Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President of the United States in the election of 1932 and was scheduled to be sworn in on March 4 1933. During this period he decided to take a Florida vacation and found himself in Miami before sailing to the Carribean.
Roosevelt had agreed to meet his constituents and give a short speech on the night of February 15th. Among the people who showed up to see the President-elect was the Mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak. Cermak was standing next to Roosevelt when shots were fired by Giuseppe Zangara, an Italian immigrant and naturalized citizen.
Zangara had purchased the handgun only days before. He fired five shots in total and hit five people, none of them Roosevelt. Rooevelt stayed with Cermak on his trip to the hospital and visited all five victims.
Cermak died 19 days later from an infection and Zangara was charged with first degree murder. He was executed on March 20th, 1933, a little over a month after his attempt on FDR’s life.
Jean-François Champollion was born in France in 1790 and is the man credited with deciphering the Rosetta Stone. The stone was found by Napolean’s forces in 1799 in the Nile Delta and has three versions of the same text in Ancient Greek, Demotic script, and Ancient Egyptian heiroglyphs.
Champollion displayed a natural ability for languages at a young age and eventually learned to speak (in addition to French): Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Ethiopic, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, and eventually Coptic. Coptic is a form of the Egyptian language, preceded by another version of the Egyptian language known as Demotic. His passion for the Coptic language was of particular significance because it led to his deciphering of Egyptian heiroglyphs.
At the age of sixteen he proposed that the Coptic language was closely related to Ancient Egyptian, which is what was represented in the heiroglyphs. (Imagine being the last person to know the Ancient Egyptian language… now there’s an idea for a book!) Following this line of thought, he postulated that the Demotic script present on the Rosetta Stone represented the Coptic language.
His breakthrough in deciphering the heiroglyphs came when he realized the characters were a combination of phonetic and symbolic. Armed with this knowledge he was able to use the names of rulers to crack the code presented by the heiroglyphs.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire occurred in New York City in March 1911 and caused the deaths of 146 garment workers. The main reason this fire was so deadly was because the owners of the factory had a policy which kept key doors locked in order to prevent thefts and unauthorized breaks. The workers ranged in age from 14-43 and of the 146 deaths, 123 were women.
Frances Perkins witnessed the events that day and was tapped to lead a committee on public safety. This committee was responsible for the recommendation of new legislation that would limit the workweek of women and children to 54 hours. It was in this capacity she met a New York State Senator named Franklin Delano Roosevelt and she would later become the first woman appointed to the U.S. Cabinet as Secretary of Labor.
Between 1911 and 1913 numerous laws, including the “54 hour bill,” would be passed in New York, all in attempt to improve the working conditions for factory workers. These changes would make New York one of the most progressive states in regards to labor laws.
The historic flight took place in 1943 when United States Presiden Franklin Delano Roosevelt took a Boeing 314 Flying Boat across the Atlantic to a WWII strategy meeting with Winston Churchill in Casablanca.
Although this was the first time a sitting president took a flight, this wasn’t the first trip made by FDR. He had previously taken a trip from New York to Chicago to accept the Democratic nomination for the presidency in person. His legs had been left useless after he contracted polio and it was thought that by flying to Chicago FDR would be able to show the nation how willing and able he was to meet the country’s challenges head on. This was the first time a nominee had taken a trip by plane in order to accept the nomination in person.
Roosevelt would go on to win four presidential elections and died in office in 1945 at the age of 63.
Évariste Galois was born in 1811 and died in 1832 after being shot in the abdomen in a duel at the age of twenty.
Beginning in 1829 he composed multiple papers (and published one) on mathematics but was still denied entrance to the prestigious École Polytechnique, the leading French school of the time. He instead enrolled in the École Normale but was expelled after criticizing the school’s director for actions taken during a period of political unrest. His protests continued and he found himself imprisoned. Upon his release he was coaxed into a duel, supposedly over a love affair.
The night before his duel, convinced of his impending death, he stayed up all night pouring out his mathematical ideas in three manuscripts. The first laid out what would come to be known as Galois Theory, a condition for equations to be solved by racials. The second concerned finding roots of continuous functions, and the third concerned the study of finite fields (which would come to be known as Galois fields.
In Mastery, Robert Greene claims that his impending death was the impetus for Galois to focus on the task of leaving behind his mathematical ideas. Before this his studies had taken a backseat to his political activities but with the self-imposed deadline looming he was able to achieve clarity of thought and change the future of algebra.
Santiago Calavatra is a Spanish architect born in 1951. He knew he wanted to draw from an early age and began to study art at the age of 6. Finished with art school at the age of 17, he stumbled upon an architecture book and realized his future was in this profession. He received his diploma as an architect from the Polytechnic School of Valencia and soon realized an education in civil engineering would allow him to become a better architect. By 1981 he received his doctorate in architecture from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at the age of thirty.
All of this education served him well. He opened his first office in Zurich and was soon on his way to having structures built all over the world. He is best known for bridges, museums, railway stations, and stadiums, having designed the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Velodrome for the 2004 Summer Olympics.
The Neustadt International Prize for Literature, sometimes referred to as the American Nobel, is awarded every other year by the University of Oklahoma’s World Literature Today. Like the Nobel, the award is based on an authors entire body of work. The award was founded in 1969 and it’s recipients include Gabo, Octavio Paz (both of which are Spanish-speaking Nobel Laureates), and Dubravka Ugrešić (it was through an interview of her that I found out this prize even existed).
Poets, novelists, and playwrights and all eligible for the prize BUT the prize isn’t open for application.
Tales of the mythical fox spirit originated in China and spread to Japan and Korea. They are known for their ability to shapeshift, most often taking the form of beautiful young women. Their main mischief is to seduce men and in some stories would consume their bodies or spirits.
Modern adaptations include the Pokemon Ninetails and a character in the video game League of Legends who has the ability to consume souls and steal memories.
The Marshall Plan was officially called the European Recovery Program but was named after US Secretary of State George Marshall. The logic was that by helping to restore the economic strength of countries ravaged by the war the spread of Communism would be halted. The fear of Communism spread to both sides of the aisle and the plan received bipartisan support in Washington.
The Soviet Union, unwilling to allow the United States any control over their economy, rejected the aid and attempted to create their own economic recovery plan even though they were required to pay large amounts of money in reparations.
The Marshall Plan focused on reducing artificial trade barriers and modernizing industry. The effects of reduced discontent and increased political stability all but eliminated the communist parties in Western Europe. There is some debate as to whether or not the Marshall Plan played such a large part in the recovery of the Western European economy but if success is measured by the effects on the spread of Communism the plan was an overwhelming success.
Edward VIII abdicated his throne in 1936 after less than a year as king in order to marry Wallis Simpson. The new king, George VI and Edward’s younger brother, created the title “Duke of Windsor” for the former king. Edward was the first and only Duke of Windsor; after his death the dukedom ramained vacant.
During World War II there were rumors that Edward was a Nazi sympathizer. Hitler was quoted as saying that he believed if Edward had stayed on the throne everything would be different, reffering to the relationship between Germany and Britain. In order to keep Edward far from the conflict he was appointed Governor of the Bahamas, a position which he held from August 1940-March 1945.
