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On This Day In History – April 4, 1949

nato signing

On April 4, 1949, Secretary of State Dean Acheson and the foreign ministers of Canada, and 10 Western European nations (Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, and Portugal) gathered in Washington, DC, to sign the North Atlantic Treaty.

In his memoirs, Dean Acheson recalled “All the North Atlantic Treaty ministers met in Washington on April 2 to approve the draft treaty and arrange for its signature at a ceremony set for April 4. Here President Truman again showed his consideration for me. I had told him that it would be appropriate and fitting for him to sign the treaty on behalf of the United States, but this he refused to do. He would attend the ceremony and stand beside me as I signed, but the treaty would bear my name.”

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Who Were The Khmer Rouge And What Did They Do?

The Khmer Rouge was a communist revolutionary government in Cambodia in the mid/late 70’s. It was founded by a group of largely western-educated Cambodians who entirely rejected concepts of the free market and individual liberties.

Instead, they attempted to construct an entirely self-sustaining nation through a rigid regime of top-down social engineering.

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Picture of The Day

nathan green and jack daniels

This photo—taken at the turn of the century—shows Jack Daniel (in the white hat) seated next to George Green, the son of Nathan “Nearest” Green who was the first Black master distiller in America.

It was long believed that Daniel was taught how to make whiskey by a wealthy landowner and Lutheran preacher named Dan Call. However, his true teacher was Nathan Green who had been rented out by his owners to Call. Green essentially took Daniel under his wing and went on to work for his whiskey business after the end of the Civil War.

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Picture of the Day

registry room ellis island

Immigrants who passed the first mental inspection wait in pens in the Registry Room, also called the Great Hall at Ellis Island in New York Harbor, 1910

Nearly every day, for over two decades (1900-1924), the Registry Room was filled with new arrivals waiting to be inspected and registered by Immigration Service officers. On many days, over 5,000 people would file through the space.

For most immigrants, this great hall epitomized Ellis Island. It was here that immigrants underwent medical and legal examinations.

Here they encountered the complex demands of the immigration laws and an American bureaucracy that could either grant or withhold permission to land in the United States.

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Picture Of The Day

ww1 bagpiper

Bagpipers were usually the first ones out of the trenches when it was time to fight; playing as they lead the soldiers into each battle in WW1

2500 bagpipe players were in the trenches with their men.

The pipers played the clarion call to arms to the men of the British Expeditionary Forces and thus were usually the first ones “over the top.”

They stood in full view of the German lines playing their instrument, and marched through “no-man’s land” without any ammunition but their sound.

The bagpipe players carried no cutting devices when they encountered barbed wire. Enemy fire mowed them down just as effectively as they killed advancing troops.

600 pipers were wounded, 500 bagpipe players died while rallying the troops into battle.

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Picture of the Day

landwehermann

A Prussian Landwehrmann tanning rat skins in a dugout, WWI

A Prussian Landwehrmann tanning rat skins in a dugout, WWI. The trench soldier of WWI had to cope with millions of rats. They were attracted by the human waste of war – not simply sewage waste but also the bodies of men long forgotten who had been buried in the trenches.

Possibly drawing on his pre-war trade in the leather industry, this fellow has set himself up in business, tanning the pelts in the age-old method of separating soil and gore from the skin, before they are washed and spread out to dry (as depicted here). It’s possible that he used the skins to make patches for repairs to uniforms. Some of these rats grew extremely large. Many troops were awakened by them crawling across their faces, or attempting to take food from the pockets of sleeping men.

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How Did Prohibition Ever Gain Enough Support To Become Law?

1) Because of the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840) and the Third Great Awakening (1850-1900), the American people became increasingly religious (yes, that’s possible), and the religious fervor translated into a zeal to improve the society, and one of the greatest scourge these religionists see is drunkenness (and people back then drank A LOT considering how cheap hard liquor was back then). These people just eradicated slavery, and they were moving down the list of societal ills.

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Picture Of The Day

Olive Oatman was captured by Native Americans in Arizona in 1851, and integrated into a Mojave tribe. She was given her (blue) tattoo to ensure her passage into the afterlife. In 1857 she was finally set free after being located by local settlers. This photo was taken after her rescue.

In 1851 Olive Oatman was a thirteen-year old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, Oatman lived as a slave to her captors for a year before being traded to the Mohave, who tattooed her face and raised her as their own. She was fully assimilated and perfectly happy when, at nineteen, she was ransomed back to white society. She became an instant celebrity, but the price of fame was high and the pain of her ruptured childhood lasted a lifetime.

The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman

Picture of the Day

Stephan-Bibrowski

Barnum & Bailey Circus’Sideshow performer Stephan Bibrowski, also known as Lionel the Lion-Faced Man.

Stephan Bibrowski was born in Bielsk, Poland in 1890 with stunning blonde hair — that covered his entire body from head to toe. Aghast at this so-called abomination, his mother gave him up and turned him over to a businessman who paraded him across Europe as a sideshow attraction before taking him to America in 1901.⁠

Once in the U.S., Barnum & Bailey quickly snatched Bibrowski up and put him on display as “Lionel the Lion-Faced Man,” describing him as “half-man half-lion.” For 20 years, Bibrowski was exhibited as a “freak,” with audiences scarcely realizing that the gentle soul behind the hair was a soft-spoken man who knew five languages and nurtured a secret dream of leaving the stage and becoming a dentist.⁠

(story) ⁠