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International Day for Monuments and Sites!!

Established in 1983, International Day for Monuments and Sites aims to promote awareness about the diversity of cultural heritage of humanity, their vulnerability and the efforts required for their protection and conservation. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) maintains the World Heritage List, which is a list of the world's cultural and/or natural sites regarded as being significant to the collective interests of humanity. There are currently 1052 listed World Heritage Sites.

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Thomas Jefferson was born on April 13, 1743. As if being President isn't awesome enough, he was also an author, inventor, lawyer, and architect. He also loved birds. His favorite bird was Dick the Mockingbird.

Dick was Jefferson's a constant companion and whenever they were alone, Jefferson would open the cage and let Dick fly about the room.  Dick would eat from Jefferson's lips and would sit on the couch waiting while Jefferson napped.

It was a birdmance for the ages.  

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On April 3, 1973, Motorola employee Martin Cooper stood in midtown Manhattan and placed a call to the headquarters of Bell Labs in New Jersey.

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Walloon is the best word.

On March 29, 1624 the West India Company's ship, Nieu Nederlandt departed Amsterdam with the first wave of settlers for the New World. While a Dutch ship, the 30 passengers were Flemish Walloon families. They arrived in May 1624 and the site of the future city of New York was formally occupied by the West India Company. Eight men were left on Nut Island, now known as Governor's Island, while the rest were taken up the Hudson River to what was then Fort Orange and is now Albany.

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For your information

As of  Nov. 21, 2016, 3:09 PM ET, Hillary Clinton is ahead by 1,265,379 votes.

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Happy Birthday

Edwin Booth born November 13, 1833. A great and famous actor who is considered the greatest Hamlet of the 19th century, if not the greatest American actor. But that was all overshadowed by his brother, John Wilkes Booth.

It’s said that years after the assassination while at party, Edwin became fixated on a cast of a hand resting on the mantel. Picking it up, he walked around and asked several people if they knew who’s hand it was. Finally the owner replied that it was Abraham Lincoln’s.  Booth silently returned the cast to it’s resting spot.

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Huh, I punched him dead in his eye and said, "Who you calling a bitch?"

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fearless female

“It is incredible to me that any woman should consider the fight for full equality won. It has just begun. There is hardly a field, economic or political, in which the natural and unaccustomed policy is not to ignore women…Unless women are prepared to fight politically they must be content to be ignored politically.” Alice Paul 1920

Alice Paul was born on January 11, 1885 in Mt. Laurel, New Jersey. As a Quaker, she was raised to believe in absolute equality and instilled with a dedication to a divinely inspired “concern.” 

She graduated from Swarthmore in 1905 and then traveled to England where she enlisted in the Woman’s Social and Political Union, the original “suffragettes” headed by firebrand Emmeline Pankhurst. She returned to the United States in 1910, a veteran of imprisonments, hunger strikes and an ugly episode of force feeding.

She launched her American campaign with the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession, a massive suffrage parade on Pennsylvania Avenue on the day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. Rallies, lobbying, petitions, parades, and election campaigns over the next four years failed to budge Congress or gain presidential support. At odds with tactics and strategy, she broke away and formed the National Women's Party in 1916.

On January 10, 1917, Alice Paul lead a dozen women to the gates of the White House. Calling themselves “Silent Sentinels” they spoke no words, instead carrying banners with their biting rallying cries. The suffragists were first harassed then arrested. They were sent to Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia, where many of them, including Alice Paul, began hunger strikes. They were force-fed through tubes and threatened with commitment to insane asylums.

By the end of 1917, President Wilson finally announced support for the sufferage amendment but  the Silent Sentinels continued to stand their post every day but Sundays from January 10, 1917 till  June 4, 1919, when the Nineteenth Amendment  was passed both by the House and Senate.

For the rest of her life, Alice Paul continued to fight for the equality of women around the world. She wrote the first version of the the Equal Rights Amendment in 1922. She was instrumental in winning guarantees of gender equality in the United nations charger and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s.

Alice Paul died on July 9, 1977 at the age of 92.

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happy halloween

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On Oct. 30, 1938, the radio play "The War of the Worlds," starring Orson Welles, aired on CBS. The live drama, which employed fake news reports, panicked some listeners who thought its portrayal of a Martian invasion was true.

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Copy of curious love letter from a gentleman to a lady. [185-?].

Part of the Printed Ephemera collection at the Library of Congress

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fearless females

Inez Milholland Boissevain was born August 1886 in New York. The eldest daughter of John and Jean Milholland, she spent most of her adolescence at the family’s home in London. In 1905 she left for the States where she began her studies at Vassar. While on a visit home to London, she became associated with aristocratic suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and was intent on bringing women’s suffrage to Vassar College.

Back at school, she wrote articles on the subject in the school newspaper and even held suffrage meetings in a nearby cemetery and was the beginning of the Vassar Votes for Women Club, which continued to meet off-campus under her leadership.

After graduating in 1909, she became a powerful, persuasive and beautiful orator of the suffrage movement.  In 1912 she received a law degree from New York University School of Law, eventually joining the New York law firm of Osborne, Lamb, and Garvan, handling criminal and divorce cases. She helped organize the Woman Suffrage Parade of 1913, leading the parade riding atop a large white horse wearing a crown and long white cape. In October 1916, while delivering an address on the tour in Los Angeles she suddenly collapsed and after ten weeks hospitalization the 30-year-old activist died, a result of pernicious anemia. 

At her first suffrage parade she held a banner that read "Forward, out of error,/Leave behind the night,/Forward through the darkness,/Forward into light!"  Here is a fellow suffragette holding that same banner at her memorial service.

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did you know?

Madame Tussaud was a real person named Anna Marie Grosholtz. She learned wax modeling from her uncle. During the French Revolution she was arrested as a royal sympathizer and narrowly avoided execution. After she was released, she was hired to make death masks of the king, the queen, and a few other notable victims. She went on tour in England with them which eventually turned into an exhibit and then her museum in London.

“Two reproductions, looking to the right and front of a wax head of Marie Antoinette after execution” from the Collection de Vinck in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It is dated 1906 and that tiny handwriting at the bottom says it’s from “Museum Tussaud, in London.” 

The image below, that I lovingly screenshotted from Getty Images, is of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette’s death masks taken in the early 1960s.

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today is a special day

New York History Day Of Note: October 26, 1825 the Erie Canal officially opened. To celebrate his engineering baby, Governor Dewitt Clinton boarded the packet boat "Seneca Chief" in Buffalo with two barrels of water from Lake Erie. Eight days later after traveling the 363-mile ditch to Albany and then down the Hudson River, he made it to New York City and ceremoniously emptied the water into the Atlantic Ocean.

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Sir William Johnson was important blah blah blah... The man had game. Playa had over 20 children with five different ladies. And that's just the ones we know about. Daaaaamn.  

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Ithaca, New York.