politician from Abingdon, Virginia. He served in the Virginia State
Senate, and represented Virginia for 13 years in the U.S. Senate after
the American Civil War. He had been ineligible to serve in Congress
because of the Fourteenth Amendment, which forbade anyone from holding
public office who had sworn allegiance to the United States and then
sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. However, his
restrictions were removed at the suggestion of the Freedmen's Bureau
when he aided a dying former slave after the War. He was the first
person who had sided with the Confederacy to serve in the U.S. Senate.
Issues in his senatorial career included the Arlington Memorial debate,
as he found the initial proposal to relocate the dead distasteful, yet
wanted to defend the memory of Robert E. Lee. He was also an outspoken
Funder during Virginia's heated debate as to how much of its pre-War
debt the state ought to have been obliged to pay back. The controversy
culminated in the formation of the Readjuster Party and the appointment
of William Mahone as its leader, ending Johnston's Senate career.
Read more: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_W._Johnston>
_______________________________
Today's selected anniversaries:
1398:
The Grand Duke of Lithuania Vytautas the Great and the Grand
Master of the Teutonic Knights Konrad von Jungingen signed the Treaty of
Salynas, the third attempt after the 1384 Treaty of Königsberg and the
1390 Treaty of Lyck to cede Samogitia to the Knights.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Salynas>
1492:
Believing he had reached the East Indies, Christopher Columbus
made landfall on an island in the Caribbean, sparking a series of events
that led to the European colonization of the Americas.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus>
1871:
The Criminal Tribes Act entered into force in British India,
giving law enforcement sweeping powers to arrest, control, and monitor
the movements of the members of 160 specific ethnic or social
communities that were defined as "habitually criminal".
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Tribes_Act>
1928:
An "iron lung" medical ventilator (example from the 1950s
pictured), designed by Philip Drinker and colleagues at Children's
Hospital, Boston, was used for the first time to treat poliomyelitis.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_pressure_ventilator>
1988:
Sri Lankan Civil War: Indian troops mounted a failed assault on
Jaffna University, which served as the Tamil Tigers' military
headquarters.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffna_University_Helidrop>
_____________________________
Wiktionary's word of the day:
jawan:
(India) An (Indian) infantryman; a soldier.
<https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jawan>
___________________________
Wikiquote quote of the day:
The motive, principle, and end of the religious life is to make
an absolute gift of self to God in a self-forgetting love, to end one's
own life in order to make room for God's life.
--Edith Stein
<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edith_Stein>
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