1858: Dr. Joseph Henry Johnson founds the Alabama School for the Deaf in Talladega, enrolling his younger brother as the first student. The school evolved into the state-supported Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind, which annually serves thousands with a variety of programs.
1937: Hugo Black, a native of Clay County, [...]
1867: For the first time in Alabama history, African Americans vote in a statewide election. About 70,000 black men, the majority of voters in the election, called for a constitutional convention and elected an overwhelmingly Republican set of convention delegates, including 18 blacks. That convention produced Alabama’s fourth constitution.
[...]I’m not really “back” I don’t think, but I did want to bring up a 2003 speech made by Ron Paul about the mortgage industry and Fannie and Freddie in particular. I actually knew who Ron Paul was in 2003 and this wasn’t some random, inconsistent rambling that was [...]
1830: Representatives of the Choctaw Indians sign the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, thereby ceding to the United States all their land east of the Mississippi River, including parts of west Alabama. Not all Choctaws moved west, however, and descendants living in Alabama are recognized by the state as the [...]
1867: The oldest newspaper in Alabama owned by a single family, The Southern Star, is first published in Dale County. Except for a few issues, the editor has always been a family member. Joseph H. Adams, the editor as of 2001, is of the fourth generation.
[...]1864: Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest takes more than 1,400 Union soldiers prisoner when he tricks Col. Wallace Campbell into surrendering a fort on Coleman Hill near Athens. Forrest convinced Campbell that his force was three times its actual size and that resisting or waiting on reinforcements was pointless. Most of [...]
1953: More than thirty years after it became law, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the right to vote, is ratified by the Alabama legislature. Although Alabama complied with the provisions of the amendment as soon as it went into effect in 1920, the 1953 legislature [...]
1923: Hank Williams is born in Georgiana, Alabama. After his first appearance on Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry in 1949, the singer-songwriter went on to become a country music legend despite his death in 1953 at age twenty-nine. His grave is located in Montgomery’s Oakwood Cemetery.
[...]1963: Four black girls are killed and 21 others are injured when a bomb explodes at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church, a center for nearby civil rights demonstrations the previous spring. The girls, ranging between the ages of 11 and 14, were preparing for Youth Day activities when the Sunday [...]
1969: Talladega Speedway opens with its first running of the Talladega 500 which is won by Richard Brickhouse. Over 30 top drivers boycotted the first run saying the track was unsafe at high speeds. The facility cost $4 million dollars to build and attracted a crowd of 65,000 to the [...]
1892: Three women pass entrance exams to earn admission to the junior class at Auburn, making the college the first in Alabama and the second in the Southeast to become coeducational. The young ladies, one of whom was the daughter of the Auburn president, were allowed on campus only when [...]
1913: Jesse Owens is born in Oakville, Alabama. Owens was one of the first U.S. athletes who combined talents as a sprinter, low hurdler, and broad jumper. In 1936, he won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics: in the100 meter, 200 meter, broad jump, and as a participant on [...]
1960: NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, which grew out of the Army’s Redstone Arsenal, is dedicated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Among many contributions to the U.S. space program, center director Wernher von Braun and his team developed the Saturn rockets that launched American astronauts to [...]
1925: Centreville reaches the highest ever recorded temperature in Alabama when thermometers hit 112°. The Labor Day weekend was a scorcher with cities and towns across the state recording several days of 100°+ temperatures.
[...]Alabama Radio Reading Service for blind gets entire government-funded budget cut.
[...]1864: The Battle of Mobile Bay begins. U.S. Admiral David Farragut, with a force of fourteen wooden ships, four ironclads, 2,700 men, and 197 guns, assaulted greatly outnumbered Confederate defenses guarding the approach to Mobile Bay. Farragut’s victory removed Mobile as a center of blockade-running and freed Union troops for [...]
The stupidest people I’ve ever even heard of live in the Internet. I hope that they don’t actually exist offline. I hope the world wide web just makes some people stupid. I consider myself a friendly person — can get along with just about anyone. But I just can’t stand [...]
Sorry, but if Barack Obama isn’t the next President of the United States, I’ll wear a dress as I blog John McCain’s inauguration.
Update: This was not intended to be an endorsement. Just a statement of reality and a warning that it’d be good for you to get used to it.
[...]So what do you think? Shameless way to mislead voters into thinking Bobby Bright is a Republican? Or clever way to show that Bobby Bright has cross-party appeal?
The Press-Register just has the strangest articles. This week’s Sunday edition has a piece from Chip Drago where law enforcement officials and judges detail what they say is a change in the criminal underground in recent years.
“Back in the day, criminals tried to stay under the radar,” the [...]
Allow me to answer some speculation.
I recently got a few emails from people I respect who are regularly critical of Alice Martin. They asked if I knew about the Legal Schnauzer blog, and I told them honestly that I caught it once in a while but that it seemed like [...]
1936: Lawrence County native Jesse Owens wins his first gold medal at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany. Owens went on to win four gold medals in Berlin, but German leader Adolf Hitler snubbed the star athlete because he was black. Today visitors can learn more about Owens at the [...]
Is this blog liberal or conservative? Lately more indexes have been putting me in the conservative category, although Matt Murphy did introduce me as a “left-leaning” blogger a couple weeks ago.
What metrics are used to determine whether someone is conservative or liberal? Of course, that’s your only choices. You’re either [...]
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
-Martin Fowler
The whole job of programming is building air castles — it’s one of the most purely mental activities you can do
-Steve McConnell
Complicated programs are far easier to [...]
1819: The first Alabama constitution is adopted, paving the way to statehood in December. Known today as the Constitution of 1819, to distinguish it from five subsequent constitutions, it was considered a model of democracy at the time. It granted, for example, suffrage to all adult white males without regard [...]
My God. I hope this is easy for the sake of humanity.
“There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making [...]
1704: French colonists in Mobile welcome the “Pelican Girls,” twenty-three young women from France who had crossed the Atlantic aboard the Pelican. The ladies had been recruited to move to the young settlement, founded in 1702, in order to marry the male settlers and naturally increase Mobile’s population.
I’ve been skimming over Mr. Shuler’s blog, and I think I’ve finally formed a solid opinion.
Are you guys for frickin’ real? Serious national and local blogs quote this guy as an authority? I mean this with all seriousness. I think Mr. Shuler needs to see a professional. Paranoia Personality [...]
I have no idea why it didn’t post today, so I’m going to fake it.
Dale Jackson just asked Troy King if the rumors about him were true. His reply is, “I don’t discuss rumors.” Pretty much a rather persistent no comment.
[...]I just heard a guest on the Dale Jackson show accidentally refer to Thomas Arthur as “Arthur Orr.” I’ve done that myself a few times over the last few days. I just want to confirm for everyone that my state senator has not been convicted of murder, and I’m [...]
I’m sure he won’t take phone calls, but Troy King will be on the Dale Jackson show this morning at 8:00 AM. Jackson is a Huntsville radio host. You can tune in to 770 AM / 92.5 FM in the area or listen live. The topic of discussion [...]
Well… that’s not quite accurate. If my former roommate Michael Kelley dies, I’ll have a party. But barring that…
Both Matt Murphy and Dale Jackson, local radio personalities of Birmingham and Huntsville, respectively, said they were going to celebrate the execution of Thomas Arthur. I hope they didn’t uncork too [...]
Several national blogs finally caught up to Troy King’s 2005 opinion about the voting rights of certain felons. The actual opinion can be found here. Although I fear the idea of Troy King defining “moral turpitude,” I can’t find too much fault with this legal opinion (which was probably [...]
Tomorrow’s Press-Register cartoon from my favorite illustrator is apparently going to be about Troy King.
Dear Press-Register editorial board: I know I say you guys are nuts a lot (you are), but you know what wouldn’t be nutty? Giving that guy more money.
[...]When Congressman Terry Everett (R) announced his retirement last year, I thought his given reason meant he was ready for retirement.
It had been my intention until last week to seek re-election, including a run for the Chair or Ranking on the Committee on Agriculture. However, there is a season [...]
I used to make great efforts to explain that beer was as old as civilization. It may be even more natural than that.
[Pentail Tree Shrews] have large eyes and developed fingers and toes. Biologists believe that they are evolutionary cousins to the primates. And like us, they spend their [...]
Alabama is currently on it’s 3rd Republican Governor since Reconstruction. It’s looking like Bob Riley might be the first Republican Governor in Alabama to ever complete a second term. (Guy Hunt was elected to a second term but was removed from office). So can people stop acting like it was [...]
New Rule: You’re no longer allowed to say Alabama is a “heavily Republican” state unless you describe your criteria for what makes for a heavily Republican state or at least show an understanding of partisan Alabama politics beyond Presidential preferences.
Some criteria. I should point out that a lot of the [...]
Ballot Access News says that Alabama is likely to be the only state in November without a minor party or independent candidate on the ballot. In the past, I’ve discussed how crazy I thought this was. It’s also crazy (as the post mentions) that Presidential candidates require far less [...]
So Kim Chandler and Charles Dean break the story on Troy King’s hiring and promotion practices. I’ll add it to Troy’s Greatest Hits later. This part was hilarious:
King himself was young and relatively inexperienced in the law when Gov. Bob Riley apÂpointed him as legal adviser shortly into [...]
1981: Dan Roberts, blogger extraordinaire, is born in Birmingham.Roberts wrote a semi-popular political blog called Daily Dixie and was regarded as a narcissistic individual. In 2008, he even put his own birthday on his blog as one of a relatively few “memorable” events in Alabama history.
