Good morning.

It’s an election day of occasional rain – or snow – for Whitewater, with no accumulation expected, and a high of forty-two by the afternoon. We’ll have 10h, 4m of sunlight, and 11h, 4m of daylight. Tomorrow will be 2m shorter.

On this day in 1860, the United Staes elected Abraham Lincoln her 16th president. The New York Times reported the news to its readers:

The canvass for the Presidency of the United States terminated last evening, in all the States of the Union, under the revised regulation of Congress, passed in 1845, and the result, by the vote of New-York, is placed beyond question at once. It elects ABRAHAM LINCOLN of Illinois, President, and HANNIBAL HAMLIN of Maine, Vice-President of the United States, for four years, from the 4th March next, directly by the People.

The election, so far as the City and State of New-York are concerned, will probably stand, hereafter as one of the most remarkable in the political contests of the country; marked, as it is, by far the heaviest popular vote ever cast in the City, and by the sweeping, and almost uniform, Republican majorities in the country.

Google’s daily puzzle asks about film and pop culture: “What was the relationship of the winner of the 2009 Oscar for Best Director to the nominee for “Avatar” in the same category?”

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be a mostly sunny day, with a high of forty-five.

Whitewater’s Parks & Rec Board meets this afternoon at 5 PM.

On this day in 1862, Pres. Lincoln removes a hesitant general:

….a tortured relationship ends when President Abraham Lincoln removes General George B. McClellan from command of the Army of the Potomac. McClellan ably built the army in the early stages of the war but was a sluggish and paranoid field commander who seemed unable to muster the courage to aggressively engage Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

After Lee defeated Pope at the Second Battle of Bull Run in late August, 1862 he invaded Maryland. With the Confederates crashing into Union territory, Lincoln had no choice but to turn to McClellan to gather the reeling Yankee forces and stop Lee. On September 17, 1962, McClellan and Lee battled to a standstill along Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, Maryland. Lee retreated back to Virginia and McClellan ignored Lincoln’s urging to pursue him. For six weeks, Lincoln and McClellan exchanged angry messages, but McClellan stubbornly refused to march after Lee. In late October, McClellan finally began moving across the Potomac in feeble pursuit of Lee, but he took nine days to complete the crossing. Lincoln had seen enough. Convinced that McClellan could never defeat Lee, Lincoln notified the general on November 5 of his removal. A few days later, Lincoln named General Ambrose Burnside to be the commander of the Army of the Potomac.

After his removal, McClellan battled with Lincoln once more–for the presidency in 1864. McClellan won the Democratic nomination but was easily defeated by his old boss.

Paranoid seems harsh as a description of McClellan, but frequently and unjustifiably nervous does the trick.

In Wisconsin on this day in 1912, a suffrage amendment fails:

1912 – Women’s Suffrage Referendum
On this date Wisconsin voters (all male) considered a proposal to allow women to vote. When the referendum was over, Wisconsin men voted women’s suffrage down by a margin of 63 to 37 percent. The referendum’s defeat could be traced to multiple causes, but the two most widely cited reasons were schisms within the women’s movement itself and a perceived link between suffragists and temperance that antagonized many German American voters. Although women were granted the vote in 1920 by the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Wisconsin’s own constitution continued to define voters as male until 1934. [Source: Turning Points in Wisconsin History]

Google’s daily puzzle asks about American rivers: “What is the location of the confluence of the two rivers that create the largest tributary to the Mississippi River?”

Good morning.

Sunday in Whitewater brings sunny skies and a high of forty-five.

On this day in 1922, the entrance to King Tut’s tomb was discovered:

British archaeologist Howard Carter and his workmen discover a step leading to the tomb of King Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.

When Carter first arrived in Egypt in 1891, most of the ancient Egyptian tombs had been discovered, though the little-known King Tutankhamen, who had died when he was 18, was still unaccounted for. After World War I, Carter began an intensive search for “King Tut’s Tomb,” finally finding steps to the burial room hidden in the debris near the entrance of the nearby tomb of King Ramses VI in the Valley of the Kings. On November 26, 1922, Carter and fellow archaeologist Lord Carnarvon entered the interior chambers of the tomb, finding them miraculously intact.

Thus began a monumental excavation process in which Carter carefully explored the four-room tomb over several years, uncovering an incredible collection of several thousand objects. The most splendid architectural find was a stone sarcophagus containing three coffins nested within each other. Inside the final coffin, which was made out of solid gold, was the mummy of the boy-king Tutankhamen, preserved for more than 3,000 years. Most of these treasures are now housed in the Cairo Museum.

From Wisconsin, over a century ago today, a business first:

1909 – Nation’s First Commercially Built Airplane
On this date in Beloit, a plane was assembled and built by Wisconsin’s first pilot, Arthur P. Warner. This self-taught pilot was the 11th in the U.S. to fly apowered aircraft and the first in the U.S. to buy an aircraft for business use. Warner used it to publicize his automotive products.[Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers]

Google’s daily puzzle is a sports-entertainment mix: “Who is the only NFL player married to a former million-dollar winner of “Survivor”?”

Good morning.

Our Saturday before election day will be mostly cloudy, with a high near 45, and calm north winds.

On this day in 1948, the Chicago Tribune makes a famous mistake:

…the Chicago Tribune jumps the gun and mistakenly declares New York Governor Thomas Dewey the winner of his presidential race with incumbent Harry S. Truman in a front-page headline: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

Many of America’s major newspapers had predicted a Dewey victory early on in the campaign. A New York Times article editorialized that “if Truman is nominated, he will be forced to wage the loneliest campaign in recent history.” Perhaps not surprisingly then, Truman chose not to use the press as a vehicle for getting his message across. Instead, in July 1948, he embarked on an ambitious 22,000-mile “whistle stop” railroad and automobile campaign tour. At every destination, Truman asked crowds to help him keep his job as president. His eventual success in the election of 1948 has been largely attributed to this direct interaction with the public and his appeal to the common voters as the political “underdog.” At the end of one of his campaign speeches, voices in the crowd could be heard yelling “Give ’em Hell, Harry!” It didn’t take long for the phrase to catch on and become Truman’s unofficial campaign slogan.

In a now famous photograph snapped in the early morning hours after the election, a beaming and bemused Truman is shown holding aloft the Chicago Tribune issue that had wrongly predicted his political downfall. Truman defeated Dewey by 114 electoral votes.

In Wisconsin history, on this day in 1804, a treaty with the Fox and Sauk:

1804 – Treaty at St. Louis
On this date Fox and Sauk negotiators in St. Louis traded 50 million acres of land in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois for an annuity of $1,000. The treaty allowed the tribes to remain on the land until it was sold to white settlers. However, Chief Black Hawk and others believed that the 1804 negotiators had no authority to speak for their nation, so the treaty was invalid. U.S. authorities, on the other hand, considered it binding and used it justify the Black Hawk War that occurred in the spring and summer of 1832. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail by William F. Stark, p. 32-33]

Google’s daily puzzle asks about the world’s tallest mountain, measured a certain way: “When measured from its base rather than from sea level, this mountain is the world’s tallest. Where is it located?”

Good morning.

Whitewater’s week ends with mostly sunny skies and a high of forty-five.

On this day in 1947, the Hughes Flying Boat actually flew:

The Hughes Flying Boat—the largest aircraft ever built—is piloted by designer Howard Hughes on its first and only flight. Built with laminated birch and spruce, the massive wooden aircraft had a wingspan longer than a football field and was designed to carry more than 700 men to battle.

Howard Hughes was a successful Hollywood movie producer when he founded the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932. He personally tested cutting-edge aircraft of his own design and in 1937 broke the transcontinental flight-time record. In 1938, he flew around the world in a record three days, 19 hours, and 14 minutes.

Following the U.S. entrance into World War II in 1941, the U.S. government commissioned the Hughes Aircraft Company to build a large flying boat capable of carrying men and materials over long distances. The concept for what would become the “Spruce Goose” was originally conceived by the industrialist Henry Kaiser, but Kaiser dropped out of the project early, leaving Hughes and his small team to make the H-4 a reality. Because of wartime restrictions on steel, Hughes decided to build his aircraft out of wood laminated with plastic and covered with fabric. Although it was constructed mainly of birch, the use of spruce (along with its white-gray color) would later earn the aircraft the nickname Spruce Goose. It had a wingspan of 320 feet and was powered by eight giant propeller engines.

Development of the Spruce Goose cost a phenomenal $23 million and took so long that the war had ended by the time of its completion in 1946. The aircraft had many detractors, and Congress demanded that Hughes prove the plane airworthy. On November 2, 1947, Hughes obliged, taking the H-4 prototype out into Long Beach Harbor, CA for an unannounced flight test. Thousands of onlookers had come to watch the aircraft taxi on the water and were surprised when Hughes lifted his wooden behemoth 70 feet above the water and flew for a mile before landing.

Despite its successful maiden flight, the Spruce Goose never went into production, primarily because critics alleged that its wooden framework was insufficient to support its weight during long flights. Nevertheless, Howard Hughes, who became increasingly eccentric and withdrawn after 1950, refused to neglect what he saw as his greatest achievement in the aviation field. From 1947 until his death in 1976, he kept the Spruce Goose prototype ready for flight in an enormous, climate-controlled hangar at a cost of $1 million per year. Today, the Spruce Goose is housed at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.

Google’s daily puzzle offers a sports question: “What was the birthplace of the 1972 Olympian credited with popularizing the running craze in the U.S.? (City)”

Good morning.

November comes to Whitewater with partly sunny skies and a high of forty-seven.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets tonight at 6 PM.

On this day in 1952, America exploded the first hydrogen bomb, at Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands:

On this day in 1902, a disappointment for the Badgers, after a long string of successes:

1902 – UW Winning Streak Snapped
On this date the University of Wisconsin football team had a 17-game winning streak snapped by the University of Michigan’s infamous “Point-A-Minute Machine” who defeated the Badgers 6-0. The game drew over 20,000 fans to Marshall Field in Chicago. [Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

Google’s daily puzzle asks about geography: “If you take Bus #919 from Deshengmen, travel to Donggou Village, Badaling Town, Yanqing County and purchase a ticket, to what would you gain entry?”