HISTORY FACTS While Theodore Roosevelt was campaigning in Milwaukee in 1912, a would-be assassin fired a bullet into the right side of his chest. Much of the force of the slug was absorbed by the Presidents eyeglasses case and by the 50 page speech he was carrying double-folded in his breast pocket. Nevertheless, the bullet lodged itself just short of his lung, and, dripping in blood, Roosevelt pulled himself up to the podium. He asked the crowd to please ...be very quiet and excuse me from making a long speech. Ill do the best I can, but theres a bullet in my body... I have a message to deliver, and I will deliver it as long as there is life in my body. He spoke for 90 minutes, but was unable to refer to his text due to the gaping hole which the bullet had torn through it. Karl Marx was targeted for assassination when he met with two Prussian officers in his house in Cologne in 1848. Marx had friends among the German labor unions, and he was considered a threat to the autocrats. Dressed in his bathrobe, he forced the officers out at the point of a revolver, which, it turned out, was not loaded. Ishi was believed to be the last of the Yahi, a tribe of Native Americans living in California that were wiped out by disease and massacres. In the early part of the twentieth century (1911), he became a sensation when he wandered out of the woods near Oroville. Ishi was taken to the University of California at San Francisco where he lived and worked (as a janitor) in the anthropology museum, helping researchers to document the Yahi language, until his death from tuberculosis in 1916. His name, Ishi, was given to him by the anthropologists. Linguists believe it was his tribes word for man. The first man to distill bourbon whiskey in the United States was a Baptist preacher, in 1789. The Aztec Indians of Mexico believed turquoise would protect them from physical harm, and so warriors used these green and blue stones to decorate their battle shields. More than 5,000 years ago, the Chinese discovered how to make silk from silkworm cocoons. For about 3,000 years, the Chinese kept this discovery a secret. Because poor people could not afford real silk, they tried to make other cloth look silky. Women would beat on cotton with sticks to soften the fibers. Then they rubbed it against a big stone to make it shiny. The shiny cotton was called chintz. Because chintz was a cheaper copy of silk, calling something chintzy means it is cheap and not of good quality. The pharaohs of ancient Egypt wore garments made with thin threads of beaten gold. Some fabrics had up to 500 gold threads per one inch of cloth. The ancient Egyptians recommended mixing half an onion with beer foam as a way of warding off death. The Chinese, in olden days, used marijuana only as a remedy for dysentery. Scientific America carried the first magazine automobile ad in 1898. The Winton Motor Car Company of Cleveland, OH, invited readers to dispense with a horse.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 23:54:48 +0000
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