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    Baltimore History Examiner
    Self Evident Truths
    POSTED July 6, 12:09 PM
     I know, I know, what kind of history examiner does no post on the 4th of July!  Well sometimes you have to take a time out and live life (or history) to enjoy it.  I did that this weekend.  I could have spent time putting together a post about our storied revolution.  I could have waxed nostalgic about how our founders drew a line in the sand and said no more to the tyranny of King George.  I could have written about how on July 4 1863, the smoke had cleared from the fields of Gettysburg where brave men gave the "last full measure of devotion" turning the tide of a war, which would decide whether or not our form of government would "perish from the earth." 

     Those tales have been told, and will be told again and again.  I'm sure I will tell them sometime in future.  However, this Fourth of July provided a bit of personal history for me.  You see it was the first one for my daughter Mattie, and really, the first one for me as a father. Mattie is almost three now, and our last two 4ths were rained out. This one came close as well.  This was the first time she was going to see fireworks.   As an adult I've been kind of jaded when it comes to fireworks.  After all, how new and exciting can they be for a 34-year old! 
     
    As we get older the things that excited us as children no longer hold the same joy. Jaded maybe too strong a word, but the feeling that Christmas or your birthday, are just not the same, is palpable. All that changed last Friday night.  The joy came not from the fine performance of the BSO or the dazzling fireworks display. Rather it came from the joy they provided my daughter. Seeing the starbursts reflected in her widened eyes, and her fists clenched up to her chest in excitement allowed me to capture a glimpse of the joy I had once felt. 
     
    The Fourth of July is about remembering our declaration of independence from Great Britain, and that there are brave men and women who put their lives on the line to defend our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yes it is all about those big things, but it is also about the small things, like the gleam in your child’s eyes at the rocket’s red glare. 

     

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    Eminent Domain and the Flight of the Colts
    POSTED July 2, 5:46 AM
      Stephen Walters and Louis Miserendino’s report Baltimore’s Flawed Renaissance: The Failure of Plan-Control-Subsidize Redevelopment is a gold mine for instructive historical tidbits. If their cogent economic argument against the... Read More
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    Plan, Control, Subsidize--Fail
    POSTED June 27, 7:34 AM
     Previously, I discussed the historical examples of the perils of government regulations and government planning. See here and here. My point was that the more fingers government puts into the market the larger the impetus for big business... Read More
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    Maryland Political Scandals
    POSTED June 26, 12:24 AM
      The travails of Sheila Dixon and Ulysses Currie are just the latest in a long line of Maryland political scandals. Here are some of the more recent and memorable scandals. 1973—Then Vice-President Spiro Agnew, pleads nolo contendre... Read More
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    "A More Perfect Union"
    POSTED June 22, 7:39 AM
     On June 21 1788, the state of New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution of the United States of America, thereby putting it into effect as the law of the land.Although all 13 states would eventually ratify the document, New... Read More
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    The Day the Dream Died
    POSTED June 19, 8:14 AM
      How ironic that the Boston Celtics won the NBA Championship nearly 22 years to the day the man they drafted to win several more died.  I will never forget June 19, 1986, the day Len Bias died.  For me, Bias was and will always... Read More
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    Get Your History On
    POSTED June 16, 11:14 AM
     One of Baltimore's true gems is the Maryland Historical Society.  The MDHS, founded in 1844, is a "temple of Maryland memories and of Maryland fame."  The MDHS complex, located at 210 West Monument St. offers a museum, special... Read More
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    "Tear Down this Wall"
    POSTED June 12, 7:20 AM
      One June 12, 1987, 21 years ago today, Ronald Reagan spoke in front of a large crowd of cheering West Berliners. With the Berlin Wall as a backdrop, Reagan challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to live up to his promise to liberalize... Read More
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    The Best Flag in the Union
    POSTED June 11, 3:32 PM
      I love our state flag. It truly is the best of all 50 states.  I hung one on my porch this past weekend.  Strangely, they are not easy to find in the Baltimore area unless you want to brave the parking nightmare at... Read More
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    Ben Franklin Flies His Kite
    POSTED June 10, 2:58 PM
     Today brought the resignation of PSC Chairman Steve Larsen, and extremely high demand for electricity. How ironic that on June 10, 1752 Ben Franklin supposedly flew a kite in a thunderstorm to prove his theory that... Read More
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    Mark Newgent
    Mark Newgent is a writer and editor with a talent for breathing history into everyday happenings.
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    Althea Gibson is first African American to win WimbledonOn this day in 1957, Althea Gibson claims the women's singles tennis title at Wimbledon and becomes the first African American to win a championship at London's All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.Gibson was born on August 25, 1927, in Silver, South Carolina, and raised in the Harlem section of New York City. She began playing tennis as a teenager and went on to win the national black women's championship twice. At a time when tennis was largely segregated, four-time U.S. Nationals winner Alice Marble advocated on Gibson's behalf and the 5'11" player was invited to make her U.S. Open debut in 1950. In 1956, Gibson's tennis career took off and she won the singles title at the French Open--the first African American to do so--as well as the doubles' title there. In July 1957, Gibson won Wimbledon, defeating Darlene Hard, 6-3, 6-2. (In 1975, Arthur Ashe became the first African-American man to win the men's singles title at Wimbledon, when he defeated Jimmy Connors.) In September 1957, she won the U.S. Open, and the Associated Press named her Female Athlete of the Year in 1957 and 1958. During the 1950s, Gibson won 56 singles and doubles titles, including 11 major titles.After winning Wimbledon and the U.S. Open again in 1958, Gibson retired from amateur tennis. In 1960, she toured with the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, playing exhibition tennis matches before their games. In 1964, Gibson joined the Ladies Professional Golf Association Tour, the first black woman to do so. The trailblazing athlete played pro golf until 1971, the same year in which she was voted into the National Lawn Tennis Association Hall of Fame.After serving as New Jersey's commissioner of athletics from 1975 to 1985, Althea Gibson died at age 76 from respiratory failure on September 28, 2003 at a hospital in East Orange, New Jersey.
    20 hrs ago (This Day in History)
    Bikini introducedOn July 5, 1946, French designer Louis Reard unveils a daring two-piece swimsuit at the Piscine Molitor, a popular swimming pool in Paris. Parisian showgirl Micheline Bernardini modeled the new fashion, which Reard dubbed "bikini," inspired by a news-making U.S. atomic test that took place off the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean earlier that week.European women first began wearing two-piece bathing suits that consisted of a halter top and shorts in the 1930s, but only a sliver of the midriff was revealed and the navel was vigilantly covered. In the United States, the modest two-piece made its appearance during World War II, when wartime rationing of fabric saw the removal of the skirt panel and other superfluous material. Meanwhile, in Europe, fortified coastlines and Allied invasions curtailed beach life during the war, and swimsuit development, like everything else non-military, came to a standstill.In 1946, Western Europeans joyously greeted the first war-free summer in years, and French designers came up with fashions to match the liberated mood of the people. Two French designers, Jacques Heim and Louis Reard, developed competing prototypes of the bikini. Heim called his the "atom" and advertised it as "the world's smallest bathing suit." Reard's swimsuit, which was basically a bra top and two inverted triangles of cloth connected by string, was in fact significantly smaller. Made out of a scant 30 inches of fabric, Reard promoted his creation as "smaller than the world's smallest bathing suit." Reard called his creation the bikini, named after the Bikini Atoll.In planning the debut of his new swimsuit, Reard had trouble finding a professional model who would deign to wear the scandalously skimpy two-piece. So he turned to Micheline Bernardini, an exotic dancer at the Casino de Paris, who had no qualms about appearing nearly nude in public. As an allusion to the headlines that he knew his swimsuit would generate, he printed newspaper type across the suit that Bernardini modeled on July 5 at the Piscine Molitor. The bikini was a hit, especially among men, and Bernardini received some 50,000 fan letters.Before long, bold young women in bikinis were causing a sensation along the Mediterranean coast. Spain and Italy passed measures prohibiting bikinis on public beaches but later capitulated to the changing times when the swimsuit grew into a mainstay of European beaches in the 1950s. Reard's business soared, and in advertisements he kept the bikini mystique alive by declaring that a two-piece suit wasn't a genuine bikini "unless it could be pulled through a wedding ring."In prudish America, the bikini was successfully resisted until the early 1960s, when a new emphasis on youthful liberation brought the swimsuit en masse to U.S. beaches. It was immortalized by the pop singer Brian Hyland, who sang "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini" in 1960, by the teenage "beach blanket" movies of Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon, and by the California surfing culture celebrated by rock groups like the Beach Boys. Since then, the popularity of the bikini has only continued to grow.
    1 day ago (This Day in History)
    U.S. declares independenceIn Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims the independence of the United States of America from Great Britain and its king. The declaration came 442 days after the first volleys of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts and marked an ideological expansion of the conflict that would eventually encourage France's intervention on behalf of the Patriots.The first major American opposition to British policy came in 1765 after Parliament passed the Stamp Act, a taxation measure to raise revenues for a standing British army in America. Under the banner of "no taxation without representation," colonists convened the Stamp Act Congress in October 1765 to vocalize their opposition to the tax. With its enactment in November, most colonists called for a boycott of British goods, and some organized attacks on the customhouses and homes of tax collectors. After months of protest in the colonies, Parliament voted to repeal the Stamp Act in March 1766.Most colonists continued to quietly accept British rule until Parliament's enactment of the Tea Act in 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a monopoly on the American tea trade. The low tax allowed the East India Company to undercut even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny. In response, militant Patriots in Massachusetts organized the "Boston Tea Party," which saw British tea valued at some 18,000 pounds dumped into Boston Harbor.Parliament, outraged by the Boston Tea Party and other blatant acts of destruction of British property, enacted the Coercive Acts, also known as the Intolerable Acts, in 1774. The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America, and required colonists to quarter British troops. The colonists subsequently called the first Continental Congress to consider a united American resistance to the British.With the other colonies watching intently, Massachusetts led the resistance to the British, forming a shadow revolutionary government and establishing militias to resist the increasing British military presence across the colony. In April 1775, Thomas Gage, the British governor of Massachusetts, ordered British troops to march to Concord, Massachusetts, where a Patriot arsenal was known to be located. On April 19, 1775, the British regulars encountered a group of American militiamen at Lexington, and the first shots of the American Revolution were fired.Initially, both the Americans and the British saw the conflict as a kind of civil war within the British Empire: To King George III it was a colonial rebellion, and to the Americans it was a struggle for their rights as British citizens. However, Parliament remained unwilling to negotiate with the American rebels and instead purchased German mercenaries to help the British army crush the rebellion. In response to Britain's continued opposition to reform, the Continental Congress began to pass measures abolishing British authority in the colonies.In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, an influential political pamphlet that convincingly argued for American independence and sold more than 500,000 copies in a few months. In the spring of 1776, support for independence swept the colonies, the Continental Congress called for states to form their own governments, and a five-man committee was assigned to draft a declaration.The Declaration of Independence was largely the work of Virginian Thomas Jefferson. In justifying American independence, Jefferson drew generously from the political philosophy of John Locke, an advocate of natural rights, and from the work of other English theorists. The first section features the famous lines, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The second part presents a long list of grievances that provided the rationale for rebellion.On July 2, 1776, the Continental Congress voted to approve a Virginia motion calling for separation from Britain. The dramatic words of this resolution were added to the closing of the Declaration of Independence. Two days later, on July 4, the declaration was formally adopted by 12 colonies after minor revision. New York approved it on July 19. On August 2, the declaration was signed.The American War for Independence would last for five more years. Yet to come were the Patriot triumphs at Saratoga, the bitter winter at Valley Forge, the intervention of the French, and the final victory at Yorktown in 1781. In 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris with Britain, the United States formally became a free and independent nation.
    2 days ago (This Day in History)
    Battle of Gettysburg endsOn the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Confederate General Robert E. Lee's last attempt at breaking the Union line ends in disastrous failure, bringing the most decisive battle of the American Civil War to an end.In June 1863, following his masterful victory at the Battle of Chancellorsville, General Lee launched his second invasion of the Union in less than a year. He led his 75,000-man Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac River, through Maryland, and into Pennsylvania, seeking to win a major battle on Northern soil that would further dispirit the Union war effort and induce Britain or France to intervene on the Confederacy's behalf. The 90,000-strong Army of the Potomac pursued the Confederates into Maryland, but its commander, General Joseph Hooker, was still stinging from his defeat at Chancellorsville and seemed reluctant to chase Lee further. Meanwhile, the Confederates divided their forces and investigated various targets, such as Harrisburg, the Pennsylvania capital.On June 28, President Abraham Lincoln replaced Hooker with General George Meade, and Lee learned of the presence of the Army of the Potomac in Maryland. Lee ordered his army to concentrate in the vicinity of the crossroads town of Gettysburg and prepare to meet the Federal army. At the same time, Meade sent ahead part of his force into Pennsylvania but intended to make a stand at Pipe Creek in Maryland.On July 1, a Confederate division under General Henry Heth marched into Gettysburg hoping to seize supplies but finding instead three brigades of Union cavalry. Thus began the Battle of Gettysburg, and Lee and Meade ordered their massive armies to converge on the impromptu battle site. The Union cavalrymen defiantly held the field against overwhelming numbers until the arrival of Federal reinforcements. Later, the Confederates were reinforced, and by mid-afternoon some 19,000 Federals faced 24,000 Confederates. Lee arrived to the battlefield soon afterward and ordered a general advance that forced the Union line back to Cemetery Hill, just south of the town.During the night, the rest of Meade's force arrived, and by the morning Union General Winfield Hancock had formed a strong Union line. On July 2, against the Union left, General James Longstreet led the main Confederate attack, but it was not carried out until about 4 p.m., and the Federals had time to consolidate their positions. Thus began some of the heaviest fighting of the battle, and Union forces retained control of their strategic positions at heavy cost. After three hours, the battle ended, and the total number of dead at Gettysburg stood at 35,000.On July 3, Lee, having failed on the right and the left, planned an assault on Meade's center. A 15,000-man strong column under General George Pickett was organized, and Lee ordered a massive bombardment of the Union positions. The 10,000 Federals answered the Confederate artillery onslaught, and for more than an hour the guns raged in the heaviest cannonade of the Civil War. At 3 p.m., Pickett led his force into no-man's-land and found that Lee's bombardment had failed. As Pickett's force attempted to cross the mile distance to Cemetery Ridge, Union artillery blew great holes in their lines. Meanwhile, Yankee infantry flanked the main body of "Pickett's charge" and began cutting down the Confederates. Only a few hundred Virginians reached the Union line, and within minutes they all were dead, dying, or captured. In less than an hour, more than 7,000 Confederate troops had been killed or wounded.Both armies, exhausted, held their positions until the night of July 4, when Lee withdrew. The Army of the Potomac was too weak to pursue the Confederates, and Lee led his army out of the North, never to invade it again. The Battle of Gettysburg was the turning point in the Civil War, costing the Union 23,000 killed, wounded, or missing in action. The Confederates suffered some 25,000 casualties. On November 19, 1863, President Lincoln delivered his famous Gettysburg Address during the dedication of a new national cemetery at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg. The Civil War effectively ended with the surrender of General Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in April 1865.
    3 days ago (This Day in History)
    Johnson signs Civil Rights ActOn this day in 1964, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs into law the historic Civil Rights Act in a nationally televised ceremony at the White House.In the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The 10 years that followed saw great strides for the African-American civil rights movement, as non-violent demonstrations won thousands of supporters to the cause. Memorable landmarks in the struggle included the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955--sparked by the refusal of Alabama resident Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a city bus to a white woman--and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous "I have a dream" speech at a rally of hundreds of thousands in Washington, D.C., in 1963.As the strength of the civil rights movement grew, John F. Kennedy made passage of a new civil rights bill one of the platforms of his successful 1960 presidential campaign. As Kennedy's vice president, Johnson served as chairman of the President's Committee on Equal Employment Opportunities. After Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Johnson vowed to carry out his proposals for civil rights reform.The Civil Rights Act fought tough opposition in the House and a lengthy, heated debate in the Senate before being approved in July 1964. For the signing of the historic legislation, Johnson invited hundreds of guests to a televised ceremony in the White House's East Room. After using more than 75 pens to sign the bill, he gave them away as mementoes of the historic occasion, according to tradition. One of the first pens went to King, leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), who called it one of his most cherished possessions. Johnson gave two more to Senators Hubert Humphrey and Everett McKinley Dirksen, the Democratic and Republican managers of the bill in the Senate.The most sweeping civil rights legislation passed by Congress since the post-Civil War Reconstruction era, the Civil Rights Act prohibited racial discrimination in employment and education and outlawed racial segregation in public places such as schools, buses, parks and swimming pools. In addition, the bill laid important groundwork for a number of other pieces of legislation--including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which set strict rules for protecting the right of African Americans to vote--that have since been used to enforce equal rights for women as well as all minorities.
    4 days ago (This Day in History)

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