Today in History: June 30

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Macmillan Publishers ordered a first printing of 10,000 copies of Gone with the Wind, which was published 80 years ago today. Ten thousand copies was a large number for a 1000-page novel bearing a high cover price ($3 in the Great Depression) and written by a first-time novelist, Margaret Mitchell. Within two months, Macmillan needed to order a second and a third printing, and by the end of the year 100,000 copies were in peoples’ homes.

Gone with the Wind was an instant bestseller, and it was a rarity among bestsellers: one that most of those who purchased it that year actually took the time to read.

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London’s Tower Bridge, one of that city’s iconic structures, was opened by HRH The Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII), and his wife, The Princess of Wales (Alexandra of Denmark). (Pictured above.)
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My Little Town

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

One of the unique things that is somehow common to many people (we are all alike in our uniqueness) is a stated belief that our hometown is no place special. We are taught to be humble, so anyplace that our humble selves hail from must be thought of as not all that special, either.

This often masks a fierce inner secret belief that one’s hometown is in fact the best place to be from and (insert name of a higher power one believes in here), please help those who chose to be born somewhere else, especially those unlucky ones born in the nearest next neighboring town. Those people are the unluckiest of all, perhaps because they were born so near to our town’s obvious greatness but they were not, which renders all the more dramatic their failure at their life’s first and easiest task: pick the right place to be born.
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Today in History: June 29

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 was signed into law by President Dwight D. Eisenhower 60 years ago today. Its other title was the “National Interstate and Defense Highways Act,” and it authorized the construction of a 41,000-mile system of highways. The highways themselves ear signs identifying the roads as a part of the “Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.”

A national network of highways is something that Congress had discussed and even voted into law several times before—in 1916 and in 1944—but authorizing highways does not pay for their construction. The 1956 bill changed all that: it also authorized a means of paying for Eisenhower’s imagined “ribbons across the land.” A federal gas tax of two cents a gallon (now three cents) was imposed to help the federal government fund 90% of the construction costs of the new highways.
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