On May 30, 1806, Revolutionary war veteran and future President Andrew Jackson killed Charles Dickinson in a duel., Andrew Jackson was the last president to be a veteran of the American Revolution and the first president to bring the backcountry values of the Carolinas to the White House. His willingness to not only duel Charles Dickinson, but also to kill him at short range for having printed libelous comments about Jackson, revealed the extent to which he had imbibed the brutality of the Carolinas during the revolution The content of Dickinsons slanderous comments about Jackson also indicated a great deal about the culture of Jacksons times. In 1790, Jackson claimed to marry Rachel Donelson Robards, whose husband had abandoned her. What Rachel and Jackson did not know was that the couple had not technically divorced, and when this was discovered, Rachel was ostracized by society as a bigamist. Her husband insisted on defending her honor, even if it required him to kill. The men rode from their homes inTennessee to Kentucky, where dueling was legal, in order to settle their deadly feud as gentlemen. On May 30, 1922, former President William Howard Taft dedicated the Lincoln Memorial on the Washington Mall . At the time, Taft was serving as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. On May 30,1990 President George Bush hosted Mikhail Gorbachev for a summit meeting centered on the issue of Germany and its place in a changing Europe. By late 1989, the Communist Party in East Germany was rapidly losing its grip on power; the Berlin Wall had come down and called for democracy and reunification with West Germany abounded . This brought about the question of a unified Germanys role in Europe. U.S. officials argued that Germany should become a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Soviets adamantly opposed this, fearful that a reunified and pro-western Germany might be a threat to Russian security. The Gorbachev-Bush summit ended after three days with no clear agreement on the future of Germany. Russias pressing economic needs, however, soon led to a breakthrough. In July 1990, Bush promised Gorbachev a large economic aid package and vowed that the German army would remain relatively small. The Soviet leader dropped his opposition to German membership in NATO. In October 1990, East and West Germany formally reunified and shortly thereafter joined NATO.
Posted on: Fri, 30 May 2014 13:30:29 +0000
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