Tidbits of History, December 27

December 27 is:

On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me . . . three French hens.
For an interpretation of the significance of each day of Christmas, see: crosswalk.com

Make Cut Out Snowflakes Day

National Fruitcake Day
From Foodimentary.com

The Egyptians thought so much of these cakes that they put them in tombs. They thought that fruitcakes would survive the long journey to the afterlife.
Even Crusaders knew that fruitcakes could withstand a long journey. Not only did these cakes withstand long journeys, but they were also full of nutritious items like dried fruit and nuts.
Fruitcakes were the wedding cake of choice in England. Single female wedding guests would take a piece home and place it under their pillow in hopes of dreaming of the man they would marry.
Fruitcake is perfectly edible as long as there is no mold on it.
If your fruitcake dries out, soak it in alcohol or some other liquid and it will become as edible as it ever was.

Birthday of Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571), German astronomer who formulated three major laws of planetary motion.

1. The orbit of a planet is an ellipse with the Sun at one of the two foci.
2. A line segment joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.
3. The ratio of the square of an object’s orbital period with the cube of the semi-major of its orbit is the same for all objects orbiting the same primary.

In 1845, Ether anesthetic was used for childbirth for the first time by Dr. Crawford Long in Jefferson, Georgia. He gave it to his wife, and she successfully gave birth to a baby girl, their second child, Fanny.

1845 – Journalist John L. O’Sullivan, writing in his newspaper the New York Morning News, argues that the United States had the right to claim the entire Oregon Country “by the right of our manifest destiny“. Presidential candidate James K. Polk used this popular outcry to his advantage, and the Democrats called for the annexation of “All Oregon” in the 1844 U.S. Presidential election.

1900 – Carrie Nation staged her first raid on a saloon at the Carey Hotel in Wichita, Kansas. She broke each and every one of the liquor bottles that could be seen. Suspicious that President William McKinley was a secret drinker, Nation applauded his 1901 assassination because “drinkers got what they deserved”.

In 1903, in New York City, the barbershop quartet favorite, “Sweet Adeline,” was sung for the first time.

“Show Boat”, considered to be the first true American musical play, opened at the Ziegfeld Theater on Broadway on December 27, 1927. Music by Jerome Kern and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on a book by Edna Ferber. The musical contributed such classic songs as “Ol’ Man River”, “Make Believe”, and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man”. “Show Boat” was made into a movie three times: 1929 with Laura La Plante; 1936 with Irene Dunn; 1951 with Kathryn Grayson.

1929 – Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin ordered the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class” in an effort to spread socialism to the countryside. That order results in the deaths of somewhere between five and fifteen million people. According to Wikipedia:

Kulaks … were a category of relatively affluent farmers in the later Russian Empire, Soviet Russia, and early Soviet Union. The word kulak originally referred to independent farmers in the Russian Empire who emerged from the peasantry and became wealthy following the Stolypin reform, which began in 1906. The label of kulak was broadened in 1918 to include any peasant who resisted handing over their grain to detachments from Moscow. During 1929-1933, Stalin’s leadership of the total campaign to collectivize the peasantry meant that “peasants with a couple of cows or five or six acres more than their neighbors” were being labeled “kulaks”.

In 1968, Apollo 8 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, ending the first orbital manned mission to the Moon.