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The Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes is driven from Tenochtitlan and retreats to Tlaxcala.
1609
The Catholic states in Germany set up a league under the leadership of Maximilian of Bavaria.
1679
The British crown claims New Hampshire as a royal colony.
1776
The statue of King George III is pulled down in New York City.
1778
In support of the American Revolution, Louis XVI declares war on England.
1850
Millard Fillmore is sworn in as the 13th president of the United States following the death of Zachary Taylor.
1890
Wyoming becomes the 44th state.
1893
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performs the first successful open-heart surgery, without anesthesia.
1925
The trial of Tennessee teacher John T. Scopes opens, with Clarence Darrow appearing for the defense and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution.
1940
Germany begins the bombing of England.
1942
General Carl Spaatz becomes the head of the U.S. Air Force in Europe.
1943
American and British forces complete their amphibious landing of Sicily.
1945
U.S. carrier-based aircraft begin airstrikes against Japan in preparation for invasion.
1951
Armistice talks between the United Nations and North Korea begin at Kaesong.
1960
Belgium sends troops to the Congo to
protect whites as the Congolese Bloodbath begins, just 10 days after the
former colony became independent of Belgian rule.
1962
The satellite Telstar is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, beaming live television from Europe to the United States.
1965
“(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” becomes the Rolling Stones’ first No. 1 single in the USA.
1967
Singer Bobbie Gentry records “Ode to Billie Joe,” which will become a country music classic and win 4 Grammys.
1976
In Seveso, near Milan, Italy, an explosion in a chemical factory covers the surrounding area with toxic dioxin. Time magazine has ranked the Seveso incident No. 8 on its list of 10 worst environmental disasters.
1985
Coca-Cola Co. announces it will resume selling “old formula Coke,” following public outcry and falling sales of its “new Coke.”
1991
Boris Yeltsin is sworn in as the first elected president of the Russian Federation, following the breakup of the USSR.
1993
Kenyan runner Yobes Ondieki becomes the first man to run 10,000 meters in less than 27 minutes.
Thumbing his nose at authority and whipping crowds into a frenzy, he changed music forever.
Ludwig van Beethoven was often mistaken for a
vagrant. With wads of yellow cotton stuffed in his ears, he stomped
around 1820s Vienna, flailing his arms, mumbling as he scribbled on
scraps of paper. Residents would frequently alert the police. Once, he
was tossed in jail when cops refused to believe he was the city’s most
famous composer. “You’re a tramp!” they argued. “Beethoven doesn’t look
like this.”
The city was crawling with spies—they lurked in
taverns, markets, and coffeehouses, looking to suss out
anti-aristocratic rebels. Since Beethoven seemed suspect, these spies
followed him and eavesdropped on his conversations. But authorities
didn’t consider him a real threat. Like the rest of Vienna, they
thought he was crazy. It had been nearly 10 years since he wrote his
Symphony No. 8, and just as long since he’d last given a public
concert. “He is apparently quite incapable of greater accomplishments,”
the newspaper Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung concluded.
Little
did they know, Beethoven was composing like a man possessed. At his
apartment, he stomped out tempos and pounded his piano keys so hard the
strings snapped. Sweat-stained manuscripts littered the room. He was
so focused, he often forgot to empty the chamber pot under his piano.
The
piece would be his grandest yet: Symphony No. 9 in D minor. With it,
he planned to give those spies reason to worry—not only would the piece
be political, but he intended to play it for the largest audience
possible. The music, he hoped, would put the nobility in its place
Born to a family of Flemish
court musicians in 1770, Beethoven had no choice but to take up music.
His grandfather was a well-respected music director in Bonn, Germany.
His father, Johann, was a not-so-well-respected court singer who gave
young Ludwig piano lessons. Some nights, Johann would stagger home from
the tavern, barge into Ludwig’s room, and make him practice until
dawn. The piano keys were routinely glazed with tears.
A decade
earlier, 7-year-old Mozart had toured Europe, playing music for royal
courts and generating income for his family. Johann dreamed of a
similar course for his son. He lied about Ludwig’s age to make him
appear younger, and for a time, even Ludwig didn’t know his real age.
But
the Beethovens saw neither fame nor fortune. Johann’s drinking debts
were so deep his wife had to sell her clothes. When Ludwig turned 11,
his family pulled him from elementary school to focus on music
full-time. The truncated education meant he never mastered spelling or
simple multiplication.
By the time he was 22, Beethoven’s world
had changed. His parents passed away, and he left Bonn for Vienna,
where Mozart, the aristocracy’s most cherished entertainer, had
recently died too. The nobles were desperate to find his replacement,
and Beethoven, who improvised at the piano for royal soirees, quickly
became regarded as one of Vienna’s most talented musicians—and Mozart’s
heir.
But the more Beethoven hobnobbed with aristocrats, the more
he despised them. Musicians were treated like cooks, maids, and shoe
shiners—they were merely servants of the court. Even Mozart had to sit
with the cooks at dinnertime.
Beethoven refused to be put in
his place. He demanded to be seated at the head table with royalty.
When other musicians arrived at court wearing wigs and silk stockings,
he came in a commoner’s clothes. (Composer Luigi Cherubini said he
resembled an “unlicked bear cub.”) He refused to play if he wasn’t in
the mood. When other musicians performed, he talked over them. When
people talked over him, he exploded and called them “swine.” Once, when
his improvisations moved listeners to tears, he chastised them for
crying instead of clapping.
Most musicians would have been fired
for this behavior, but Beethoven’s talent was too magnetic. “He knew
how to produce such an effect upon every hearer that frequently not an
eye remained dry, while many would break into loud sobs,” Carl Czerny
wrote in Cocks’s Musical Miscellany. So Archduke Rudolph made an exception: Beethoven could ignore court etiquette.
But
Beethoven wasn’t alone in his resentment. A few hundred miles to the
west, in France, aristocrats were being queued up for the guillotine,
and a stiff anti-royalist air was sweeping in toward Vienna. While not a
fan of bloodshed, Beethoven supported the Revolution. He loved the
free thought it encouraged, and he toyed with the idea of setting music
to Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy,” a call for brotherhood and
liberty.
But he never wrote the piece. Harboring revolutionary
sentiments left him in a pickle: His career depended on the people he
wanted to see uprooted. So he kept quiet. As the decade wore on,
Viennese nobility continued to lionize him—he rose to be one of the
city’s biggest celebrities. Then his ears began to ring. It started as a faint whistle.
Doctors advised him to fill his ears with almond oil and take cold
baths. Nothing worked. By 1800, his ears were buzzing day and night.
Beethoven sank into depression, stopped attending social functions, and
retreated to the countryside, where loneliness drove him to consider
suicide.
Music
kept him going. “It seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I
had produced all that I felt was within me,” he wrote. At 31, he was
known as a virtuoso, not as a composer. But it seemed he had little
choice. He snuffed his performing career and dedicated himself to
writing.
Artistically, isolation had its benefits. Every morning,
he woke at 5:30 a.m. and composed for two hours until breakfast. Then
he wandered through meadows, a pencil and notebook in hand, lost in
thought. Sketching ideas, he mumbled, waved his arms, sang, and
stomped. One time, he made such a ruckus that a yoke of oxen began to
stampede. He often forgot to sleep or eat, but did pause to make
coffee—counting precisely 60 beans for each cup. He sat in restaurants
for hours, scribbling music on napkins, menus, even windows.
Distracted, he’d accidentally pay other people’s bills.
He
started grumbling more openly about politics. He admired Napoleon and
planned on publicly naming his third symphony for the general. It was a
daring move: Napoleon was imperial Austria’s enemy. But when Napoleon
declared himself Emperor of the French, Beethoven was disgusted. “Now
he will trample on all human rights and indulge only his own ambition.
He will place himself above everyone and become a tyrant,” he wrote,
ditching the dedication. In 1809, Napoleon’s troops stormed into
Vienna. The booming of his cannons hurt Beethoven’s eardrums so much he
retreated to the cellar and buried his head under pillows.
In
1814, Napoleon’s empire collapsed and Austria’s nobility attempted to
restore order. Within a few years, Prince Klemens von Metternich had
established the world’s first modern police state. The press was banned
from publishing without the state’s blessing. The government removed
university professors who expounded “harmful doctrines hostile to public
order.” Undercover cops infested Vienna. Beethoven’s contempt for
power grew.
Although he still had royal patrons, Beethoven had
fewer friends in high places. Many were missing or dead, and his
ordinary friends were just as unlucky—briefly jailed or censored.
Thankfully, Beethoven wrote instrumental music. For years, listeners
considered it an inferior, even vulgar, art form compared to song or
poetry. But as tyrants returned to power, Romantic thinkers like E.T.A.
Hoffmann and Goethe praised instrumental music as a place for solace
and truth. “The censor cannot hold anything against musicians,” Franz
Grillparzer told Beethoven. “If they only knew what you think about in
your music!”
That’s when the composer made the brash decision to
return to Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” Censors in Vienna had banned
Schiller’s works in 1783, then reauthorized it 25 years later only
after some whitewashing. (The original says, “Beggars will become the
brothers of princes.” Beethoven had stronger feelings, writing in his
notebook, “Princes are beggars.”) Adding words to a symphony would
destroy the safety net of ambiguity that instrumental composers
enjoyed, spelling Beethoven’s motives out for all to hear. On May 7, 1824,
Vienna’s Karntnertor Theater was packed. Beethoven had spent months
preparing for this moment, corralling nearly 200 musicians and dealing
with censors who quibbled over a religious work on the program. They
did not, however, complain about Symphony No. 9. No one had heard it
yet.
Beethoven took the conductor’s
baton, beating time for the start of each movement. The musicians’
eyes were glued to his every move, but in reality, none of them
followed his lead. They had been ordered not to. Stone deaf, Beethoven
was an unreliable conductor, so a friend actually led the orchestra.
The
piece was four movements long and lasted a little more than an hour.
The first three movements were purely instrumental; the last contained
Schiller’s ode. But when one of the movements finished, the hall
exploded with applause. Modern audiences would scold such behavior, but
during Beethoven’s lifetime, a public concert was more like a rock
show. People spontaneously clapped, cheered, and booed mid-performance.
As
the audience hollered for more, Beethoven continued waving his arms,
oblivious to the cheering and sea of waving handkerchiefs behind him.
The applause was so loud, and lasted for so long, that the police had
to yell for silence. When the performance finished, a teary-eyed
Beethoven almost fainted.
The Ninth was a hit. But not with the
aristocracy, who never showed up. Undeterred, Beethoven kept with
tradition and dedicated the Symphony to a royal, King Friedrich Wilhelm
III of Prussia. He sent the King a copy of the score and, in return,
the King sent Beethoven a beautiful diamond ring. It appeared to be a
gift of gratitude, but when Beethoven took the ring to a jeweler to
sell it, the jeweler had bad news: The diamond was fake. Beethoven had
clearly pushed some buttons.
The Ninth would be Beethoven’s last,
and most famous, symphony. When he died in 1827, some 20,000 people
filled the streets for his funeral. Schools were closed. Soldiers were
called to ensure order. Five years later, people suggested erecting a
Beethoven monument in Bonn. In the 1840s, Bonn celebrated its first
“Beethoven Festival.” Salespeople hawked Beethoven neckties, Beethoven
cigars, and even Beethoven pants.
All of it was groundbreaking.
Never before had a musician garnered so much attention. It indicated a
larger cultural sea change: A society that reveres artists and makes
them celebrities. In a way, Beethoven was the world’s first rock star.
Beethoven-worship
changed the course of art history. Isolated. Autonomous. Rebellious.
Sublime. He was Romanticism’s posterboy, and his stature elevated the
meaning of artist: No longer a skilled craftsman, like a cook
or carpenter, an artist became a person who suffered to express
emotions, genius, or—in drippier language—their soul. Beethoven’s
success helped cement ideas that now define Western art.
And, of
course, his influence on classical music is vast. The bigger, stronger
modern piano emerged partly to accommodate his pieces. The first
professional orchestras appeared in his wake, many with the goal of
preserving his work. He was one of the first musicians to be canonized.
Some argue the movement to immortalize his work eventually made
classical music turn stale.
Before Beethoven, the works of dead
composers were rarely played. But by the 1870s, dead composers owned
the concert hall. They still do today. Aaron Copland would complain
that “musical art, as we hear it in our day, suffers if anything from
an overdose of masterworks.” John Cage bemoaned that “[Beethoven’s]
influence, which has been as extensive as it is lamentable, has been
deadening to the art of music.” Indeed, attending a classical music
concert can be like visiting a museum.
It’s often forgotten that
the piece that secured Beethoven’s status as an icon and reshaped the
course of classical music was, at its heart, a powerful work of
politics. In concentration camps during World War II, prisoners took
solace in Beethoven’s message of freedom. In one heartbreaking tale, a
children’s choir rehearsed “Ode to Joy” in Auschwitz’s latrines. It’s
been sung at every Olympic Games since 1956. When the Berlin Wall fell,
Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth with musicians from both sides
of the divide. Today, it’s the national anthem of the European Union,
and the message remains relevant. The same problems that plagued Vienna
nearly 200 years ago—war, inequality, censorship, surveillance—have
not disappeared. Perhaps it’s naive to believe that “all men will
become brothers,” as the piece proclaims. But Beethoven, who never
heard his own symphony, didn’t write it for himself. He wrote it for
others. It’s our job to not only hear his message, but also to truly
listen.
James
Young Simpson didn’t invent chloroform, but he championed its use as a
surgical anesthetic. He opened a container of it during a meeting of
physicians in 1847 and laughed at the giggling, snoring results.
Chloroform was better than the ether then in use, as ether was very
flammable and often left the patient thrashing about in their sleep. But
any anesthetic was suspicious, because people were afraid of not waking
up afterward. And no one really understood how it worked.
More
questions about chloroform arose, mostly because the substance was
ill-understood: some, for example, believed it could be strictly a
respiratory depressant. But such concerns were set aside for the demand
created by the Civil War, which required a fast-acting anesthetic on the
battlefield. Of the 80,000 operations surveyed by Union physicians, all
but 254 used anesthetic of some kind — usually chloroform, and
sometimes a mixture of ether and chloroform to help mitigate the risks
of either.
Any fears about induced sleep were quickly mitigated
by the searing pain of a shrapnel-fed leg. The patient would inhale and
the vapor would first numb the senses. Relaxation would set in, followed
by a feeling of impairment. The patient would cease to move, to feel
and to have any awareness of the scalpels digging into their flesh. In
short, it was just what they needed.
Occasional cardiac death
aside, chloroform was a wonder drug. And any lingering doubts the
general public had about its administration ended in 1853, when Queen
Victoria gave birth without feeling a thing.
As
chloroform grew in popularity for surgery, it was also used for
entertainment at parties and for private highs. But all it took was for
one person to accuse a doctor of impropriety while a victim was
unconscious from chloroform, and the substance gained a reputation as a
crime tool. Read about chloroform during its heyday at Van Winkle’s.
Choose
your major wisely because you don't want to just flush your money away.
The new building for the North China University of Water Conservancy
and Electric Power in Heinan, China is, appropriately, shaped like a
massive toilet. The Chinese central government is circulating photos of
it to describe its recent move to ban "weird buildings."
Proper architecture, the government argues, does not try to imitate other objects, such as cell phones or human genitals. You can see photos of other weird Chinese buildings at Shanghaiist.
His
Royal Highness Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, Prince of Venice, is the
grandson of King Umberto II, the last King of Italy. That nation
abolished its monarchy in 1946 and exiled the royal family. So Prince
Emanuele has lived most of his life abroad.
Lately, he's been in
Los Angeles. He learned that the food truck business was booming there
and saw an investment opportunity. So he created an Italian cuisine food
truck called The Prince of Venice, which is one of his formal titles,
and painted it with the colors of the House of Savoy. The Telegraph reports:
“I
came to Los Angeles six months ago for an event and I realized there
were various Mexican and Asian food trucks around, “ the prince told
Italian magazine, Chi, in an interview.
“I thought ‘why don’t I try it?’ With a food truck with fresh Italian pasta that is loved around the world.” […]
The
would-be heir, who was born in Geneva and is married with two children,
says his new business is flourishing and he’s relishing the role.
He
has hired a chef, Mirko Paderno, and sells dishes like fettucine with
shrimp and clams or linguine with truffles for as little as $15.
A Pennsylvania woman pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct for having
such loud sex that it shook the furniture in a neighbor’s home, and
then threatened her neighbors for complaining about it.
Red Lion residents who shared a row house wall with Amanda Marie Warfel,
25, had complained of sex noises, loud music and threats coming from
her home on March 21.
The sounds and bangs coming from Warfel’s apartment became so loud that her neighbour’s own bed and dresser shook,
according to an arrest affidavit.
When her neighbor knocked on the common wall and asked for quiet,
Warfel yelled back and became louder, the court document said.
She pleaded guilty on Wednesday.
During the hearing, Warfel said that she wished that her neighbors were
in the court so she could apologize.
Warfel was ordered to spend 45 to 90 days in York County Prison. She's
already served that sentence, but is being held on a detainer from
Lancaster County. It is not immediately clear why that's in place.
She was also ordered to pay court costs and was told not to have contact
with her neighbors under any circumstance.
“I will not,” Warfel said.
Police said Warfel’s neighbor had dealt with this issue before on
February 17 and again on February 26, when she yelled obscenities and
racial slurs at her neighbor in response.
Warfel pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and harassment charges in
that incident.
A Florida man was arrested after police said he attempted to steal a boat, but forgot about untying it from its dock.
Jimmie Shuman, 42, almost got away with the heist outside the waterfront
restaurant Sailor’s Return in Stuart when he tried to make off with the
23-foot boat at around 10pm on June 24.
However, while attempting to ride off, Shuman didn’t realize that the boat was still tied to the dock.
“The victim stated he saw the defendant on his boat trying to drive it away, but the boat was still tied to the dock
at Sailor’s Return,” an affidavit states.
The man whose boat he was trying to take, a retired law enforcement officer, detained Shuman until police arrived.
He told police he wished to prosecute Shuman before officers took him to jail.
Shuman, of Stuart, was arrested on charges including grand theft of a boat and battery on a law enforcement officer.
A kebab shop owner calmly carried on making souvlaki while a gunman
attempted to rob his store in Christchurch, New Zealand.
CCTV footage posted by Canterbury police shows Said Ahmed bagging up a
souvlaki when a masked and armed robber enters the the Egyptian Kebab
House shortly before 11pm on May 28.
Unfazed, Mr Ahmed finished the order, reaching right past the offender to hand it to a customer.
Mr Ahmed then calmly turned around and walked away.
The would-be robber then left as well, without taking a thing.
"He was surprised from my reaction - 'I have come to rob him and he is walking away from me, so what can I do?'" Mr Ahmed said.
"I was sure he would not shoot me.
"He came to rob me, not to kill me."
Mr Ahmed said at first he thought the man was a customer, smiling at him like he would anyone else.
"When he came closer I realized he was wearing a mask on his face, I could see just his eyes."
The man retrieved a gun from his backpack, pointed it at Mr Ahmed and demanded money.
"When I saw the gun I thought, oh this is different, this is a robbery."
Mr Ahmed walking away seemed to confuse the man, who hesitated, then left the shop.
"When he found this reaction from me, I ignored him, I walked to the kitchen and called the police - nothing he can do.
He didn't scare me ... he failed, unsuccessful night."
Canterbury police posted the video on Thursday afternoon, asking members of the public to help them identify the gunman.
You can watch the CCTV video footage here and a follow-up interview with Mr Ahmed here.
Lawyers working on behalf of Roger Ailes, the chairman of the wingnut Fox 'News' Channel, filed a legal motion on Friday that would
hide the details of...
Kevin
Kit Parker, Sung-Jin Park, and their team of scientists have built a
real-life cyborg, a robot consisting of both artificial and biological
components. While not yet Terminator level,
it’s both fascinating and scary. The medusoid has a body made of
silicone, with a gold skeleton, covered with genetically-engineered rat
heart cells that provide its movement.
Infected
with a virus that delivers the gene encoding the optogenetic molecular
switch, the modified cardiac cells twitch when blue light shines on
them. But translating that effect into coherent motion took months of
tweaking; simply getting a robot ray to move forward when light
stimulated the front of its fin took Park 200 tries. Ultimately, he
built 100 more robots and showed they could navigate underwater obstacle
courses. To negotiate turns, Park guides a ray with two light sources,
one pointed at each fin. Changing the frequency of the light slows or
speeds up the contraction rate; by making one side beat faster than the
other, he steers the robot left or right.
