MONDAY, 27 FEBRUARY, 2006
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Poem: "Prego" by Ingrid Wendt from Surgeonfish. © WordTech Editions. Reprinted with permission.
Prego
Ask for something, Per
favore, please, the answer is
Prego. Please.
Thank you, Grazie, thank you,
you say. Instead of you're welcome?
Prego. The answer is please.
Prego, listen, here in Italy, every
time you think you're polite, this lift
of the verbal eyebrow, this rise
and fall of the voice like a hand
on its way to your shoulder, insistent
lifeline picking you up,
letting you go
again. No problem! Prego
pulls up the covers and tucks you in.
Cape of Saint Martin. Communion
wafer on each Italian tongue. Prego.
Please, Prego, I pray to you,
Prego, don't
worry. Let me
do something for you.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1860 that the photographer Mathew Brady took the first of several portraits of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln had come to New York City to give an anti-slavery speech at the Cooper Union and he thought a portrait might help his presidential campaign.
Brady was one of the first Americans to get into photography, and within a few years he was known as one of the best portrait photographers in the country. Brady was the first person to take a photograph of an American president when he photographed President Zachary Taylor in 1849.
The portrait was difficult to take, in part because Lincoln was so tall. Brady usually used a head clamp to immobilize his subjects, but the clamp didn't reach Lincoln's head. So Lincoln had to stand absolutely still for several minutes of his own free will. The photograph worked out, though, and it was published on the cover of Harper's Weekly. Lincoln later claimed the photograph and the Cooper's Union speech had made him president.
It's the birthday of novelist and humorist Peter De Vries, born in Chicago, Illinois (1910). His parents were immigrants from Holland, and he grew up in a Dutch section of Chicago. He later said, "In addition to being immigrants, and not able to mix well with the Chicago Americans around us, we were Dutch Reformed Calvinists ... who, in fact, had considerable trouble mixing with one another. We were the elect, and the elect are barred from everything, you know, except heaven."
He eventually rebelled against his upbringing, but he never quite got over the strangeness of worldly things, and it inspired him to begin writing satirical fiction. He got a part-time job as an associate editor at Poetry magazine, and while working for the magazine, he wrote an essay about the work of James Thurber, and the two men became friends. Thurber later invited De Vries to join the writing staff of the New Yorker, where De Vries worked on cartoons, supplying captions for pictures that other people drew, and he also wrote humorous stories for the magazine.
De Vries went on to publish many humorous novels, including Comfort Me With Apples (1956) and The Tents of Wickedness (1959). But by the late 1950s, his work grew darker when his young daughter Emily came down with leukemia. De Vries began to spend more and more of his days at the hospital with his daughter. In a letter to a friend at the time he wrote, "One trip through a children's ward and if your faith isn't shaken, you're not the type who deserves any faith."
His daughter died in 1961, and the following year he published an autobiographical novel called The Blood of the Lamb (1962), about a man named Don Wanderhope who grows up in a strictly religious family only to lose his faith when his daughter dies. It was the darkest book De Vries had ever published. Most of his readers were shocked at the time but critics now consider it his masterpiece.
It's the birthday of Irwin Shaw, born in the Bronx, New York City (1913). He wrote a series of formulaic, potboiler novels, such as The Young Lions (1948) and Rich Man, Poor Man (1970). But at the same time he was publishing a series of dark short stories in the New Yorker magazine and collecting them in books such as Sailor Off the Bremen (1939) and Welcome to the City (1942). Critics consider these short stories his most important work. The most well known of these stories is "The Girls in Their Summer Dresses."
It's the birthday of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, born in Portland, Maine (1807). The most well-known and best loved poet of his lifetime, he wrote poems such as "Evangeline" (1947), "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855), and "Paul Revere's Ride" (1863). And in "The Village Blacksmith" (1841) he wrote,
"Under a spreading chestnut tree,
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands."
TUESDAY, 28 FEBRUARY, 2006
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Poem: "The Bear's Money" by Louis Jenkins from The Winter Road: Prose Poems by Louis Jenkins. © Holy Cow! Press. Reprinted with permission.
The Bear's Money
Every fall before he goes to sleep a bear will put away five or six
hundred dollars. Money he got from garbage cans, mostly. Peo-
ple throw away thousands of dollars every day, and around here
a lot of it goes to bears. But what good is money to a bear? I
mean, how many places are there that a bear can spend it? It's a
good idea to first locate the bear's den, in fall after the leaves are
down. Back on one of the old logging roads you'll find a tall pine
or spruce covered with scratch marks, the bear runes, which
translate to something like "Keep out. That means you!" You can
rest assured that the bear and his money are nearby, in a cave or
in a space dug out under some big tree roots. When you return
in winter, a long hike on snowshoes, the bear will be sound
asleep. ... In a month or two he'll wake, groggy, out of sorts,
ready to bite something, ready to rip something to shreds ... but
by then you'll be long gone, back in town, spending like a
drunken sailor.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1953 that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of the DNA molecule. They were working in a lab in Cambridge, England, where they didn't even have the right equipment to examine DNA. That equipment was located at King's College in London. They learned that a woman named Rosalind Franklin was taking X-ray pictures of DNA there, and they decided that the only way to discover the structure was to look at those pictures.
Watson got to know Rosalind Franklin's lab partner, Maurice Wilkins, and one night he persuaded Wilkins to show him one of the X-ray pictures that Franklin had taken of a DNA molecule. Watson took a train back to Cambridge after seeing the picture, and he made a sketch of the molecule on a newspaper. When he got back to his lab, he and Crick spent several days building theoretical models of the molecule. They hit on the correct structure on this day in 1953. Once they realized what they had accomplished, they went to the local bar to celebrate.
Toasting their discovery, Watson suddenly shouted, "We have discovered the secret of life!" They would go on to win the Nobel Prize for their discovery.
And it's the birthday of the man who almost beat Watson and Crick to the discovery of DNA, the chemist Linus Pauling, born in Oswego, Oregon (1901). He studied chemistry at the Oregon Agricultural College and then won a Guggenheim Fellowship which he used to go abroad to study the new field of quantum mechanics with some of the most important physicists of the era.
At the time, quantum mechanics was revolutionizing the way scientists understood the nature of individual atoms and molecules. Using his new knowledge, Pauling became the first chemist to examine individual molecules with X-rays, and he showed how the various properties of a chemical, its color and texture and hardness, are a result of its molecular structure. He won a Nobel Prize for his work in 1954.
Linus Pauling said, "The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."
It's the birthday of The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, born on Long Island, New York (1953). He studied economics at MIT and became one of the leading economists in the U.S., specializing in international trade. But he decided that the best way he could contribute to the world of economics would be to explain economics to ordinary people, and so he wrote several books in the 1990s for the general public, including The Age of Diminished Expectations (1990), Peddling Prosperity (1994) and Pop Internationalism (1996). He became an op-ed columnist for The New York Times in 1999, and he has since become a fierce critic of the Bush administration. His book The Great Unraveling came out in 2003.
It's the birthday of the great essayist Michel de Montaigne, born in Perigueux, France (1533). He was the first person to call short pieces of prose "essays" from the French word for attempt.
He lived at a time when religious civil wars were breaking out all over the country. Protestants and Catholics killing each other, the Black Plague was ravaging the peasants in his neighborhood, and he once saw men digging their own graves and then lying down to die in them. But he spent most of his time writing about the most ordinary things, like his gardening or the way radishes affected his digestion.
He wrote, "To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battle and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. ... The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness."
WEDNESDAY, 1 MARCH, 2006
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Poem: "Manners" by Howard Nemerov from Trying Conclusions. © University of Chicago Press. Reprinted with permission.
Manners
Prig offered Pig the first chance at dessert,
So Pig reached out and speared the bigger part.
"Now that," cried Prig, "is extremely rude of you!"
Pig, with his mouth full, said, "Wha, wha' wou' 'ou do?"
"I would have taken the littler bit," said Prig.
"Stop kvetching, then, it's what you've got," said Pig.
So virtue is its own reward, you see.
And that is all it's ever going to be.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of the poet Robert Hass, born in San Francisco, California (1941). He's the author of several collections of poetry, including Human Wishes (1989) and Sun Under Wood (1996), and he served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997.
Robert Hass said, "Everyone ... wants to say in their own terms what it means to be alive. Poetry is the most common way, because the material of poetry is the stream of language that is constantly going on in our heads. It's very low tech. Anyone can do it."
He also said, "Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day."
It's the birthday of poet Robert Lowell, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1917). He came from one of the most distinguished and famous families in Boston. He went to Harvard University as all his male ancestors had done, but he dropped out after two years, unsure of what to do with his life. He decided to devote his life to poetry under the mentorship of Allen Tate.
He wrote his early poems in the style of Milton, with elaborate meter and rhyme schemes, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for his first major collection, Lord Weary's Castle (1946), which included poems about whale hunters and Napoleon. But after World War II, Lowell began to write more and more about himself and the people he knew, his relatives and friends, and the most ordinary details of his daily life. His collection Life Studies (1959) was one of the most baldly autobiographical collections of poetry ever published at that time. He was criticized at first for writing what was called "confessional poetry," but it quickly became the standard style of American poetry.
Lowell had an erratic life, suffering from manic depression and three difficult marriages. One of his few stable relationships was with his friend, the poet Elizabeth Bishop. After they met for the first time, Bishop said, "It was the first time I had ever actually talked with someone about how one writes poetry ... like exchanging recipes for making a cake."
It's the birthday of the poet Richard Wilbur, born in New York City (1921). He entered the military during World War II and was supposed to go into cryptography. But his superior officer thought he had dangerously radical ideas and reassigned him to the frontline infantry where he witnessed his fellow soldiers being machine-gunned around him or driven over by jeeps.
During lulls in the fighting, Wilbur sat in his foxhole reading Edgar Allan Poe and writing poems about the war. Those poems became his first book The Beautiful Changes (1947), and it was a big success. Ten years later, he won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for his collection Things of this World.
Wilbur was one of America's leading poets at a time when most of America's poets were suffering from mental illness and alcoholism. While those other poets wrote about their madness in increasingly more experimental styles, Wilbur kept writing precise, rhythmical verse with meter and rhyme, living the life of a successful writer and literature professor. Of the major poets of his generation, he is one of the last still living and writing.
Richard Wilbur said, "I think that all poets are sending religious messages, because poetry is, in such great part, the comparison of one thing to another ... and to insist, as all poets do, that all things are related to each other, comparable to each other, is to go toward making an assertion of the unity of all things."
It's the birthday of poet Howard Nemerov, born in New York City (1920). His Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1978. He's also written several novels, including The Melodramatists (1947) and The Homecoming Game (1957). He grew up in New York City, went to Harvard, fought in World War II, and spent almost the rest of his life teaching at Bennington College in Vermont. He once said he liked teaching because he could do all of his explaining in class, and that allowed him to write poetry with no explanations.
It's the birthday of the man who wrote Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (1914). He played cornet in high school and wanted to become a classical musician. He decided to study music at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, but he didn't have enough money to pay for the train fare, so he hitched his way there on freight trains.
Ellison went to New York after his first year at the music institute, hoping to make enough money to pay for his second year. It was here that he met the great African-American writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. They encouraged him to write stories and book reviews for New York magazines, and Ellison decided to quit studying music and devote his life to writing.
One day, Ellison was sitting in a barn on his friend's farm in Vermont, staring at a typewriter, when he typed the sentence, "I am an invisible man." He didn't know where it came from, but he wanted to pursue the idea, to find out what kind of a person would think of himself as invisible. The sentence turned into his first novel, Invisible Man, published in 1952.
THURSDAY, 2 MARCH, 2006
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Poem: "Comeback" by Tess Gallagher from Dear Ghosts, © Graywolf Press. Reprinted with permission.
Comeback
My father loved first light.
He would sit alone
at the yellow formica table
in the kitchen with his coffee cup
and sip and look out
over the strait. Now,
in what could be
the end of my life, or worse,
the life of someone I love, I too
am addicted to slow sweet beginnings.
First bird call. Wings
in silhouette. How the steeples
of the evergreens make a selvage
for the gaunt emerging sky.
My three loves are far away
in other countries,
and one is even under
this dew-bright ground
where the little herds
of jittery quail peck
and scurry for their lives.
My father picks up his
cup. Light is sifting in
like a gloam of certainty
over the water. He knows
something there in the half light
he can't know any other way.
And now I know it with him: so much
is joining us in the dawn
that no one can ever be parted.
It steals over us because we left
the warm beds of our dreams
to sit beside what rises.
I think he wants to stay there
forever, my captain, gazing but not
expecting, while the world
begins, and, in a stark silent calling,
won't tell anyone what it's for.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the birthday of horror novelist Peter Straub, born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (1943). His first two books were collections of poetry, Ishmael and Open Air, published in 1972; but he had always wanted to write a novel, and in 1973 he came out with Marriages, about an American businessman who cheats on his wife in London. Critics didn't like it, and it didn't sell very well. Straub said, "[I realized] I was one of those guys coming along with more of the same. It unnerved me. I knew I could never hold a real job—that I'd be an impossible employee anywhere. I had to save my life by writing a book that could get published."
So for his next book he tried writing a horror novel, hoping to make enough money to support himself. The novel was Julia (1975), about a woman haunted by the ghost of a murdered child. Straub has gone on to become one of the best known writers of horror fiction today. Straub once said, "[Horror is] a nasty, subversive genre, the purpose of which is to upend conventional ideas of good taste, and to speak truths otherwise ignored or suppressed."
It's the birthday of novelist John Irving, born in Exeter, New Hampshire (1942). His parents divorced by the time Irving was two years old. He never met his father and never learned anything about the man. He said, "The principal event of my childhood was that no adult in my family would tell me who my father was." He fell in love with the novels of Charles Dickens in part because he identified with the stories about orphans.
He made his name with his novel The World According to Garp (1978), about the fatherless son of a radical feminist. It was Irving's fourth novel, and it went on to sell more than three million copies in six months. The success allowed Irving to quit his teaching job and devote the rest of his life to writing, but instead of making him happy, it made him miserable. He said, "The first thing I thought of when that novel made me famous, was, 'Now [my father] will come find me. Now he'll identify himself.'"
Irving finally learned the identity of his father in 1981, when his mother gave him a collection of letters she'd been hiding since World War II. Irving learned that his father had been a fighter pilot who was shot down over Burma, who walked to China, and was only rescued after being missing for forty days.
Irving used his father's letters in his novel The Cider House Rules (1985). He hoped that somehow his father might read the book and see the letters. He said, "[It] was my way of saying, 'If you're out there, if you do read me, hello, I know something about you.' But I never heard from him."
In 2001 Irving had just started a new novel about an actor who goes looking for his lost father and finally finds him. That year, he gave an interview on television, and after the interview he got a phone call from a man claiming to be his half brother. It turned out that Irving's father had died in 1996. Irving went on to finish the novel about a man searching for his father, called Until I Find You, which came out in 2005.
He's disappointed that he never managed to meet the man, but Irving believes he might not have become a writer if his father hadn't been absent. He said, "My imaginary reader has been my father. Surely, in one novel after another, I've been inventing fathers. I've been making them up. I have a ceaseless capacity to make up the missing part, to fill in the blanks, and he was a blank in my life."
FRIDAY, 3 MARCH, 2006
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Poem: "Seemed Pleased" by Malena Mörling from Astoria. © University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted with permission.
Seemed Pleased
Just after the plane lifted
off the ground with all of its
weight, a small hand, its nails with
partially chipped off red nail
polish, worked itself back
from in between the seats in
front of me and sort of waved.
The next I saw of the person
with the hand was a blue eye
peering back at me and then
the girl stood up on her seat
and smiled. She had brown, just
above the shoulder length hair
and bangs and she wore a blue
and white striped sundress. A
red rose of the same material
as the dress was attached to
the middle of the upper
lining which was also red.
"My mother is dead," she told
me suddenly. "She is already gone—
She is in heaven." The girl seemed
pleased, almost proud at that
moment, to be able to inform
me of this, perhaps as a
handy way of meeting."This
is my dad," she said, and pointed
to the back of his head of
blond thinning rather unruly
cap of hair. "My dad." She
exclaimed again and again
and hugged his face with all
of her might until she knocked
his glasses off and they ended
up in the aisle. Then she introduced
her brother, engrossed in a book:
"This is Marcus, he is eight.
I am four and a half." And then
she proceeded to demonstrate
the workings of a doodle pad.
On the cover of it was a clown
riding in an airplane waving
his hands in the clouds. And that's
when the trays of food arrived and the girl
whose name I never learned was told
by her father to turn around
and sit down and eat what was
being unwrapped for her on her tray.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1863 that Congress passed the Civil War Conscription Act, which required all men between the ages of twenty and forty-five to serve three years in the military. But one big loophole in the law allowed wealthy men to hire substitutes to serve in their place. Among the wealthy men who did hire substitutes were J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and the future President Grover Cleveland.
The draft was hugely controversial in Northern cities. Increasingly lengthy casualty lists were printed in newspapers every day, and men of the working classes resented the fact that they were being used as cannon fodder while the rich men sat idle. The frustration eventually led to the New York draft riots that summer. Mobs broke into the homes of the wealthy and smashed store windows, eventually killing more than 105 people. It was a regimen of soldiers, fresh from the Battle of Gettysburg, who eventually restored peace to the city.
It's the birthday of inventor Alexander Graham Bell, born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1847).
It was on this day in 1875 that the opera Carmen appeared on stage for the first time at the Opéra-Comique in France. When it premiered, the audience was shocked by the characters of Carmen, a gypsy girl, and her lover, Don José. It's set in an exotic Spain among gypsies and bullfighters. One element that shocked audiences was that the heroine smokes on stage, something considered less than proper then. The opera ran for thirty-seven performances.
It's the birthday of the host of the radio show This American Life, Ira Glass, born in Baltimore, Maryland (1959). After his freshman year of college he was looking for a summer job in television or advertising, and someone suggested that he try to be an intern for National Public Radio. He had never even listened to public radio at the time, but he applied for the job and got it, and he's been working in public radio ever since. He started out as a tape cutter, and then he was a desk assistant, newscast writer, editor, producer, reporter and substitute host.
In 1989, he moved to Chicago and produced documentaries for the local public radio station. He and a friend started a live show called The Wild Room that included music, stories, and commentary, and outtakes from his own documentaries. In 1995, he came up with the idea for a show called Your Radio Playhouse, which would tell a series of stories each week, centered on a certain aspect of everyday life in America. That show became This American Life, which has become one of the most popular radio programs in the country. There have been shows on superpowers, babysitting, Frank Sinatra, guns, and monogamy, among many other themes.
Ira Glass said, "There are people who are fundamentally lazy, who only get anything done because they put themselves under dreadful deadline pressure. Those people are all my brothers."
SATURDAY, 4 MARCH, 2006
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Poem: "After the Test Said Yes" by Kelly Madigan Erlandson from Born in the House of Love. © Main-Traveled Roads. Originally published in Barrow Street. Reprinted with permission.
After the Test Said Yes
Stopped at the crossroad on 14th street, ice clean
as an apple slice under my wheels, I am waiting
for my turn and I don't know yet about looking back
which is why I cannot describe the color or make of what hit me,
moving too fast to brake on the black, and my blue Volkswagen
shoots out into oncoming lanes and once there begins to spin—
and that is where time slows, like they always say,
forming an opening in the day that was already thick with news.
The man comes to the car window,
wants to know if I'm okay, and I tell him I'm pregnant,
that I just found out this morning, and he looks like he will faint,
and I open the door and step out into the street,
and this, I believe, is the story of conception; how my daughter
used momentum and ice and velocity and impact
to pierce the atmosphere and enter the world.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It was on this day in 1789 that the U.S. Constitution went into effect, and so it was that this day was chosen as the original Inauguration Day. Just about every president from Washington to Roosevelt was inaugurated on this day, except for Zachary Taylor and Rutherford B. Hayes, who were both inaugurated on March 5th, due to the 4th falling on a Sunday. Also, Washington's very first inauguration was delayed until April 30th.
The constitution only requires that the newly elected president swear a thirty-five-word vow to uphold the Constitution. It was George Washington who started the custom of giving an inaugural address. He also gave the shortest inaugural address in history at his second inauguration on this day in 1793. It was only 135 words long.
John Adams didn't much enjoy becoming the second inaugurated president. None of his family showed up for the event, he was suffering from money troubles, and he was terrified that he'd never be able to fill George Washington's shoes.
Among the most notorious inaugurations was President Andrew Jackson's in 1829. He invited the American public to the White House, and more than 20,000 drunken partygoers showed up. The crowds became so boisterous that they ruined many of the White House furnishings, and Jackson had to escape through a window. White House aides eventually lured people from the building by placing vats of whiskey on the front lawn.
On this day in 1841 William Henry Harrison stood outside in an ice storm and delivered the longest inaugural address in American history. It was 8,445 words long, and it took Harrison two hours to deliver it. He died a month later from pneumonia.
In his second inaugural, with John Wilkes Booth in the audience, Lincoln said, "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
Franklin Roosevelt was the last president to be inaugurated on this day in 1933. That year, the constitution was amended to move the inauguration up to January to reduce the lag time between presidencies.
On this day in 1952, Ernest Hemingway wrote a letter to his publisher, telling him that he'd finished his latest novel, The Old Man and the Sea. Hemingway's previous novel, Across the River and Into the Trees, had gotten horrible reviews, and people were starting to think he was washed up. He was working on a huge novel that he called The Sea Book, and The Old Man and the Sea was originally written as an epilogue to the novel, but he thought it was good enough to publish by itself.
It came out in a single edition of Life magazine, which sold over five million copies. It was also published as a book, which stayed at the top of the best-seller list for six months. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and it was a big reason that Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
It's the birthday of crime novelist James Ellroy, born in Los Angeles, California (1948). Ellroy is perhaps best known for his "LA Quartet," a series of four novels that attempt to depict the criminal history of Los Angeles from the 1940s through the 1950s. He's also the author of My Dark Places (1996), a memoir about the murder of his mother.
SUNDAY, 5 MARCH, 2006
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Poem: "Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room" by William Wordsworth. Public Domain.
Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room
Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
and hermits are contented with their cells;
and students with their pensive citadels;
maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
high as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
in truth the prison, into which we doom
ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
in sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
should find brief solace there, as I have found.
Literary and Historical Notes:
It's the anniversary of the so-called Boston Massacre, which took place in 1770. British soldiers had occupied Boston for eighteen months to protect the tax collectors for the King of England. It was a cold, snowy night when an argument broke out between a young barber's apprentice and a British officer about payment for a haircut.
A crowd of young men who were watching shouted at the officer, and they began throwing snowballs and pieces of ice at him. Other soldiers came out of the Customs House to help defend the man. The crowd grew rowdier, throwing oyster shells and lumps of sea coal. The soldiers brandished their weapons, and the crowd dared them to shoot. They did, and five colonists were killed.
It was hardly a massacre, but the more revolutionary members of the colonies played it up as much as they could. Paul Revere made an engraving of the incident, showing the British soldiers lining up like an organized army to execute the colonists. Printed under the engraving were verses that described the soldiers as "fierce barbarians grinning over their prey."
The soldiers were put on trial, and it turned out that the man chosen to represent them was the American patriot John Adams. He didn't support the British by any means, but he was told that no one else would take the case and he believed that all men deserve a good defense under the law. So he took the case, even though he was terrified that the case would ruin his reputation and that it might even put his family in physical danger.
Ultimately, Adams managed to get most of the soldiers acquitted. Only two were convicted of manslaughter. Adams' reputations suffered a little in the aftermath. He lost many of his clients. But there were no riots in the days following the verdict, and eventually the case became a famous example of Adams' extraordinary fairness and good judgment.
John Adams later said, "[Taking that case] was one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country."
It was on this day in 1933 that the Nazi Party won the majority of the seats in the German parliament, known as the Reichstag, effectively taking control of the country. It was the last free election in Germany until the end of World War II. Adolf Hitler had secured the chancellorship after the November 1932 elections, but he still didn't have a majority in the Reichstag, so he set March 5, 1933 as the date for new elections. Six days before the election, the Reichstag building caught fire, and the Nazis used the fire as a symbol of the chaos that they would help correct, though some historians believe that the Nazis set the fire themselves. After the elections, Hitler passed a law that gave him absolute power over the country.
Just five days after the election, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of romantic languages living in Germany, wrote in his diary: "It's astounding how easily everything collapses. ... Since [the election,] day after day commissioners appointed, provincial governments trampled underfoot, flags raised, buildings taken over, people shot, newspapers banned, etc., etc. ... A complete revolution and party dictatorship. And all opposing forces as if vanished from the earth. ... No one dares say anything anymore, everyone is afraid."
On the same day in 1933, across the Atlantic from Germany, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered a four-day bank holiday in an effort to curtail the devastating "bank runs" of the Great Depression when panicky investors withdrew their money from the banks.
Twenty years later, on this day in 1953, one of the most ruthless dictators of the twentieth century, Josef Stalin, died in Moscow.
