Coming in October: Amazon Prime Big Deal Days

 

Are you a Prime member?

https://amzn.to/3rYVgkN

Erin O'Riordan's Almanac Is Now Available in Audio Form on Spotify

If you've been enjoying the "today in history" posts, you can now find them in audio format on Spotify:

I'm looking for guests for my startup podcast, so please message me if you're interested!

Much more tentatively, I'm also planning to put the podcast audio up on my long-unused YouTube channel as well. I'm figuring out how to use ClipChamp.

121 Years Ago Today: Shiloh Baptist Church Stampede

121 years ago today, on September 19, 1902, one hundred fifteen members of the Shiloh Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, are killed in a stampede after one of them called out “Fight!” and this was misheard as “Fire!” 

Listen to the facts of the incident on Disaster Area Podcast:

Here it is from the perspective of Useless Information Podcast:

In addition, you can learn about the history from All Bad Things:

This is an affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3Rak9ol

Here are some other disastrous September 19ths from history:

September 19, 1692: Massachusetts Bay Colonist Giles Corey, having been accused of witchcraft but refusing to plead either guilty or not guilty in court, is subjected to a form of torture in which his body is crushed with increasingly heavy stone weights in an attempt to force him to plead. Corey refuses and is crushed to death, with his last words reportedly being, “More weight!”

September 19, 1881: U.S. President James Garfield dies of septic infection. He had been shot by his assassin, Charles Guiteau, on July 2, 1881.

September 19, 1913: Purdue University student Francis Obenchain dies of a broken neck after taking part in a large-scale fight between first- and second-year students intended as a class hazing ritual.

September 19, 1973: Singer-songwriter Gram Parsons dies of an accidental overdose of alcohol and morphine at the age of 26. He dies peacefully in his sleep inside a room at the Joshua Tree Inn in California. 

His stepfather Bob Parsons insists the singer’s body be flown to New Orleans for burial, but friends of Gram Parsons steal the body from Los Angeles International Airport and attempt to carry out what they insisted were Parsons’s final wishes, to be created in Joshua Tree National Monument (now Joshua Tree National Park). They pour gasoline into the coffin and light it with a match, causing a tremendous fireball, and are charged a fine of $750. What remains of Parsons’s body is buried in Louisiana.

Stay safe and look out for your neighbors.

Remembrance of September 11, 2001

If everything has gone as planned, I'll be started a new job today, September 11, 2023. I'll be going into the office rather than working from home, something I haven't done since before the COVID-19 pandemic. 

While I'm embarking on the next step in my career, please consider these books for commemorating the awfulness those of us who were around went through on September 11, 2001. (I shared my diary entry from that date here, on the 10th anniversary.)

https://amzn.to/3ElQr8o

https://amzn.to/3L0tnQb

https://amzn.to/3Pkz264

Book Review: 'Little, Crazy Children' by James Renner

As an adult, one of the hardest things for my mind to process is the premature loss of a young person who showed so much promise and talent in their short life. The What Might Have Been is haunting. For this reason, the case James Renner presents in this title is compelling. The murdered young woman had an obviously active, creative, insightful mind, and her senseless killing is irreconcilable with any form of the way things are supposed to be in an ideal world. I'm terrible sorry for the loss her family and friends still feel. Renner appears to feel this terrible lack as well.

Of course a well-written crime story should focus on the victim, and this one does. One thing I found so utterly compelling about Renner's previous book, True Crime Addict, was the way the author was also a character in the story, to the extent that it was virtually a covert memoir. Little, Crazy Children is not autobiographical to that extent.

The author does show up as a presence in the latter chapters, as he proposes an alternative explanation for the senseless crime that law enforcement doesn't seem to have considered in any depth or breadth. As in True Crime Addict, he makes a compelling case. 

For me as a reader, having read True Crime Addict earlier this year, this book took me a little more effort to get into, largely because it's structured with the evidence of the case and witness testimonials laid out in great detail in the first half. I've come to understand that the more James Renner there is an any given James Renner book, the better the book will be. Think of the way Rebecca Skloot became a character in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Maybe the extent to which I'm a nerd for research is a niche preference, but I like a nonfiction narrator who narrates their investigation.

This is an affiliate link: https://amzn.to/44Lv0rR

So, I give 4 stars to Little, Crazy Children and still strongly recommend you read the 5-star book, True Crime Addict.

I borrowed this book from my local library using the Libby app and was not obligated in any way to review it.

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Don't forget to use YOUDESERVEIT for 40% off today, Monday, September 4, 2023!

September 2023 Book Deals on Audible.com

Links contained in this post are Amazon affiliate links and if you purchase products after following these links, I may earn a small commission. These books will be on sale until September 30th, 2023. 

https://amzn.to/3Pl1Hb7

I have absolutely no reason to believe that the United States is as politically divided as it was before the Civil War, right? Right??

https://amzn.to/3qMpHL6

There's more to Richard Matheson than just I Am Legend and A Stir of Echoes. If you're like me and you use the beginning of September as an excuse to start thinking about Halloween, you might want to listen to these tales.

https://amzn.to/44yxJov

https://amzn.to/3L5MDMc

Add to your basketball book collection with this definitive bio of Sir Charles Barkley.

https://amzn.to/3Enushc

https://amzn.to/3ErhfUo

Perhaps you would like to learn about women in ancient and early modern history. 

https://amzn.to/3Lu0psj

These are only a few of the 20 pages of choices on sale for the month of September from Audible.com. Go ahead and browse. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the cozy season of curling up under a blanket with tea and good book will be upon us soon.

The 1900 Galveston Hurricane with Disaster Area Podcast

As you may remember from last year's post:

September 2, 1900: A tropical hurricane formed over the Atlantic Ocean makes landfall in the Dominican Republic. This storm is among the deadliest in U.S. history, with a large number of fatalities coming from Galveston, Texas. Meteorologists of the time, and in particular Isaac Cline, didn’t believe that a significant hurricane was possible in Galveston, and so rejected requests from the townspeople that the city should build a sea wall. As many as 8,000 people in the Caribbean, the U.S., and the Maritime Provinces of Canada are thought to have lost their lives in this storm, including Cline’s wife and some of his children.

There's an episode of Disaster Area for that.

If you enjoy the Disaster Area podcast and want to support author/podcaster Jennifer Matarese, the following are some links to her social media accounts. I want her to be able to afford to write her next book, because I really want to read it. Become her patron on Patreon; you'll feel like a Renaissance-era Venetian arts patron, turning your money into art.

Tumblr: trollprincess

Instagram: disasterareapod

Patreon: disasterareapodcast 

Mastodon: trollprincess@ohai.social

Twitter: https://twitter.com/trollprincess

Hive: trollprincess

If you don't have money--this is quite understandable--the best free way to support Jennifer and her research, writing, and podcasting is to give Disaster Area a 5-star review on any podcast platform that allows reviews. Especially Apple (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/disaster-area/id1071491908). Giving a podcaster a 5-star review on Apple increases their podcast's visibility to new potential listeners.

This is an affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3L3MNnl

Unfortunate (Mostly) Literary Happenings of Past Septembers

This post is an update of last year's Bummer Summer Part II: Awful Things That Happened in September.

September 2, 2004: A fire at the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Germany, destroys 12,500 irreplaceable books and damages an additional 62,000 materials, including Friedrich Schiller's death mask and 35 oil paintings of historical significance.

September 2, 2018: An air conditioner short circuits, causing a catastrophic fire at the National Museum of Brazil. The museum loses an estimated 92.5% of its collection.

https://amzn.to/3Og8G3n

September 8, 2016: 59-year-old performer The Lady Chablis, who’s featured prominently in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt and played herself in the 1997 film based on it, dies of pneumonia at Candler Hospital in Savannah, Georgia.

September 9, 1898: French poet and literary critic Stéphane Mallarmé dies suddenly while suffering from what had been a relatively mild case of tonsillitis. While being examined by his doctor, Mallarmé has a coughing fit so severe he dies of asphyxia. He is 56 years old.

September 12, 1977: Poet Robert Lowell dies of a heart attack in a taxi cab on his way to see his ex-wife, writer and literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick.

September 15, 1958: A commuter train traveling from Bay Head, New Jersey, to Jersey City ignores warning signals and falls into Newark Bay through an open bridge lift. The crash kills 48, including Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s brother-in-law James Carmalt Adams.

September 18, 1961: United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others die when their Transair Sweden DC-6 aircraft crashes in what was then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Hammarskjöld had been traveling to Katanga, a disputed state that broke off from the Congo after Congo gained its independence from Belgian colonial rule. The cause of the crash is disputed. It may have been caused by pilot error, although some have speculated that it was shot down to assassinate Hammarskjöld.

September 18, 1988: Poet/filmmaker Kathleen Collins dies of breast cancer at the age of 46.

September 20, 1989: The last fluent speaker of the Kamassian language, Klavdiya Zakharovna Plotnikova-Andzhighatova, an approximately 105-year-old woman, dies. Kamassian is one of the Samoyed languages of the Ural Mountains. In fact, it was the last of the Samoyed languages to go extinct.

September 23, 965: Al-Mutanabbi, a courtly poet of the Abbasid Caliphate who wrote in Arabic, dies in what is now Iraq. His birth date is not known, but he was thought to be about 50 years old at the time of his death. He died in a fight with a group of assailants who were insulted by one of his poems.

September 23, 1939: Sigmund Freud dies of cancer of the jaw. He had been diagnosed with epithelioma of the mouth in 1923, and although the tumor had been surgically removed, the surgery was incomplete. By 1939, the cancer that had spread to his jawbone was so painful, and also inoperable, that Freud asked his personal physician to give him a life-ending dose of morphine. 

September 23, 1973: Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and is in his fifth day of hospitalization. He calls his wife to let her know he isn’t feeling well and dies a few hours later, officially of heart failure. 

Some have speculated that Neruda may have been poisoned in the hours before his death. Chile’s coup d’etat that ended the term of democratically-elected socialist President Salvador Allende had happened on September 11th. Neruda had been Allende’s ambassador to France and his home had already been searched by the military forces of coup leader General Augusto Pinochet. Neruda famously told Pinochet’s troops that the only dangerous thing they would find was poetry.

September 23, 1994: Psycho writer Robert Bloch dies of cancer of the esophagus and kidneys at the age of 77.

September 24, 2007: Camera operator Conway Wickliffe is killed while filming stunts for the movie The Dark Knight. He is the passenger in a pickup truck driving parallel to a stunt car; the driver misses a turn and the truck crashes into a tree.

September 26, 1937: Blues musician Bessie Smith dies of traumatic injuries she suffers in a car accident. She was the passenger in a car driven by her boyfriend Richard Morgan. Morgan, driving along U.S. Route 61 toward Clarksdale, Mississippi, misjudges the speed of a truck he’s coming up on and swerves at the last moment to avoid rear-ending the truck but sideswipes it instead. Since Smith is in the passenger seat and possibly has her hand and/or forearm sticking out of the passenger-side window, she sustains severe crush injuries to the right side of her body and a partially amputated arm. Surgeons at Clarksdale’s African-American hospital surgically amputate Smith’s arm. She never regains consciousness following surgery.

September 29, 1902: French writer Émile Zola dies of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a blocked chimney flue in his home. The manner of his death may have been accident, assassination, or suicide. He’s 62 years old.

September 29, 2010: A 24-year-old man whose family says he suffers from mental illness pours gasoline on himself and sets himself on fire near the statue of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Longfellow Square in Portland, Maine. The man is critically injured but survives. Coincidentally, the date the statue was unveiled to the public was also September 29th, in 1888.

September 30, 1962: Paul Guihard, a journalist for France’s Agence France-Presse, is in the U.S. covering African-American student James Meredith’s attempt to enroll in the whites-only University of Mississippi. White students on the campus start a riot, during which Guihard is shot through the back, piercing his heart. 

His shooting is never solved. Guihard is considered the only journalist to have been killed during the U.S. civil rights movement.

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