Latest news with #WildBillHickok
IOL News
27-05-2025
- Entertainment
- IOL News
Did you know that famed English bard William Shakespeare died because of a Covid-19 vaccination? Neither did we
Bismarck sinks Hood Bismarck, the feared German battleship, sinks the pride of the Royal Navy, HMS Hood in the North Atlantic, near Greenland, during World War II. 1837 Wild West figure Wild Bill Hickok is born in Troy Grove, Illinois. A frontiersman, lawman, marksman and army scout, he was shot dead on August 2, 1876 during a poker game by a drunk in the Number Ten saloon in Deadwood, in Dakota. In his hand, was a pair of eights and a pair of aces, the 'dead man's hand'. 1931 Auguste Piccard and Paul Kipfer make the first flight into Earth's stratosphere, from Augsburg, Germany, in a pressurised gondola borne beneath a balloon designed by Piccard. It was also a precursor to manned exploration of the ocean depths, also by Piccard. 1941 The Germany navy's feared battleship Bismarck, is sunk. HMS Rodney becomes the only battleship to torpedo another. 1942 Sailor Dorie Miller gets the Navy Cross for his reckless fight back at Pearl Harbor (he manned anti-aircraft guns – as depicted in the movies, Tora! Tora! Tora! and Pearl Harbor). 1942 Reinhard Heydrich, the darkest figure in the Nazi elite – Hitler's 'man with the iron heart', is ambushed and killed in Prague. 1963 The son of Kikuyu farmers, Jomo Kenyatta becomes Kenya's first prime minister. 1966 The 55th West German air force F-104 interceptor crashes – 292 of the 916 Starfighter fleet crashed, hence the name Witwenmacher (The Widowmaker). 2017 Pitched battles between Islamic State-linked militants and Philippine government troops in and around Marawi, leave 43 dead. 2017 Arsenal wins the FA Cup making Arsène Wenger the most successful manager in FA Cup history with seven titles. 2020 'I can't breathe': a video of African-American George Floyd's arrest and murder, while restrained in Minneapolis police custody, shows that he was pinned to the ground by police officer Derek Chauvin's knee for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Chauvin's action ignites global outrage. 2021 English playwright William Shakespeare reported by Argentine news channel Chanal 26 to have died after receiving the Covid-19 vaccine. The Bard died in 1616. 2021 French President Emmanuel Macron recognises France's role in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide after a meeting with Rwandan President Paul Kagame in Kigali, Rwanda. DAILY NEWS
Wall Street Journal
22-05-2025
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Gunfighters' Review: The Duelists of Texas
On the Friday evening of July 21, 1865, a recently discharged Confederate soldier named Davis Tutt stood in the courthouse square of Springfield, Mo. He wore a leather duster and he carried a pistol and a gold pocket watch. Facing him on the south side of the square, writes Bryan Burrough at the outset of 'The Gunfighters,' his lively chronicle of a uniquely American creature, was a 28-year-old Union scout with 'weary eyes and a nose so long it almost reached his upper lip; one wag had nicknamed him 'Duck Bill''—but likely not within his hearing, as the scout was James Butler 'Wild Bill' Hickok. He, too, had a pistol—a big Navy Colt revolver. 'Dave,' he called. 'Here I am.' His martial career behind him, Tutt had become a professional gambler, but not a wise one. He and Hickok had recently quarreled over a poker game. Tutt claimed that Hickok owed him $35; Hickok said it was only $25. Tutt chose to settle the matter by grabbing Hickok's watch and running off with it.
New York Times
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Move Over Lone Ranger, Hopalong,Wyatt and Pals — History is Coming Your Way
Children in 1950s America grew up with a distinct image of the Old West through television heroes like the Lone Ranger, Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp and Hopalong Cassidy. They all had one thing in common, apart from always prevailing over the bad guys: They were white. Native-American actors had parts but rarely, if ever, did any of these shows include a Black actor as hero, villain or anything in between. That produced what historians have long recognized as a white-centric version of America's westward expansion, especially from Hollywood. The author C.T. Kirk and other historians posit that at least one in four cowboys was Black, many of them former slaves escaping the lingering cruelties of Reconstruction and the Jim Crow years. 'It was the narrative of television to push toward the all-American family as white,' said Kirk, author of the 2020 book, 'How the West Was White-Washed.' 'The idea was to take the importance off of one demographic to focus on another. The Western theology was that it was the white man's burden to settle the West, and everybody else was barbaric.' Black actors had been part of the nation's movie industry from the early years of the 20th century. Their projects, known as 'race films,' many of them westerns, such as 'Harlem on the Prairie' in 1937, featured Black casts playing almost exclusively to Black audiences. Films from the major studios were almost exclusively white, with only the occasional African-American actor before cinema slowly began integrating over the second half of the century, featuring such prominent actors as Woody Strode and Sidney Poitier. More and more these days, museums have taken up the cause of dispelling the perception cultivated by the entertainment industry of a whites-only West. With a variety of exhibitions, they are educating visitors to a more accurate telling of Western history by showcasing the role Black people played in everyday life across territories that would later become states. For nearly a year through early April, the Witte Museum in San Antonio presented a Texas-focused exhibition on the Black cowboys who worked on ranches and cattle drives. Many of the cowboys later became ranch owners, lawmen, rodeo stars, entrepreneurs and entertainers. Major parts of that show are now moving to the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles as part of a wider exhibition that follows Black people as they moved westward from Texas cattle ranches through the latter decades of the 19th century. The Autry's 'Black Cowboys: An American Story' opens on June 14, and shows how they helped develop the West. Their presence echoes today through the participation of Black people in rodeos, ranching and acting, and through Western-based themes in the music of recording artists such as Beyoncé, Megan Thee Stallion and Lil Nas X. 'I think we want to remind people that the history, and really the myth of the West and of America, is much more complicated and a great deal more diverse,' said Stephen Aron, the president and chief executive of the Autry, reflecting on the misperceptions of a white-settled West. 'The reality, in fact, is far more reflective of America, then and now.' Curated by Joe Horse Capture, vice president of Native Collections, and the senior curator Carolyn Brucken, the Autry show extends the Witte exhibit well into the 21st century in California. While many Black Westerners worked on the cattle trails, others found jobs on farms or helped build the railroads. It was menial labor for many, but some became ranch owners and entrepreneurs, the forebears of current California and Los Angeles area community groups such as the Compton Cowboys and Urban Saddles, which use horseback riding to promote the contributions of Black people in Western culture. Visitors to the Autry will learn about Bill Pickett, a Texas cowboy who invented rodeo bulldogging in the 1880s and later became one of the country's early African-American performers in Black-cast movies. Allen Allensworth, born a slave in 1842, became a military chaplain after the Civil War, rising to lieutenant colonel, making him the highest-ranking Black person in the U.S. armed forces at the time. Two years after retiring in 1906, he founded a Black settlement in California's San Joaquin Valley known as Allensworth. It remains a dot on the map today, with a population of 457, according to 2024 census figures, although less than five percent were African-American. The exhibition also celebrates women who embody Black roles in cowboy traditions. Bridget 'Biddy' Mason, a midwife and entrepreneur in mid-1800s Los Angeles, became the matriarch of a family that operated a livery stable and cattle-sale business that employed nearly a dozen cowboys. DeBoraha Akin-Townson became the International Professional Rodeo Association western region champion in 1989 and a year later the first Black cowgirl to reach the association finals. Chanel Rhodes's work as a horse trainer and equestrian led her to open a business in 2021 making wigs as decorative manes for horses. As Black people became ensconced in the western expansion, they experienced the same joys and tribulations as whites, a history unknown, even, to many contemporary African Americans, said Alaina E. Roberts, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh and author of 'I've Been Here All The While,' a study of Black people and Native-Americans in the post-Civil War era. 'African Americans don't know any more about their history than any other group,' she said. 'They're going through the same education system that is not telling them about it.' The Autry Museum was founded in 1988 by Gene Autry, the 'Singing Cowboy' whose radio, film, recording and television career beginning in the 1930s made him one of America's most recognizable entertainers. He also owned professional rodeo companies and the Los Angeles Angels baseball team. The museum opened with his personal art and memorabilia as the foundation for a permanent collection. Today, its 100,000 square feet celebrate all aspects of Western culture through artifacts, photos, drawings and paintings, including a rich focus on Native American culture and essential elements of Western life for all who lived it — horses, firearms, ceramics, jewelry, Hollywood memorabilia and clothing: One exhibit in Black Cowboys will feature costumes worn by Black cast members of the 2021 western, 'The Harder They Fall.' The timing of the Black Cowboys exhibition has an ironic twist that is not lost on museum officials. While more than two years in the planning, the opening comes as American businesses, education institutions and government agencies are eliminating programs that embrace diversity, equity and inclusion in their hiring and operational practices. There are also ongoing debates over the starting point of American history — at the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 or the arrival of the first slave ship in 1619. Only the second acknowledges the role that Africans played in America's beginnings. Exhibitions like Black Cowboys, Aron said, underscore a truer American history, that it was not only whites leading America's Manifest Destiny in the 19th century. 'If we provide some new thinking about the way in which we've remembered or misremembered our history, that would be a valuable contribution as well as a valuable takeaway,' he said. 'I think museums do best when they spark conversation, when they provoke people to think anew and push people to ask questions.'
