Conductor and composer John Philip Sousa, America’s “March King,” was born on November 6, 1854, in Washington, D.C. As a child playing the violin and studying music, it was found he had perfect pitch. At 13 he apprenticed with the U.S. Marine Band, in which his father was a trombonist. Starting in 1880 and for the next 12 years, he conducted that band and began writing marches – 136 over his lifetime. He also conducted "The President's Own" band for Presidents Hayes, Garfield, Cleveland, Arthur and Harrison. His greatest marches include "Semper Fidelis" (1888), the official march of the U.S. Marine Corps; "The Washington Post" (1889), named for the newspaper that commissioned it; "The Liberty Bell" (1893); and his greatest work, "Stars and Stripes Forever" (1896), with its piccolo obbligato, declared by Congress the National March of the United States. In 1892 he formed his own Sousa Band and developed the sousaphone (similar to the tuba). Sousa was also one of the world’s greatest trapshooters and helped found what became the Amateur Trapshooting Association.
On November 5, 1605, the Gunpowder Plot, intended to assassinate King James I by blowing up the House of Lords, was thwarted in London. The treachery was part of a revolt in Britain’s Midlands designed to install James' young daughter (granddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots) as the Catholic head of state, thereby reversing England’s break from the Church of Rome. One of the 13 members of the plot, Guy Fawkes, was apprehended while guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder placed under the House of Lords. He was later sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The date became known as Gunpowder Treason Day, Bonfire Night and other names, on which people lit bonfires and burned effigies of hate-figures, often the pope, out of anti-Catholic sentiment. Over time masks of Fawkes became common and the annual occasion was called Guy Fawkes Day. Stylized Fawkes masks seen in the movie “V for Vendetta” (2006) are now used by post-modern anarchists, particularly the hacktivists Anonymous. The modern word “guy” is derived from references to Guy Fawkes.
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was established on November 4, 1952, by order of President Harry Truman. Its predecessor was the Armed Forces Security Agency (1949), which failed to centralize post-World War II intelligence functions or coordinate them with civilian agencies. Operating under the Defense Department, the NSA’s function is to manage signals intelligence, i.e., interception of communications. It monitors, collects, decodes and analyzes information for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence. It is authorized to do so via clandestine means and allegedly via use of subversive software. It conducts surveillance of specific individuals within the United States and collects and stores all phone records of all American citizens. Its 1,300 buildings are headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington. The NSA is Maryland’s largest employer and largest consumer of electric power. Its large main building is sheathed in one-way dark glass that is lined with copper shielding to trap signals and prevent espionage. NSA owns the world’s single largest group of supercomputers.
Bookseller and publisher Karl Baedeker was born on November 3, 1801, in Essen, Prussia, the eldest of 10 sons of a printer and bookseller. In 1827, at age 25, he started a bookselling and publishing business in Koblenz, a hub of tourism in the Rhine region. He acquired a publishing house that sold a traveler’s handbook for Rhine journeys, which he revised as a single-source guide that included information he believed would be useful, such as tourist sights, routes, transportation, hotels, restaurants, tipping and prices. Such data distinguished his books from English travel guides published from 1836 by John Murray, which Baedeker admired and emulated. He was known for being incorruptible in his dealings, often checking the quality of establishments by making incognito visits, and used a system of stars to denote places of special interest. His red-bound Baedeker handbooks became indispensable for their clearness, accuracy, detail and reliable maps. One historian has said of Baedeker, "It is a moot point whether he invented tourism or tourism invented him."
Realist author Stephen Crane was born on November 1, 1871, in Newark, NJ, the last of 14 children of a Methodist minister and his wife. Though sickly as a child, he was precocious and taught himself to read by age 4. He spent less than two years as a college student, partly at Syracuse University, before starting a freelance writing career in New York, where he lived in the gritty, impoverished world of the Bowery in Lower Manhattan. From this emerged his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), the tale of a girl driven to prostitution. He also contracted various diseases in this period (and later as a war correspondent abroad). Crane’s fascination with stories of Civil War battles resulted in his masterwork of naturalism, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), which he called "a psychological portrayal of fear," told through the inner experiences of a young Union private whose dreams of glory disappear when he flees from battle. Crane had never been to war, but the book became a huge bestseller in the United States and Britain. He died of tuberculosis at age 28.
English poet John Keats was born on October 31, 1795, in London. He developed an interest in the classics and Renaissance literature, but by age 20 he had become a medical student, showing some talent as a surgeon’s assistant. But his literary ambitions were aroused by poets such as Leigh Hunt (a friend of the poet Shelley) and Lord Byron. In 1816 he published his first book of verse, Poems. It was a critical failure. But during most of 1819, while staying with a friend on London’s Hampstead Heath, Keats began writing his most mature and enduring works – six famous odes – after hearing lectures on the subject of poetic identity by literary critic William Hazlitt, and also meeting the celebrated poet William Wordsworth. That spring he wrote five poems: "Ode on a Grecian Urn," "Ode on Indolence,” "Ode on Melancholy," "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode to Psyche." In September, he composed "To Autumn" shortly before he showed the first signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him. When he died at age 25, Keats had been writing poetry seriously for only six years.
English Impressionist painter Alfred Sisley was born in Paris on October 30, 1839, to affluent, educated parents. In the 1860s he abandoned a business career in London, inspired by works of English landscape painters including Turner and Constable. In Paris, he joined with Impressionists Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir in pioneering realistic and natural depictions of subjects. Most notably, they painted landscapes en plein air (outdoors), not in the studio, to focus on capturing the transient effects of sunlight. Sisley was the most consistent Impressionist of his time, exclusively painting plein air landscapes. Of his nearly 900 oil paintings, fewer than 12 were still lifes. He favored the pastoral Fontainebleau region southeast of Paris, avoiding industrialized cityscapes, and is also known for a series of paintings of the River Thames (1874) near Hampton. One of his most alluring landscapes, “Lane of Poplars at Moret-sur-Loing” (1890, pictured), has been stolen three times from a museum in Nice, and recovered each time, in 1978, 1998 and 2007.
155 years ago: Theodore "T.R." Roosevelt, Jr., who was elected the 26th President of the United States in 1901, was born on October 27, 1858, in New York, NY. His father was a philanthropist, his mother a socialite. An asthmatic, he had to sleep propped up in bed or in a chair in his youth. Although frequently ill, he was a hyperactive hellion. During his life, Roosevelt wrote 18 books, including his Autobiography, The Rough Riders and a four-volume The Winning of the West. The Teddy bear is named for him, but he deeply disliked the name “Teddy” and was unafraid to let people know it. He deplored the use of the phrase "In God We Trust" on U.S. currency, writing that "It seems to me eminently unwise to cheapen such a motto by use on coins, just as it would be to cheapen it by use on postage stamps, or in advertisements." He often skinny-dipped in the Potomac and pursued strenuous exercise, including boxing. But he discontinued sparring when a blow to his left eye while President detached his retina and left him blind in that eye – a fact that was concealed for years.
On October 26, 1861, the Pony Express ceased operating between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California, two days after the transcontinental telegraph reached Salt Lake City to complete a connection between Omaha, Nebraska, and Sacramento. The mail delivery system, originally part of an express freight company, carried messages, mail, newspapers and small packages, much of which originated from the East coast. The need for fast mail service beyond the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada was hastened by westward migration on the Oregon Trail in the 1840s, then the 1849 Gold Rush. Horses of the Pony Express raced between more than 150 relay stations for a period of only 18 months, starting in April 1860. Riders earned $25 a week at a time when unskilled labor was paid between 43 cents and $1 a day. They covered more than 1,800 miles, delivering mail in an advertised “10 days to San Francisco!” Today nearly all of the express trail has disappeared, although short segments, open to guesswork, can be seen in Utah and California.
On October 24, 1590, English explorer and artist John White returned to Plymouth, England, after failing to rescue the ill-fated “lost colony” at Roanoke Island. He had been a member of the settlement in 1585, in what is now North Carolina, sent by Sir Walter Raleigh as an artist and illustrator for the New World expedition. His watercolors of the flora, fauna and native peoples (pictured) are the earliest, most informative extant illustrations of native societies on the East coast. No Englishman had ever before painted America. White returned as governor in 1587 to reestablish Roanoke with more than 100 colonists (though his destination was actually Chesapeake Bay). In August his daughter, Elenora, gave birth to Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas. When the colony clashed with natives and began to fail, White returned to England against his will to bring back supplies. He was promptly delayed by the invasion of the Spanish Armada (1588). When he finally returned in 1590, the settlement – and his family – had disappeared.
