MILESTONES: August 30, birthdays for Bebe Rexha, Warren Buffett, Lewis Black
ON THIS DAY IN 1877, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “Brigham Young, the head of the Mormon Church, died in Salt Lake City at 4 o’clock yesterday afternoon. The dead prophet was born in Whittingham, Vt., on June 1, 1801 … His conversion was brought about by Samuel H. Smith, a brother of Joseph Smith, and in September 1832, having been baptized by Eleazer Miller, he joined the Mormon Church at Kirtland, Ohio. An intimacy soon sprang up between Brigham and Joseph Smith. The new convert was ordained elder, and soon began to preach. His shrewdness, powerful will and knowledge of character gave him great influence in a community where general ignorance prevailed. In 1835 Brigham was ordained one of the Twelve Apostles of the Church and in the following year became their President.”
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ON THIS DAY IN 1883, the Eagle reported, “A convulsion of nature which in a few hours has swept from life some 75,000 persons, has swallowed islands, engulfed mountains, obliterated towns and converted forests into cinders, uplands into dreary wastes of sulphur and rock and fertile plains into arms of the sea is an event in the physical history of our planet which possesses few known parallels. The burial of Herculaneum and Pompeii in 79 in the ashes and scorise of Vesuvius, the sudden and terrific fate of Lisbon seventeen centuries later, just when the exploration of the newly discovered cities had commenced, and the shaking of the South American republics in Chile and Peru furnish the only parallels in history to the awful display of nature’s hidden forces that has recently been made in Java. Removed as the island is from us almost as far as it can be upon the surface of the planet, and different as are the conditions of life there in its unsurpassed climate and other conditions, the telegraph has so annihilated distance that we can more fully share the horrors of the scene with the survivors of the cataclysm than could have been done a century ago in adjoining states.”