Good Morning & God Bless To Every One !
Today is May 24, the 144th day of 2014 and there are 221 days left this year where it is another Blessed Day in the pleasure of our service for our Lord here at:
For God’s Glory Alone Ministries !!!
An odd, but true, thought:
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
– Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
So, What Happened Today In 1775?
John Hancock becomes the President of the second Continental Congress
John Hancock is elected president of the Second Continental Congress.
John Hancock is best known for his large signature on the Declaration of Independence, which he jested the British could read without spectacles. He was serving as president of Congress upon the declaration’s adoption on July 4, 1776, and, as such, was the first member of the Congress to sign the historic document.
John Hancock graduated from Harvard University in 1754 at age 17 and, with the help of a large inherited fortune, established himself as Boston’s leading merchant. The British customs raid on one of Hancock’s ships, the sloop Liberty, in 1768 incited riots so severe that the British army fled the city of Boston to its barracks in Boston Harbor. Boston merchants promptly agreed to a non-importation agreement to protest the British action. Two years later, it was a scuffle between Patriot protestors and British soldiers on Hancock’s wharf that set the stage for the Boston Massacre.
Hancock’s involvement with Samuel Adams and his radical group, the Sons of Liberty, won the wealthy merchant the dubious distinction of being one of only two Patriots—the other being Sam Adams—that the Redcoats marching to Lexington in April 1775 to confiscate Patriot arms were ordered to arrest. When British General Thomas Gage offered amnesty to the colonists holding Boston under siege, he excluded the same two men from his offer.
While Hancock served as president of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Samuel Adams’ cousin John Adams convinced Congress to place Virginian George Washington in command of the rebel army. In 1776, the Continental Congress declared independence from Great Britain. The next year, John Hancock returned home to Massachusetts, where he served as a major general in the militia and sat in the Massachusetts constitutional convention that adopted the world’s first and most enduring constitution in 1780. Having helped to create the new state government, Hancock proceeded to serve as the state’s first governor, a position he held on and off until his death in 1793.
Other Memorable Or Interesting Events Occurring On May 24 In History:
1543 – Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus dies in what is now Frombork, Poland. The father of modern astronomy, he was the first modern European scientist to propose that Earth and other planets revolve around the sun. Prior to the publication of his major astronomical work, “Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs,” in 1543, European astronomers argued that Earth lay at the center of the universe, the view also held by most ancient philosophers and biblical writers. In addition to correctly postulating the order of the known planets, including Earth, from the sun, and estimating their orbital periods relatively accurately, Copernicus argued that Earth turned daily on its axis and that gradual shifts of this axis accounted for the changing seasons. He died the year his major work was published, saving him from the outrage of some religious leaders who later condemned his heliocentric view of the universe as heresy. By the late 18th century, the Copernican view of the solar system was almost universally accepted;
1607 – Captain Christopher Newport and 105 followers found the colony of Jamestown at the mouth of the James River on the coast of Virginia;
1689 – The English Parliament passes the ‘Act of Toleration’, protecting and guaranteeing freedom of religion for Protestants . Roman Catholics are specifically excluded from exemption;
1764 – Boston lawyer James Otis denounces “taxation without representation,” calling for the colonies to unite in opposition to Britain’s new tax measures;
1844 – In a demonstration witnessed by members of Congress, American inventor Samuel F.B. Morse dispatches a telegraph message from the U.S. Capitol to Alfred Vail at a railroad station in Baltimore, Maryland. The message–“What Hath God Wrought?”–was telegraphed back to the Capitol a moment later by Vail. The question, taken from the Bible (Numbers 23:23), had been suggested to Morse by Annie Ellworth, the daughter of the commissioner of patents. Morse learned of a French inventor’s idea of an electric telegraph in 1832 and then spent the next 12 years attempting to perfect a working telegraph instrument. During this period, he composed the Morse code, a set of signals that could represent language in telegraph messages, and convinced Congress to finance a Washington-to-Baltimore telegraph line. On May 24, 1844, he inaugurated the world’s first commercial telegraph line with a message that was fitting given the invention’s future effects on American life. Just a decade after the first line opened, more than 20,000 miles of telegraph cable crisscrossed the country;
1861 – During the American Civil War, Union General Benjamin Butler declares slaves to be the contraband of war. Contraband was a term commonly used in the United States military during the war to describe a new status for certain escaped slaves or those affiliated with Union forces. The army and the Congress determined that the U.S. would not return escaped slaves who went to Union lines. They used many as laborers to support Union efforts and soon bagan to pay them wages. The former slaves set up camps near Union forces and the army help0ed support and educate both adults and children among the refugees;
1864 – In the American Civil War, Union General Ulysses S. Grant continues to pound away at Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the engagement along the North Anna River in central Virginia, that had begun the day before. Since early May, Lee and Grant had been slugging it out along an arc from the Wilderness to Spotsylvania and to Hanover Junction, on the North Anna River. Grant was doing what other Union commanders had failed to do since 1861: ensuring that the Army of Northern Virginia was in constant action to prevent them from retooling. The engagement at North Anna was small by the standards of this campaign. Grant was wise to refrain from an all-out assault on the Confederate position. However, he was not as cautious just a week later at Cold Harbor, Virginia, where Northern soldiers were butchered wholesale in a devastating attack on fortified Rebels;
1883 – After 14 years and 27 deaths while being constructed, the Brooklyn Bridge over the East River is opened, connecting the great cities of New York and Brooklyn for the first time in history. Thousands of residents of Brooklyn and Manhattan Island turned out to witness the dedication ceremony, which was presided over by President Chester A. Arthur and New York Governor Grover Cleveland. Designed by the late John A. Roebling, the Brooklyn Bridge was the largest suspension bridge ever built to that date. The Brooklyn Bridge, with its unprecedented length and two stately towers, was dubbed the “eighth wonder of the world.” The connection it provided between the massive population centers of Brooklyn and Manhattan changed the course of New York City forever. In 1898, the city of Brooklyn formally merged with New York City, Staten Island, and a few farm towns, forming Greater New York;
1917 – During World War I, driven by the spectacular success of the German U-boat submarines and their attacks on Allied and neutral ships at sea, the British Royal Navy introduces a newly created convoy system, whereby all merchant ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean would travel in groups under the protection of the British navy. For more than three years of World War I, Britain’s Royal Admiralty steadfastly resisted the creation of a convoy system, believing they could not afford to spare ships and other resources from its mighty fleet where they might be needed in battle. The effect of the German U-boat submarines, however, and their attacks on merchant ships—both belligerent and neutral—proved devastating. With the entrance of the United States into the war in April 1917, there was an even greater need for protection of Allied interests at sea, as large numbers of soldiers and arms would need to be transported from the Atlantic coast to Europe. In early May 1917, it was announced that the previous month had seen the highest shipping losses of the war so far for Allied and neutral countries: 373 ships, or a total weight of 873,754 tons. The introduction of the convoy system finally marked the beginning of a sharp decline in the scale of German submarine damage and the death of German hopes to starve Britain into submission. Between May 1917 and November 1918, a total of 1,100,000 American troops were transported across the Atlantic in convoy, and only 637 of them were drowned as a result of German attacks;
1935 – The first major league baseball game to be played at night took place at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field as the Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 2-1;
1941 – During World War II, Germany’s largest battleship, the Bismarck, sinks the pride of the British fleet, HMS Hood. The Bismarck was the most modern of Germany’s battleships, a prize coveted by other nation’s navies, even while still in the blueprint stage (Hitler handed over a copy of its blueprints to Joseph Stalin as a concession during the days of the Hitler-Stalin neutrality pact). The HMS Hood, originally launched in 1918, was Britain’s largest battle cruiser (41,200 tons)-but also capable of achieving the relatively fast speed of 31 knots. The two met in the North Atlantic, northeast of Iceland, where two British cruisers had tracked down the Bismarck. Commanded by Admiral Gunther Lutjens, commander in chief of the German Fleet, the Bismarck sunk the Hood, resulting in the death of 1,500 of its crew; only three Brits survived. During the engagement, the Bismarck‘s fuel tank was damaged. Lutjens tried to make for the French coast, but was sighted again only three days later. Torpedoed to the point of incapacity, the Bismarck was finally sunk by a ring of British war ships. Admiral Lutjens was one of the 2,300 German casualties;
1943 – In World War II, the extermination camp at Auschwitz, Poland receives a new doctor, 32-year-old Josef Mengele, a man who will earn the nickname “the Angel of Death.” Upon arriving at Auschwitz, and eager to advance his medical career by publishing “groundbreaking” work, he began experimenting on live Jewish prisoners. In the guise of medical “treatment,” he injected, or ordered others to inject, thousands of inmates with everything from petrol to chloroform. He also had a penchant for studying twins, whom he used to dissect. Mengele managed to escape imprisonment after the war, first by working as a farm stableman in Bavaria, then by making his way to South America. He became a citizen of Paraguay in 1959. He later moved to Brazil, where he met up with another former Nazi party member, Wolfgang Gerhard. In 1985, a multinational team of forensic experts traveled to Brazil in search of Mengele. They determined that a man named Gerhard, but believed to be Mengele, had died of a stroke while swimming in 1979. Dental records later confirmed that Mengele had, at some point, assumed Gerhard’s identity, and was in fact the stroke victim;
1954 – IBM announces the vacuum tube “electronic” brain that could perform 10 million operations an hour;
1959 – During the (first) Cold War, after battling cancer for nearly three years, former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles dies. Dulles served as secretary of state from 1953 until shortly before his death in 1959 and was considered one of the primary architects of America’s cold war foreign policy during that period. Dulles was born in 1888, the son of a Presbyterian minister. President Dwight D. Eisenhower would later joke that the serious Dulles had been preparing to become secretary of state since he was a toddler. As secretary of state, Dulles was most famous for developing the notion of “massive retaliation.” In this theory, Dulles posited that the United States should make it known that it was ready and willing to use its massive nuclear arsenal to retaliate against threats to American interests around the globe. The secretary was also well known for his views on Third World neutralism. In Dulles’ view, neutralism in the battle against communism was a sin. During his tenure, Dulles saw the United States through several foreign policy crises, including the Suez Crisis of 1956. In 1956, however, it was discovered that Dulles was suffering from lung cancer. Over the next two-and-a-half years, Dulles bravely battled the disease, continuing his work as secretary of state between trips to the hospital for treatment. On April 22, 1959, Dulles resigned his position when he became too weak to fulfill his duties;
1964 – A referee’s call in a soccer match between Peru and Argentina sparks a riot on this day in 1964. More than 300 fans were killed and another 500 people were injured in the violent melee that followed at National Stadium in Lima, Peru. The match was a qualifier for the 1964 Olympics and the Peruvian fans were fiercely cheering on their team with only a few minutes left in a close game. When the referee disallowed an apparent goal for Peru, the stadium went wild. The resulting panic and crowd-control measures taken caused stampedes in which people were crushed and killed. The extent of this disaster has only been surpassed once. In 1982, 340 people died at a match in Moscow when a late goal caused fans who had exited the game to attempt to return suddenly. Meanwhile, police were forcing people to exit; those caught in the middle were crushed;
1964 – During the Vietnam War, Senator Barry Goldwater, running for the Republican Party nomination in the upcoming presidential election, gives an interview in which he discusses the use of low-yield atomic bombs in North Vietnam to defoliate forests and destroy bridges, roads, and railroad lines bringing supplies from communist China. During the storm of criticism that followed, Goldwater tried to back away from these drastic actions, claiming that he did not mean to advocate the use of atomic bombs but was “repeating a suggestion made by competent military people.” Democrats painted Goldwater as a warmonger who was overly eager to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. Though he won his party’s nomination, Goldwater was never able to shake his image as an extremist in Vietnam policies. This image was a key factor in his crushing defeat by opponent Lyndon B. Johnson who took about 61 percent of the vote to Goldwater’s 39 percent;
1974 – The highest compliment Edward Kennedy Ellington knew how to pay to a fellow musician was to refer to him as being “beyond category.” If any label could possibly capture the essence of Ellington himself, it would be that one. In a career spanning five decades, the man they called “Duke” put an indelible stamp on 20th-century American music as an instrumentalist, as a composer and as an orchestra leader. Equally at home and equally revered in the Cotton Club and Carnegie Hall, if any musician ever defied categorization, it was Duke Ellington. Fifty years after becoming a household name, and without slowing down professionally until the very end, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington died on May 24, 1974, at the age of 75. Over the course of his career, Ellington never stopped pushing himself into new territory, from long-form orchestral jazz compositions to sacred church music. “Every morning you wake up, it’s a new day, isn’t it?” he once said. “Is there any reason why a human being shouldn’t be influenced by a new day?” Jazz historian Ralph Gleason called him “The greatest composer American society has produced.” Duke Ellington himself would likely have been satisfied with simply “beyond category”;
1976 – Britain and France opened trans-Atlantic Concorde supersonic transport service to Washington;
1986 – British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher becomes the first British PM to visit the state of Israel;
1994 – Four men convicted of bombing New York’s World Trade Center in 1993 were each sentenced to 240 years in prison;
2001 – 23 people were killed when the floor of a Jerusalem wedding hall collapsed beneath dancing guests, sending them plunging several stories into the basement;
2004 – North Korea bans mobile phones;
2004 – President George W. Bush, trying to dispel rising doubts about the Iraq war, declared the United States would stay in Iraq until it was free and democratic and suggested more U.S. soldiers might be needed to stop enemy forces bent on destroying the new government;
2004 – Severe storms flooded villages in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, resulting in an estimated 3,000 deaths;
2010 – After South Korea’s ROKS Cheonan ship is sunk by North Korea, South Korea cuts off trade with North Korea and announces North Korean ships will no longer be allowed to use South Korean waters;
2011 – The Tokyo Electric Power Company claims that three Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant reactors had partially melted down during the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami;
2013 – British fighter jets intercepted a Pakistan International Airlines Boeing 777 carrying more than 300 people from Pakistan and diverted it to an isolated runway at London-Stansted Airport, where two passengers who’d allegedly threatened to destroy the plane were arrested;
2013 – It was one year ago TODAY!!!
Number 19 of 50 beautiful pictures from 50 beautiful states:
Portland Head Light, Cape Elizabeth, Maine
As I
A thought
Being “devoted to another in brotherly love” requires that our church talk — we’re family, brothers and sisters, children of God — must be more than mere words. We must enter each others lives, getting to know one another so that we can serve, love and bless each other. Have you gotten more involved in the lives of your fellow Christians? Devotion to others follows a commitment to know and be known by them!
Leads to a verse
Don’t just pretend to love others. Really love them. Hate what is wrong. Hold tightly to what is good. Love each other with genuine affection, and take delight inhonoring each other. Never be lazy, but work hard and serve the Lord enthusiastically.
– Romans 12:9-11
That brings a prayer
Father God, thank you for giving me a world wide family. Thank you for loving me so completely. Father I ask that you help me be more open with myself and my time to those in your family. Give me a heart that burns to bless and be blessed by those you have made your children. In Jesus name I pray. Amen
Until the next time – America, Bless GOD!!!
