Historical Events

Here are several historical events that occurred this past week. I didn't get a chance to post them on thier respective days so I grouped them here..................PEACE..................Scott



December 31:
1999 : Panama Canal turned over to Panama

On this day in 1999, the United States, in accordance
with the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, officially hands
over control of the Panama Canal, putting the
strategic waterway into Panamanian hands for the first
time. Crowds of Panamanians celebrated the transfer of
the 50-mile canal, which links the Atlantic and
Pacific oceans and officially opened when the SS Arcon
sailed through on August 15, 1914. Since then, over
922,000 ships have used the canal.

Interest in finding a shortcut from the Atlantic to
the Pacific originated with explorers in Central America in the early 1500s. In 1523, Holy Roman
Emperor Charles V commissioned a survey of the Isthmus
of Panama and several plans for a canal were produced,
but none ever implemented. U.S. interest in building a
canal was sparked with the expansion of the American
West and the California gold rush in 1848. (Today, a
ship heading from New York to San Francisco can save
about 7,800 miles by taking the Panama Canal rather
than sailing around South America.)

In 1880 a French company run by the builder of the
Suez Canal started digging a canal across the Isthmus
of Panama (then a part of Colombia). More than 22,000
workers died from tropical diseases such as yellow
fever during this early phase of construction and the
company eventually went bankrupt, selling its project
rights to the United States in 1902 for $40 million.
President Theodore Roosevelt championed the canal,
viewing it as important to America's economic and
military interests. In 1903, Panama declared its
independence from Colombia in a U.S.-backed revolution
and the U.S. and Panama signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla
Treaty, in which the U.S. agreed to pay Panama $10
million for a perpetual lease on land for the canal,
plus $250,000 annually in rent.

Over 56,000 people worked on the canal between 1904
and 1913 and over 5,600 lost their lives. When
finished, the canal, which cost the U.S. $375 million
to build, was considered a great engineering marvel
and represented America's emergence as a world power.

In 1977, responding to nearly 20 years of Panamanian
protest, U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Panama's
General Omar Torrijos signed two new treaties that
replaced the original 1903 agreement and called for a
transfer of canal control in 1999. The treaty,
narrowly ratified by the U.S. Senate, gave America the
ongoing right to defend the canal against any threats
to its neutrality. In October 2006, Panamanian voters
approved a $5.25 billion plan to double the canal's
size by 2015 to better accommodate modern ships.

Ships pay tolls to use the canal, based on each
vessel's size and cargo volume. In May 2006, the
Maersk Dellys paid a record toll of $249,165. The
smallest-ever toll--36 cents--was paid by Richard
Halliburton, who swam the canal in 1928.

history.com/tdih.do


December 30:
1922 : USSR established

In post-revolutionary Russia, the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (USSR) is established, comprising
a confederation of Russia, Belorussia, Ukraine, and
the Transcaucasian Federation (divided in 1936 into
the Georgian, Azerbaijan, and Armenian republics).
Also known as the Soviet Union, the new communist
state was the successor to the Russian Empire and the
first country in the world to be based on Marxist
socialism.

During the Russian Revolution of 1917 and subsequent
three-year Russian Civil War, the Bolshevik Party
under Vladimir Lenin dominated the soviet forces, a
coalition of workers' and soldiers' committees that
called for the establishment of a socialist state in
the former Russian Empire. In the USSR, all levels of
government were controlled by the Communist Party, and
the party's politburo, with its increasingly powerful
general secretary, effectively ruled the country.
Soviet industry was owned and managed by the state,
and agricultural land was divided into state-run
collective farms.

In the decades after it was established, the
Russian-dominated Soviet Union grew into one of the
world's most powerful and influential states and
eventually encompassed 15 republics--Russia, Ukraine,
Georgia, Belorussia, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Turkmenistan,
Tajikistan, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. In 1991,
the Soviet Union was dissolved following the collapse
of its communist government.

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December 29:
1890 : U.S. Army massacres Indians at Wounded Knee

On this day in 1890, in the final chapter of America's
long Indian wars, the U.S. Cavalry kills 146 Sioux at
Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.

Throughout 1890, the U.S. government worried about the
increasing influence at Pine Ridge of the Ghost Dance
spiritual movement, which taught that Indians had been
defeated and confined to reservations because they had
angered the gods by abandoning their traditional
customs. Many Sioux believed that if they practiced
the Ghost Dance and rejected the ways of the white
man, the gods would create the world anew and destroy
all non-believers, including non-Indians. On December
15, 1890, reservation police tried to arrest Sitting
Bull, the famous Sioux chief, who they mistakenly
believed was a Ghost Dancer, and killed him in the
process, increasing the tensions at Pine Ridge.

On December 29, the U.S. Army's 7th cavalry surrounded
a band of Ghost Dancers under the Sioux Chief Big Foot
near Wounded Knee Creek and demanded they surrender
their weapons. As that was happening, a fight broke
out between an Indian and a U.S. soldier and a shot
was fired, although it's unclear from which side. A
brutal massacre followed, in which it's estimated
almost 150 Indians were killed (some historians put
this number at twice as high), nearly half of them
women and children. The cavalry lost 25 men.

The conflict at Wounded Knee was originally referred
to as a battle, but in reality it was a tragic and
avoidable massacre. Surrounded by heavily armed
troops, it's unlikely that Big Foot's band would have
intentionally started a fight. Some historians
speculate that the soldiers of the 7th Cavalry were
deliberately taking revenge for the regiment's defeat
at Little Bighorn in 1876. Whatever the motives, the
massacre ended the Ghost Dance movement and was the
last major confrontation in America's deadly war
against the Plains Indians.

Conflict came to Wounded Knee again in February 1973
when it was the site of a 71-day occupation by the
activist group AIM (American Indian Movement) and its
supporters, who were protesting the U.S. government's
mistreatment of Native Americans. During the
standoff, two Indians were killed, one federal marshal
was seriously wounded and numerous people were
arrested.

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December 28:
1895 : First commercial movie screened

On this day in 1895, the world's first commercial
movie screening takes place at the Grand Cafe in
Paris. The film was made by Louis and Auguste Lumiere,
two French brothers who developed a camera-projector
called the Cinematographe. The Lumiere brothers
unveiled their invention to the public in March 1895
with a brief film showing workers leaving the Lumiere
factory. On December 28, the entrepreneurial siblings
screened a series of short scenes from everyday French
life and charged admission for the first time.

Movie technology has its roots in the early 1830s,
when Joseph Plateau of Belgium and Simon Stampfer of
Austria simultaneously developed a device called the
phenakistoscope, which incorporated a spinning disc
with slots through which a series of drawings could be
viewed, creating the effect of a single moving image.
The phenakistoscope, considered the precursor of
modern motion pictures, was followed by decades of
advances and in 1890, Thomas Edison and his assistant
William Dickson developed the first motion-picture
camera, called the Kinetograph. The next year, 1891,
Edison invented the Kinetoscope, a machine with a
peephole viewer that allowed one person to watch a
strip of film as it moved past a light.

In 1894, Antoine Lumiere, the father of Auguste
(1862-1954) and Louis (1864-1948), saw a demonstration
of Edison's Kinetoscope. The elder Lumiere was
impressed, but reportedly told his sons, who ran a
successful photographic plate factory in Lyon, France,
that they could come up with something better. Louis
Lumiere's Cinematographe, which was patented in 1895,
was a combination movie camera and projector that
could display moving images on a screen for an
audience. The Cinematographe was also smaller, lighter
and used less film than Edison's technology.

The Lumieres opened theaters (known as cinemas) in
1896 to show their work and sent crews of cameramen
around the world to screen films and shoot new
material. In America, the film industry quickly took
off. In 1896, Vitascope Hall, believed to be the first
theater in the U.S. devoted to showing movies, opened
in New Orleans. In 1909, The New York Times published
its first film review (of D.W. Griffith's "Pippa
Passes"), in 1911 the first Hollywood film studio
opened and in 1914, Charlie Chaplin made his
big-screen debut.

In addition to the Cinematographe, the Lumieres also
developed the first practical color photography
process, the Autochrome plate, which debuted in 1907.

history.com/tdih.do


December 27:
1932 : Radio City Music Hall opens

At the height of the Great Depression, thousands turn
out for the opening of Radio City Music Hall, a
magnificent Art Deco theater in New York City. Radio
City Music Hall was designed as a palace for the
people, a place of beauty where ordinary people could
see high-quality entertainment. Since its 1932
opening, more than 300 million people have gone to
Radio City to enjoy movies, stage shows, concerts, and
special events.

Radio City Music Hall was the brainchild of the
billionaire John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who decided to
make the theater the cornerstone of the Rockefeller
Complex he was building in a formerly derelict
neighborhood in midtown Manhattan. The theater was
built in partnership with the Radio Corporation of
America (RCA) and designed by Donald Deskey. The
result was an Art Deco masterpiece of elegance and
grace constructed out of a diverse variety of
materials, including aluminum, gold foil, marble,
permatex, glass, and cork. Geometric ornamentation is
found throughout the theater, as is Deskey's central
theme of the "Progress of Man." The famous Great
Stage, measuring 60 feet wide and 100 feet long,
resembles a setting sun. Its sophisticated system of
hydraulic-powered elevators allowed spectacular
effects in staging, and many of its original
mechanisms are still in use today.

In its first four decades, Radio City Music Hall
alternated as a first-run movie theater and a site for
gala stage shows. More than 700 films have premiered
at Radio City Music Hall since 1933. In the late
1970s, the theater changed its format and began
staging concerts by popular music artists. The Radio
City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular, which debuted
in 1933, draws more than a million people annually.
The show features the high-kicking Rockettes, a
precision dance troupe that has been a staple at Radio
City since the 1930s.

In 1999, the Hall underwent a seven-month, $70 million
restoration. Today, Radio City Music Hall remains the
largest indoor theater in the world.

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