APRIL 6 —
1859 Alexis de Tocqueville, publisher of Democracy in America, passes away; 1917 America enters WWI; 1928 HB James Watson, DNA co-founder;; 1841 Tyler becomes President
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APRIL 6
1917-America enters WWI.
<script data-ad-client="ca-pub-8113795558250501" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>That was just one too many ships that the Germans sunk. Good timing too! Western Europe didn’t have a lot of fight left in them. Even though the U.S. wanted neutrality from WWI, it appeared that war was just inevitable. In 1914 Americans didn’t believe that war would actually happen, so imagine the tourists that were caught by surprise. America was still paying out large scale loans to France and Britain so they could keep up the fight, and eventually Germany threw the international rules out the window and started targeting all ships headed towards Britain, whether it was a merchant ship or not. Germans sunk the British –owned RMS Lusitania in 1915, then offered military alliance with Mexico in the famous Zimmerman telegram that was intercepted and decoded by the British, and American ships like the Housatonic were getting sunk in the north Atlantic.
President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for “a war to end all wars” that would “make the world safe for democracy”, and on this day in 1917 Congress voted yes and approved funding and troops. On June 26, 14,000 US troops landed in France to begin training for combat. Up until that point years of fighting led to a stalemate on the western front, and America’s fresh troops sparked a turning point in the war in favor of the allies. When the war finally ended on November 11, 1918, more than two million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, approximately 50,000 lost their lives.
1928 – Happy birthday Dr. James Watson, one of the co-founders of DNA.
The good ol’ double helix, the building blocks of life, the how of who we are, unlocking the keys of life as we know it, the deoxyribonucleic acid. Born on this day in 1926 in Chicago IL, young James studied the World Almanac as a kid and won a hundred bucks brainy nerd radio contest, which he used to buy binoculars.
Yes folks, by the time he was 15, the same age I was finding pencils sticking out of both nostrils of my nose hysterical, Watson was headed to the University of Chicago where he excelled at zoology and biology. After receiving his PhD in 1950, he headed to Cambridge in the U.K. and began working with Francis Crick to reveal the double helix.
The double helix, or two strands that coil around each other, fitting together almost symbiotically, for lack of a better word, when uncoiled can produce copies of the original, which explains how hereditary genes are passed down from generation to generation.
This discovery was made in May of 1953, but the world was not ready for it. Heck, during the 1990s it couldn’t even be taken seriously enough to get OJ Simpson a guilty verdict in his murder trial, despite 45 bloodstains he left behind, which by the way I get into more on my July 22nd ep.
In fact, it would take a few decades for DNA to become used in applications such as genetic engineering, stem cell research, DNA fingerprinting. However in 1962 he would get his well-deserved glory by earning the Nobel Prize for Physics, which he won along with Dir., Crick and Maurice Wilkins, and Rosaline, or Rosy to her friends, Franklin.
In 1968, Dr. Watson published The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA, considered one of the biggest contributions in science history. He taught at Harvard for a while, then moved his studies and teachings of neurobiology and molecular genetics to the the Cold Spring Harbor Lab in New York. Since then, he’s waged a War on Cancer and promoted the Human Genome Project, and published Molecular Biology of the Gene, which would become the go-to manual biology textbooks.
After that came Molecular Biology of the Cell and Recombinant DNA. In 2014, a writer for The Guardian attacked Dr. Watson by calling him a racist and a sexist for suggesting once that black people he’s worked with were not on the same intelligence playing field as he was, and that his former partner Rosy Franklin was beautiful but plain.
<script data-ad-client="ca-pub-8113795558250501" async src="https://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"></script>I’m not really sure how that was a sexist remark against Rosy, because if I wake up from a nap and my hair’s a mess and I go out in public and my wife says I should have combed by hair, that she’s a sexist for saying that. I really don’t see what the difference is, but Adam Rutherford wants Dir., Watson’s credentials taken away for that remark. The work of Watson, Crick, Franklin, Wilkins and the others is considered the most important contribution to the biology of mankind, or womankind in came the Guardian’s listening, since Darwin’s evolution contribution.
Happy birthday Dr. James!
1939– Happy birthday Sheila Nevins, one of the most influential documentary writers in history. I should get a lesson from her! Sheila was born apr 6 1939 and grew up in a Jewish Family in Manhattan. She had a wealthy uncle who helped her with schooling, and she was able to obtain a BA in English in 1960. Her career would soon flourish as she became an actress, writer, and producer through the 60s and 70s, and hired by HBO as the Director of Documentary Programming in 1979. In the 80s she had a production company and later returned to HBO to become Vice President of Documentary Programming, in 2000 was inducted to the Broadcasting & Cable Company Hall of Fame, 2011 was honored by the Directors Guild of America for her unwavering commitment to documentary filmmakers and the advancement of the documentary genre, in 2013, won the Women’s Achievement Award, and by 2016 was awarded with a record number 32 prime time Emmy awards. Sheila took home the Exceptional Merit in Documentary filmmaking award for Jim: The James Foley Story, a biography of the US war correspondent. For the record, Nevins also shared the record for the most Emmy Award nominations received by an individual, which is 74. A record she shares with Hector Rameriez
1939 – happy birthday Sheila Nevins, one of the most influential documentary writers in history. I
should get a lesson from her!
Sheila was born April 6 1939 and grew up in a Jewish Family in Manhattan. She had a wealthy uncle who helped her with schooling, and she was able to obtain a BA in English in 1960. Her career would soon flourish as she became an actress, writer, and producer through the 60s and 70s, and hired by HBO as the Director of Documentary Programming in 1979.
In the 80s she had a production company and later returned to HBO to become Vice President of Documentary Programming, in 2000 was inducted to the Broadcasting & Cable Company Hall of Fame, 2011 was honored by the Directors Guild of America for her unwavering commitment to documentary filmmakers and the advancement of the documentary genre, in 2013, won the Women’s Achievement Award, and by 2016 was awarded with a record number 32 prime time Emmy awards.
Sheila took home the Exceptional Merit in Documentary filmmaking award for Jim: The James Foley Story, a biography of the US war correspondent. For the record, Nevins also shared the record for the most Emmy Award nominations received by an individual, which are 74. A record she shares with Hector Ramirez.
1841-His Accidency becomes president of the United States.
Now before I explain why John Tyler was named His Accidency, I should tell you who he is. Because unless you’re a real US history buff, you wouldn’t really have any reason to know who he was. He was our tenth President who ran as vice president in the whig party with William henry Harrison, and after Harrison died in April, Tyler took over as President. This really tested the laws of the constitution in terms of winning the White House without actually being elected president.
By the 1820s, the Democratic-Republican Party had split into different sanctions. Tyler, originally a democrat, opposed Andy Jackson and Martin Van Buren and sided with the Whig Party. He served as a Virginia state legislator, governor, US representative, and US senator before his eletion as VP in the election of 1840. Although a Whig, he found many of the Whig policies unconstitutional, and started vetoing all of them. He alienated himself from the Whig party as a result, and that’s why they call him His Accidency. He got death threats from both parties and was expelled by the Whigs. Other than that, his contributions include working with Great Britain to restore Canadian border territorial disputes, and spearheading the annexation of Texas. During the American civil war, he served in the Confederate House of Representatives.
1970-Sam Sheppard dies.
What a story this guy had! Sam Sheppard, osteopath, father, loving husband, pro wrestler. Except maybe he wasn’t such a loving husband. He did after all, spend 10 years behind bars for brutally killing his wife one night. I wish I had time to get into this whole story because it’s amazing. Because the story got so much public attention in the 1950s when he was pronounced guilty, Sheppard hired a new defense attorney to convince the Supreme Court to grant his client a new trial since he didn’t have his due process.
This time around, he was pronounced not guilty, got out of prison, and became a professional wrestler who came up with the move known as the Mandible Claw. Supposedly the movie and TV show The Fugitive was written based on Sam’s story. Check out more on this story in the novel Crooked River Bruning by Mark Winegardner, as well as Law and Order episode called Justice.