It happened – December 29
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It happened
NTB
29 December 2022 at 02.00
1785: Johan Herman Wessel died in Copenhagen, aged 43. Wessel was born in Akershus and can rightly be called Vestby’s great poet. After artium at Christiania Cathedral School, he traveled to Copenhagen as a 19-year-old to study. The studies were never completed, and Wessel instead made a living as a writer and private tutor. In 1772 he was among the founders of the patriotic literary and social club Norske Selskab. In the same year, he published “Kierlighed uden Strömper,” a satirical comedy that was to stand as his masterpiece. Wessel also wrote humorous poems. Perhaps the best known is “Smeden og Bageren”, first printed in 1784, where he railed against the judiciary. The expression «to fix bakers for blacksmiths» originates in this poem.
1876: The deadliest railroad accident in the United States in the 19th century occurred when a bridge collapsed under a passenger train crossing the Ashtabula River in Ohio. The locomotive made it over the bridge with a cry of distress, but all 11 carriages plunged into the river below, where they were immediately ignited by the train’s kerosene lamps and stoves. The extent of the accident must have been magnified by the fact that the local fire chief refused to direct the water hoses at the burning wagons, citing that the fire was too big to put out. The consequence was that several of the passengers who had survived the fall burned inside. It is believed that 92 people lost their lives in the accident. The cause of the bridge collapse was structural failure. The Ashtabula River rail accident was the worst on American soil until July 9, 1918, when two passenger trains collided head-on in Nashville. At least 101 people died.
1890: American soldiers committed mass murders of indigenous Lakota people in a military camp at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The day before, 350 men, women and children under the leadership of Chief Big Foot had been captured and escorted to the camp, suspected of planning a rebellion. During the disarmament of the prisoners on December 29, a rifle must have gone off when one of the fighters was wrested from his weapon. In the panic that ensued, the soldiers fired four rapid-fire machine guns into the crowd. Estimates of killed Lakotas vary from 153 to over 300. The massacre at Wounded Knee marked the end of the so-called Indian Wars, and has stood as a symbol of the white abuses against the Native American population.
(© NTB)
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