One captain is hailed as a hero. One captain saved 800 from freezing to death in the icy North Atlantic.

And yet, they are not the same man.

Sail in hell, Smith.

Come to think of it, I don't even know if I have those words anymore.

I suppose I must have been thinking, without thinking about it, that the icebergs had already eaten a ship that night and wouldn't be hungry for a second one, therefore none of the other ships were in any danger. Silly of me.

A brave act indeed.

Contrary, yeah. And in fact, I don't believe that. But I thought it worth exploring in pen, and now, crap, I can't find it.

Please back up.

What is sure is that his actions could serve as the textbook example of what to do in such circumstances.

Rostron made a judgement call that the Carpathia could safely get there to render aid, and he was throwing the lives of everyone aboard as well as his ship in.

Awesome heroism.

But I'm fairly sure large boats and ships are not canoes. No oars for starters. And I know they're not the same as swimming. So what does one do to keep proper watch?

Apropos of the subject, I switched past the Titanic two-night miniseries last night, and found, much to my surprise, that I got caught up in it. It's a 6-hour British production, and not entirely unlike "Downton Abbey Gets Hit By An Iceberg" at least in spirit -- there's as much attention paid to the underclass as the aristocracy, plus there's an intricate plot structure that has a number of storylines criss-crossing and cutting back and forth in time.

Alas, the final three nights are tonight, so the audience that might have found it then is going to be at sea.

My first reaction to this post was that it might make someone feel bad, but I guess we're kind of past that. My earworm has children's voices. I still get a nervous twitch hearing someone sing one of those standbys of childhood, until review has shown it's safe, though I'm amazed at how many of those are now not PC.

"The cannibal king with the brass nose ring fell in love with a dusky maid..."

I was going to tie this back to the OP but my system is giving wonky signs.

Any cheery camp songs about 9/11 had better wait, methinks. At least they'd better wait until I'm out of earshot!

The radio watch part makes perfect sense. I'm presuming that is the naval equivalent of a communications officer or an air traffic controller job... so you make sure your vessel is aware of other vessels, and you communicate to prevent stupid accidents and share data about weather conditions.

Are there other things Captain Rostron would have done routinely to make sure the Carpathia didn't join the victims list?

Too, there are no words to describe the crew of the Californian, which spent the night as aptain Stanley Lord slept watching a strange, brightly lit vessel that may have been as few as ten miles away, exhibiting a range of odd behaviors that included launching several white rockets (the color of distress signal rockets).

However, no one checked the wireless properly; when the crew woke Lord and described teh ship's behavior (including the launching of white rockets), he declined to treat it as a ship in distress; the fact that they were in an ice field made the crew doubly cautious.

(As a data point, ships tend to keep a scratch log, a record of any unusual incidents during the night. The Californian's scratch log for that night- which would have assuredly included the launching of the white rockets, and the night's other oddities- was missing when they made port.)

The fact that none of the Titanic's officers never achieved their own command (usually a surety after the prestige of serving on such a vessel) is scarcely surprising; the fact that the Californian's captain and crew weren't brought up on charges of criminal negligence is rather more surprising.

I confess that I previously thought little about the crew; this program brought me to tears.

The conduct of the inquiries has been criticised.

Let's not forget people such as Jack Phillips, who manned the Titanic's wireless room until the place flooded and the power failed.

Captain Rostron, with his RNR commission, went to war in 1914, commanding various ships, mostly serving as troopships and hospital ships.

Unfortunately, what I've read of him supports a view of him as being a man who would push limits when he thought he could get away with it. Majestic had the Blue Ribband, a recognition for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic, at least once, and it was in pursuit of this honor which was the motivation behind his actions on Titanic.

Titanic was not his only encounter with an iceberg; he had to haul Majestic almost broadside to avoid a collision with one in 1902. I do wonder if he was speeding that day, too.

This is not exactly on-topic, but a few weeks ago I was at a local cafe. There was an elderly guy there reading "Goodbye To All That", a book that's been on my list. We talked about the Great War years, and I mentioned the influenza epidemic, having just read Katherine Anne Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider". He said his father had died in the epidemic. I remembered that my grandmother's older sister Daisy, a young woman of 22, had died as well. It struck me how close to a century it's been since that disaster, and how big it was. Two random strangers, one an elderly man and one a going-on-but-not-quite elderly woman, and we had memories. My memory is of my grandmother's grief, not my own, but I know Daisy's name, and that she was loved.

It is not, imo, as good as Downton, though it's not terrible. Will tape the final bit tonight (watching The Good Wife).

Lightoller, one of the surviving officers of the Titanic, assisted with the Dunkirk evacuation years later. Apparently the evacuees weren't sure whether they should be worried or reassured by his presence.

My uncle's older brother died in infancy during the 1918 'flu; this would have been twenty years or so before uncle Murray was born. I don't know if it was the 'flu itself that killed uncle Allan, or whether it was because his parents were both too sick to get up and go to his crib.

she was 21 years of age. Miss Newmaster was taking nurse's training at St. Mary's hospital in Kansas City and contracted the influenza while caring for her patients. She had recovered from the disease but suffered a relapse on Friday bronchial pneumonia developing rapidly and causing her death Friday night.

She wasn't the only one who died in that epidemic, but that's possibly the most poignant example I've seen in my family.

He was college educated. His son had to drop out of high school to support the family when he died of the flu.

Jaime Brockett: Legend of the USS Titanic

I wonder if they still sing it.

¹Extra verse the first: Orca. Little barge boat that they used for bringing in supplies. One fine day they loaded her up with a food run including tons of those little individual milk cartons. They started getting up to speed—and one guy decided to go to the front to get the boat to plane out. The camp director got a walkie-talkie call for help from his son, the boat driver, and came to find them standing waist-deep in the lake, lifejackets on, with the boat floating just below the surface and little milk cartons everywhere. Friendly boaters were dropping the waterlogged cartons on the pier for the next week.

Extra verse the second: Minnow. (My verse.) They'd gone cliff jumping at the head of the lake and it was time to bring everybody back. They'd been having troubles with the starter cord ripping free, so all the scouts—in lifejackets—were at the front of the boat. For once, the silly thing started on the first pull and all the weight at the front of the boat pushed the nose under. "To the back! To the back!" That didn't work. The last line of the verse I wrote was "Since the Scouts wore PFDs, they were thrown into the seas."

There were a lot of crazy things that went on at summer camp.

> Any cheery camp songs about 9/11 had better wait, methinks.

Back when 9/11 happened I was working for an American company, and people in our New York office got to watch collapsing buildings out of their office windows - so it was all pretty immediate.

Some idiot started cracking jokes on the internal company mail about how everybody should go and see Fight Club that night (referring to the scenes of collapsing buildings at the end of the movie). Never seen anyone dogpiled so hard - or so deservedly.

Timing is everything - no one really minds Genghis Khan having build pyramids of severed heads these days (though one wonders how he squared up the sides).

As I mentioned some time ago, a pandemic with a 15-40% infection rate and a 2.5-5% death rate is still sufficient to overwhelm the hospitals, exhaust the supply of coffins, and to make it necessary to dig mass graves with steam shovels.

Larkspur: "Goodbye To All That" is excellent, read it soon. I also liked all the Roman historical novels, "I, Claudius" et seq.

It's true now. Somewhere out there, at this very moment, every year of the past half-century is still happening. It was even more true before the internet came along.

=====

Jim, Lila, I've maintained a stash of epidemic supplies ever since Jim pointed out that a sufficiently high infection rate means the sick don't get taken proper care of. I'd be happier if it included some antibiotics, but if I could get that everyone could, and that would turn out badly.

In my case, it takes me to 1916: the Easter Rising and the Great War.

The dates and figures are debated, but the personal tragedy remains.

Also, apparently, the year that a patent was filed for the synthesis of MDMA.

The Ottoman Sultan was overthrown. Arguably the beginning of what came to be known as the "Middle East". People still throw around the term "Young Turks", and contrary to Adolf Hitler's assertion, people also still remember the Turkish genocides in Armenia.

The independence of Panama was recognized by Colombia, and the last U.S. troops were removed from Cuba, which a 1910 school history book in my possession refers to as "The Child of Our Adoption".

A lot of effort was expended to write "FRIST!" on both the North and South Poles, but there was a lot more actual science done by Andrija Mohorovičić in studying the results of an earthquake in the southern regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

People feared a major war, on the level of the Napoleonic era, but they mainly expected either French revanchism against Germany or a showdown between the U.S. and Great Britain, not the Greta War which actually happened five years later.

And Captain Rostron had no idea what lay three years in his own future . . . .

...or not.

Garbo vs Scacchi?

1906: the year of the San Francisco earthquake. White Fang was serialized in The Outing Magazine. Dreyfus was exonerated. The first radio broadcast took place in December. The TB vaccine was developed.

Robert E. Howard, John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., Hans Asperger, Madeleine Carroll, Bugsy Siegel, Lou Costello, Adolf Eichmann, Samuel Beckett, Mary Astor, Roberto Rossellini, T. H. White, Josephine Baker, Billy Wilder, Estee Lauder, Satchel Paige, Horst, Phil Farnsworth, Ed Gein, Gertrude Ederle, Hermione Baddeley, Louise Brooks, Otto Preminger, Leonid Brezhnev, and Oscar Levant were born (among others)

Cezanne, Modigliani, Derain, Matisse, Picasso, and Monet (among others) were changing the world of art. Frank LLoyd Wright was already making buildings and Philip Johnson was born. Mahler, Ives, Rachmaninoff, and Schoenberg were composing. Alois Alzheimer spoke about pre-senile dementia for the first time. The term allergy was coined, and Frederick Hopkins suggests the existence of vitamins.

The LIRR station that serves my neighborhood was opened in 1906 and the area was given its current name.

(all non-family stuff from Wikipedia)

The Anglo-Zulu War raged during the first half of the year (about which I know nothing). Einstein was born. The first Woolworth's dimestore was opened in Utica NY. Edison demonstrated his carbon-thread electric light bulb to the public. An Afghan state was established by Russia-UK treaty. The Pirates of Penzance was first performed.

For me, the year would be 1934, the very depth of the Great Depression.

Per Wikipedia, that was the year of the Dust Bowl, the year the Dionne Quintuplets were born. In the US, President FDR established the Securities and Exchange Commission. In Germany, Adolf Hitler became Fuehrer (head of state and Chancellor).

In that year, Marie Curie died and Yuri Gagarin was born.

The Mexican Revolution began.

Django Reinhardt and Akira Kurosawa were born.

Mark Twain and Florence Nightingale died.

An epidemic of pneumonic plague killed 40,000 people in China.

The earth passed through the tail of Halley's Comet.

Notorious murderer Dr. Hawley Crippen was arrested, tried, convicted and executed (after a wireless telegraph message tipped off officers of the ship on which he was crossing the Atlantic).

Einstein publishes 4 papers, develops his theory of special relativity and explains the photoelectric effect. A boiler explodes at the Grover Shoe Factory in Brockton, MA, causing a fire, collapse of the building, and 58 deaths. The Cullinan Diamond is found. Las Vegas, NV, is founded. The Wright Flyer III is the first plane to stay in the air longer than half an hour (39 minutes, to be exact). Sinn Féin is founded in Dublin. The Brooklyn Library bans Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer for setting a "bad example".

Notable births included Sterling Holloway, Tex Ritter, Thelma Ritter, Christian Dior, Harold Arlen, Maria Von Trapp, Richard Haydn, Joan Crawford, Jean-Paul Sartre, Joseph Cotten, Henry Fonda, Dag Hammarskjold, and Jule Styne, among numerous others.

Not a bad year.

According to Wikipedia:
"By January 1 of this year, every state in the entire world had adopted the Gregorian calendar, having abandoned the Julian calendar."

Canadian women were ruled to be persons. (Mighty generous.)

Stalin expelled Trotsky.

It was the first British election in which women under 30 could vote.

"Also in this year Hallelujah! became the first Hollywood film to contain an entirely black cast, and Atlantic, a German film about the Titanic, was the first sound-on-film movie, signaling the beginning of the end for silent films."

(Wikipedia does have its uses, and this is one of the places where it really shines.)

He lived well into my childhood, but never talked about his past, or at least not to me. His brother died before I was born, of the wonderfully named "pernicious anemia".

Goodness, but history seems closer from this perspective.

The Sikorsky R-4 helicopter makes its first flight, Mexico declares war against Germany, Anne Frank begins keeping a diary (and goes into hiding shortly thereafter), the first A-4 rocket is launched, Casablanca premiers in New York City, Aaron Copeland writes Rodeo and Fanfare for the Common Man, and DDT is first used as a pesticide. Notable births include Stephen Hawking, Terry Jones, and current US VP Joe Biden. Notable deaths include Lucy Maud Montgomery, John Barrymore, and George M. Cohan.

My paternal grandfather had been in the US Army since 1939, and by 1942 we're hitting the point in his military career generated family stories. He was in the Signal Corps, and I believe 1942 would have been when he was stationed in the Aleutians. It was so cold, he swore if he made it home, he'd never complain about cold toilet seats again. And according to Grandma, he kept that promise through all the years they were married. There are other stories from the war, too, many of them written down in the diaries he wasn't supposed to be keeping.

That spring, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory burned (less than a week after the first International Women's day), and Pancho Villa was fighting for the Mexican Revolution. Five years later the US would turn against him, and my grandfather, an underage Polish Jewish immigrant cavalryman, would be sent under General Pershing's command to pursue him. TIL that Black Jack Pershing's nickname was originally less PC, because of his earlier command of the segregated 10th Cavalry.

That summer, Machu Picchu was rediscovered, and the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre by an Italian patriot (and recovered 2 years later). That fall, the last imperial Chinese dynasty was overthrown. In December, Roald Amundsen's expedition reached the South Pole, and Marie Curie was awarded her second Nobel Prize, in Chemistry (she had shared the Physics Nobel with her husband and Henri Becquerel 8 years earlier).

Ronald Reagan, L. Ron Hubbard, Josef Mengele, Jack Ruby, Tennessee Williams, Robert Johnson, Phil Silvers, Vincent Price, James H. Schmitz, and Roy Rogers were all born in 1911 (sorted by month of birth, not by color of hat, I swear). Gustav Mahler, W.S. Gilbert, Carrie Nation, Edward Whymper, and Joseph Pulitzer died.

Mount Rushmore is finished. Bugs Bunny makes his second ever (and first named) appearance. Citizen Kane and the Maltese Falcon are released. And of course, Pearl Harbour is attacked, which drastically changes the war.

Births: Hayao Miyazaki, Martha Stewart, Neil Diamond, Buffy Sainte Marie, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel both, Joseph Shabalala, Dr. Demento ... and in a massive counterbalance, Dick Cheney.

Heisenberg formulates his uncertainty principle
the FRC (later FCC) begins to regulate radio frequencies
the first armored car robbery
Metropolis premieres in Germany
Bureau of Prohibition founded
the Great Mississippi River Flood strikes 700,000 people, the largest natural disaster in US history up to that point (and I had direct great-granparents on both sides involved, and some ancestors lost in same)
Charles Lindbergh makes a famous airplane flight
FDIA established (the Food, Drug and, Insecticide Administration) - no wonder they changed the name
the Communist Chinese People's Liberation Army is formed
sculpting begins at Mt. Rushmore
first Japanese commuter metro line opens

The first radio in the White House, and the Teapot Dome Scandal, and also the first midair collision. The State of Massachusetts opened all public offices to women. A 20-ton meteorite landed in Virginia. And other things I'm too sleepy to focus on also happened.

Since the statute of limitations on silly earworms is about three days, I have to throw this out there or lose (what remains of) my sanity. Is there anyone else who, upon reading the title of the original post, is earwormed not by the perky camp song, but rather by the filk version commemorating the sprinkler incident?

It was wet, (it was wet), it was wet, (so wet!), it was wet when that sprinkler came down....

It is the worst sort of earworm because I don't know all the words and can't sing it out of my head....

A friend of mine's father down the road to Wells is still hanging on to life at 95; if he played the game we would be in 1822, which includes more Titanic-resonant stuff: the February sinking of the junk Tek Sing with the loss of 1,600 people and the rescue of 190 survivors by a British ship. Babbage publishes a proposal for a difference engine, coffee is no longer banned in Sweden, Galileo's Dialogue is removed from the Catholic Index, and Brazil becomes independent of Portugal.

At first, I read "Rodeo and Fanfare for the Common Man" as a single title. Life's so much more interesting when one gets confused about where the italics go.

Narmitaj @88: The last person alive known to have served in uniform in the Great War, Florence Green, died this year, two weeks short of her 111th birthday. My early-morning math makes her number 1792. The last Holy Roman Emperor takes office. A tsunami in Japan kills fourteen thousand people. The U.S. Postal Service is established. France tests out this new thing called the guillotine. Also in France, the first purpose-built ambulance wagons are created by the chief surgeon of the Grand Armee. And Mary Wollestonecraft's A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN is published.

To quote Wikipedia: "This year also marks the start of the Second World War, the deadliest human conflict in history."

And "In Britain, 1,000 people a week die from an influenza epidemic."

Just think, in some far-off time--that isn't actually very long from now, really--people will play the subtract-your-age-from-your-year-of-birth game, and someone will say, "I got 2012. Look at all this weird stuff that happened back then that I've never even heard of."

Notables born this year: Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Irving G. Thalberg, E. B. White, Ernest Hemmingway, Alfred Hitchcock, and Humphrey Bogart.

My grandparents had just gotten married. Two years later, my grandfather survived the kamikaze attack on his ship, the USS Lexington.

Memory goes back a long way. When I was in my teens (mid-1990's), I spent a lot of time listening to an older neighbor's stories. He, as a pre-teen, had spent a lot of time with his grandmother, and had her diary; she had grown up in central Tennessee, near the main road from Nashville to Chattanooga, and her diary recorded the armies marching up and down the road.

It was sad (so sad!), it was sad (so sad!), it was sad when that colony came down (on Peoria)...

Like you, I don't know all the words, because I've only heard it once or twice.

UK National Trust founded, volleyball invented, Diesel engine patented, Oscar Wilde arrested and jailed, first professional American football game, first US patent for an automobile, Roentgen discovers X-rays, Lumiere brothers show their first moving picture.

Born: J. Edgar Hoover, Shemp Howard, Babe Ruth, Rudolph Valentino, Hattie McDaniel, Jack Dempsey, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Graves, Gracie Allen

Died: Frederick Douglass, Berthe Morisot, Friedrich Engels, Louis Pasteur, T.H. Huxley and Alexandre Dumas (fils)

In 1902 my gran - my Mum's Mum, the only grandparent I ever knew - was perhaps 9 or 10 years old. The man she wasn't even to meet, never mind marry, for more than ten years, was in his late 20s, working on the railways in Glasgow, having recently returned to Scotland from India and South Africa, just in time to miss the Boer War.

My other grandfather was 17 I think and working in a shipyard on Tyneside, and his later wife a young girl living round the corner, not even at school yet.

A lot of women on Clydeside and Tyneside married older men in the years after the Great War, for the obvious reason that so many men of their own generation had been killed.

When I was a child in the 1960s "The War" was the Second World War, and alive in the memories of everyone around me. We talked about it, young boys played Germans vs. British in the streets, older boys made plastic Airfix models of bombers and fighters, we saw it on TV and in the cinema. But the Great War, the First World War, was distant history, along with the Victorians and Napoleon and pretty much everything between the Middle Ages and my own parent's childhood. It was all "The Old Days" when no-one had proper clothes or houses and children worked down mines and they had horses and carts instead of cars and buses.

Now, with the perspective of a longer view, the Second War has receded but the Great War has got closer. I tend to think of the Victorian and Edwardian era, well the end of it anyway, the last quarter of the 19th century and the begining of the 20th, as part of the late modern period, when Britain was in many ways already a developed, industrialised, even affluent country. Part of the world I live in.

And we get into "Where's my jet pack?" territory. Now the 20th century is over I can see that there was less technologically-driven social change in the second half of it, during my own lifetime, than there was in the first half of the 20th or in the 19th.

I'm in my 50s but in I live in the pretty much the same sort of world culturally and politically as I lived in in my 20s, and not a very different one to the one I was born in. That was not true of my grandparents, nor was it true of their parents and grandparents.
Things have slowed down.

My pages are way, WAY out of date, but feel free to look here for the lyrics.

Hm. I suspect that's a different sprinkler incident than the one that comes to my mind (involving a different acronym and an overestimation of the weight-bearing capability of a hotel room fire sprinkler head.)

1792

Remindes me of the time I realized that the Bacon Game can be played through time as well as in space, and that I'm (I forget how) only three handshakes away from Abraham Lincoln.

Odd, that's not how I feel at all, and we are roughly contemporaries. Perhaps being (1) American and (2) female makes a difference.

Bravo, sir! That's the one! (I have no idea when or where I picked it up; I am confident that alcohol must have been involved.)

That's exactly the one. I heard the LARP (Live Action Role-Playing) remark from a gamer friend after the convention.

And ooh, I love your realization of the Bacon Game being playable through time as well as space. That's going to make my mind go wubba-wubba for a while, in a good way.

Also, HI, FILKERDAVE! Haven't seen you for months!
*runs over and offers a hug*

I'd expected that this community would include someone who could confirm or deny the incident happened. I didn't expect someone that close to the source. :-)

Doubling my father's lifespan takes the date to 1828.

I'll let you use Google and Wikipedia. You don't have to suffer my typing.

Tell kids that today, and they won't believe you.

I'm comparing the 1980s with the 2010s

Now imagine the same comparison between the 1880s and 1910s Technology was changing faster then, or rather it was causing faster social change. And the map of the world was certainly changing faster (though who knows what wel will see if spared till 2018?)

In your context maybe. (I'm assuming male, majority ethnicity/culture, middle-class or better in USA or UK)

If you are American and female or non-white or gay, you've seen plenty of social change between 1980 and 2010, comparable or greater to any 3-decade period you can pick in the last 150 years, mostly driven by communication technology. That's not to say that these changes are always for the better, or that change is evenly distributed (compare urban vs rural attitudes toward gays or minorities), but it is happening, even if not everyone is fully aware of it.

If you are Chinese, Indian, Korean, Taiwanese, Eastern European or pretty much a citizen of any country that wasn't first-world in 1980, you've seen massive social changes since then, even if you are male and part of the governing elites in those cultures. You could say that these cultures are merely just catching up to the supposedly technologically driven social changes the first world experienced earlier in the 20th century, and that may be part of it, but it shouldn't be trivialized just because the first-world got there first.

And how are we measuring change anyway? Are we going to argue that electrification and indoor plumbing and automobiles generated more social change than computers and cell phones and the internet? Both sets of technologies are very significant, but measuring their relative impact on a given society seems to me like comparing apples and oranges. If we are talking absolute numbers of people worldwide, I can argue the later set of technologies have had more impact, by virtue of affecting more people. Pick some other metric, and you can argue the former. And so on.

I think the frustration, if you believe in social progress, is that perhaps all this social change has not resulted in as much progressive political change as there should be. The governing elites in most countries, the composition of which have not changed much in the last 30 years (i.e. overwhelmingly male, majority culture, wealthy), have been and are being reactionary to all the social changes that have been happening despite their efforts to the contrary.

It's interesting that Aunt Eve would have had to go back so far before her birth to where the basis of her work would be unknown; I was born just a handful of years after the computer that would be my professional focus was invented; my son, who is (among other things) a web designer was born 20 years before the invention of the World Wide Web. Some things are indeed developing faster.

The other side of that - disappearing jobs - is interesting too: when my father was born, my grandparents could reasonably have expected their son to get a job in the Colonial Office. By the time he entered the workforce, the Colonial Office - along with basically all the colonies - was gone.

Formation of the Soviet Union.
Wimbeldon gets some concrete Courts.
Lincoln Memorial is dedicated
Tutankhamen's tomb found
Home Brewing exception to Probibition
Mussolini takes power in Italy
BBC Created
Ghandi imprisoned in India
Lower Lousiana floods, affects 50,000 people
Egypt declares independence
Reader's Digest founded
Waterskiing is invented
Irish Free State is Founded

Insulin successfully used in Canada

The USS Langly is commissioned,and the US has an aircraft carrier
Canada decides to drive on the right side of the road
US puts its first living person on a coin (Thomas E Kirby)
Buck Weaver fails to be reinstated to major leage baseball (a member of the Black Sox): US Supreme Court, independently, rules MLB not a business,and so exempt from Antitrust legislation.
USGS predicts the US Oil Supply will be tapped out in 20 years
Eskimo Pie is patented
NFL Created
Pius XI elected
Lots of radio stations in the US start broadcasting: some, e.g. KFI in Los Angeles, are still doing so.
There is snow on Mauna Loa
First public celebration of a Bat Mitzvah; the daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan
Microfilm invented.
President Harding dedicates the F.Scott Key Memorial, on the radio.
First Newberry Medal Awarded
France gives Canada 1 square KM of Vimy Ridge, "freely, and for all time, to the Gov't of Canada, the free use of the land exempt from all taxes" (and I teared up reading it). There is an amazing memorial there today; one of two National Historic sites of Canada outside the territorial Boundaries)
First General Election in the Netherlands.

[A comma without a trailing space. -- JDM]

The Cat in the Hat and On the Road are published. West Side Story opens.

The Dodgers move from Brooklyn to LA. Katie Couric, Vanna White, and Osama bin Laden are born. Laura Ingalls Wilder dies.

Really not that long ago - most of these are things I learned about as cultural references, rather than the events of history classes.

That in itself says something about how close and how far away history is, I reckon.

There is another version involving a lettuce.

Playing that takes me to 1901 (if I were to wait till my birthday it would take me to 1900). Let's see: Queen Victoria shuffled off into eternity and Edward VII became King-Emperor. TR became president. One great-uncle was off to dig the Panama Canal. One great-grandfather was readjusting from having been the Great White Overlord in the Philippines and looking round for a wife.

The Platt Amendment turned Cuba into an American protectorate.

TR caused a scandal by inviting Booker T. Washington to eat at the White House. How dare he!

The first Nobel Prize ceremony was held.

If I do it for my father (82 years before his death, giving him the full week to fill out the year), that takes him to 1827.

George IV on the throne. Canning becomes prime minister. Dies and is succeeded by Lord Goderich. John Quincy Adams is president.

Battle of Navarino guarantees Greek independence.

The fountain pen is invented.

The lucifer is patented.

The first transAtlantic steam passage -- from the Netherlands to Surinam.

An interesting year.