July 17th

On this day in 1794 the rebels had their biggest victory in the Whiskey Rebellion. Back in 1791 things were getting off to a flying start in the federal government. To raise cash for the new government, Alexander Hamilton convinced Congress to approve taxes on alcohol and carriages. (No not baby carriages) In what would become an American tradition, Congress designed the tax so smaller distillers would pay more than larger distillers. George Washington was a big time booze maker and he got to pay 6 cents per gallon, while the little guy was taxed at 9 cents per gallon.

Hamilton's principal reason for the tax was that he wanted to pay down the national debt, but he justified the tax "more as a measure of social discipline than as a source of revenue." But most importantly, Hamilton "wanted the tax imposed to advance and secure the power of the new federal government."

In the new nation that was without a caste system, the "cohee" of the frontier, which was like Pennsylvania back then, were having none of this. Considered it to be both unfair and discriminatory, civil protest soon became an an armed rebellion. In the summer of 1794, what with no dead presidents masks available yet, some rebels disguised themselves as women to tar and feathers a tax collector. On July 17, the rebels had their biggest victory. 500 armed men clashes with troops from Fort Pitt after firing on a revenue collector and burning down his home.

Get you a copper kettle, get you a copper coil,
Fill it with new-made corn mash and never more you'll toil.
You'll just lay there by the juniper while the moon is bright,
Watch them jugs a-filling, in the pale moonlight.

Build you a fire with hickory, hickory, ash and oak,
Don't use no green or rotten wood; they'll get you by the smoke.
We'll just lay there by the juniper while the moon is bright,
Watch them jugs a-filling, in the pale moonlight.

My daddy, he made whiskey; my granddaddy, he did too.
We ain't paid no whiskey tax since 1792.
We just lay there by the juniper while the moon is bright,
Watch them jugs a-filling, in the pale moonlight.
Watch them jugs a-filling, in the pale moonlight.

Within the next three weeks, 15,000 uniformed militiamen enter into the fray and the "Whiskey Rebellion" was no more. Big business won, the "cohee" chalked one up in the loss column.

In 1821, warm beaches and a retirement heaven. When the Adams-Onís treaty was concluded with Spain, the Spanish ceded Florida to the United States and war with Spain was delayed for 77 years. But 180 years later it didn't seem like such a good idea.

In 1861, Congress authorized the Treasury Department to print and circulate paper money for the first time. Not immediately called the "Federal Reserve Notes," Congress was pressed for money to finance the Civil War so they authorized "Demand Notes" and replaced that a year later with "Legal Tender Notes". These were the predecessors of the "Greenbacks" today that are not worth the paper they are printed on.

In 1862, Congress authorizes African Americans to become laborers in the U.S. Army. Over 186,000 African-Americans serve in the Union Army, with 38,000 losing their lives.

In 1898, Spanish troops in Santiago, Cuba, surrendered to U.S. forces during the Spanish-American War. Two and a half years later, at the signing of the Cuban-American Treaty, The United States took permanent possession of Guantanamo Bay.

On July 17, 1899, James Cagney, the Academy-Award winning American film actor, was born. Following his death on March 30, 1986, his obituary appeared in The New York Times.

In 1901, Dr. Willis Carrier installed a commercial air conditioning system at a Brooklyn, NY printing plant. The first system to provide man-made control over temperature was not meant for humans but machines. In 1902, Carrier completed drawings for what came to be recognized as the world's first scientific air conditioning system. By the early 1920s the centrifugal chiller by Carrier led to comfort cooling appearing in movie theaters for summer blockbusters. Then came department stores and office buildings. Now chillin' out in July is considered a must.

On July 17, 1917 with Great Britain at war with Germany, King George V issues a royal proclamation, changing name of the British royal from the German Saxe-Coburg Gotha to Windsor. Everyone is immediately fooled into believing that a bunch of inbred Germans are really English.

Today in American Memory section of The Library of Congress, homage is payed to the Spanish Civil War.

The Spanish Civil War began on July 17, 1936 as a series of right-wing insurrections within the military, staged against the constitutional government of the five-year-old Second Spanish Republic. Because it was the first major military contest between left-wing forces and fascists, and attracted international involvement on both sides, the Spanish Civil War has sometimes been called the first chapter of World War II.

The rebels, or Nationalists as they came to be known, were backed by a spectrum of political and social conservatives including the Catholic Church, the fascist Falange Party, and those who wished to restore the Spanish monarchy. They received aid in the form of troops, tanks, and planes from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and Germany field-tested some of its most important artillery in Spain. With the rise of General Francisco Franco as leader of the Nationalist coalition, the threat of fascism's spread across Europe visibly deepened.

The Republicans were backed by Spanish labor unions and a range of anti-fascist political groups, from communists and anarchists to Catalonian separatists to centrist supporters of liberal democracy. The Republicans received aid from the Soviet Union and from Mexico, but their most likely European allies signed a joint agreement of nonintervention. The most visible international aid came in the form of volunteers. Estimates vary, but as many as 60,000 individuals from over fifty countries joined the International Brigades to fight for the cause of the Spanish Republic. Between two and three thousand of these volunteers were men and women from the United States—most served with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

The Spanish Civil War posed a major threat to international political equilibrium, and Americans watched closely the events of the conflict. The brutality of the situation also forced many Americans to question the United States' post-World War I noninterventionist policies. Between 500,000 and 1 million Spaniards, both soldiers and civilians, died from war or war-engendered disease and starvation, and thousands more became displaced refugees.

‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan wasn't so wrong after all. Americans may be bad at geography but on July 17, 1938 when he left Floyd Bennett Field in New York, supposedly headed for Los Angeles,how long could he say to himself "Wow that Hudson River is bigger than I thought." A 3,150-mile wide river! According to Wikipedia, Douglas Corrigan knew what he was doing.

Corrigan, however, was a skilled aircraft mechanic (he was one of the builders of Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis) and a habitual risk-taking maverick; he had made several modifications to his own plane, preparing it for transatlantic flight. Between 1935 and 1937, he applied several times, unsuccessfully, for permission to make a nonstop flight from New York to Ireland, and it is likely that his "navigational error" was a protest against government "red tape"; however, he never publicly acknowledged having flown to Ireland intentionally.

The man who is remembered every time a football player goes the wrong way was welcomed home as a hero (ticker tape parade and all) and was forever known as ‘Wrong Way’ Corrigan.

On July 17, 1944, munitions, which were being loaded aboard the SS E.A. Bryan at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine north of Oakland, California, detonated, killing 320 sailors and civilians and injuring 390 others. Most of the dead and injured were enlisted African-American sailors.

On this day in 1948, The Dixiecrat Revolt and Strom Thurmond.

Tensions came to a head in 1948 when, in an unprecedented move, President Harry Truman placed himself squarely behind civil rights legislation. Truman advocated federal protection against lynching, anti-poll tax legislation, the establishment of the permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), and the prohibition of segregation in interstate transportation. For the first time since Reconstruction, the status of African Americans had become a national issue. Many white southerners believed these measures signaled the beginning of an insidious campaign to destroy cherished regional "customs and institutions."

On July 16, 1948 Southern Democrats opposed to the Democratic party's position on civil rights met in Birmingham, Ala., to endorse South Carolina Gov. Strom Thurmond.

In 1954, the world’s first jazz fest. The tennis courts of Newport Casino, in Newport, Rhode Island, were host to the first Newport Jazz Festival. The opening song was performed by Eddie Condon and his band who played "Muskrat Ramble."

In 1955, Walt Disney opened the gates to "The Happiest Place on Earth." The man who claimed "That place is my baby, and I would prostitute myself for it," held a gala television broadcast featuring Bob Cummings, Art Linkletter and Ronald Reagan on the opening day of Disneyland.

On the same day in 1955, Arco, Idaho became became the first community in the world to have all its electrical needs provided by nuclear power. The one hour demonstration was made to show the safety of nuclear-powered electricity and its ability to sustain the load.

In 1959, Mary Leakey, the wife of Dr Louis Leakey, made a very significant find when she discovered an ancient hominid skull, the first specimen of a formerly unknown species. Found in the Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania, Louis Leakey briefly considered this to be a human ancestor, but the claim was dropped when Homo habilis was found soon afterward. Originally named "Zinjanthropus" (East African Man), the skull was later renamed "Australopithecus boisei". The Leakey's dedicated their lives to the study of Australopithecus and estimated that the skull's age was 1.75 million years old.

On July 17, 1959 "Lady Day" no longer sings the Blues. Billie Holiday, known to her fans as "Lady Day," died in a New York City hospital at age 44."Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose." — Billie Holiday

On July 17, 1961 "The Georgia Peach," Ty Cobb died at the age of 74 from cancer. Considered to be one of or perhaps the greatest baseball player in history, he still holds several records as of 2009, including the highest career batting average (.367)

On July 17,1967 Jimi Hendricks ended his short career as a warm act for the Monkees.

To make a bad situation even worse, Hendrix joined the tour in progress in Jacksonville, Florida on 8 July 1967, just before the Monkees were scheduled to play a couple of shows in North Carolina. One would have been hard pressed to have found a part of America less likely to appreciate what Micky Dolenz described as "this Black guy in a psychedelic Day-Glo blouse, playing music from hell, holding his guitar like he was fucking it, then lighting it on fire" and what Eric Lefcowitz termed "the cacophonic strains of Hendrix's feedback orgies mixed with his lascivious sexuality."

Matters came to head a few days later as the Monkees played a trio of dates in New York. After a handful of gigs, Hendrix grew sick of the "We want the Monkees" chant that met his every performance. Finally, he flipped the bird at the less-than enthusiastic crowd at Forest Hills Stadium in New York and stormed offstage.

On July 17, 1975, the last of the Apollo spaceship program docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit. The first superpower linkup of its kind, seemed sort of sexual.

In 1979, Jimmy Carter was having none of Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza's Miami retirement plans as the Sandinista rebels take Nicaraguan capital.

In 1981, 114 people died in the lobby of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel. A pair of walkways above the lobby collapsed during a dance.

In 1985, Bank of America, the United States second largest banking company, reported a second-quarter loss of $338 million. Maybe the government should have fixed that.

In 1986, the largest filing for bankruptcy in the history of the United States occurred when the LTV Corporation asked for court protection from debts of more than $4 billion. $3 billion of it was retiree benefits that LTV just cutoff . This act led to the Retiree Benefit Bankruptcy Protection act of 1988 that did little to protect retiree's pension and nothing to protect their healthcare. Later during the Shrub era when Congress passed a bill to protect corporations from individuals, corporations were still free to pull the same crap and get this, LTV Corporation screwed the workers again. And if that's not enough for you, in this good old shadow welfare state we live in, LTV is still in business.

In 1996, 230 people died aboard TWA Flight 800. Shortly after leaving John F. Kennedy International Airport, the Boeing 747 bound for Paris, exploded and crashed off Long Island, N.Y.

In 1997, the last day of the Five and Dime. Woolworth Corp. closed its last 400 stores and laid off 9,200 employees.

On this day in 1998, Russia buries Tsar Nicholas II and family, 80 years after they died. Russia's Nicholas II, his wife, their five children, their doctor, cook, valet, maid and even the family dog were executed by the Bolsheviks. They must have been afraid that someday the dog would seek revenge or reclaim the throne. The youngest human to die was the thirteen year old son of Nicholas and Alexandra, Alexei Nikolaevich.

Five years ago today: Arnold Schwarzenegger used the term "girlie men" to describe California Democrats and called upon voters to "terminate" them at the polls in November if they don't pass his $103 billion budget.

One year ago today: With signs that the record salmonella outbreak, while not over, may finally be slowing, the FDA lifted its warning on tomatoes. Hot peppers were still a no no. And if that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, George W. Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki held a secure video conference during which they agreed to set a "general time horizon" for bringing more U.S. troops home from the Iraq war.