Here is your Today in History -
April 14, 73 -
With the 10th Roman Legion about to breach the gates of their mountaintop fortress, 960 Sicarii Jews commit mass suicide at Masada. According to Josephus, the radical cult selected ten swordsmen by
lottery to perform the killing. Then they held a second lottery to choose one man to kill the remaining nine. Finally, the last one fell on his sword.
April 14, 1828 -
Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language. He was a man who'd grown up in America at a time when Americans from different states could barely understand each other, because they spoke with such different accents and even different languages. Americans in Vermont spoke French, New Yorkers spoke Dutch, and the settlers in Pennsylvania spoke German. All these different languages were influencing American English, and there were no standards of spelling or meaning.
Please note: the word"blogger" was not in that edition of the dictionary.
April 14, 1865 -
President Abraham Lincoln receives a cranial gunshot wound from the nation's most famous actor, John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln dies the following day, primarily from ill-advised attempts to extract the
bullet lodged in his brain. So, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln.
On April 14, 1894, a public Kinetoscope parlor was opened by the Holland Bros. in New York City at 1155 Broadway, on the corner of 27th Street—the first commercial motion picture house. The venue had ten machines, set up in parallel rows of five, each showing a different movie. For 25 cents a viewer could see all the films in either row; half a dollar gave access to the entire bill. The machines were purchased from the new Kinetoscope Company, which had contracted with Thomas Edison for their production; the firm, headed by Norman C. Raff and Frank R. Gammon, included among its investors Andrew M. Holland, one of the entrepreneurial siblings, and Edison's former business chief, Alfred O. Tate. The ten films that comprise the first commercial movie program: Barber Shop, Bertoldi (mouth support) (Ena Bertoldi, a British vaudeville contortionist), Bertoldi (table contortion), Blacksmiths, Roosters (some manner of cock fight), Highland Dance, Horse Shoeing, Sandow (Eugen Sandow, a German strongman), Trapeze, and Wrestling. As historian Charles Musser describes, a "profound transformation of American life and performance culture" had begun.
They were sure plenty of kleenex were on hand.
April 14, 1912 - 11:40 P.M.
The Unsinkable RMS TITANIC hits an iceberg causing damage to six of her sixteen 'water tight' compartments. (Lat. 41° 46' N. and Long. 50° 14' W.)
April 14, 1986 -
Hindus crossing a bridge over the sacred Ganges river at Hardwar, India to bathe during the Kumbha Mela fete somehow stampede. 46 pilgrims are trampled.
April 14, 1989 -
California winery worker Ramon Salcido picks up a butcher knife and kills his wife, mother-in-law, two sisters-in-law, and two of his own daughters. Then he goes to work and kills his supervisor. He wasn't having a very good day
And so it goes.
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