Miscellaneous Posts

A Commentary by Bud Meyers

Re-evaluating racism in the United States today.

Though it was wrong then, but because of circumstance and history, did the ancestors of those enslaved native Africans eventually fare far much better in America today?

Even though slavery can be traced back as far as 760 BC (Code of Hammurabi), should the United States of America be held fully accountable for the practice even though Ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece, and the Muslims did this for centuries, long before Columbus even discovered the West Indies? After all, although the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended shortly after the American Revolution, slavery still remained a central economic institution in the Southern States until after our Civil War (est. 618,000 Caucasians died in that war to free African slaves - a tragedy for both whites and blacks alike during this time in American history).

Do the ancestors of slavery in other countries (where it was also practiced) hold the same long-held resentments from 135 years ago and nurture them as they do today in the United States? Do they also still feel the same rage?

I myself am appalled, and saddened that there are those here in America who had Euro-American ancestors that enslaved native African people by inducing their local tribal Chiefs (with cheap trinkets) to sell their own people into slavery to those Euro-American ancestors for forced labor (here, and in the rest of the Americas). What should have happened upon Abraham Lincoln's "Emancipation Proclamation" to those wrongfully enslaved native African people that were then living here? Should they have immediately been sent back to their original and rightful homeland at U.S. government expense?

After 1865, slavery has ended. Now what?

Had they been sent back, would those poor people then have escaped the suffering from having to endure the years of prejudice, racial hatred, police profiling, social injustice, and discrimination in this country? Would they never have had to fight for Civil Rights or Affirmative Action? Would they never have had felt the need to loot, burn, and riot in Watts? Would terms such as "diversity" and "Green" only have applied to people of Hispanic and Asian decent in America today?

If those Euro-American ancestors had immediately sent them home, then today (with their proud African heritage) would they most likely all be happily living amongst their own honorable ancestors while enjoying their God-given freedoms in their original intended and natural homeland in beautiful places such as the Congo, Rwanda, and *Sudan (sarcasm) - Though unfortunately, we never would have had Gangsta' Rap like we so much enjoy today - (more sarcasm). It's a disgrace what those Euro-American ancestors did to those poor enslaved people, and it's a shame that we cannot (because of the cost our social programs today) afford to pay reparations to them, but we can't do that for the native American Indians nor to the Neanderthals either (just a little more sarcasm).

So, did the ancestors of those enslaved native Africans eventually fare far much better in America today?

Where would these highly respected, wealthy, and successful people have been today if there was never slavery in America? And is it ironic that history (no matter how horrible it was then) actually provided a better future for their ancestors today?

Barack Obama - The U.S. President (thought not from the majority of whites) received overwhelming support from "young" whites, a majority of Asians, legal Americans of Hispanic origin, Native Americans, and most African-Americans (even despite their own personal ideologies.) Even Michelle Obama said she was proud of her country!

Just to name a very few who prospered and fared economically well:

Mike Vick - Philadelphia Eagles
Kevin Johnson - Mayor of Sacramento California (and ex-NBA star)
Mark Lloyd - Obama's FCC "Chief Diversity Officer"
Eric Holder - U.S. Attorney General
Henry Louis Gates Jr. - Harvard Professor
Donte' Stallworth - Cleveland Browns
OJ Simpson - Heisman Trophy
Van Jones - Obama "ex-Czar"
Johnnie L Cochran, Jr - Defense Attorney

(And some of my all-time personal favorites)

Michael Jordan - Retired NBA basketball player and active businessman
Colin Powell - Retired four-star general
Jimi Hendrix - Guitarist
Condoleezza Rice - Secretary of State under Bush
Michael Steele - Chairman of the Republican National Committee 2009
Denzel Washington - Actor
Tiger Woods - Pro golfer
Richard Pryor - Comedian

One of my favorite movies (Based on a true story.)

Valerie Jarrett's (Obama's top advisor) maternal great-grandfather Robert Robinson Taylor was once an architect and the vice principal of the Tuskegee Institute. ("Robinson", spelled just like Michelle Obama's maiden name.)

*It is estimated that as many as 200,000 people had been taken into slavery during the Second Sudanese Civil War which began in 1983 - The slaves were mostly Dinka people - and 1.9 million were murdered. As slavery still exists on the continent of Africa, so does extreme poverty, famine, disease, and social injustice.

So, should African-Americans in the United States today still continue resenting the ancestors of those distant European-American enslavers, even though, if only by fate, they fared far much better in America today than they would have elsewhere?

I didn't enslave anyone. Today you are free, now I only ask that you free your mind. So stop blaming me and stop hating me, I did nothing to you.

See my post - Race and the Dust Bowl

http://tobuds.com/blogs/blog5.php/2009/09/13/race-and-the-dust-bowl

Ancestral Ties to Slavery

http://tobuds.com/blogs/blog5.php/2009/09/12/ancestral-ties-to-slavery

The Scourge of Slavery - The Rest of the Story

http://www.christianaction.org.za/articles_ca/2004-4-TheScourgeofSlavery.htm

Was racism born in slavery, or in the early 20th Century?

For almost 70 years the story of white families from the Great Plains making their way to California in the midst of the Great Depression has been kept alive by journalists, filmmakers, college teachers, museum curators, songwriters, novelists, historians, and in the new Millennium...bloggers.

Famous photo "Migrant Mother"

The Dust Bowl saga had something to do with the way race and poverty have interacted over the generations since the 1930s. Here is one of the last great stories depicting white Americans as victims of severe poverty and social prejudice.

In 1935 the economist Paul Taylor realized that something was happening in California's agricultural areas. The workers who picked crops had been mostly Mexicans, Filipinos, and single white males before the Depression. But now Taylor noticed more and more whites were looking for jobs, many of them traveling as families with license plates from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas.

Those states had suffered greatly in the early 1930s from a severe drought that for several years denied much of the Great Plains sufficient rain to produce its usual complement of wheat and cotton. The drought had also produced a spectacular ecological disaster. Wind driven dust storms in western Kansas and the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles between 1933 and 1935 filled the air with millions of tons of finely plowed top soil - blackening the skies for a thousand miles as the clouds moved east. The dust storms brought press attention and later government intervention to the affected area, soon known as the "Dust Bowl."

Those white families from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas were showing up in large numbers in the fields of California...they had come with great hope, like the westward moving pioneers of old, but they were heading into disappointment. A shortage of work awaited them. Housing would be a tent camp or a shack thrown together of scraps...these people had become the first "refugees", but some journalists of the day named them "The Dust Bowl Refugees". But the actual Dust Bowl counties were sparsely populated and contributed very few refugees to the migration that was pouring into California. Most were from Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, and Arkansas which knew drought and depression, but little dust.

John Steinbeck wrote the book "The Grapes of Wrath" in 1939, a fictional account of the Joad family who lose their Oklahoma farm to dust and avaricious bankers, then set out for the California promised land only to find there even greater challenges and hardships. Hollywood followed up with an equally brilliant movie directed by John Ford.

The Joad Family

Numbers are elusive but it is safe to say that 300,000 to 400,000 Oklahomans, Texans, Arkansans, and Missourians moved to California and settled there during the 1930s. This would have been a significant population transfer in any era but was particularly momentous in the context of the depression when internal migration rates for other parts of the country were low and when high unemployment made any kind of relocation very risky. (Despite popular beliefs, almost half of these migrants were from towns or cities, and the rest had been farmers.)

Whites comprised roughly 95 percent of those moving. A few African Americans were represented in the populations of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas - but most had left for the cities of the North. It was not until World War II that large numbers of African Americans would move to the West Coast.

But by the time The Grapes of Wrath was flying off bookshelves in 1939, conditions had already began to improve in rural California due to federal aid programs and to the World War II defense boom. (Still, incomes for many former Oklahomans, Arkansans, and Texans would remain low for some time, and as late as the 1970s poverty experts in the San Joaquin Valley of California talked about "Okies" as a disadvantaged population and could point to poverty and welfare-use rates that exceeded the norms for other whites.)

The "Grapes of Wrath" by John Steinbeck

The poverty associated with the Dust Bowl migration had a great impact on public policy. But this high-profile episode (with its sympathetic white victims) helped reshape poverty-related policymaking in various other ways, especially around the issues of interstate migration and farm labor. Poor people crossing state lines would have rights in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl migration, but not just for whiles, but for families with darker skins and different accents as well. Many migration laws in California had been challenged by the ACLU all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1941 the court issued a landmark decision (Edwards v. California) ruling that states had no right to restrict interstate migration by poor people or any other Americans. But by this time, the next generation of whites had already started becoming upwardly mobile, and they laws were mainly for the benefit of minorities.

Race has always been central to the story of the Dust Bowl migration. Paul Taylor knew in 1935 when he wrote his first article about the "drought refugees" that their white skins and Anglo-Saxon names could win attention and sympathy that would not so readily attach to the Mexican and Asian farm workers who normally struggled in the valleys of California. Steinbeck too used the paradox, emphasizing in a dozen ways that Americans of their pedigree were not supposed to experience what the Joads experienced.

As the Dust Bowl saga worked its way into history, race has become still more important. The continuing fascination with this subject over the decades has had as much to do with racial politics as with the events themselves. As poverty became more and more racialized, and as struggles over social welfare programs increasingly contentious, the Dust Bowl migration took on new meanings and new functions.

By the 1970s an aging generation of former migrants and their upwardly mobile offspring where ready to memorialize the experiences of the 1930s and another set of storytellers were ready to help. A new round of journalism, novels, history books, TV documentaries, and country music songs has been the result, much of it fed by a late 20th century need for stories of poverty, hardship, and eventual triumph where the victims are white.

Some liberals say that these latter-day Dust Bowl accounts have sometimes promoted conservative agendas, as in the collection of songs that Merle Haggard produced in the late 1960s and 1970s celebrating the struggles of his parents and implying that the poverty of their generation was more noble than the poverty of contemporary America. And that they were unwilling to acknowledge kinship with the Mexican-Americans who replaced them in the fields or admit the importance of government assistance in Dust Bowl survival strategies. (This is still being debated today.)

But others among the new storytellers see the meanings differently. In keeping alive the Dust Bowl migration saga, they remind America that poverty has had many faces, that disparaging the victims is senseless and cruel, and that the poor and helpless of one era will hopefully escape that fate in the next. That the poor whites and the poor minorities of all races in the last generation (with education, hard work, and honest ethics) can succeed in this generation.

My personal opinion is that, like all government entitlements or government-run programs (such as Social Security, welfare, Medicare, the U.S. Post Office, etc) ... though maybe at first they may be well-meaning in principal, but too soon do they become poorly mismanaged (either by ineptness and/or by outright corruption) and thus they become too much of a financial burden on ordinary taxpayers. It is socialistic my nature, and thus becomes the great debate between liberalism and conservatism - and the great divide in ideologies, from topics like healthcare for illegal immigrants to federally funded abortions; and the argument of "spreading the wealth". Conservatives believe in working hard for all one has, while liberals seem to believe in sharing everything with the poor (even those who are here illegally or don't want to work hard for anything). My dad used to call them "lazy people just looking for a hand out". (My dad was raised a poor boy on a farm in Arkansas during the Great Depression".)

Diversity does not need to be promoted, because it has already existed in this country for centuries...it's only the individuals that need to promote themselves.

See my post - Slavery in America - Revisited in 2009

http://tobuds.com/blogs/blog5.php/2009/09/13/slavery-in-america-revisited-in-2009

Ancestral Ties to Slavery
http://tobuds.com/blogs/blog5.php/2009/09/12/ancestral-ties-to-slavery

Do I Have Any Ancestral Ties to Slavery?

Slavery and The American Civil War - When Arkansas Was A Slave State...and How I'm Directly Related (or not)

(And if so, should I make reparations?)

Many years ago in the 19th century, my great-grandfather was once a farmer in Perry County, Arkansas.

Slavery’s Origins in Arkansas

In 1720 (before slavery in Western European had completely ended) was when the first slaves entered what was to eventually become the State of Arkansas. They were given to early settlers (French citizens) by King Louis XV of France (see Code Noir), where they remained for the rest of Arkansas' territorial periods.

In 1808 a man named Aaron Price was the first recorded white settler in the area of Perry County, Arkansas (nine miles downstream from the present-day Perryville...and nearby to where my great-grandfather eventually settled.)

In 1810 the first official U.S. census of all of Arkansas as the “District of Louisiana” (as a portion of the Louisiana Purchase) by census takers reported 136 slaves within a total population of 874 people (not counting any native American Indians). Before "Manifest Destiny", Arkansas was very sparsely populated.

In 1819, known now as "The Arkansas Territory", there was a rapid growth in the slave population, and by 1820 there were 1,617 slaves - and by 1830 the slave population went up to 4,576. After Arkansas became the 25th state of the United States on June 15, 1836, the slave population in Arkansas had climbed to 19,935 by 1840.

Most slave owners possessed only a few slaves. The largest number of slaves were the property of the owners of large plantations in the state’s lowlands. (A relatively large slave holding would have been ten slaves, a work force valued at about $9,000 on the average in 1859, an amount equal to approximately $240,000 today.)

By 1860, seventy-three percent of slaves were on plantations and farms of that size. They were owned, however, by only about twenty-six percent of the state’s slave owners. Elisha Worthington of Chicot County was Arkansas' largest slave owner, holding more than 500 slaves on the eve of the Civil War.

By the start of the Civil War (1861–1865), there were as many as 111,115 slaves in the entire State of Arkansas. The historian, Orville Taylor, estimated that roughly one in four whites in Arkansan either owned slaves or lived in families that did. (Only 2,465 whites and 303 slaves lived in Perry County at this time - mathematically making 616 whites who may have benefited in some way from 303 slaves in Perry County Arkansas when slavery was at it's peak in 1861.)

During the Civil War, men from Perry County in Arkansas joined both sides of the Civil War (Confederate and Union alike, and rumored a few were black).

Most joined Company B / First Arkansas Mounted Volunteers, which later transferred into Confederate service on July 20, 1861, as Company B / Third Arkansas Confederate Cavalry.

And a much smaller number of men from Perry County joined the Union forces of the Third Arkansas Cavalry Regiment / Union, Company C.

The total "white population" (men, women, and children) of Perry County Arkansas was only approx. 2,465 people at this time - so how many white men from Perry County could have actually fought in the Civil War?

NOTE: There were no Civil War battles fought in Perry County and only one minor skirmish on December 3, 1864.

The nearest major Civil War action to Perry County fought between Union and Confederate forces in Arkansas was The Battle of Pine Bluff (Jefferson County, Arkansas) and was fought on October 25, 1863 (the Confederates lost).

The Civil War produced over 1,030,000 casualties (about 3% of the U.S. population), including about 620,000 soldier deaths (two-thirds which was by disease). The war accounted for as many American deaths as all other American deaths in all other U.S. wars combined since then.

After the war, the Southern population had 3.5 million freed slaves in a total population of 5.5 million people, thus leaving the South's white population outnumbered by a ratio of more than 4 to 1 (This might be when Michelle Obama's great-great grandfather, Jim Robinson, was an American slave in the state of South Carolina - the first state to succeed from the Union - and a state with over 400,000 slaves.)

My great-grandfather Heinrich (May 7, 1845 - February 24, 1915)- (I took a photo of his grave stone, and it's in German) who was Catholic and born on a farm in Sudhagen Westphalia near Delbrück Germany, came to the USA as a stowaway (illegal immigrant) aboard a Scandinavian ship from Germany to New York City. (Church records in Germany today dates his original family origins as far back as 1666.)

NOTE: Slavery in Western European countries largely disappeared by the late Middle Ages (the 16th century) but from the 16th to 19th centuries, an estimated one million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates (Muslim pirates and privateers) and sold as slaves in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. But my great-grandfather's family was never in any danger because by the 1800's, the practice had ended (France had colonized the Barbary coast). And when Heinrich had first come to the U.S. in 1865, it was AFTER the Civil War, and slavery in the U.S. had also ended.

In 1866 with the Southern Homestead Act (which provided “free land” in the former Confederate states) Arkansas was the 2nd most in acres still in the public domain, and offered an opportunity for thousands of Arkansans (both black and white) to own farms free of charge. To ensure that black farmers had the first opportunity to file, individuals “taking up arms against the United States” (ex-Confederate soldiers) were denied access to public lands until 1867.

1867 (The "Reconstruction Era") - Even though there were no significant battlegrounds in Perry County Arkansas, the countryside had been ravished by the "Jayhawkers", Union soldiers, and outlaws who had killed many local farmers in Perry County, plundered their farms, raped the women, burned down their homes, and stolen their livestock (Wasn't this enough "revenge" for the time?).

My Great-Grandfather

From 1865 to 1868 Heinrich eventually migrated all the way to Perry County (a settlement named either Dixie or Old Dixie at that time) from New York to become a farmer - he was one of the first settlers there. He later met a young German girl named Anna Maria (June 22, 1850 - August 19, 1907) and they married in 1869 and had 10 children together. (Both my grandfather and my father were born in Perry County.)

My Great Uncles and Aunts:

Stephen F (approx.1869 - ?)
Barney H (approx. 1878 - ?)
John, July 9, 1880 - December 13, 1935
Kathryn C. [Misses Katie], March 17, 1882 - May 13, 1963
Henry B. [Henry Jr], November 27, 1884 - September 17, 1968 (my grandfather - "Pe-pa")
Barney, September 3, 1887 - October 9, 1952
Theresa (1889 - ?)
Joseph B. [Josephy], June 2, 1891 - April 21, 1966
Barney Joe, March 28, 1899 - November 5, 1967
Josie (born? - died?)

Neither my great-grandfather, nor any of his children, had ever owned slaves or benefited in any way from slavery...they all worked 12-16 hours a day under the hot sun in the fields on an Arkansas farm (except on Sundays, when they went to church and only did light chores like feeding the livestock, etc). They had black farmers as their neighbors.

During that time from 1869 to 1893, more than 45 black men won seats in the Arkansas State legislature.

In 1879 (during the Southern Homestead Act) many more German Catholic families settled in east Perry County Arkansas, when the community was first named New Dixie (this was about 11 years after my great-grandfather Heinrich first settled here). In 1880, the St. Boniface Catholic Church was just getting organized in New Dixie, but the actual church is believed to have been built around the turn of the century - - - and Heinrich's family had donated the leaded glass windows, which had been imported from their German homeland.

The St. Boniface Catholic Church today

The Mosaic Templars of America (a black fraternal organization) was first founded in Little Rock in 1882 by John E. Bush and Chester W. Keatts, in the same city where ACORN was first founded in 1970. (One of my favorite Alternative Metal Bands, Evanescence, is also from Little Rock.)

Between 1876 and 1888 Congress amended the Southern Homestead Act and buyers representing seven Northern timber and railroad companies and many Arkansans (both black and white) bought 628,744 acres of land. By the time Congress took steps in 1888 to limit access to the public domain, Arkansas had very few public lands left.

Early after the turn of the Century, a railroad track was built running through a large section of Perry County through what became known as "rail towns" such as Bigelow (near New Dixie). Heinrich and his wife Anna later ran The Mercantile General store in Bigelow (Perry County) Arkansas in 1900 and people got their mail there. My grandmother Estella (Dolly) was born October 12, 1900.

The Fourche River Lumber Company was formed in Bigelow (formerly a settlement named Esau) around 1903, which employed (and paid) between 300 to 400 workers. (That same year John E. Bush organized the Colored Men's Business League. The following year, Black communities across Arkansas began to grow and flourish with newspapers, beauty shops, jewelry stores, hotels and restaurants; and Black-owned banks were opened in nearby Pine Bluff and Little Rock.)

The old Bigelow Bridge

By 1905 the Fourche River Lumber Company in Perry County now owned thousands of acres of land and built mills near the railroads employing many more men...Bigelow became a "boomtown".

Several Lithuanian families settled near Bigelow between 1912 and 1914.

Around 1912, African American families also began settling in Perry County's "Toad Suck" community, also known as "Redemption".

A group of Italian immigrants arrived in 1915 near the east end of the county, bringing their wine-making skills to a region of Perry County that resembled Italy - this was the year my great-grandfather Heinrich (the hard-working immigrant farmer and general store owner) died at 70 years old.

After World War One, (for reasons I haven't researched) the lumber companies in Perry County eventually all closed, and Bigelow and the surrounding areas gradually became economically depressed, even before the "Crash of 1929"... from boomtown to bust.

In 1926, a two-room Rosenwald School was built to improve the quality of public education for African Americans. (This building was placed on the National Historical Register in 2004.)

1929 - The Great Depression begins. It was followed in 1930 and 1931 by one of the worst droughts in the country’s history. During the plight of the rural poor in the nation’s “Dust Bowl” from 1935 to 1940, photographers took hundreds of photographs in Arkansas (of displaced sharecroppers and poor farmers, devastated by the circumstances in the heartland of America), capturing the sympathy of the entire nation and helped set the stage for the policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal.” Heinrich's son (my grandfather - my "Pe-pa") was one of those who remained behind with his children (including my father) and somehow, they just managed to survive, working the years away on the farm in Perry County.

(See my post "Race and the Dust Bowl"

http://tobuds.com/blogs/blog5.php/2009/09/13/race-and-the-dust-bowl

Also in 1929, the Toad Suck Ferry was first opened in Perry County, taking travelers across the Arkansas River. And that same year my father was born (who 18 years later left the farm forever, and joined the U.S. military for a life's career).

In 1942 slavery is briefly re-instituted in Europe again by Hitler and Nazi Germany (The Third Reich). Under Heinrich Himmler, a plan for the "Final Solution" in Europe was designed. From then until the end of the war in 1945, some six million Jews (and many others) were systematically killed, while more than 10 million people were put into forced labor. Over 70 million people (the majority of whom were civilians) were killed in WW II making it the deadliest conflict ever in human history.

In 1944 the Toad Suck Ferry had closed, but then reopened in 1953. As a young kid my dad took me and my sister to see his parents (my Me-ma and Pe-pa) in Bigelow Arkansas in the 1960's. Even today, I still remember crossing on that ferry...for me and my sister, it was a real adventure!

(I believe this was when both my parents voted for JFK and Lyndon B. Johnson.)

The old Toad Suck Ferry and the newer Toad Suck Bridge and Dam

The ferry closed for good in 1970 when the first Toad Suck Bridge was built. Soon after the ferry closed, all hell broke lose when Obama's friend (Bill Ayres) started making bombs...and the world was never quite as simple again.

So...do I have any ancestral ties to slavery?

Should I or any of my ancestors be chastised for the slavery in this country's past? Did I, or anyone in my family contribute to or benefit from slavery in the United States? Did I or anyone from my ancestor's lineage enable slavery in any way? Did I or any of my ancestors ever support or condone slavery? And do they, in any way, have any affinity to the enslavement of any people in the United States? Should I, or any of my Euro-American ancestors with German heritage, be held to blame or accountable in any way whatsoever? Do I, or any of my ancestors, have any relation to King Louis XV of France? (Though my ancestors in Germany in 1720 while farmers, once raised horses, and may have sold some to the French during that time in history). Should I, or any of my ancestors living today, pay reparations to the ancestors of slaves, for something that the ancestors of others did, from 145 to 300 years ago?

(Don't forget, my great-granderfather didn't get to America until after the war 1865.)

If you can answer YES to any of these questions, THEN PLEASE GIVE ME ONE GOOD REASON WHY.

As a Euro-American (a person "without color") who never experienced any form of slavery (unless you count my parents), I can never claim to possibly ever understand the social psych of a descendant that is 3 or 4 or 5 generations removed from slavery, but PLEASE...

...be you black, white, "green", or "pink"...(male or female, American or German, "politically correct" or truthful, a left-wing fruit fly or a Conservative blogger)...

...try to remember that I don't dislike you and that I never did anything to you, so try to be a little more considerate as a responsible and civilized neighbor and refrain from your unjust and unprovoked attacks against me (a total stranger) by playing your music so loudly (especially if you have BIG woofers). I'm just trying to do something normal, like sleep. OK? Is that a fair, humanely reasonable, and polite request to make?

...and try to remember this: Read back this article about all that has passed and think, "Things these days aren't nearly so bad after all."

See my post - Slavery in America- Revisited in 2009

http://tobuds.com/blogs/blog5.php/2009/09/13/slavery-in-america-revisited-in-2009

(Relating to the Present Day's Calendar and Clock of 365 days with 24 hours)

As usual, like almost everything else, we have the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Romans, and Greeks to thank.

Posted on 09/09/09

Next: 10/10/10 at 10:10 AM and 10:10 PM (on a Sunday)
Next:11/11/11 at 11:11 AM and 11:11 PM (on a Friday)
Last:12/12/12 at 12:12 AM and 12:12 PM (on a Wednesday)

(There can never be a 13/13/13 unless we re-invent the calendar. A good thing too - talk about bad luck!)

When was the very first time 09/09/09 could have happened?

Early recorded hours were not constant, but a popular theory is that the early Sumerians from Mesopotamia, using "Babylonian Mathematics", were the first to divide the period of time during the day between sunrise and sunset by twelve parts.

The Egyptians, like the early Sumerians, also divided the day into 12 parts. They used huge granite columns called "Cleopatra Needles" to keep track of time periods. They had 12 marks on the ground that equalled 12 parts of the day. When the sun touched the top, a shadow was created and the length and position of the shadow told the Egyptians how much daylight remained...a huge sundial.

The Egyptians were the first to develop a twelve-month / 365-day calendar (prior to 45 BC) based upon the earth's movement around the sun. This helped them predict Nile River flooding, which helped them plant their crops at the correct time of the year.

But one of the most important developments in the history of calendars was that attributed to Roman dictator Julius Caesar. We owe the concept of leap year to Caesar, as well as the names of the months.

The "Julian Calendar" was introduced in 45 BC. It has a regular year of 365 days divided into 12 months, and a leap day is added to February every four years. Hence the "Julian Year" is on average 365.25 days long.

In 25 BC the Roman Emperor Augustus formally reformed the calendar of Egypt, keeping it forever synchronized with the newly introduced Julian Calendar.

(The later decision to use equal length hours is usually credited to the Greek astronomer Hipparchus who lived from 190 BC to 120 BC).

Our current calendar is called the "Gregorian Calendar", which is a modified form of the Julian Calendar described above. This was introduced by Pope Gregory in 1582.

But when was the first 24 - hour day created?

I don't know yet, but the first mechanical clocks in the 14th century showed all 24 hours, using the 24-hour analog dial.

FIXED! (Work around) You can receive but not send email using HOTMAIL's new POP settings.

Use the settings from the link below BUT, change this part...

For outgoing mail, DO NOT USE smtp.live.com - use whatever your default server is (mine is smtp.west.cox.net). I figured this part out on my own because when I use my domain mail, this is how it is set up. (Use port 25 for outgoing messages).

And if using anti-virus e-mail scanning like NORTON, go to OPTIONS / EMAIL and UNCHECK "scan outgoing messages". (Incoming are still scanned for your protection.)

Microsoft (LIVE) and Symantec (NORTON) need to get together to resolve this issue...

Source: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/329820/en-us

POP Settings: http://ask-leo.com/what_are_windows_live_hotmails_pop3_and_smtp_settings.html