Today in History: June 3

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Valerie Solanas spent the morning and afternoon of June 3, 1968, in a search for a chance to commit a violent act that would, in her words that day, “make her famous.” By afternoon, she had committed the act: she shot Andy Warhol, gravely wounding him.

She was probably looking for an act of violence that would match the violence roiling her inner world.
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A Grand Purpose

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In Act 2, Scene 2, of Hamlet, the doomed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are chatting with Prince Hamlet. They are his old college buddies, and King Claudius (Hamlet’s step-father) and Queen Gertrude (his mother) have sent for them to attempt to learn what is bothering the young man, who has been acting with an “antic disposition” and saying strange things, half to himself and half to, well, no one can figure out who.

Hamlet greets them and speaks in the same riddling manner that he has been using with the rest:

HAMLET: Let me question more in particular, my good friends, what you have done to deserve such fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?
GUILDENSTERN: Prison, my lord?
HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ: Then the world is one.
HAMLET: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
ROSENCRANTZ: We don’t think so, my lord.
HAMLET: Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. [Emphasis mine.]

Hamlet quickly determines that they are not merely dropping in to talk about sports and the weather or to compare Klout scores but are indeed spies. Ultimately, he manages to have them both killed.
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Today in History: June 2

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Babe Ruth of the Boston Braves announced his retirement from baseball on this date in 1935.

By the end of the 1934 season everyone, Ruth included, knew that he was just about finished as a ballplayer, but he had ambitions to be a manager. Teams regularly mentioned him as a possible future coaching or managerial candidate, but they seemed to do so more to make their future prospects sound interesting rather than spend what it might take to hire him or the time to educate him about team operations.
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