January 8, 2007

• Literary and Historical Notes (From The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Kellor):

  It's the birthday of Elvis Presley,
  born in Tupelo, Mississippi (1935). He learned to play the guitar when
  he was 12, and his friends said that he could reproduce
  perfectly almost anything he heard on the radio. After high school, he
  got a job as a truck driver for the Crown Electric Company, and he
  began studying to become an electrician. His career as a recording
  artist only came about because of his love for his mother.

  At the time, the Sun Record Company had a special recording studio
  where anyone could come in and pay a small fee to record personal
  records for themselves. In the summer of 1953, Elvis scraped together
  four dollars to record two songs, "My Happiness" and "That's When Your
  Heartaches Begin," as a present for his mother.

  The recording engineer that day liked Elvis's voice, and somehow
  those recordings made their way into the hands of producer Sam
  Phillips, and that was the beginning of Presley's career.

  It's the birthday of physicist Stephen Hawking, (books by this
  author)
  born in Oxford, England (1942). He went to Oxford University, but never
  attended lectures. He was bored with most of his classes, because they
  seemed too easy, and it was only after an oral exam that his professors
  realized how smart he was. He had gone on to get a Ph.D., and he was
  just starting to find his courses interesting when he was diagnosed
  with ALS, a disease that slowly destroys a person's ability to move any
  part of his or her body, while leaving the brain itself unharmed. His
  doctors said he probably had two to three years to live.

  At first Hawking was utterly depressed, and he considered giving up
  on everything. But he decided to focus his studies on the mysterious
  astronomical objects known as black holes, and he developed new
  theories about how they function and what role they may have played in
  the origin
  of the universe.

  In 1988, Hawking decided to sum up all the research on physics and astronomy in a book for nonscientists called A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. It went on to sell almost 10 million copies.

  Today is the anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, which took place on this day in 1815. It was the last major battle of the War of 1812, won with the help of a
  pirate named Jean Laffite.

  The war of 1812 had started for a variety of complicated reasons,
  but mainly because the United States refused to put up with British
  control of the Atlantic Ocean while the British were fighting a war
  with France. When the war started, the United States had only existed
  for a few
  decades. By 1814, after just two years of fighting with the British,
  almost all the buildings in Washington, D.C., had been destroyed, the
  U.S. treasury was virtually empty, and the British Navy had blockaded
  every major seaport on the East Coast.

  At the Battle of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson managed to fend off the
  British attempt to take over the mouth of the Mississippi with a ragtag
  band of volunteers, Indians, and pirates. It was America's greatest
  triumph in the War of 1812, but it turned out that it took place after
  the war was over. The United States and Great Britain had signed a
  treaty, ending the war, on Christmas Eve, a few weeks before the
  battle. The news of the treaty just hadn't reached New Orleans in time.

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