Freed U.S. slaves depart on journey to Africa


Year
1820
Month Day
February 06

The first organized immigration of freed slaves to Africa from the United States departs New York harbor on a journey to Freetown, Sierra Leone, in West Africa. The immigration was largely the work of the American Colonization Society, a U.S. organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to return freed American slaves to Africa. However, the expedition was also partially funded by the U.S. Congress, which in 1819 had appropriated $100,000 to be used in returning displaced Africans, illegally brought to the United States after the abolishment of the slave trade in 1808, to Africa.

The program was modeled after British’s efforts to resettle freed slaves in Africa following England’s abolishment of the slave trade in 1772. In 1787, the British government settled 300 former slaves and 70 white prostitutes on the Sierra Leone peninsula in West Africa. Within two years, most members of this settlement had died from disease or warfare with the local Temne people. However, in 1792, a second attempt was made when 1,100 freed slaves, mostly individuals who had supported Britain during the American Revolution and were unhappy with their postwar resettlement in Canada, established Freetown under the leadership of British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson.

During the next few decades, thousands of freed slaves came from Canada, the West Indies, and other parts of West Africa to the Sierra Leone Colony, and in 1820 the first freed slaves from the United States arrived at Sierra Leone. In 1821, the American Colonization Society founded the colony of Liberia south of Sierra Leone as a homeland for freed U.S. slaves outside of British jurisdiction.

Most Americans of African descent were not enthusiastic to abandon their homes in the United States for the West African coast. The American Colonization Society also came under attack from American abolitionists, who charged that the removal of freed slaves from the United States strengthened the institution of slavery. However, between 1822 and the American Civil War, some 15,000 African Americans settled in Liberia, which was granted independence by the United States in 1847 under pressure from Great Britain. Liberia was granted official U.S. diplomatic recognition in 1862. It was the first independent democratic republic in African history.

READ MORE: How a Movement to Send Freed Slaves to Africa Created Liberia

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Woman claiming to be Anastasia Romanov arrives in the U.S.


Year
1928
Month Day
February 06

On February 6, 1928, a woman calling herself Anastasia Tschaikovsky and claiming to be the youngest daughter of the murdered Russian czar Nicholas II arrives in New York City. She held a press conference on the liner Berengaria, explaining she was here to have her jaw reset. It was broken, she alleged, by a Bolshevik soldier during her narrow escape from the execution of her entire family—the Romanovs—at Ekaterinburg, Russia, in July 1918. Tschaikovsky was welcomed to New York by Gleb Botkin, the son of the Romanov family doctor who was executed along with his patients in 1918. Botkin called her “Your Highness” and claimed that she was without a doubt the Grand Duchess Anastasia with whom he had played as a child.

READ MORE: The Romanov Family Tree: Real Descendants and Wannabes

Between 1918 and 1928, more than half a dozen other women had come forward claiming to be a lost heir to the Romanov fortune, so some American reporters were understandingly skeptical of Tschaikovsky’s claims. Nevertheless, she was treated as a celebrity during her stay in New York and occasioned society parties and fashionable hotels worthy of a Romanov heir. Registering for one hotel during her visit, she used the name Anna Anderson, which later became her permanent alias.

In 1917, the February Revolution in Russia forced Czar Nicholas II to abdicate the throne. Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their four girls and one son were held at Czarskoye Selo palace and then taken to Ekaterinburg in the Urals after the Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution. Civil war raged throughout 1918, and in July anti-Bolshevik Russian forces approached Ekaterinburg. Fearing that Nicholas and his family would be rescued, the local authorities passed a death sentence on the Romanovs.

Just after midnight on July 17, 1918, Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children, and four family retainers, among them Dr. Botkin, were ordered to dress quickly and go down to the cellar of the house in which they were being held. There, the family and servants were arranged in two rows–for a photograph, they were told, to quell rumors that they had escaped. Suddenly, nearly a dozen armed men burst into the room and shot the imperial family in a hail of gunfire. Those who were still breathing when the smoked cleared were stabbed to death.

The executioners then took the bodies to an abandoned mine shaft some 14 miles from Ekaterinburg, burned them in a gasoline-fueled bonfire, and doused the bones with sulfuric acid to further disguise the remains. Finally, what was left was thrown into the mine pit, which was covered with dirt.

At first, the Bolshevik government reported that only Nicholas was executed and that his wife and children were moved to a safe location. Later, reports that the entire family had perished were confirmed by Russian investigators. At the same time, however, a persistent rumor spread through Europe, telling of a Romanov child, usually Anastasia, who had survived the carnage. Several pretenders came forward, hoping to cash in on the Romanov fortune reportedly held in European banks, but they were quickly exposed as frauds. Europe, however, had yet to meet Anna Anderson.

In 1920, an apparently suicidal young woman was pulled from the Landwehr Canal in Berlin. She refused to tell authorities her identity and was committed to the Dalldorf Asylum, where she lived in anonymity until 1922, when she suddenly announced that she was none other the Grand Duchess Anastasia.

At the time, Europe was filled with Russian exiles who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution, and a number of sympathetic czarists rushed to the aid of this young woman, who at first glance was certainly articulate and beautiful enough to be the lost Anastasia. Her body showed ugly scars, which she said she incurred from Bolshevik knives during the execution of her family. One Bolshevik soldier, she said, finding her alive, had helped her, and she eventually escaped to the West. Several months after claiming to be Anastasia, she was released from the asylum and moved in with the first of a long line of supporters.

READ MORE: Why the Romanov Family’s Fate Was a Secret Until the Fall of the Soviet Union

During the next few years, her entourage of Russian emigres grew, and she became particularly close to Gleb Botkin, who as the son of the slain Romanov family physician had spent considerable time with the imperial family in his childhood. During this time, numerous Romanov relatives and acquaintances interviewed her, and many were impressed by both her resemblance to Anastasia and her knowledge of the small details of the Romanov’s family life. Others, however, left skeptical when she failed to remember important events of young Anastasia’s life. Her knowledge of English, French, and Russian, which the young Anastasia knew how to speak well, were also significantly lacking. Many blamed these inconsistencies on her reoccurring mental illness, which led to short stays in mental institutions on several occasions.

Meanwhile, her supporters began a long battle to win her legal recognition as Anastasia. Such recognition would not only win her access to whatever Romanov riches remained outside the USSR but would make her a formidable political pawn of czarist exiles who still hoped to overthrow Russia’s communist leaders.

The Grand Duke of Hesse, Alexandra’s brother and Anastasia’s uncle, was a major critic of this effort, and he hired a private investigator to determine Anastasia Tschaikovsky’s true identity. The investigator announced that she was in fact Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish-German factory worker from Pomerania who had disappeared in 1920. Schanzkowska had a history of mental instability and was injured in a factory explosion in 1916, which accounted for the scars. These findings were published in German newspapers but were not proved definitively.

The woman who became known as Anna Anderson continued her fight for recognition, losing several court cases as the decades passed. A French play about her story, Anastasia, debuted in 1954, and in 1956 an American film version appeared, with Ingrid Bergman winning an Academy Award for her title role.

In 1968, Anne Anderson married an American history professor, J.E. Manahan, and moved to the United States, living her final years in Charlottesville, Virginia. In 1970, she lost her last major suit, and a remaining portion of the Romanov fortune was awarded to the duchess of Mecklenberg. Anna Anderson Manahan died in 1984.

In 1991, Russian amateur investigators, using a recently released government report on the Romanov execution, found what they thought to be the Romanov burial site. Russian authorities took over and exhumed human remains. Scientists studied the skulls, claiming that Anastasia’s was among those found, but the Russian findings were not conclusive. To prove that the remains were indisputably those of the Romanovs, the Russians enlisted the aid of British DNA experts.

First, the scientists tested for sex and identified five females and four males among the remains. Next they tested to see how, if at all, these people were related. A father and mother were identified, along with three daughters. The four other remains were likely those of servants. The son Alexei and one daughter were missing.

To prove the identity of Alexandra and her children, the scientists took blood from Prince Philip, the consort of Queen Elizabeth II and the grand nephew of Alexandra. Because they all share a common maternal ancestor, they would all share mitochondria DNA, which is passed almost unchanged from mother to children. The comparison between the mtDNA in Philip’s blood and in the remains was positive, proving them to be the Romanovs. To prove the czar’s identity, who would not share this mtDNA, the remains of Grand Duke George, the brother of Nicholas, were exhumed. A comparison of their mtDNA proved their relation.

A Romanov daughter was missing from the burial site. Could Anastasia have escaped and resurfaced as Anna Anderson? In 1994, American and English scientists sought to answer this question once and for all. Using a tissue sample of Anderson’s recovered from a Virginia hospital, the English team compared her mtDNA with that of the Romanovs. Simultaneously, an American team compared the mtDNA found in a strand of her hair. Both teams came to the same decisive conclusion: Anna Anderson was not a Romanov.

Later, the scientists compared Anna Anderson’s mtDNA with that of Karl Maucher, a great nephew of Franziska Schanzkowska. The DNA was a match, finally proving the theory put forth by a German investigator in the 1920s. One of the great mysteries of the 20th century was solved.

READ MORE: Could Anyone Have Saved the Romanovs?

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King George VI dies; Elizabeth becomes queen


Year
1952
Month Day
February 06

On February 6, 1952, after a long illness, King George VI of Great Britain and Northern Ireland dies in his sleep at the royal estate at Sandringham. Princess Elizabeth, the oldest of the king’s two daughters and next in line to succeed him, was in Kenya at the time of her father’s death; she was crowned Queen Elizabeth II on June 2, 1953, at age 27.

King George VI, the second son of King George V, ascended to the throne in 1936 after his older brother, King Edward VIII, voluntarily abdicated to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson. During World War II, George worked to rally the spirits of the British people by touring war zones, making a series of morale-boosting radio broadcasts (for which he overcame a speech impediment) and shunning the safety of the countryside to remain with his wife in bomb-damaged Buckingham Palace. The king’s health deteriorated in 1949, but he continued to perform state duties until his death in 1952.

Queen Elizabeth, born on April 21, 1926, and known to her family as Lilibet, was groomed as a girl to succeed her father. She married a distant cousin, Philip Mountbatten, on November 20, 1947, at London’s Westminster Abbey. The first of Elizabeth’s four children, Prince Charles, was born in 1948.

From the start of her reign, Elizabeth understood the value of public relations and allowed her 1953 coronation to be televised, despite objections from Prime Minister Winston Churchill and others who felt it would cheapen the ceremony. Elizabeth, the 40th British monarch since William the Conqueror, has worked hard at her royal duties and become a popular figure around the world. In 2003, she celebrated 50 years on the throne, only the fifth British monarch to do so.

The queen’s reign, however, has not been without controversy. She was seen as cold and out-of-touch following the 1996 divorce of her son, Prince Charles, and Princess Diana, and again after Diana’s 1997 death in a car crash. Additionally, the role in modern times of the monarchy, which is largely ceremonial, has come into question as British taxpayers have complained about covering the royal family’s travel expenses and palace upkeep. Still, the royals are effective world ambassadors for Britain and a huge tourism draw. Today, the queen, an avid horsewoman and Corgi dog lover, is one of the world’s wealthiest women, with extensive real-estate holdings and art and jewelry collections.

READ MORE: Queen Elizabeth II’s Reign: Then and Now

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Mussolini fires his son-in-law


Year
1943
Month Day
February 06

Wary of his growing antiwar attitude, Benito Mussolini removes Count Galeazzo Ciano, his son-in-law, as head of Italy’s foreign ministry and takes over the duty himself.

Ciano had been loyal to the fascist cause since its inception, having taking part in the march on Rome in 1922, which marked the Black Shirts’ rise to power in Italy. He graduated from the University of Rome with a degree in law, and then went to work as a journalist. Soon thereafter he began a career in Italy’s diplomatic corps, working as consul general in China. He married Mussolini’s daughter, Edda, in 1930; from there it was a swift climb up the political ladder: from chief of the press bureau to member of the Fascist Grand Council, Mussolini’s inner circle of advisers.

Ciano flew a bombing raid against Ethiopia in 1935-36 and was made foreign minister upon his return to Rome. Both because of his experience in foreign affairs and personal relationship to the Duce, Ciano became Mussolini’s right-hand man and likely successor. It was Ciano who promoted an Italian alliance with Germany, despite Mussolini’s virtual contempt for Hitler. Ciano began to suspect the Fuhrer’s loyalty to the “Pact of Steel”–a term Mussolini used to describe the alliance between Germany and Italy–when Germany invaded Poland without consulting its Axis partner, despite an agreement to the contrary Ciano made with his German counterpart, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Despite his concern about Germany’s loyalty, he felt that Italy stood to profit nicely from an alliance with the “winning side,” so when France fell to the Germans, Ciano advocated Italian participation in the war against the Allies.

After humiliating defeats in Greece and North Africa, Ciano began arguing for a peace agreement with the Allies. Mussolini considered this defeatist–and dismissed him as foreign minister, taking control of that office himself. Ciano became ambassador to the Vatican until he and other members of the Grand Council finally pushed Mussolini out of power in July 1943. Mussolini never forgave his son-in-law for what he later considered a betrayal. Ciano soon fled Rome for the north when the new provisional government began preparing charges of embezzlement against him. Ciano unwittingly fled into the arms of pro-fascist forces in northern Italy and was charged with treason. He was executed on January 11, 1944 on his father-in-law’s orders–Mussolini was installed in a puppet government that had been set up by the Germans. Ciano’s diaries, which contained brutally frank and sardonic commentaries on the personalities of the war era, are considered an invaluable part of the historical record.

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Tennis great Arthur Ashe dies of AIDS


Year
1993
Month Day
February 06

On February 6, 1993, tennis champion Arthur Ashe, the only African-American man to win Wimbledon and the U.S. and Australian Opens, dies of complications from AIDS, at age 49 in New York City. Ashe’s body later laid in state at the governor’s mansion in Richmond, Virginia, where thousands of people lined up to pay their respects to the ground-breaking athlete and social activist.

READ MORE: How Arthur Ashe Transformed Tennis—and Athlete Activism

Arthur Robert Ashe, Jr., was born in Richmond on July 10, 1943. He first picked up a tennis racket as a young boy at a segregated playground near his home. Ashe attended U.C.L.A. on a full scholarship and in 1963 became the first African-American member of the U.S. Davis Cup Team. In 1965, he claimed the individual NCAA tennis championship and helped U.C.L.A. win the team championship. After graduating in 1966, Ashe served in the U.S. Army for two years. In 1968, while still an amateur player, he won the U.S. Open and became the first black man to win a Grand Slam event. Two years later, in 1970, Ashe won the Australian Open. In 1972, he was a co-founder of the Association of Tennis Professionals, the union for male players, and later served as its president. Three years later, he beat heavily favored Jimmy Connors to win the singles title at Wimbledon. Ashe also competed on the Davis Cup team for 10 years, winning three championships. His prize money and endorsements made him the first African-American millionaire in his sport. In 1980, though, heart problems forced Ashe to retire from tennis. He was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1985.

Off the court, Ashe was known for his commitment to charitable causes and humanitarian work. He established tennis programs for inner-city children and campaigned against apartheid in South Africa. Following his retirement, Ashe was a TV sports commentator and columnist and wrote a 3-volume book, “A Hard Road to Glory,” about black athletes. In 1988, Ashe learned he had AIDS. It was believed he contracted the HIV virus from a tainted blood transfusion following a 1983 heart operation. Ashe kept his medical condition private until April 1992, when a newspaper informed him of its intention to run an article about his illness. Ashe decided to pre-empt the article and held a news conference to announce he had AIDS. He spent the remainder of his life working to raise awareness about the disease. In 1997, the U.S. Tennis Association announced it would name the new center court stadium at the USTA National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, New York, the Arthur Ashe Stadium.

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Dalton Gang commits its first train robbery


Year
1891
Month Day
February 06

The members of the Dalton Gang stage an unsuccessful train robbery near Alila, California–an inauspicious beginning to their careers as serious criminals.

Bob, Emmett, and Grat Dalton were only three of Lewis and Adeleine Dalton’s 10 sons. The brothers grew up on a succession of Oklahoma and Kansas homesteads during the post-Civil War period, when the region was awash in violence lingering from the war and notorious outlaw bands like the James-Younger Gang. Still, the majority of the Dalton boys became law-abiding citizens, and one of the older brothers, Frank, served as a deputy U.S. marshal.

Ironically, Frank’s position in law enforcement brought his younger brothers into lives of crime. When Oklahoma whiskey runners murdered Frank in 1887, Grat took Frank’s place as a deputy marshal and recruited Emmett and Bob as assistants. Disillusioned by the fate of their older law-abiding brother, the three Dalton boys showed little respect for the law and began rustling cattle and horses to supplement their income. The brothers soon began to use their official law enforcement powers for their own ends, and in 1888, they killed a man for pursuing Bob’s girlfriend.

Such gross abuses of authority did not escape attention for long. By 1890, all three men were discredited as lawmen, though they managed to escape imprisonment. Taking up with some of the same hardcore criminals they had previously sworn to bring to justice, the Daltons decided to expand their criminal operations. Bob and Grat headed to California, leaving Emmett behind in Oklahoma because they felt he was still too young for a life of serious crime. In California, they planned to link up with their brother Bill and become bank and train robbers.

The Dalton Gang’s first attempt at train robbery was a fiasco. On February 6, 1891, Bob, Grat, and Bill tried to rob a Southern Pacific train near Alila, California. While Bill kept any passengers from interfering by shooting over their heads, Bob and Grat forced the engineer to show them the location of the cash-carrying express car. When the engineer tried to slip away, one of the brothers shot him in the stomach. Finding the express car on their own, Bob and Grat demanded that the guard inside open the heavy door. The guard refused and began firing down on them from a small spy hole. Thwarted, the brothers finally gave up and rode away.

The Daltons would have done well to heed the ominous signs of that first failed robbery and seek safer pursuits. Instead, they returned to Oklahoma, reunited with young Emmett, and began robbing in earnest. A year later, the gang botched another robbery, boldly attempting to hit two Coffeyville, Kansas, banks at the same time. Townspeople caught them in the act and killed Bob, Grat, and two of their gang members. Emmett was seriously wounded and served 14 years in prison.

Of all the criminal Dalton brothers, only Emmett lived into old age. Freed from prison in 1907, he married and settled in Los Angeles, where he built a successful career in real estate and contracting.

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“Of Mice and Men” is published


Year
1937
Month Day
February 06

John Steinbeck’s novella Of Mice and Men, the story of the bond between two migrant workers, is published. He adapted the book into a three-act play, which was produced the same year. The story brought national attention to Steinbeck’s work, which had started to catch on in 1935 with the publication of his first successful novel, Tortilla Flat.

Steinbeck was born and raised in the Salinas Valley, where his father was a county official and his mother a former schoolteacher. A good student and president of his senior class in high school, Steinbeck attended Stanford intermittently in the early 1920s. In 1925, he moved to New York City, where he worked as a manual laborer and a journalist while writing stories and novels. His first two novels were not successful.

In 1930, he married Carol Henning, the first of his three wives, and moved to Pacific Grove, California. Steinbeck’s father gave the couple a house and a small income while Steinbeck continued to write. His third novel, Tortilla Flat (1935), was a critical and financial success, as were such subsequent books as In Dubious Battle (1935) and Of Mice and Men (1937), both of which offered social commentaries on injustices of various types.

In 1939, Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath, a novel tracing a fictional Oklahoma family as they lose their family farm in the Depression and move to California seeking a better life.

His work after World War II, including Cannery Row and The Pearl, continued to offer social criticism but became more sentimental. Steinbeck tried his hand at movie scripts in the 1940s, writing successful films like Forgotten Village (1941) and Viva Zapata (1952). He also took up the serious study of marine biology and published a nonfiction book, The Sea of Cortez, in 1941. His 1962 nonfiction book, Travels with Charlie, describes his travels across the United States in a camper truck with his poodle, Charlie. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1962 and died in New York in 1968.

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Austrian superstar Falco dies


Year
1998
Month Day
February 06

The bus accident that killed Johann Hölzel went largely unnoticed in the English-speaking world, but in the Strasses and Allees of his native Vienna, February 6, 1998, was something like the Day die Musik Died. Johann Hölzel, after all, was not the name by which most of the world knew him. To pop fans from Germany to Japan, he was Falco, the man behind “Rock Me Amadeus” and “Der Kommisar” and possibly the biggest star to emerge from Austria since Herr Mozart himself. Seventeen years after his first international breakthrough, Johann “Falco” Hölzel died on February 6, 1998, when his rental car was struck by a bus while he vacationed in the Dominican Republic.

The song that made Falco’s name internationally was “Der Kommissar,” a paranoid tale of youthful rebellion that was almost entirely inscrutable to non-speakers of German. “Alles klar, Herr Kommissar?” nevertheless entered the vocabularies of millions of  New Wave fans around the world, sending the song to the top of many European pop charts in 1982 and making history by doing so. In the United States, where the original version of “Der Kommissar” barely dented the Hot 100, Falco would accomplish the same historic feat four years later, when “Rock Me Amadeus,” a German-language tribute to that other famous Austrian, shot all the way to #1 on the Billboard pop charts in the spring of 1986. And what exactly was Falco’s history-making achievement? Well, not only did “Rock Me Amadeus” make him the first Austrian to top the U.S. pop charts, but it also earned Falco the unlikely distinction of scoring the first American #1 pop hit by a male rap artist. Yes, that’s right—it wasn’t Doug E. Fresh or Kool Moe Dee or Kurtis Blow or Run-D.M.C. but an Austrian in a powdered wig who first brought hip hop—of a sort—to the top of the pops.

There were other hits for Falco in the years to come, but nothing approaching the international success of “Der Kommissar” and “Rock Me Amadeus.” He appeared repeatedly in the upper reaches of the German and Austrian charts in the late 80s and 1990s, but albums like 1988’s Wiener Blut (Viennese Blood) somehow failed to gain traction elsewhere. During his history-making career, however, Johann Hölzel sold an estimated 60 million records worldwide. He was only 40 years old when he died on this day in 1998.

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Ronald Reagan born


Year
1911
Month Day
February 06

As the 40th president of the United States, the former movie star was called the “Great Communicator” for his ability to get through to ordinary Americans and give them hope and optimism for their own future and that of their country. Despite his lifelong opposition to “big” government, he was credited with restoring faith in the U.S. government and the presidency after a long era of disillusionment in the wake of Nixon, Vietnam and economic hardship under Carter. But before his years of Hollywood stardom, and long before Washington, Ronald Reagan was born on February 6, 1911, in Tampico, a small town in northwestern Illinois.

Though his family was poor, Reagan later remembered his as an idyllic childhood. After playing football in high school and college (at Eureka University), he graduated during the Great Depression with few job prospects. He soon began working in radio in Iowa, broadcasting for football and other sports. While on a spring training trip with the Chicago Cubs in Los Angeles, Reagan got in touch with a former colleague at WHO in Des Moines, who connected him with a Hollywood agent, and in 1937 Warner Brothers offered Reagan a seven-year contract starting at $200 per week. His first role was far from a stretch: He played a radio reporter in the 1937 B-movie Love Is on the Air, and the Hollywood Reporter called him “a natural.”

After a few years as what he later called “the Errol Flynn of the B pictures,” Reagan won the role he would become known for, the football player George Gipp of Notre Dame University in Knute Rockne – All-American. The film told the story of the legendary Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne (played by Pat O’Brien), who died in a plane crash in 1931. Gipp was the walk-on who became Rockne’s star player and died of a throat infection two weeks after his final game. As Reagan later recounted in his memoir, he convinced the filmmakers (who wanted a taller, heavier actor for the part) that he could play Gipp by showing them a picture of himself in his college football uniform. During his political career, Reagan would reprise the now-immortal line “Win one for the Gipper” from his deathbed scene in the film.

In addition to making more than 50 films, Reagan became heavily involved in the Screen Actors Guild during his years in Hollywood, serving six terms as its president and leading the union through some of the most volatile years in the movie industry. In 1947, when accusations of Communism were running rampant in Hollywood, Reagan testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and refused to name names of suspected Communist sympathizers (although an FBI file later revealed that he had in fact named people in secret). Around this same time, Reagan’s personal life was in turmoil: His wife, the actress Jane Wyman, divorced him in 1948; his increasing involvement in the Screen Actors Guild was reportedly mentioned as a factor in the divorce. Reagan married Nancy Davis, also an actress, in 1952; they had two children, Patricia and Ronald. (Reagan and Wyman also had a daughter, Maureen, and adopted a son, Michael.) Nancy Reagan would become her husband’s closest confidante and adviser during his future political career.

In the early 1950s, Reagan became familiar to a much wider audience when he began hosting the television program General Electric Theater; he also traveled the country giving speeches as the GE company spokesman. Though he was a registered Democrat during his years in Hollywood, he changed his political affiliation to Republican in 1962. Two years later, Reagan made his grand entrance on the political stage with a much-publicized speech at a fundraiser for Barry Goldwater, that year’s Republican presidential candidate. In Kings Row (1941), Reagan had played a small-town hero whose legs are amputated. He considered it his finest film and took a line from it–”Where’s the rest of me?”–for the title of his first autobiography, published in 1965, before his run for governor of California. The following year, Reagan defeated the incumbent governor of California, Pat Brown, by close to a million votes, taking the next step on the road to the White House.

At 69, Reagan was the oldest man in history to take office as U.S. president. His career in Hollywood, thought to be a weakness at the beginning of his life in politics, turned out to be arguably one of his biggest assets. As president, he projected a comforting optimism and weathered setbacks with such success that he became known as the “Teflon president.” His foreign policy legacy, tarnished after the Iran-Contra affair, was redeemed in the eyes of many by the end of the Cold War and the opening of relations with the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. The long-term success of his sweeping tax cuts and “Reaganomics” may have been debatable, but he managed to maintain his popularity throughout, leaving the White House in the hands of his loyal vice president, George H.W. Bush, in 1988 and maintaining a high approval rating. Six years later, Reagan made the sobering announcement that he had Alzheimer’s disease, which would end his public career. He died on June 5, 2004, at the age of 93.

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Man United players among victims of plane crash


Year
1958
Month Day
February 06

A British European Airways flight crashes just after takeoff from the Munich Airport. Twenty-three people died in the crash, including eight players from the Manchester United soccer team, which had just qualified for the semifinals of the European Cup.

The Manchester United team was returning from Belgrade, where they had played the Red Star team. Manchester was led by Coach Matt Busby; his young players were known as the “Busby Babes.” A 3-3 tie with Red Star meant that Manchester United moved on to the semi-finals of the European Cup.

The team’s flight back to Manchester was delayed an hour because one of the players forgot his passport. The Airspeed Ambassador G-ALZU charter then stopped at Munich-Riem Airport to re-fuel. Munich had just had a snowstorm and conditions were not ideal for flying. Pilot James Thain had to abort his first two attempts at take-off because of engine trouble. On the third attempt, just after 3 p.m., the plane was unable to get enough lift and crashed into a fence at the end of the runway. It then plowed into an empty house.

Twenty-two of the 43 people on board died in the crash. Seven players were among the dead and an eighth, Duncan Edwards, died from his injuries two weeks later, bringing the total death toll to 23. Coach Busby suffered severe injuries and was in critical condition for weeks. The plane’s captain survived the crash and was later charged with criminal negligence after photos appeared to show that he had ignored an icy buildup on the wings.

A subsequent investigation revealed that there was little ice on the wings but that slush at the end of the runway had slowed the plane at a critical point in the takeoff, making it impossible to achieve proper lift. Still, German prosecutors did not clear the captain until 1968. That same year, Coach Busby led Manchester United to their first European Cup title. The team included two players who had survived the crash.

Singer Morrissey (formerly of the band The Smiths) immortalized the crash with his 2004 song “Munich Air Disaster 1958.”

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