文章基本信息

标题：American chronicles
作者：Alexander, Gary L
期刊名称：Human Events
印刷版ISSN：0018-7194
出版年度：2000
卷号：Aug 4, 2000
出版社：Eagle Publishing

American chronicles

Alexander, Gary L

175 YEARS AGO, ON AUG. 6,1825, two years after President James Monroe announced his famous doctrine of limiting European presence in the New World, "Upper Peru" became the last major region of South America to be freed from Spanish rule. This new land-locked country in the High Andes was soon enamed Bolivia, after its liberator, Simon Bolivar.

75 YEARS AGO, ON AUG. 8, 1925, the Ku Klux Klan reached the pinnacle of its popularity, in a massive parade of about 40,000 white-robed Klansmen and women down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. At its peak, the HIan had three to four million members, but each parade got smaller, and by 1930 the organization had lost national influence.

50 YEARS AGO, ON AUG. 4, 1950, President Harry S. Truman called up 62,000 U.S. armed forces reservists to serve 21 months of active duty in support of the United Nations police force moving in to defend South Korea. Teree weeks later, on August 25, Truman ordered the government to seize the U.S. railroads, to avert a strike. The already overstretched Army would operate the rails until a settlement was reached, he said. (Korea was not a popular war effort, like we had in the 1940s.)

40 YEARS AGO, ON AUG. 3, 1960, American scientists placed the first phone call in which voices were bounced off the moon. The next day; test pilot Joseph Walker set a world air speed record of 2,196 miles per hour in the X-15 rocket plane. On August 10, the Discoverer 13 was placed in orbit, and the next day the first payload recovered from orbit was picked up, in the Pacific Ocean. Finally, on August 19, Discoverer 14 was launched, and a 300-pound space capsule was snagged in midair by the U.S. Air Force, as it fell from 10,000 to 8,500 feet above earth.

25 YEARS AGO, ON AUG. 1, 1975, the New Orleans Superdome was ded- icated. Costing $162 million, it was billed as the world's largest indoor sports entertainment center. And on August 5, Alger Hiss was ordered reinstated to the Massachusetts bar 25 years after he was convicted of perjury.

10 YEARS AGO, ON AUG. 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi forces invaded and captured Kuwait, launching what became the Gulf War in early 1991. The U.S. stock market fell 10% in August and 21% overall from mid-July to early October. The price of oil doubled from $20 to $40 a barrel.