Daily Bread for 4.19.13

Good morning.

Our week ends with the possibility of rain or snow in the afternoon, with a high of forty-one.

Update: David, kindly commenting below, reminds me that I missed a crucial anniversary in American history. Yes, did I ever! On April 19, 1775, Americans fight the British at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and a great revolution begins:

At about 5 a.m., 700 British troops, on a mission to capture Patriot leaders and seize a Patriot arsenal, march into Lexington to find 77 armed minutemen under Captain John Parker waiting for them on the town’s common green. British Major John Pitcairn ordered the outnumbered Patriots to disperse, and after a moment’s hesitation the Americans began to drift off the green. Suddenly, the “shot heard around the world” was fired from an undetermined gun, and a cloud of musket smoke soon covered the green. When the brief Battle of Lexington ended, eight Americans lay dead or dying and 10 others were wounded. Only one British soldier was injured, but the American Revolution had begun….

When the British troops reached Concord at about 7 a.m., they found themselves encircled by hundreds of armed Patriots. They managed to destroy the military supplies the Americans had collected but were soon advanced against by a gang of minutemen, who inflicted numerous casualties. Lieutenant Colonel Frances Smith, the overall commander of the British force, ordered his men to return to Boston without directly engaging the Americans. As the British retraced their 16-mile journey, their lines were constantly beset by Patriot marksmen firing at them Indian-style from behind trees, rocks, and stone walls. At Lexington, Captain Parker’s militia had its revenge, killing several British soldiers as the Red Coats hastily marched through his town. By the time the British finally reached the safety of Boston, nearly 300 British soldiers had been killed, wounded, or were missing in action. The Patriots suffered fewer than 100 casualties.

On this day in 1995, “a truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring 500. (Timothy McVeigh was later convicted of federal murder charges and executed.)”

On 4.19.1862, while fighting to preserve his country, Wisconsin’s governor dies:

1862 – Governor Harvey Drowns in the Tennessee River
On this date Governor Louis Harvey died while leading an expedition to relieve Wisconsin troops after the battle of Shiloh. The expedition was bringing doctors, nurses, and much-needed medical supplies to soldiers when Harvey, crossing from one steamboat to another, slipped, fell into the swift currents of the Tennessee River, and never re-surfaced. His body was recovered ten days later, nearly sixty miles downstream. When news reached Madison, Lieutenant Governor Edward Salomon was sworn in as Wisconsin’s first German-American governor. [Source: Wisconsin in the Civil War, by Frank L. Klement]

Google-a-Day asks a question about animals in Chicago: “As a testament to its adaptability in urban areas, what kind of animal strolled into a popular sandwich shop in the Chicago Loop area in the spring of 2007?” Follow up: What kind of sandwich did it order? I’d guess pastrami on rye, but that’s just speculation.