Good morning.
It’s a snowy midweek for Whitewater, with about two to four inches expected, and temperatures falling in the afternoon from thirty-two to about twenty-three. The Weather Channel is increasingly dramatic about our weather, but there’s nothing surprising about snow, in the winter, in Wisconsin. It’s only the absence of snow that would be surprising.
On this day in 1948, a Hindu extremist murders Mahatma Gandhi:
Mohandas K. Gandhi was killed by as assassin’s bullet today. The assassin was a Hindu who fired three shots from a pistol at a range of three feet.
The 78-year-old Gandhi, who was the one person who held discordant elements together and kept some sort of unity in this turbulent land, was shot down at 5:15 P. M. as he was proceeding through the Biria House gardens to the pergola from which he was to deliver his daily prayer meeting message.
The assassin was immediately seized.
He later identified himself as Nathura Vinayak Godse, 36, a Hindu of the Mahratta tribes in Poona. This has been a center of resistance to Gandhi’s ideology.
Mr. Gandhi died twenty-five minutes later. His death left all India stunned and bewildered as to the direction that this newly independent nation would take without its “Mahatma” (Great Teacher).
Google-a-Day has a history question for today: “At the time of signing, what was the title of the man who is the first of the two names in the name of the 1901 treaty that nullified the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty?”