Iron Maiden on This Day in History

This Day in History: English singer-songwriter Bruce Dickinson was born on this day in 1958. He is best known for his work as the lead singer of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden since 1981. The band's name comes from a medieval torture device. Bruce Dickinson is also an accomplished swordsman, an activity I expect every heavy metal frontman to be engaged in. The band has their own beer, and their own video games. They are also one of the few bands that had a generation of kids quoting Scripture in their song "The Number of the Beast", even if it's only Revelation 13:18: "Here is wisdom. He that hath understanding, let him count the number of the beast; for it is the number of a man: and his number is Six hundred and sixty and six"...and they even had Vincent Price recite it.

The Damned Charles Fort on This Day in History

This Day in History: Charles Fort was born on this day in 1874. He is best known for his "Book of the Damned." Fort was a skeptic of science, and his book produced numerous instances of occurrences that science just could not explain, or were just ignored by science. Such instances were falling frogs, fishes, and inorganic materials, spontaneous human combustion, ball lightning (a term explicitly used by Fort), poltergeist events, unaccountable noises and explosions, levitation, unidentified flying objects, unexplained disappearances, giant wheels of light in the oceans, and animals found outside their normal ranges. He offered many reports of out-of-place artifacts (OOPArts), strange items found in unlikely locations. He was often criticized but he also had a large following.

The Fortean Times magazine is still being published.

See also: The Supernatural & Paranormal, 400 PDF Books on DVDrom
https://thebookshelf2015.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-supernatural-paranormal-400-pdf.html

The Income Tax on This Day in History

This Day in History: The United States government levied the first income tax on this day in 1861 to pay for the war effort. This tax was 3% of all incomes over $800; and it was rescinded in 1872. "This adherence to a terminal date is worth noting; it is a left-handed admission that the taxation of incomes was generally held to be obnoxious, perhaps unconstitutional, and was tolerated only as a temporary necessity."~Frank Chodorov

A more permanent income tax would come 50 years later under Woodrow Wilson in 1913, a man who also gave us World War I, the League of Nations, and Conscription (the draft). The income tax is bureaucratic slavery, after all, we work for months to pay, not ourselves, but someone else. Prior to the passage of the 16th Amendment (income tax) in 1913, the United States government funded its operations mainly through excise taxes, tariffs, customs duties and public land sales. 

Some have gone to great extremes to prove that the income tax was illegal and unconstitutional, notably Irwin Schiff who died in an American prison as a political prisoner.

Dickens Knew Taxes Started the French Revolution
https://thebookshelf2015.blogspot.com/2017/06/dickens-knew-taxes-started-french.html

How They Viewed an Income Tax Over 100 Years Ago
https://thebookshelf2015.blogspot.com/2018/04/how-they-viewed-income-tax-over-100.html

See also The History & Mystery of Money & Economics-250 Books on DVDrom

Visit my Econ blog at http://fredericbastiat1850.blogspot.com/

For a list of all of my disks and ebooks (PDF and Amazon) click here

Dom Perignon's Champagne on This Day in History

This Day In History: Today is the traditional date of Dom Perignon's (a Benedictine monk) invention of Champagne in 1693. Champagne is a French sparkling wine. Many people use the term Champagne as a generic term for sparkling wine, but in the EU and some countries, it is illegal to label any product Champagne unless it came from the Champagne wine region of France and is produced under the rules of that region [appellation]. Monks for centuries have been at the forefront of beer, wine and brandy inventions. They had vast tracts of land for planting grapes or barley, and at the time it was safer to drink beer than water for sanitary reasons. "The process of making beer purified all the ingredients." [Fabrice Bordon] Arnold of Soissons [the patron saint of hop-pickers and Belgian brewers] during an epidemic, deterred people from drinking water and had them consume his brews. Because of this, many people in his church survived the plague.

See also: The Alcoholic & Narcotic History of the World - 60 Books on CDrom
https://thebookshelf2015.blogspot.com/2015/09/alcoholic-narcotic-history-of-world-60.html 

The Wandering Jew on This Day in History

This Day In History: French novelist Eugene Sue died on this day in 1857. Famous for writing the serialized "Mysteries of Paris" he also popularized the legend of "The Wandering Jew." The Wandering Jew is a mythical immortal man whose legend began to spread in Europe in the 1200's. The original legend tells of a Jew who taunted Jesus before his death and was then cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming. According to some sources, the legend stems from Jesus' words given in Matthew 16:28: "Yes. I tell you that there are some people standing here who will not experience death until they see the Son Man coming in his kingdom." (Jewish New Testament)

In the 1988 film The Seventh Sign the Wandering Jew appears as Father Lucci, and in the third episode of the first season of The Librarians, the character Jenkins mentions the Wandering Jew as an "immortal creature that can be injured, but never killed". The Wandering Jew even made it into video games. Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned presents The Wandering Jew as a childhood friend and, later, disciple of Jesus, who drank drops of his blood during the crucifixion and was thus cursed with immortality. The video game series Assassin's Creed features a group of individuals known as Sages, who share a number of supernatural abilities. In the game Assassin's Creed Unity, one of the sages is named the Wanderer and is linked to the Wandering Jew, described as "a Jewish Sage born in Judea. He was believed to have encountered Jesus Christ on his way to Golgotha".

See also: Jewish History and Mysteries - 220 PDF Books on DVDrom
https://thebookshelf2015.blogspot.com/2018/11/jewish-history-and-mysteries-220-pdf.html

President Warren G. Harding on This Day in History

Video Presentation about the Crash of 1921

This Day In History: President Warren Harding died on this day in 1923. Many call him the worst president, but he may be one of the best. In 1921, under President Harding, unemployment hit 11.7 percent. Harding did nothing to get the economy stimulated. Despite objections, he reduced government spending. He simply let the market revive on its own and as a result the 11.7 percent unemployment rate in 1921 fell to 6.7 percent in 1922, and then to 2.4 percent in 1923.

"For the first 150 years of this country's existence, the federal government felt no great need to 'do something' when the economy turned down. Over that long span of time, the economic downturns were neither as deep nor as long lasting as they have been since the federal government decided that it had to 'do something' in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929, which set a new precedent...history shows that the economy rebounded out of a worse unemployment situation in just two years under Harding, who simply let the market revive on its own, as it had done before, time and time again for more than a century."~Thomas Sowell

"With tax rates cut for all groups, Americans invented or expanded such businesses as air conditioning, talking movies, radios, refrigerators, telephones, and air travel. The Roaring ‘20s launched with Harding’s assumption that greater freedom and less government would increase prosperity for all groups. The 1920s would also become the last decade in US history to see annual budget surpluses every year. Almost one-third of the federal debt disappeared under Harding and Coolidge."~Burton Folsom

See also The History & Mystery of Money & Economics-250 Books on DVDrom

White Cargo on This Day in History

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This Day In History: The ship "Speedwell" started its journey from Europe to transport pilgrims to America on this day in 1620, along with the Mayflower. The New York Times' 1619 Project has a certain narrative about slavery, but few know that these ships were carrying white slaves.

Hundreds of thousands of White people in colonial America were owned outright by their masters and died as slaves. They had no control over their own lives and were auctioned on the block and examined like livestock exactly like Black slaves. White slaves “found themselves powerless as individuals, without honor or respect and driven into commodity production not by any inner sense of moral duty but by the outer stimulus of the whip.” (Hilary Beckles, White Servitude, p. 5).

At the time, White slaves were cheaper than Black slaves and therefore were often mistreated to a greater extent. Having paid a bigger price for Black slaves, “the planters treated the black better than they did their ‘Christian’ white servant. Even the [Blacks] recognized this and did not hesitate to show their con-tempt for those white men who, they could see, were worse off than themselves...” (Carl Bridenbaugh)

Critics often point out that the Whites were servants, not slaves, but even Daniel Defoe in his classic book, Moll Flanders, points out in one section, “'They were of two sorts, first such as were brought over by masters of ships to be sold as servants. Such as we call them my dear,’ says she, ‘but they are more properly called slaves.'”

“...white indentured servants were employed and treated, incidentally, exactly like slaves... “(Morley Ayearst, The British West Indies, p. 19).

“In the North American colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries and subsequently in the United States, servant was the usual designation for a slave” (Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, p. 2,739)

See also: See also: They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America on Amazon

See also: When Blacks Owned Slaves, by Calvin Dill Wilson 1905
https://thebookshelf2015.blogspot.com/2017/02/when-blacks-owned-slaves-by-calvin-dill.html

See also: A History of White Slavery by Charles Sumner 1853 and When the Irish were Slaves, article in The Month 1890

See also Bible Defense of Slavery and other Southern books on CDrom - Join my Facebook Group - For a list of all of my digital books and books on disk click here

The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America