On This Day In History...
On this day in 1807, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born. He wrote:
Perseverance is a great element of success. If you only knock long enough and loud enough at the gate, you are sure to wake up somebody. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, US poet (1807 - 1882)
Also born on this day, but in the year 1902, was author John Steinbeck, who wrote:
All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal. - John Steinbeck, "Once There Was A War" 1943, US novelist (1902 - 1968)
(h/t dKos)
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Comments (2)
testing comments...
Comment #1 Posted by: Tyler | February 28, 2008 01:32 PM
also on this day, in PEACE history:
February 28, 1919
Mohandas Gandhi launched his campaign of non-cooperation with Imperial British control of India. He called his overall method of nonviolent action Satyagraha, formed from satya (truth) and agraha, used to describe an effort or endeavor. This translates roughly as "Truth-force." A fuller rendering, though, would be "the force that is generated through adherence to Truth."
February 28, 1946
Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the newly formed Democratic Republic of Vietnam, facing reimposition of French colonial rule over his country, sent a telegram to Pres. Harry Truman: “. . . I most earnestly appeal to you personally and to the American people to interfere urgently in support of our independence and help making the negotiations more in keeping with the principles of the Atlantic and San Francisco charters [founding documents of the League of Nations and United Nations].”
February 28, 1954
The U.S. detonated its largest thermonuclear blast ever, in a test of a new fusion (hydrogen) weapon design in the atmosphere at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. With an explosive yield of 15 megatons (equivalent to 15,000,000 tons of TNT), it was two-and-a-half times the maximum possible expected by the Atomic Energy Commission.
Carried out in spite of adverse weapon conditions (the monitoring station downwind at the time of detonation), the unexpected yield created a radioactive fallout plume that contaminated three other atolls of the 29 in the Marshall chain. Though too late to avoid their contamination, hundreds of Marshallese and U.S. servicemen were evacuated.
To avoid another such radiological disaster, future tests required an exclusion zone 1370 km in diameter (850 miles), an area equal to about 1% of the earth’s surface. Because Bikini had been essentially destroyed, subsequent test weapons were detonated from barges.
February 28, 1958
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was founded in London by philosopher Bertrand Russell, then 86 years old, and the Rev. Canon (Lewis) John Collins of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The peace symbol was originally developed for CND.
February 28, 1989
The Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement to Stop All Nuclear Testing was founded in the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). Olzhas Suleimenov, a popular Kazakh poet, was chosen to lead this first anti-nuclear non-governmental organization in a country formerly part of the USSR. Nevada-Semipalatinsk ended nuclear arms tests at the Semipalatinsk Polygon. Organizers had been inspired by the large Nevada Test Site anti-nuclear demonstrations and encampments outside Las Vegas in the mid-to-late 1980s.
Comment #2 Posted by: evan austin | February 28, 2008 05:29 PM