizabeth: The Life of Elizabeth Taylor
• Elizabeth

Books Taylor wrote herself:

• Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair with Jewelry
• Elizabeth Taylor’s Nibbles and Me
• Elizabeth Takes Off

Text sources: http://www.notablebiographies.com/St-Tr/Taylor-Elizabeth.html, http://www.cnn.com/2011/SHOWBIZ/03/23/obit.elizabeth.taylor/index.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Taylor, http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000072/

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Anti-Chinese Massacre of 1871

On October 24, 1871 a police officer responding to shots fired entered a notoriously bad area of Los Angeles to find a Chinese man shot in the neck. He saw men fleeing the scene and followed them into a building. He was then shot in the shoulder. Hearing his cries a local business owner also rushed into the same building, after firing several shots into it. He too was shot his injury much worse, he died an hour later.

Soon a mob developed and started to lay siege to the building the fleeing men were held up in. 17 Chinese were hung from the local wagon shop roof.

This was the largest mass lynching in American history and I bet, like me, you have never heard of it. Thank you to Christian P. who brought this to my attention. The whole article can be found on laweekly.com.

This story is not over yet. It was later revealed that the officer that went to investigate the shots may have actually been going to rob from a rich Chinese business man. The officer turns out to be not such a great guy, many court cases were filed against him. For example some accused him of stealing valuable roosters to fight in his cockfighting side business. The officer was also a gambler and believed to be manipulating the voting. This thing is so screwed up! Eventually, several people are brought to court for the charges, but the case gets thrown out. Unbelievable.

The story gets better, and it is amazing that there has not been a book published about this incident yet. There is a chapter on it in A Companion to Los Angeles (Blackwell Companions to American History). You can read some of the chapter in this book by googling The Anti-Chinese Massacre of 1871 Victor Jew the 5th link down is a link to the google book preview.

According to Wikipedia it is also briefly covered in The Brick People.

Image credit: Marion Doss unrelated image of lynching.

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Book Review: Unsolved Mysteries of History

I picked up Unsolved Mysteries of History: An Eye-Opening Investigation into the Most Baffling Events of All Time (n avery long title!) off the discounted shelves at Barnes & Noble on a whim. It sat for probably a year before I got to it. I was interested in it because I was hoping it would have some obscure historical mysteries in it. The book is divided up like this, each chapter covers a topic. Each one is presented as a question. For example, the first chapter is called “Were the Neanderthals our Ancestors?” It does cover some interesting topics, but each one is covered very quickly. Not enough attention is paid to each topic. Like the first chapter, you could write a whole book about this topic, but the author only covers this topic as a chapter. The book as a whole is very short making it impossible for the author to give the right amount of attention to each topic. The book is only 225 pages.

This books is one of those quick reads that you pick up for a short plane ride or something. Not something you are really going to get engrossed in. A quick history fix, if you will. I can’t recommend you to pick this one up, spend your time on something better that goes into the depth of a subject not something that briefly covers a large range. It has 3 stars out of 13 reviews at Amazon.com and 3.21 stars out of 28 ratings at Goodreads.com. Not a lot of people are reading this and they don’t really like or dislike the book.

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Remembering Brittanie Cecil

Today I’m going to share a very sad story with you. Brittanie Cecil’s story is the heart-wrenching story of the only fan to have ever been killed by an errant puck. On March 16, 2002 Brittanie Cecil went to the Blue Jackets vs. Calgary Flames game. During the game Espen Knutsen, a player on the Blue Jackets hit a slap shot toward the goal, but before it got there it was deflected by another player and it shot up into the stands.

It went right for Brittanie and hit her just above her nose. She was a 13 year old hockey fan at her first game. She was excited to be there. She was bleeding from the hit but it didn’t seem that bad, she was able to talk to everyone around her and with a jacket over her nose she was led out of the stadium and was taken to the hospital just to make sure everything was okay.

Once at the hospital they did some xrays, but Brittanie seemed fine. Even joking with her grandfather that she had a cool souvenir from the game, she had kept the puck. But two days later she complained of a headache and things went down hill from there. It was later discovered that she had a torn artery in the back of her neck. It did not show in the xrays that the hospital had taken. A blood clot developed and eventually cut off the blood circulation to the other two arteries to her brain.

The doctors found the problem and repaired it, but it was too late and Brittanie died 2 days after she was hit by the puck and two days before her 14th birthday. The player who hit the puck, Espen Knutsen blamed himself and was never the same. He tired playing for a few more years, but it didn’t really work out for him and after he ran into the boards a little too hard in 2005, he never came back to the game of hockey.

One good thing that came of all this was that NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman ruled that before games could start for the 2002 season all arenas must install protective netting behind the nets.

Sorry to be a downer today, but I thought this brave little hockey fan should be remembered.

text sources: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1025413/index.htm, http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1026135/index.htm, http://www.bluejacketsxtra.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2010/03/21/brittanies-legacy.html?sid=101

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I hope you are wearing green or you might get pinched. But why do we pinch? According to the Christina Science Monitor:

No surprise, it’s an entirely American tradition that probably started in the early 1700s. St. Patrick’s revelers thought wearing green made one invisible to leprechauns, fairy creatures who would pinch anyone they could see (anyone not wearing green). People began pinching those who didn’t wear green as a reminder that leprechauns would sneak up and pinch green-abstainers.

Want to listent ot a podcast about St. Patrick’s Day, you’re in luck, I pulled this one out of the vault. All the way back from 2006. Enjoy!

But wait there’s more. Who was the man behind St. Patrick’s Day? According to National Geographic he was:

For starters, the real St. Patrick wasn’t even Irish. He was born in Britain around A.D. 390 to an aristocratic Christian family with a townhouse, a country villa, and plenty of slaves. What’s more, Patrick professed no interest in Christianity as a young boy, Freeman noted. At 16, Patrick’s world turned: He was kidnapped and sent overseas to tend sheep as a slave in the chilly, mountainous countryside of Ireland for seven years. “It was just horrible for him,” Freeman said. “But he got a religious conversion while he was there and became a very deeply believing Christian.”

There is a ton of content to get you St. Patrick’s Day fix on history.com. If that is not enough, try this:

Further Learning:
St. Patrick’s Day (Holiday Histories)
The Harp and The Shamrock
The Story of St. Patrick’s Day
Paddy Whacked – The Irish Mob (History Channel)
The History of St. Patrick’s Day

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The Scarlet Letter is Published

One of my favorites from my high school reading list.  One of the few assigned readings I enjoyed at that age and one of the few that I remember.  The Scarlet Letter was published on this day in 1850. One of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most popular and well-known books, largely considered his “great work”. I would be remise if I didn’t mention The House of the Seven Gables, one of his other famous works.

The Scarlet letter is a fictional romance tale set in Puritan Boston in the years 1642 to 1649.  There have been several film adaptations of the book:

• The Scarlet Letter 1995 with Demi Moore
• The Scarlet Letter 1979 with Meg Foster
• The Scarlet Letter 1934 with Colleen Moore
• The Scarlet Letter 1972 with Senta Berger

Further Learning:

Biographies on Nathaniel Hawthorne:

• Hawthorne: A Life
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (American Literary Greats)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times

They didn’t have this when I was in school, but nowadays you don’t even have to read the cliff notes, they have videos for free online that go over the whole book, see below.  And if you want more but don’t want to read the WHOLE cliff notes you can read the long description of the story on wikipedia that is basically the whole book.  It is amazing, I guess students now don’t have to read the story at all.

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Podcast Review: The Memory Palace

For this review I listened to episode 37 of The Memory Palace. It is entitled “natural curiosity”. It is about Joice Heth, the African American slave that P.T. Barnum put on display and told everyone she was 161 years old nanny of George Washington. It is a wonderfully told story of a piece of history that is very obscure. The episode itself is just short of 7 minutes, because there just is not much known about Joice Heth. Even her Wikipedia article is very short. There is a book that Nate the author of the podcast mentions on the website, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America by Benjamin Reiss.

Some nitpicky things, the sound was a little quiet so I had to turn up my ipod quit a bit. No description notes in the lyrics section of the podcast. I always find these useful when listening to a new podcast for the first time. Nate played music in the background of the podcast, but it didn’t bother me at all.

I would recommend this podcast for history lovers. It is currently number 9 in the history podcast category on iTunes [iTunes Link]. It has 5 stars out of 5 stars, with 254 ratings. The podcast also has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. There is an interview of Nate located on this website (click on “Extra”).

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Albert Einstein Born

On this day in 1879 Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, which is about 90 miles or 141 km West of Munich. Six weeks after Einstein was born his family travelled that 141 km to Munich. This is where Einstein began his education at Luitpold Gymnasium. His family would again move to Italy, but Einstein would be attending school in Aaru, Switzerland. In 1896 he found himself in Zurich attending the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School. There, he trained to be a teacher of Physics and Mathematics. In 1901 he gained his Swiss citizenship and his diploma. When he was not able to find a teaching position he grabbed a job at the Swiss Patent Office. He married Mileva Maric in 1903 and they had a daughter and two sons, but this didn’t slow down his education.  He wasn’t able to stop his education and in 1905 he obtained his doctor’s degree. Still this wasn’t enough and in 1908 he got his PhD in Berne.

In 1911 he became a professor of theoretical physics in Prague. In 1914 he was appointed Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute and Professor in the University of Berlin.  In 1919 his wife died and he married his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, who died in 1936.  He must of liked it in Germany because he became a citizen the same year and stayed there until 1933. But that didn’t last because he left for America because of “political reasons”. He quickly got a job as Professor of Theoretical Physics at Princeton. In 1940 he became an American citizen and in 1945 he retired. But he continued to learn and try to figure out things himself.

Einstein’s work is chronicled in many publications:

• Special Theory of Relativity (1905)
• Relativity (English translations, 1920 and 1950)
• General Theory of Relativity (1916)
• Investigations on Theory of Brownian Movement (1926)
• The Evolution of Physics (1938)

His non-scientific works:

• About Zionism (1930)
• Why War? (1933)
• My Philosophy (1934)
• Out of My Later Years (1950)

Einstein traveled the world giving speeches and presentations.  He was honored with numerous awards and received many honorary degrees from a bunch of universities.  Einstein died on April 18, 1955 at Princeton, New Jersey.

Further Learning:

Einstein: His Life and Universe

text source: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/einstein-bio.html

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