NevadaLabor.com: News, Bulletins & Almanac March 08 Archive

César Chávez Celebration VII
Tuesday/Martes, March/marzo 31, 2009
Circus Circus-Reno

BREAKING NEWS, MARCH 31, 2009

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., endorses AB 301

DECLARACION DE REID SOBRE EL CUMPLEAÑOS DE CESAR CHAVEZ

BREAKING NEWS
Obama pays tribute to late Reno labor leader

THE WAY WE WERE — The above is a recently discovered photo from 1986. Left to right are Kathy Brown, Culinary Union Local 86 office manager; Miguel Contreras, Local 86 Secretary-Treasurer; Local 86 President Bill Uehlein; a lady named Natalie (anyone who knows her last name, please write), and César Chávez. This item was first published in Ahora, northern Nevada's Spanish-English weekly, on March 26, 2008. (UPDATE: On 3-19-2009, President Obama paid tribute to Brother Contreras as he spoke in the L.A. building named after the late labor leader. See the 1986 Chávez Reno archive, below.)

(Photo courtesy of Dan Rusnak, retired business manager of Laborers' Union Local 169.)

More stories and photos from César Chávez's 1986 Reno visit.

Sponsorship, Ticket & Hotel Room Info
Last year's César Chávez event was a sellout!
Buy earlybird tickets online now and save.
Washoe County students may enter the annual Chávez essay contest
Proyecto de ley pide designación de día de Cesar Chávez es presentado en la legislatura de Nevada.
Fecha limite para el concurso anual del ensayo de Cesar Chávez es el 24 de marzo, 2009.

[[EDITOR'S NOTE: Unless otherwise noted, historical items appear courtesy of longtime Nevada reporter Dennis Myers' Poor Denny's Almanac [PDA]. Items highlighted in blue are of interest to labor in particular and seekers of justice in general. Copyright © 2009 Dennis Myers.]]

UPDATE: Wednesday, 25 March 2009, 00:02:11 PDT, 07:02:11 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT –

Allen Ginsberg/ Howl: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix; Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.

On this date in 1896, a measles epidemic in Lincoln County was hitting Native Americans particularly hard, with six of them dead in a week; in 1911, a fire broke out in New York's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, killing 146 people, 132 of them girls, and disclosure of the lack of safety exits and fire escapes and the condition of the building became a turning point in social policy and politics in the United States, made reformer Francis Perkins famous (she had witnessed the fire from her home), galvanized the union movement, led to workers injury insurance, shorter work weeks, an end to child labor, and not guilty verdicts on manslaughter charges against the factory owners); in 1917, a representative of a new national organization, the League to Enforce Peace, arrived in Reno to form a local chapter and advance an April speech in Reno by former Minnesota governor Adolph Eberhart (peace organizing was very risky during the world war because the Wilson administration prosecuted it under the Espionage Act); in 1926, a Parent Teachers Association chapter was organized at Sparks Junior High School; in 1939 with war talk common, the Nevada Bureau of Mines was doing a study of the prospects for development of strategic war minerals in the state; in 1955, customs inspectors seized a shipment of copies of Allen Ginsberg's Howl as they were brought in to the U.S. (Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco responded by publishing the book in the U.S.); in 1961, Elvis performed at Pearl Harbor to raise money for the U.S.S. Arizona memorial (it was his last public performance for nine years); in 1966, the fab four posed for the "butcher cover" of their Yesterday and Today album; in 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's only album, the magnificent Déjà Vu (containing Teach Your Children, Helpless, Our House, Woodstock), went gold; in 1975 in a Nevada Assembly judiciary committee hearing on a measure to hike the penalties for marijuana possession, ACLU of Nevada lobbyist Richard Siegel pointed out that jail time for possession in Nevada was already six times longer than the maximum sentence possible for conspiracy to murder (missing the point completely, the committee responded by ordering a bill draft to make jail time equal for the two crimes); in 1977, Governor Mike O'Callaghan vetoed Assemblymember Steve Coulter's legislation repealing the mandatory motorcycle helmet law for adults; in 1977, former Washoe County superintendent of schools Earl Wooster, who counted the 1944 shutdown of the Washoe Indian school and integration of Native Americans into the white Orvis Ring School among his most important achievements, died in Reno; in 1992, cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev returned to a changed world after ten months on the Mir space station (his nation, the Soviet Union, no longer existed).

UPDATE: Tuesday, 24 March 2009, 08:59:36 PDT, 15:59:36 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT –

UPDATE: Monday, 23 March 2009, 00:02:58 PDT, 07:02:58 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT – On this date in 1743, Handel's Messiah was performed at London's Covent Garden, a performance often thought of as its premiere (it had already debuted in Dublin on April 12, 1742); in 1775, Patrick Henry supposedly told the Virginia Convention "I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death", but in fact he never said it; in 1806, the Lewis and Clark expedition began its return trip out of Fort Clatsop in the Oregon country to St. Louis after failing to find a northwest passage; in 1842, Whig U.S. Representative Joshua Giddings of Ohio was censured for mentioning slavery in violation of the House's "Gag Rule" (he defended slave mutineers on board the Creole, an incident similar to the Amistad case), after which he resigned and was then reelected; in 1874, President Grant issued an executive order affirming the existence "for the Pah-Ute and other Indians residing thereon" of the Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation, which had existed uncertainly since 1859; in 1918, Lithuania's independence was recognized by German emperor Wilhelm II; in 1921, the War Resisters League International was founded in the Netherlands; in 1923, it was announced that the 1923 Nevada Legislature cost $58,104.87; in 1923, Chollar Mine worker Andy Antunovich lost an arm on the job as rumors circulated of a miners strike on the Comstock; in 1932, the Nevada State Journal reported "A life of enforced idleness, huddled on a narrow parcel of barren land, wind-swept in winter and sun-scorched in summer, with the dingiest of shanties and dog houses‚ as homes, is rapidly causing the deterioration of the Indians on the Reno reservation between here and Sparks. The United States senate Indian affairs committee promised the Indians the aid of the federal government in providing them some means of earning a livelihood, perhaps an industry of some small nature, a few dairy cows to give milk for the young, water to grow small quantities of truck crops. The committee left here May 26, 1931, and disappeared as completely as if it never existed. The people in Reno and other cities do not want to employ Indians, according to Meredith Crooks, Indian officer in charge of the reservation."; in 1933, the Reichstag enacted the Ermächtigungagesetz, making Adolf Hitler a dictator; in 1942, evacuation of U.S. citizens from their homes to internment camps began (see below); in 1950, All the King's Men won the best picture Oscar; in 1954, French Chief of Staff General Paul Ely and U.S. Joint Chiefs chair Admiral Arthur Radford concocted a plan called Operation Vulture (Opération Vautour) to use an atom bomb in Vietnam to rescue the besiged French at Dien Bien Phu (both Vulture and other plans for U.S. involvement died when the Eisenhower administration was unable to lure British Prime Minister Winston Churchill into the scheme); in 1954, former cowboy actor Rex Bell of Las Vegas, who lost a congressional race in 1944, announced that he would oppose Reno Mayor Francis "Tank" Smith and White Pine County Assemblymember George Hawes in the Republican primary for lieutenant governor; in 1956 in her newspaper column, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote "There must be great pride, not only among the Negroes but among white people all over the country, in the remarkable restraint and courage shown by the Negroes in their struggle for their rights in Montgomery, Ala., and other places in the South. Never before has such a peaceful but determined movement taken place. It is inspired by the example of Mahatma Gandhi and his followers in India and calls for remarkable fortitude and perseverance. Dr. Luther King, in his insistence that there be no hatred in this struggle, is asking almost more than human beings can achieve. Yet there has not been one single word of praise from any member of the [Eisenhower] administration."; in 1956, Nevada labor commissioner D.W. Everett reminded employers that adult women workers must be paid the minimum wage, $1 an hour, and that women under 18 must be paid a minimum of 87.5 cents an hour; in 1960, after Nevada District Judge Richard Hanna declared Joe Conforte's Triangle Ranch brothel a public nuisance, Storey County Sheriff Cecil Morrison burned it down with other officials, such as Washoe County District Attorney William Raggio and Sparks Fire Chief William Farr, also in attendance (meanwhile, a few hundred yards away in Lyon County, another branch of the brothel continued doing business); in 1963, Surfin' U.S.A. by The Beach Boys was released; in 1964, John Lennon's In His Own Write was published; in 2002, Rex Daniels, who took the first master's degree in journalism from the University of Nevada, died in Reno; in 2003, Donald John Cline, Jr., of Sparks, Nevada and Frederick Pokorney, Jr., of Nye County, Nevada died in Nasiriyah, Iraq; in 2003, the Institute for Policy Studies in D.C. reported that, according to the U.S. State Department's own human rights survey, many of the members of the Bush administration's Iraq "coalition of the willing" were themselves terrorist states (Albania, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Georgia, Macedonia, Nicaragua, Philippines, Turkey and Uzbekistan); in 2003, Michael Williams of Yuma, who was born in Reno, died in Nasiriyah, Iraq

On this date in 1864 in the U.S. House, Representative Henry Winter Davis pointed out that because Lincoln's "emancipation proclamation" had no legal effect, there was still need for congressional action to abolish slavery; in 1912 with the bunk house in the Southern Pacific railroad preserve in Sparks abolished, Sparks boarding houses were gaining new customers and some workers were living in Reno and riding the train to Sparks; in 1923, the annual women-edited issue of the University of Nevada Sagebrush carried an editorial on the role of women (see below); in 1934 as part of a bet, George Gallo and "Young" Firpo of Reno ate 14 pounds of spaghetti in an hour and ten minutes (after eating some sandwiches) at Colombo's; in 1949, Nevada Governor Vail Pittman vetoed a bill making prostitution legal if localities consented, calling on legislators "to protect the name of Nevada, to keep it synonymous with personal liberty but not with licentiousness"; in 1951, Carson City March of Dimes chair Paul Laxalt reported that a house-to-house solicitation had produced $849.53 for the anti-polio campaign; in 1954, the headline on the cover of the new issue of Newsweek (postdated March 29) asked in the wake of See It Now's McCarthy broadcast "Should television take sides?"' in 1954, Nevada District Court Judge Frank McNamee heard several post-settlement motions in the RKO Studios stockholders lawsuit that charged Howard Hughes with mismanaging the studio; in 1954, syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler, using material from the Senate Judiciary Committee chaired by U.S. Senator Patrick McCarran of Nevada, ran an innuendo-filled column attacking Edward R. Murrow; in 1961, a Clark County grand jury convened to investigate local police was dismissed after filing a report calling officers "burglars behind badges" but also saying that the police department was making progress in reforming itself; in 1971, Latter Day Saints Church members in Reno said they were being encouraged by Salt Lake City church officials to get involved in the Nevada Legislature debates over abortion reform; in 1980, Dark Side of the Moon broke Tapestry's record for longest stay on the Billboard top 100 album chart; in 2004 in a major privacy development, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would hear verbal arguments in the Nevada case Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada, in which Larry Hiibel argued he had every legal right to remain silent when asked by a Humboldt County deputy to identify himself (Hiibel was not charged with any other "crime"); in 2004 using a missile, Israel murdered Sheik Ahmed Yassin and seven bystanders near the wheelchair-bound sheik.

UPDATE: Saturday, 21 March 2009, 19:01:08 PDT, 02:01:08 3-22-2009 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT – On this date in 1851, the anarchist cooperative colony Modern Times was started in New York; in 1864, President Lincoln approved legislation allowing the people of Nevada to write a constitution and form a state government and allowing the president to declare Nevada a state when the prep work was finished; in 1871, famed stalker Henry Stanley began his search for David Livingstone in Zanzibar; in 1907, the United States attacked Honduras, one of at least seven U.S. invasions of that nation on behalf of U.S. corporations; in 1923, the first charges (against two men arrested in a Taylor Street home in Reno) were filed under Nevada's state alcohol prohibition law, setting the stage for a court test of the law, which state Attorney General Michael Diskin contended was unconstitutional; in 1934, Nevada Governor Fred Balzar died at the governor's mansion in Carson City and Lieutenant Governor Morley Griswold became acting governor; in 1938 in their ongoing fight against Senator Pat McCarran's bill, perennial measures to force the Pyramid Lake tribe to sell part of the reservation to whites who had been squatting for decades, the tribal council asked President Roosevelt to veto the measure if it passed, and also appealed to the public for support in defeating the bill; in 1939, Billie Holliday recorded Long Gone Blues on the Columbia label; in 1952 in Cleveland, Alan Freed's Moondog Coronation Ball, a rhythm and blues show, was shut down by police after fans who could not get in (Freed had wildly oversold tickets) rioted and beat down the doors; in 1953, Las Vegas Elks Lodge officials reported that a Cleveland Indians/New York Giants exhibition game at Cashman Field on March 19 attracted 9,088 people and would probably be repeated; in 1954, the National Security Council approved joint chiefs chairman Arthur Radford's plan to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam to reverse the recent victory of the Vietnamese over the French; in 1982, a revival of George M. Cohan's 1904 revue Little Johnny Jones, with Donny Osmond in the title role, opened on Broadway and closed after one performance (New York Times: "With so many stars and stripes on view, is it treason to be bored stiff from beginning to end of Little Johnny Jones?"); in 1994, The Grateful Dead played in concert with Jerry Garcia for the last time; in 2001, the United States Supreme Court heard verbal arguments in Nevada vs. Hicks, in which the State of Nevada claimed immunity from being sued in Paiute/Shoshone Tribal Court; in 2002, veteran Nevada journalist Lee Adler died in Carson City; in 2004, Richard Clarke, counterterrorism official in the Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II administrations, said in an interview: "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda, ever."

UPDATE: Friday, 20 March 2009, 22:58:50 PDT, 06:58:50 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT 3-21-2008 –

On this date in 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in protest against the fugitive slave laws, was published, spreading anti-slavery sentiment (in the novel, Tom is an African-American who is portrayed as a noble, courageous and self sacrificing figure, so naturally when white playwrights got ahold of the story they changed the character into a groveling, submissive figure); in 1854, a group of former Whigs met in Ripon, Wisconsin, to start the Republican Party; in 1898, thirteen wagonloads of Latter Day Saints settlers from Moroni, Utah, arrived in White Pine County, Nevada, where they established the hamlet of Preston; in 1903, the Reno Evening Gazette reported that "J. Pierpont Morgan was in Washington the other day. He visited the President and also saw Senator Gorman and Senator Hanna. We will now hear that the trusts have ordered the removal of the capitol to Wall Street."; in 1917, the sagebrush was "hereby adopted as the state emblem of the State of Nevada"; in 1923 in Blanding, San Juan County, Utah, Sheriff W.E. Aliver was pistol whipping a Native American in the jail when another one grabbed his gun and the two Paiute Indians disarmed him, locked him in the cell, and escaped (newspaper reports referred to the two as "young bucks"); in 1928, the installation of dial telephones began in Reno, though they were not yet functional for dial calls; in 1939, the German reich was in negotiations with Lithuania over the fate of Memel, which had been administered by France under a League of Nations mandate since the end of the world war; in 1940, University of Nevada freshman halfback Marion Motley killed an elderly Japanese man in a car accident and was charged with negligent homicide; in 1949, Gentleman's Agreement, an indictment of anti-Semitism in the U.S., won the Academy Award for best picture of the year; in 1954, official Washington coped with a shocking turn of events, the apparent victory of the Vietnamese over the French at Dien Bien Phu, as French General Paul Ely arrived to seek U.S. help (the chair of the U.S. joint chiefs would propose using nuclear weapons against the Vietnamese); in 1988 over a park in Mountain View, California, a passing aircraft snagged the tail of a kite, lifting 8-year old DeAndra Anrig off the ground and carrying her 100 feet, when she let go (she was not seriously injured); in 2003, the U.S. government began its war against Iraq; in 2005, with the support of Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid, GOP leaders pushed legislation through Congress intervening in a family court dispute in Florida over the fate of a brain-damaged woman named Terri Schiavo, setting off a furious ten-day storm over the case that damaged both political parties (only three senators participated in the voice vote in the nearly empty Senate chamber, and Reid, in a phone call from the Middle East, gave his permission for that maneuver without checking with his caucus members).

UPDATE: Thursday, 19 March 2009, 01:03:1 a.m. PDT, 08:03:1 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT — On this date in 624, Muhammed proclaimed the "Day of Deliverance"; in 1860, William Jennings Bryan, U.S. congressmember, three-time Democratic presidential nominee, and U.S. secretary of state who resigned in protest against the Wilson administration's belligerence that led to entry into world war, was born in Salem, Illinois; in 1874, President Grant signed an executive order reserving land in the region of Walker Lake, Nevada, "for the use of the Pah-Ute Indians residing thereon"; in 1917 in Wilson vs. New, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the eight-hour day and minimum wages by approving the Adamson act of 1916 that covered railroad workers; in 1923, two agents in the Reno office of the U.S. alcohol prohibition enforcement agency were fired, and U.S. Attorney George Springmeyer made clear his disapproval of the firings and denied having anything to do with them; in 1925, Angelo Roncalli, later Pope John XXIII, was made a bishop; in 1928, a judge in Independence, California, threw out charges against six Owens Valley men accused of bombing the aqueduct built to carry water out of the Owens Valley to Los Angeles; in 1928, U.S. court watermaster Harry Dukes filed a report with the federal court in Carson City on the division of waters from natural storage and artificial storage in Lake Tahoe; in 1928, cock fights in Washoe County were reported to be drawing good crowds; in 1931, gambling was made legal again in Nevada; in 1954, U.S. Representative Kenneth Keating of New York introduced legislation designed to curb the Nevada gambling industry by banning casino advertising over state lines, prohibiting the shipment of gambling equipment into the state, and blocking collection of gambling debts with bank checks (the Las Vegas Review-Journal referred to him as Emmett Keating); in 1962, three University of Nevada regents started a three-day "How to be a regent 101" workshop in San Francisco; in 1968, a group of "wise men", presidential advisors convened by President Johnson, many of whom supported getting into Vietnam, advised Johnson to get out of Vietnam; in 1969, the Chicago 8 were indicted; in 1991, Phoenix lost the right to host the 1993 Super Bowl because of the behavior of state political leaders in denigrating Martin Luther King, Jr.; in 1996, a new Beatles song Real Love (created by adding the voices of George, Ringo and Paul to a recording made by John) was released as part of The Beatles Anthology; in 1997, President Clinton named George Tenet as CIA director.

UPDATE: Wednesday, 18 March 2009, 00:32:34 a.m. PDT, 07:32:34 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT —

Robert Kennedy / University of Kansas / Lawrence, Kansas / March 18, 1968: Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product...if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

On this date in 1834, six members of a farmworkers union in Tolpuddle, England (the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers), were sentenced to banishment on the penal colony of Australia, prompting widespread anger and public protests and helping bestow legitimacy on the trade union movement (their sentences were remitted two years later); in 1849 on his first day at sea after sailing from Massachusetts for the California gold fields, nineteen year-old Alf Doten began the diary that he would keep all his life (including his years as a Nevada editor), eventually stretching to 79 volumes that would be edited by Walter Van Tilburg Clark and published in three mammoth volumes by the University of Nevada Press seventy years after his death; in 1871, the republican Paris Commune, the first government of the working class, was formed; in 1897, a day after their heavyweight championship fight in Carson City, new champion Robert Fitzsimmons was still in the capital and former champ James Corbett was in San Francisco getting a tooth repaired and showing himself in the streets to quash a rumor that he was dead; in 1907, during flooding in western Nevada, dozens of buildings in Reno were destroyed, 200 yards of railroad track at Floriston was swept away, Reno's Chinatown was underwater, the Verdi steel bridge went under, the Floriston dam was blown up to save the paper mills, sending logs into the river where they destroyed the Mayberry Bridge, and the Reno Evening Gazette got out a one-sheet edition; in 1922, the Cinderella state champion team of Fallon was invited to participate in a basket ball interscholastic tournament in Chicago against forty other states and an intermountain tourney in Salt Lake City but could not attend either because of the expense; in 1932, final congressional approval was given to U.S. Senator George Norris' bill shielding workers from unrestricted federal court injunctions against strikes; in 1932, traveling to San Francisco to embark on a ship to Hawaii to handle the Fortescue Massie case, Clarence Darrow was interviewed while his train was standing in Reno and predicted that President Hoover would be swept out of office in November by an "astounding" vote; in 1938, Mexican President (Lazaro) Cardenas nationalized oil companies owned by U.S. investors; in 1942, the U.S. War Relocation Authority was created to handle the internment around the nation of U.S. citizens of Italian, German, Japanese, Romanian and miscellaneous other descents; in 1954, Las Vegas school officials said construction of Rancho High School would begin within a month; in 1967, Penny Lane hit number one; in 1969, Richard Nixon secretly and illegally ordered the bombing of neutral Cambodia; in 1979, U.S. feminist Kate Millett was arrested in Iran for aiding the Persian women's movement; in 2005, Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman in the 14th year of a persistent vegetative state, was subpoenaed to testify before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health on March 28 in Washington, an effort by U.S. senators Bill Frist and Michael Enzi to keep her alive after a Florida judge ordered her feeding tube removed.

Robert Kennedy / March 18, 1968 / Kansas State University: I am concerned – as I believe most Americans are concerned – that our present course will not bring victory; will not bring peace; will not stop the bloodshed; and will not advance the interests of the United States or the cause of peace in the world. I am concerned that, at the end of it all, there will only be more Americans killed; more of our treasure spilled out; and because of the bitterness and hatred on every side of this war, more hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese slaughtered; so that they may say, as Tacitus said of Rome: "They made a desert, and called it peace." And I do not think that is what the American spirit is really all about.

UPDATE: Tuesday, 17 March 2009, 00:24:37 a.m. PDT, 07:24:37 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT – On this date in 1812, U.S. troops invaded Florida's panhandle in an effort to seize the territory from Spain; in 1897, shortly after the Nevada Legislature hastily made boxing legal, a heavyweight title fight between "Ruby Bob" Fitzsimmons and "Gentleman Jim" Corbett was held in Carson City (as late as 1999 the film of the fight received a vote in a Village Voice poll of film critics as the best film of its decade); in 1917, the first known women's bowling tournament got underway in St. Louis; in 1922 on the first St. Patrick's Day since part of Ireland was liberated from England, green neckties were worn and the tricolor was raised and blessed at Marlborough Hall, which had been transferred from crown forces to the Irish Republican Army; in 1922 in Washington, green ties worn on the floor of the House of Representatives created such a sensation that the house was temporarily adjourned; in 1922 in New York, a parade marked the liberation of most of Ireland but one sign carried by a women's society kept the faith: "We know no south, we know no north, we know only Ireland"; in 1926, Reno Mayor Edwin Roberts and City Clerk J.B. Reese signed an agreement with owners of a twenty-foot strip of land on the Majestic Theatre property providing for appraisal of the property and negotiation of the purchase price between owners representative Richard Kirman and city representative Roy Frisch; in 1928, federal prohibition agents interrupted and dispersed a high school fraternity dance at Moana Springs; in 1939, young Spanish artist Salvador Dali, retained by a New York department store to decorate store windows, pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after he plunged a bathtub through one of the windows when the store changed his work; in 1955, Dick Graves opened the Sparks Nugget; in 1959, the fourteenth Dalai Lama vanished from public view in Tibet, being given up for dead at the hands of Chinese occupation forces but actually eventually escaping across the Khenzimana Pass into India; in 1960, the Washoe County sheriff and Reno and Sparks police chiefs announced a crackdown on "obsenity (sic) – comic books and magazines depicting "criminal news, police reports, accounts of criminal deeds, drawings and photos of deeds of blood shed, lust" and other crimes; in 1966, farm workers led by César Chávez began a march from Delano to Sacramento; in 1990, Lithuania rejected a Soviet demand that it revoke its March 11 declaration of independence and The New York Times ran an editorial praising the Bush I administration for not recognizing Lithuania and leaving the matter to the U.S.S.R and Lithuania (the Soviets occupied Vilnius and in January launched a general attack on Lithuania); in 2003, the contributions of U.S. socialists were finally recognized on a coin when the Alabama quarter was released with socialist and IWW leader Helen Keller featured.

Helen Keller / November 3d 1912: If I ever contribute to the Socialist movement the book that I sometimes dream of, I know what I shall name it: Industrial Blindness and Social Deafness.

UPDATE: Monday, 16 March 2009, 00:21:18 a.m. PDT, 07:21:18 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT – On this date in 1875, a Nevada District Judge charged a Eureka County grand jury to take special note of those trying to buy elections because such practices put the public "at the mercy of men whose means and lack of conscience, and fearlessness of the laws, shall enable them to control the election of men to office who will be their tools and minions, ending in overthrowing republican government and erecting in its stead an incompetent and wicked monarchy, presided over by these alleged corruptionists"; in 1892, the Nevada State Journal reprinted a melancholy report from the fading mining camp of Pioche: "The furnaces were shut down Monday, February 29th, at 5:30, and the employes at the smelter and upon the Pioche and Jack Rabbit railroad were given their time. About fifty men altogether were laid off from the smelter and railroad. They are making arrangements to leave camp. Our streets are nearly deserted now. Thus doth our glory fade."; in 1936, the New Deal project of constructing Rye Patch Dam in Pershing County, Nevada, was hit with a fire that destroyed a machine shop; in 1940, a group of movie stars including Errol Flynn, Alan Hale, Humphrey Bogart, Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan arrived in Reno on the train for the premiere in Virginia City of the movie Virginia City, and the movie also premiered at the Majestic, Granada and Wigwam theatres in Reno; in 1942, Fats Waller recorded Jitterbug Waltz for Bluebird Records; in 1954 in Los Angeles, a jury was deliberating on the case against Jimmy "The Weasel" Frattianno, Dominic Raspona and James Modica, accused of threatening the lives of Terry Oil Company executives (including Nevada Lieutenant Governor Cliff Jones); in 1963, the Peter, Paul and Mary song Puff the Magic Dragon was released (a rumor attributed by PP&M to Time magazine claimed it was a drug song); in 1968 over a period of four hours, four hundred Vietnamese were murdered in two sections of Son My village in Quang Ngai province, the My Lai massacre becoming famous after a coverup and publication of photos and the My Khe massacre remaining little known because news outlets didn't have photos (the Pentagon asked journalists to discontinue the use of the term "massacre" in favor of "incident", and many journalists have complied); in 1968, U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy announced his candidacy for president; in 1968, in his announcement of candidacy for the presidency, U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy cited the suicide rate of young Native Americans as one of several indices of the unacceptable state of the nation; in 2006, the Penn State Latino Caucus discovered that a campus conservative group, Young Americans for Freedom, were holding a "Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day", confronted members of the group, and convinced them to cancel it.

UPDATE: Sunday, 15 March 2009, 00:03:43 a.m. PDT, 07:03:43 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT – On this date in 44 BC, Roman military dictator Julius Caesar was assassinated; in 1867, the first special session of the Nevada Legislature began, lasting three weeks, to deal with a state revenue shortfall; in 1907, the Nevada Senate approved legislation to create a state publicity bureau; in 1928 with all roads to Lake Tahoe closed except Kingsbury Grade, plans were being made to open the Kings Canyon grade west of Carson City and an appeal went out to Renoites with homes at Tahoe to bring their snow shovels and help; in 1940, the NBC Radio program Death Valley Days broadcast a radio play titled Abe Curry, The Father Of Carson.; in 1945, The King Cole Trio was number one in the first Billboard magazine albums chart (Nat Cole later abandoned jazz for MOR ballad singing, but his trio's recordings are still widely admired); in 1954, The Chords (one of the "hallway groups" that harmonized in school, on streetcorners or in the subway) recorded Sh-boom as the B side of a 78 record on the Cat label, setting off the doo-wop era (unfortunately, a white group called The Crew Cuts quickly covered the Chords version, draining away the Chords' earnings and their hit); in 1957, the Atomic Energy Commission revealed that an atomic reactor at Los Alamos had exploded on February 12, but gave no explanation for the delay in the announcement; in 1963, the University of Nevada in Reno took possession, after removal of graves, of a former cemetery parcel, now the site of the Nye Hall dormitory (approximate date); in 1988, a four-day battle began in the area of Halabja on the Iran/Iraq border during which the city was gassed by what the Reagan administration said was an Iranian attack (fourteen years later, the second Bush administration changed that story as part of its campaign for war, claiming the attack was launched by Saddam Hussein's forces, then charging that "he gassed his own people").

UPDATE: Saturday, 14 March 2009, 00:01:06 a.m. PDT, 07:01:06 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT – On this date in 1881, Assemblymember James Adams of Eureka County was shot in a saloon fight and was not expected to live; in 1896, Sutro Baths opened in the Bay area; in 1913, Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey became president of the United States, beginning a dark era of white supremacy, militarism and repression never equaled in a single presidency; in 1921, the Nevada Senate voted 9 to 8 to remove Nevada District Judge Frank Langan from office, falling short of the two-thirds margin needed for removal; in 1939, the Nevada Assembly voted to shut down the Nevada Historical Society and create a Nevada Museum and Art Institute by passing legislation sponsored by Assemblymember Peter Amodei of Ormsby County; in 1947, Assemblymember Don Crawford of Vya proposed that, since the sixtieth day was fast approaching and there was a lot of unfinished business, the governor be asked to call the legislature back into special session on day 61, but he found little support for the idea; in 1959, a new First National Bank of Nevada branch building in Carson City was opened at a ceremony attended by Governor Grant Sawyer (the building is now a Nevada State Museum annex); in 1960, Clark Guild, Jr., was elected regional vice president of the YMCA; in 1961, the Reno city council sold the town's brick clock tower city hall to First National Bank for a parking garage, generating outrage in the community; in 1963, President Kennedy released $200,000 in flood relief funds for Nevada, the first cash to reach the state since the January floods; in 1989, Edward Abbey, the Thoreau of the desert who worked to redefine the west and especially the desert from a movie stereotype to a besieged region victimized by corporate greed and government exploitation, died in Arizona; in 2008, with mammoth mortgage underwriter Bear Stearns near collapse, the Federal Reserve Bank stepping into the market to save it, and financial markets wobbling, George Bush told the Economic Club of New York that the U.S. was "really in many ways the economic envy of the world".

UPDATE: Friday, 13 March 2009, 5:43:37 a.m. PDT, 12:43:37 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT –

On this date in 1867 in Galaxy magazine, there appeared in the fiction short story Captain Tom's Fright the first known instance in the U.S. of someone being described as tied hand and foot and left on a railroad tracks, a story that subsequently was copied by other dramatists and then in real life (honest! – it really happened); in 1897, the gloves to be used in the Fitzsimmons/Corbett heavyweight championship fight in Carson City on St. Patrick's Day were delivered, weighed and accepted, and a bell that previously was used in a Virginia City mine to signal raising and lowering the hoist was installed as the fight bell; in 1913, the Wadsworth Club of Sparks sent a letter to Nevada Assembly Speaker Thomas Brandon objecting to the revival of gambling in Nevada; in 1936, the Civilian Conservation Corps boys at Camp Reno held a dance for themselves and the people of the town before they ended their work and returned to their homes in the east; in 1939, Neil Sedaka was born in Brooklyn; in 1947, The Best Years Of Our Lives won the Academy Award for best picture of the year; in 1954, after building a military base on a flat plain surrounded by supposedly impassable mountainous terrain and daring the Viet Minh to attack, the French at Dien Bien Phu received a terrible shock: Over many months 50,000 Vietnamese had hauled 200 heavy artillery pieces, anti-aircraft guns, huge supplies of ammunitions and four rocket systems up the steep mountains, surrounding the French in a deadly trap – one of the legendary logistical achievements of military history; in 1956, the album Elvis Presley was released by RCA and went straight to number eleven on the Billboard chart, becoming the first million-selling album; in 1971 in a heavy wind, a steel girder fell from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas humanities building (which was under construction) , missed the Moyer Building where the Nevada Board of Regents was meeting, and crushed four cars parked in front of the building; in 1980, the Ford Motor Company was acquitted of murder in its intentionally faulty manufacture of the Pinto; in 2001, U.S. Representative Scott McInnis of Colorado introduced legislation "To provide permanent appropriations to the Radiation Exposure Compensation Trust Fund" to compensate without more delay victims of U.S. nuclear testing in Nevada."

UPDATE: Thursday, 12 March 2009, 12:37:45 a.m. PDT, 07:37:45 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT – On this date in 1917, three weeks before the U.S. entered the European war and after food riots in Britain, New York and Philadelphia, the Women's National Farm and Garden Association in the U.S. formed the Land Service League, which (on 26 acres of land provided by the federal government) trained New Yorkers and then later women from urban areas across the nation as farm workers who labored on farms in rural areas to feed the nation during the country's short involvement in the war; in 1928, a joint army/navy board recommended to Congress that a munitions depot be established at Hawthorne, Nevada; in 1928, trial was set for violation of the federal alcohol prohibition law for 12 businesses in Reno, one in Sparks, one in Black Springs, one in Yerington, one in Verdi, one in Carlin and one in Lovelock; in 1930, Gandhi and almost 80 satyagrahis (nonviolent fighters) started walking on the 240 mile "Salt March" to protest the British monopoly on salt and the salt tax, encouraging the illegal manufacture of salt, demonstrating the power of satyagraha (see below), giving millions a sense of empowerment, and taking a major step toward Indian independence; in 1935, Lyon County Republican Senator George Friedhoff resigned from the Nevada Senate to become Federal Housing Administrator in the state; in 1943, Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man was performed for the first time, by the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra; in 1947, President Truman announced the influential "Truman doctrine" that in the short run led the U.S. to intervene in the Greek civil war on the side of the neo-fascist governing forces and in the long run led to U.S. interventions in Iran, Vietnam, Guatemala and innumerable other places, all in the name of anti-communism; in 1954, a film crew was in Las Vegas (downtown and the strip, including the Desert Inn) shooting scenes for Cinerama Holiday, a tale of a Swiss couple touring the U.S. and a Kansas City couple touring Europe, which would become the highest grossing film of 1955; in 1957, word reached Reno that Renoite Dawn Wells had been elected to student body office at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, running on a slogan of "Not day, not dusk – Dawn for treasurer"; in 1961, Miss Nevada 1959 Dawn Wells appeared as "Caprice Rambeau" on The Deadly Image, a fourth season episode of Maverick; in 1968, Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy took 42.2 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary away from incumbent Lyndon Johnson, who received 49.4 percent, demonstrating divisions in the Democratic Party (uncounted McCarthy write-ins on the Republican side of the primary raised the possibility that McCarthy outpolled Johnson in total votes); in 1971, nineteen year-old Joseph James Gomez of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Dinh Tuong province, Vietnam (panel 30w, row 87); in 2008, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned after harsh reaction to disclosure of his use of call girl services.

UPDATE: Tuesday, 10 March 2009, 8:33:18 a.m. PDT, 15:33:18 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT – On this date in 1848, the United States Senate ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the fruit of U.S. aggression against Mexico, ended the disreputable Mexican invasion and brought the territory that became Nevada and other states into the union (the treaty was signed February 2 and was "formally proclaimed" on July 4); in 1875, a first anniversary ball of the Silver City Miners Union was held at Armory Hall; in 1909, after refusing for seven years to reveal the information, the U.S. Treasury finally disclosed the expenditures made from a July 1, 1902, congressional appropriation of $45,000 for expenses associated with the aftermath of President McKinley's assassination and it came to $37,591.13 for medical bills and undertaking costs; in 1925, Vice-President Charles Dawes left the debate on senate confirmation of President Coolidge's nominee for attorney general and went to the New Willard Hotel for a nap and slept through the vote, missing an opportunity to break a tie in favor of Coolidge, whose nominee was rejected by the senators; in 1929, tired of the damage inflicted on the U.S. family unit by alcohol prohibition, the founder of the Women's National Republican Club, Pauline Sabin, shocked the group by announcing she was breaking with Prohibition forces and resigning from the club to lead the fight for repeal; in 1948, the body of Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk, son of the nation's founder, was found in a courtyard below his windows, a death that was officially ruled a suicide, a finding upheld in a reinvestigation of the case during Alexander Dubcek's 1968 liberalization but overturned in favor of a murder finding in a second reinvestigation after the fall of communism; in 1952, the Soviet Union proposed that Germany be reunified with internationally supervised elections and all foreign troops withdrawn on the condition that the united country be prohibited from joining any military alliance, but the U.S. refused the offer in order to get West Germany into NATO; in 1959 as a result of advance orders, Elvis' new single went gold the moment it was released (A Fool Such As I b/w I Need Your Love Tonight); in 1968, Robert Kennedy and César Chávez met in Delano, California, for the breaking of Chávez's anti-violence fast (Chávez's physicians had contacted Kennedy to ask for his help in convincing Chavez to end his fast before it did more damage to his health); in 1973, Nevada District Judge James Santini testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Las Vegas needed a third justice of the peace to alleviate an "almost nightmarish" caseload that forced the two justices to "cram stuff through", making their courts "a turnstile affair"; in 1986, Newsweek ran a quote from anti-drug activist Arnold Washton that cocaine is "almost instantly addicting" without checking its accuracy and set off a national hysteria that affected public policy and created a powerful myth that is still widely accepted today – and is false.

UPDATE: Monday, 9 March 2009, 12:03:13 a.m. PDT, 09:22:25 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT – On this date in 1841, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld lower court decisions and ordered that the survivors of the voyage of La Amistad be set free (thanks to the donations of Christian anti-slavery groups, they were able to return to Sierra Leone, though the leader of the Amistad mutiny, Joseph Cinque, never found his family); in 1863, ("The Gray Ghost") John Mosby and his rangers went behind Union lines to northern-held Fairfax Court House, captured General Edwin Stoughton, 32 other prisoners and 58 horses, and made their way safely back to Confederate lines (President Lincoln reportedly said he could always make another general, but he couldn't afford the loss of all those horses); in 1866, a Nevada state law was approved "establishing and maintaining a Mining School and Creat[ing] the Office of State Mineralogist"; in 1905, the plans for a new $25,000 state park to be created between Reno and Sparks were put on display at the Overland Hotel in Reno; in 1912, San Francisco newspaper reports suggested that bad blood between Nevada Governor Tasker Oddie and state prison warden Ray Baker was the product of the rejection of the governor's "heart and hand" by Baker's sister-in-law, Mrs. Dale Hartley Baker, and by the governor being overshadowed by Baker's record as warden; in 1912, the Reno chapter of the International Concatenated Order of Hoo Hoo (I'm not making this up) initiated twenty new members; in 1933, the first New Deal measure, the Emergency Banking Act (a conservative measure drawn up for President Frankling D. Roosevelt by Hoover administration holdovers) was introduced in Congress and enacted without being read, winning the support of bankers across the nation for FDR (during the debate over the act, Senator Huey Long, D-Louisiana, insisted on asking what was in the bill, prompting Senator Carter Class to snarl "You damn son of a bitch!"); in 1939, a letter from U.S. Senator Key Pittman to Nevada Lieutenant Governor Maurice Sullivan was made public, and it denounced U.S. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes' administration of the Hoover Dam area as dictatorial; in 1940, U.S. Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, president pro tempore of the senate and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made a radio address about world affairs on NBC; in 1940, Reno police got new seven-pointed badges; in 1954, former Reno Airport Authority member and state legislator Dawn Gibbons was born in Atlanta, Georgia; in 1956, MGM's Meet Me In Las Vegas starring Cyd Charisse, Jim Backus, Dan Dailey, Lili Darvas and Agnes Moorehead was released; in 1968, Sgt. Pepper'sLonely Hearts Club Band won the 1967 Grammys for album of the year, best contemporary album, best engineered recording (non-classical catergory), and best album cover (graphic arts category); in 1969, nineteen year-old Rodney Lane Crane of McGill, Nevada, died in Binh Duong province, Vietnam (panel 30w line 86 of the Vietnam wall), and 20 year-old Ronald Eugene Dedman of Wells, Nevada, died in Quang Ngai province, Vietnam (panel 30w, row 87); in 2005, a statue of author and Native American leader Sarah Winnemucca was unveiled in Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol.

UPDATE: Sunday, 8 March 2009, 1:22:25 a.m. PST, 09:22:25 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT – On this date in 1904, U.S. Senator Francis Newlands of Nevada spoke in the senate about his bill to guarantee an uninterrupted vista from the Capitol to the Washington monument; in 1908, Schurz was enjoying an economic boom, with about a hundred miners in the town awaiting transportation to the new boom camp of Rawhide (contracts were signed on March 7 for the construction of a railroad to Rawhide); in 1913, a federal quarantine on Nevada sheep that banned shipments from the state for six years (prompted by federal inspectors' estimate that 12 percent of the state herd was carrying scabies) was lifted; in 1933 with wealthy people hoarding gold and thus draining capital from the banking system, President Franklin D. Roosevelt told the Federal Reserve to announce that on March 13 it would publish a list of all those who had withdrawn bullion or gold coins before the Roosevelt inauguration and had not yet returned it, whereupon the hoarders lined up to redeposit hundreds of millions of dollars; in 1946, W.E. Travis, who was once a stagecoach driver, became chairman of the board of the Pacific Greyhound Bus Lines (he died six years later and left a will that provided money to the University of Nevada for construction of a student union); in 1951, the popular Marilyn Maxwell/Bob Hope movie remake of the Damon Runyon short story The Lemon Drop Kid was released, and it included a new kind of Christmas song, Silver Bells, an urban carol by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, set in the city rather than a rural site, which became a huge hit in 1952 and has since been recorded by hundreds of artists from Henry Mancini to Regis Philbin; in 1956, a U.S. Navy investigation was completed into the sexuality of Navy physician Thomas Dooley (who would later be proposed for Catholic sainthood) and the results of the investigation were used later in the month to force Dooley out of the service; in 1961, Senate liberals led by Wayne Morse of Oregon were unable to block President Kennedy's nomination of segregationist Charles Meriwether, former campaign manager of Alabama's Klan-supported governor John Patterson, to be a director of the Export-Import Bank (the vote was 66-18); in 1968, twenty year-old Danny Lee Smothers of Carson City, Nevada, died in Quang Tri province, Vietnam (panel 43e, row 61 of the Vietnam wall); in 1969, twenty year-old Larry Donald Brown of Caliente, Nevada, died in Kien Hoa province, Vietnam (panel 30w, row 72); in 1970, twenty-one year-old William Robert Rogne of Fallon, Nevada died in Quang Duc province, Vietnam (panel 13w, row 98).

UPDATE: Saturday, 7 March 2009, 12:38:21 a.m PST, 08:38:21 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT –

On this date in 1799, President John Adams declared April 25 a national day of fasting and repentance, an action so sharply at odds with the founding generation's concept of (separation of) church and state that one clergyman (a cousin of James Madison) distributed a prayer calling for fasting to protest the abandonment of Christian liberty. Adams received three written threats to burn Philadelphia (then the national capital and the location of the president's home) and on April 25, thousands of Philadelphians marched to protest in the streets against the breach of church/state separation. Gov. Thomas Mifflin called out the cavalry to protect Adams; in 1875, the Virginia and Truckee Railroad, which ordered four engines from the Baldwin Car Works and 50 flat cars from the Detroit Car Works, put the first two engines (the Truckee and the Tahoe) into service after they were worked over in the Carson City shops (the other two engines, the Inyo and the J.W. Bowker, had not yet arrived, but ten of the flat cars had); in 1878, the Washoe County Commission published a defense of its expenditure of $50 ($913.59 in 2006 dollars) to aid Native Americans during heavy winter snows, which had been criticized by the county grand jury; in 1908, federal troops sent by President Theodore Roosevelt left Goldfield after they broke the mining unions, and a second detachment of the new state police force formed to replace the troops departed for Goldfield; in 1917, RCA Victor recorded The Dixie Jazz Band One Step by Nick La Rocca and his Dixieland Jazz Band, considered by some to be the first jazz record; in 1923, the New Republic published Robert Frost's Stopping By Woods On a Summer Evening, which became one of the most beloved of U.S. poems; in 1937, a photo caption in the Nevada State Journal read "Pretty Gene Wines caused quite a furor in the forging laboratory of the college of engineering at the University of Nevada when she signed up for forging – the first co-ed to invade the hitherto male sanctuary....A sophomore student, Miss Wines hopes some day to become an architectural engineer but is determined to master mechanical engineering, including forging, first." (Gene Wines Segerblom was a Boulder city councilmember from 1979 to 1983 and a member of the Nevada Legislature from 1992 to 2000); in 1944, historian Emanuel Ringelblum (archivist of the Warsaw Ghetto) and his family were tortured and killed; in 1949, the U.S. House Armed Services Committee was busily processing a secret bill giving U.S. intelligence agents new powers, and committee chair Carl Vinson said no details of the bill would be given to Congress, no record of the committee hearing was kept, debate on the bill would be limited, amendments would not be permitted, and little time would be provided on the floor for questions before the vote; in 1960 on the eve of the New Hampshire presidential primary election, Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts seemed to be holding his own against ball point pen manufacturer Paul Fisher of Nevada, the only other candidate running actively in New Hampshire; in 1962, Nevada Attorney General Roger Foley informed Governor Grant Sawyer that he would not represent state gambling regulators in court in their effort to desegregate casinos; in 1962, Manogue High School first-year student April Kestell won the Reno Arch Lions Club speech contest and qualified for the zone finals; in 1968, nineteen year-old Sterling Price Johnson of Carlin, Nevada, died in Quang Tri province, Vietnam (panel 43e, row 45); in 1969, twenty-one year-old John Ira Aleck of Reno, Nevada, died in Quang Nam province, Vietnam (panel 30w, row 62); in 1968, Robert Kennedy made his last comments in the U.S. Senate on Vietnam (see below); in 1979, Ray Charles performed Georgia On My Mind before a joint session of the Georgia Legislature, which had named it the state song; in 1998, President Clinton signed a federal funding reauthorization bill into which Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy had slipped a seven word sentence making his state's Lake Champlain one of the Great Lakes in order to qualify it for federal marine research money (New York Times: "Some lakes are born Great, and some have greatness thrust upon them."; Senator John Glenn: "I know the Great Lakes. I've traveled the Great Lakes. And Lake Champlain is not one of the Great Lakes.").

On this date in 1836, in a significant defeat of human slavery, Santa Anna's forces defeated the forces inside the Alamo in a ninety-minute early morning battle; in 1836, while Santa Anna inspected the plaza of the Alamo, six of the defenders including David Crockett were found hiding under some mattresses and were brought before the general, who ordered them executed, and they were killed with swords (Santa Anna also freed a surviving slave belonging to Col. William Travis, in keeping with the purpose of the war to enforce the abolition of slavery in northern Mexico); in 1930, 100,000 people demonstrated in New York City, demanding jobs; in 1939, a federal project was launched to aid Native Americans who had been relocated from fertile land to less arable land by Los Angeles' successful effort to remove water from the Owens Valley in California; in 1946, France recognized the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as a state within the French union, with Ho Chi Minh as its chief of state (the French violated the agreement twelve weeks later); in 1951, the Nevada Legislature ratified the 22d amendment (limiting presidents to two terms) to the U.S. constitution; in 1961, Reno labor union leaders were furious with U.S. Representative Walter Baring, D-Nev., for trying to divert what would become the Interstate 80 freeway route from downtown Reno to a bypass route north of town, thus interfering with construction of some housing developments; in 1962, Governor Grant Sawyer appointed attorney Procter Hug, Jr., to the Univeristy of Nevada Board of Regents to replace casino owner Newt Crumley, who was killed in a plane crash; in 1968, twenty-one year-old Jere Douglas Farnow of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in action in Quang Tin province, Vietnam (panel 43e, row 18 of the Vietnam wall); in 1968, twenty-one year-old James Herbert Smith, Jr., of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Quang Tri province, Vietnam panel 43e, row 35); in 1970, The Beatles' Let it Be b/w You Know My Name (Look Up The Number) was released in England; in 1999, The New York Times began publication of a startling series of reports that claimed espionage had been committed at the Los Alamos atomic laboratories and that a U.S. citizen of Chinese descent was a suspect, setting off a spy hysteria that prompted anti-Clinton Republicans to call congressional hearings and the FBI and U.S. Justice Department to persecute scientist Wen Ho Lee, though investigations by other newspapers could find no substantiation for the Times reports (Wen Ho Lee was eventually cleared of all espionage charges, a federal judge apologized to him and castigated federal investigators, and The Times retracted its reporting, though Lee was forced to plead guilty to a technical violation).

UPDATE: Thursday, 5 March 2009, 12:30:47 a.m PST, 08:30:47 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT – On this date in 1770, eight British soldiers goaded by a crowd of colonists panicked and fired into the crowd, killing five men (the soldiers were charged with murder and defended by John Adams, and exaggerated accounts of the incident – the "Boston Massacre" – were used to whip up anti-British sentiment throughout the colonies); in 1849, a convention of Latter Day Saints settlers was held at Salt Lake City to organize a government for a "State of Deseret"(which, as Utah Territory, would initially contain much of present day Nevada); in 1868, the Virginia and Truckee Railroad was incorporated; in 1869, Elko County, Nevada, was created (no verifiable explanation for the name is known); in 1877, after the appointment of Rutherford Hayes as president following his defeat in both popular and electoral votes, rumors swept the nation that Samuel Tilden, who actually won the election, would take the oath of office in New York and then go to Washington; in 1885, Assemblymember David Allen of Washoe County introduced legislation providing for the appointment of "state detectives", which, after the bill was enacted, were paid by commercial interests like the mining and cattle industries and empowered with deputy's powers to serve those interests, often being employed against labor; in 1910, during a strike on the Tonopah and Goldfield Railroad, railroad officials were arrested for posing as law officers, a strikebreaker was rotten-egged by citizens as he left a barber shop, and a performance of The Gingerbread Man at the Majestic Theatre in Reno was cancelled when the troupe of performers were delayed by the interruption in rail service; in 1911, the Nevada State Journal wrote "It is a reproach on civilization that these young Indians should be in the condition of close cousins to savage wildcats."; in 1924, President Coolidge declared an amnesty for all U.S. deserters in the world war who had deserted after the armistice, about a hundred men (those who deserted before the armistice had already been amnestied by President Harding); in 1924, the name of Hiram Johnston of Zilwaukee township, which had been filed to appear on the Michigan presidential primary ballot along with that of U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson of California, was stricken from the ballot when it was determined that he was buried in a Bay City cemetery; in 1944, poet Max Jacob, Jewish godson of Pablo Picasso who converted to Catholicism after seeing a vision of Jesus but was still forced to wear the yellow star, died of bronchial pneumonia in Drancy concentration camp in France (see below); in 1951, the song Rocket 88 was recorded by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats (who were in fact Ike Turner and the Kings of Rhythm, though Brenston sang lead) for Sun Records, a benchmark in the Sun catalog and considered by some to be the first rock and roll record; in 1961, construction was underway on 500 homes in Hidden Valley Estates south of Sparks, a development that would become one of the Truckee Meadows' swankiest and most troublesome areas; in 1962, Reno's city manager sent a letter to the University of Nevada in Reno informing campus officials that the city council had rescinded a vote changing the name of Center Street to University Avenue because having cross streets with similar names (University Terrace/University Avenue) would create problems for the fire department; in 1962, George C. Scott declined his Academy Award nomination for The Hustler; in 1963, singers Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins died in a plane crash; in 1967, Persian Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, who was overthrown and replaced by Reza Pahlavi in a 1953 CIA-engineered coup that ushered in Pahlavi's quarter-century tyranny, died in Ahmad Abad, Iran; in 1968, eighteen year-old David Louis Bidart of Reno, Nevada, died in Phuoc Long province, Vietnam (panel 43e, row 3 of the Vietnam wall); in 1968 at an appearance in Hampton, New Hampshire, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon made some comments about Vietnam that some journalists interpreted to mean that Nixon said he had a "secret plan" to end the war, and the term became a chronic problem for him as president even though he never spoke it; in 1969, the first issue of the rock magazine Creem was published; in 1971 at Ulster Hall in Belfast, Led Zeppelin played the immortal Stairway to Heaven for the first time, drawing long applause from the audience (the song, released on Led Zeppelin IV on November 8, 1971, became and remains the most requested song on FM radio stations in the United States (even though the band never authorized a shortened version for radio play), is the best selling sheet music in U.S. history, and an Australian comedy television program had a different artist each week perform it, releasing 25 versions on the videotape The Money or the Gun/Stairways to Heaven); in 1973, New York Yankee pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson announced they were trading wives, with Peterson asking reporters "Don't make anything sordid out of this" (the trade was named by the New York Daily News as one of "100 Classic Yankee Moments"; Mike Kekich and Marilyn Peterson did not last, but Fritz Peterson and Suzanne Kekich are still together); in 1981, President Reagan called for an end to legal aid for the poor; in 1992, U.S. Senator Robert Kerrey of Nebraska withdrew from the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, singing Eric Bogle's And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, a haunting antiwar song that laments the criminal sacrifice of soldiers by their commanders at Gallipoli and the loss of public awareness of that sacrifice [Click here for the lyrics of And The Band Played "Waltzing Matilda" and historical bytes]; in 1999, Joan Kerschner stepped down as acting administrator of the Nevada State Archives and Library to become director of the Henderson Public Library; in 2004, former Nevada governor Mike O'Callaghan died at age 74.

UPDATE: Wednesday, 4 March 2009, 12:54:25 p.m PST, 20:54:25 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT –

Henry Clay / March 4, 1818: An oppressed people are authorized whenever they can to rise and break their fetters.

On this date in 1193, Salah ah Din (Saladin), the heroic Muslim leader who defeated the Christian crusades, died in Damascus, setting off mourning throughout the Middle East; in 1865, surrounded by members of the assassination conspiracy – including John Wilkes Booth – in the crowd, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office for a second term (Booth on March 8: "What a splendid chance I had to kill the president on the fourth of March"); in 1875, the Territorial Enterprise expressed the wish that Churchill County would be "wiped off the map of the State"; in 1875, the Storey County Board of Commissioners ordered that six lawsuits against widows for back taxes be discontinued; in 1903, the Nevada BM-8, a coastal defense monitor built by Bath Iron Works, was delivered to the U.S. Navy; in 1914, the new $110,000 University of Nevada library was dedicated; in 1925, Vice-President Charles Dawes upstaged President Coolidge's inaugural address by taking the oath of office and then making a speech attacking U.S. senate procedures, including the filibuster, a speech one historian said Dawes delivered in "his best hard-nosed, stiff-collared, patronizing performance, and the senate didn't like it for a minute – Not since the time of Andy Johnson had a new Vice President upset the decorum of the inauguration program."; in 1927, caught between a filibuster which kept the Senate from doing business and opposition in the House from U.S. Representative Harry Englebright of California who wanted the project for his own district, Nevada Senator Tasker Oddie's bill to create a naval ammunition depot near Hawthorne died when Congress adjourned (also dying from inaction were $100,000 for a Truckee canal, $6,000 for a water system for the Reno/Sparks Indian Colony, and renewal of a $25,000 appropriation for land acquisition for the Te Moak tribe in Ruby Valley); in 1927, Vice-President Charles Dawes took the occasion of the failure of Congress to function because of a filibuster to make some I-told-you-so comments (see 1925); in 1933, with the nation's banking system in collapse (most states had shut down all their banks) and everyone from Walter Lippman to William Randolph Hearst urging him to seize power as a dictator, Franklin Roosevelt gave an inaugural speech designed to prepare the public for the possibility (see below); in 1960, the Washoe County Democratic Party blew apart into two factions, holding two different county conventions representing an old guard and a younger group of allies of Governor Grant Sawyer; in 1960 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Leonard Warren sang the line "He is saved, he is saved, oh joy!" in Verdi's La Forza del Destino and dropped dead; in 1977, workers at the Flame dinner spot in Las Vegas voted to decertify the Culinary Union and the Bartenders Union as their bargaining agents, the seventh such recent loss for unions in Las Vegas; in 2002, Matthew A. Commons of Boulder City died near Gardez, Afghanistan; in 2007, the Associated Press reported that U.S. troops threatened the lives of Afghan reporters unless those reporters erased images of a U.S. attack on civilians: "Delete them or we'll delete you."

UPDATE: Tuesday, 3 March 2009, 07:54:05 a.m PST, 15:54:05 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT – On this date in 1817, Congress approved a petition from a group of Napoleonic military officers and their families who were exiled or escaped from St. Domingue after a slave rebellion and from France after Waterloo, granting 92,000 acres of Creek and Choctaw territory (four adjoining townships) on the Tombigbee and Warrior Rivers in Alabama for $2 an acre, the present site of Demopolis (lively French culture flourished at the site for many years but wine and olive enterprises did not, and when it was discovered that the colony had settled on the wrong site, most of the French moved away); in 1863, U.S. Representative Aaron Sargent of California introduced legislation providing for the appointment of Indian agents in Nevada; in 1887, U.S. infantry soldiers stopped in Reno on their way from service in the Pine Ridge/Wounded Knee campaign to return to their permanent duty stations in the San Francisco bay area; in 1931, President Hoover signed legislation making Defence of Fort McHenry (aka The Star Spangled Banner), written by anti-war lawyer Francis Scott Key and set to the music of the British drinking song To Anacreon in Heaven (aka The Anacreontic Song), as the national anthem; in 1934, six governors, including Balzar of Nevada, endorsed a proposal for a western conference on silver, public lands, and domestic sugar quotas; in 1944, an army official said most of the wartime military training at the University of Nevada in Reno would be ended in a week; in 1985, Luciano Pavarotti appeared in concert at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas; in 1994, Nevada Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa issued a legal opinion saying that the county supremancy movement's "Plan for Public Land" (which argues that Nevada holds title to federally managed lands within the state) does not have a "theory with any measure of respect in the legitimate legal community."

UPDATE: Monday, 2 March 2009, 08:22:40 a.m PST, 16:22:40 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT – On this date in 1805 in his farewell remarks as presiding officer of the United States Senate, Vice-President Aaron Burr ended his troubled term of office with a moving speech that left senators drained and in tears: "...this House, I need not remind you, is a sanctuary, a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty; and it is here – it is here, in this exalted refuge; here, if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storms of political phrenzy and the silent arts of corruption; and if the Constitution be destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of the demagogue or the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor."; in 1836, northern Mexicans meeting at Washington-on-the-Brazos, outraged that the nation's new constitution outlawed slavery, declared their independence from Mexico, elected David Burnet as their president, Sam Houston as their commander in chief, and adopted a constitution that protected slavery; in 1870, Comstock editor Joseph Goodman wrote of the tycoons who mined Nevada and shipped the profits out of state: "They may take the gold and silver from our hills, and bind us in vassalage to the caprices of their stock boards, but the pure water that comes from Lake Tahoe, that drives our mills and makes glad our waste places, is God's exhaustless gift, and the hand of man cannot deprive us of it"; in 1935 in Reno, the Hoboes Union voted unanimously to oppose legislation pending before the Nevada Legislature that would limit the number of cars on a train, and sent the letter to Assemblymember L.R. Arnold, a Clark County Democrat (see below); in 1946, the National Assembly named Ho Chi Minh president of Vietnam; in 1955, Bo Diddley by Bo Diddley was recorded for the Checker label, introducing the driving, insistent beat that was so influential that "Bo Diddley beat" became the term to describe it; in 1958 on See It Now, Edward R. Murrow quoted U.S. Senator George Malone of Nevada on why statehood should not be granted to Hawaii and Alaska: "They have no direct knowledge of life in the United States and are different from us."; in 1969, French postal officials reported Las Vegas junior high school student Charline Mitchell to the U.S. Post Office for sending money through the mails without certifying the mailing after Mitchell sent some cash to La Parisian with a request for a copy of the paper; in 1989, a sculpture in tribute to the Dineh (Navajo) code talkers was dedicated in Phoenix; in 1997, former Sparks mayor and Nevada assembly speaker Chet Christensen, the first Nevada speaker known to have acted as governor, died.

UPDATE: Sunday, 1 March 2009, 12:15:54 a.m PST, 08:15:54 Sunday 3-1-2009 ZULU/GMT/CUT/SUT – On this date in 1788, the Rhode Island Legislature broke from the practice being followed by other states and decided not to call a state convention to consider ratification of the proposed Constitution, instead submitting it directly to the voters; in 1869, the Nevada Legislature approved the 15th amendment (guaranteeing the right to vote to former slaves and prohibiting denial of the right to vote on grounds of race or color) to the U.S. Constitution; in 1906, the first issue of Emma Goldman's newspaper Mother Earth was published; in 1917, the Zimmerman telegram, an offer from Germany to Mexico of restoration of its stolen lands in the western United States if it joined Germany in the world war, was published in the U.S.; in 1921, E.M. Forster departed on his second visit to India, which led to his A Passage to India, the novel set against British racism and the Indian independence movement of the 1920s; in 1933, the Mineral County Independent in Hawthorne, Nevada, published its first issue; in 1957, Muddy Waters' I Got My Mojo Working was released; in 1961, President Kennedy signed an executive order creating the Peace Corps until Congress could do so by statute (Kennedy's view that the Corps could teach residents of other countries received a jolt when Indian Prime Minister Nehru told him it was a good way for those residents to teach affluent young U.S. citizens about the world); in 1965, sixteen weeks after winning election on a "no wider war" promise, President Lyndon Johnson informed the Saigon government of his intention to send 3,500 Marines to Vietnam; in 1964, Fred Gale (later Nevada's first state archivist) started work as a library collections assistant at the University of Nevada-Reno library at a salary of $375 a month; in 1968, nineteen year-old Michael Kenneth Hastings of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Quang Tri province, Vietnam (panel 42e, row 18); in 1969, Sgt. Pepper finally ended its stay on the charts after 88 weeks; in 1969, Verdi residents were organizing to oppose an Army Corps of Engineers plan to build a dam that would flood half the 500-person town; in 1973, the Honda Civic debuted, becoming a huge success several months later after the October 17, 1973, cutoff of oil by OPEC to Israel-supporting nations and concurrent OPEC plans to raise oil prices; in 1973, the Joffrey Ballet performed Deuce Coupe Ballet, which took its inspiration from Beach Boys music; in 1977, Pyramid Lake tribal chair James Vidovich and a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation lawyer met with river conservation and Sierra Pacific Power Company (which owned Reno's municipal water company) officials about water stored in Stampede Dam, the viability of the spawn for the lake's fish, and drought reserve.