Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be mostly sunny, with a high of twenty-two. There will be 9h 26m of sunlight, 10h 29m of daylight, and we;ll have a waxing crescent moon.
Queen Liliuokalani
On this day in 1893, Hawaii’s monarch is overthrown:
The Hawaiian steamer Claudine arrived at this port [San Francisco] at 2 o’clock this morning [one day after the overthrow] with the news of a revolution at Honolulu. The revolutionists have succeeded in overthrowing the Government of Hawaii, and United States troops have been landed.
A provisional government has been established, and a commission, headed by Mr. Thurston, came in on the Claudine en route to Washington with a petition to the American Government to annex the Hawaiian Islands to the United States. The commission will leave here to-morrow afternoon and reach Washington next Friday.
Queen Liliuokalani has been deposed from power, the monarchy abrogated, Government buildings seized, and the new provisional Ministry, composed of four members, is sustained by bayonets of volunteers.
Queen Liliuokalani attempted on Saturday, Jan. 14, to promulgate a new Constitution, depriving foreigners of the right of franchise and abrogating the existing House of Nobles, at the same time giving her the power of appointing a new House. This was resisted by the foreign element of the community, which at once appointed a committee of safety of thirteen members, which called a mass meeting of their classes, at which 1,200 or 1,500 were present. That meeting unanimously adopted resolutions condemning the action of the Queen and authorizing the committee to take into consideration whatever was necessary for the public safety.
The slug of that New York Times headline: ‘Grasping for more power she fell.’ If only present-day monarchs, far worse, went so easily…
On January 17th in 1900, a Wisconsin strike, at a cotton mill:
1900 – Female Cotton Mill Workers Strike
On this date 100 female employees of the Monterey mill, affiliated with the Janesville Cotton Mills, went on strike for higher wages. According to local sources, a committee of four “good-looking young ladies” was appointed to negotiate with management. Doing piece work, the women earned only $40 a month. The company said the women “don’t know how good they’ve got it…because they are paid more than at other local cotton mills and as well as some men with families.” The women argued their monthly pay only averaged $20. Within three days, all the women were hired to work by tobacco warehouses. The Monterey mill was one of three Janesville cotton mills in operation at the turn of the century. [Source: Janesville Gazette]
Google-a-Day has a geography question for us: “A few weeks after the birth of Michelangelo, his family returned to an Italian city that is the capital of the what region?”