Good Morning & God Bless To Every One !
Today is May 6, the 126th day of 2014 and there are 239 days left this year where it is another Blessed Day in the pleasure of our service for our Lord here at:
For God’s Glory Alone Ministries !!!
Just thinking:
House Leader John Boehner will create a House Select Committee to investigate the White House cover-up of the al-Qaeda attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi. At the time the president knew nothing about the cover-up. He was too busy not knowing about the IRS targeting conservatives.
So, What Happened Today In 1864?
Grant and Lee continue fighting in the Battle of the Wilderness Forest in Virginia
During the American Civil War, in the opening battle in the biggest campaign of the war, Union and Confederate troops continue their desperate struggle in the Wilderness forest in Virginia. General Ulysses S. Grant, commander of the Union forces, had joined George Meade’s Army of the Potomac to encounter Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the tangled Wilderness forest near Chancellorsville, the site of Lee’s brilliant victory the year before. The fighting was intense, and raging fires that consumed the dead and wounded magnified the horror of battle. But little was gained in the confused attacks by either side.
On May 6, the second day of battle in the Wilderness, Grant sought to break the stalemate by sending Winfield Hancock’s corps against the Confederate right flank at the southern end of the battle line. The Federals were on the verge of breaking through the troops of James Longstreet when they stumbled in the dense undergrowth.
Lee entered the fray to rally the Confederate troops, but his devoted soldiers urged him away from the action. Later in the morning, Longstreet’s men attacked Hancock’s forces and seemed poised to turn the Union flank. But, like the Union troops earlier, they became disoriented as they drove Hancock’s troops back. In the confusion, Longstreet was wounded by his own men, just four miles from the spot where Stonewall Jackson was mortally wounded by his own men the year before.
The Confederate attack halted when Hancock’s men found refuge behind hastily constructed breastworks. In the evening, Lee attacked the Union flank at the northern end of the battlefield and nearly turned the Federal line. Grant’s men, however, held their ground, leaving the exhausted armies in nearly the same positions as when the battle began. In two days, the Union lost 17,000 men to the Confederates’ 11,000. This was nearly one-fifth of each army.
The worst was yet to come. Grant pulled his men out of the Wilderness on May 7, but, unlike the commanders before him in the eastern theater, he did not go back. He moved further south towards Spotsylvania Court House and closer to Richmond. At Spotsylvania, the armies engaged in some of the fiercest fighting of the war.
Other Memorable Or Interesting Events Occurring On May 6 In History:
1527 – German troops begin sacking Rome ending the Renaissance. Libraries are destroyed, the Pope is captured and thousands are killed;
1536 – King Henry VIII orders bible be placed in every church in England;
1775 – In the American Revolution, in a candid report to William Legge, 2nd earl of Dartmouth and the British secretary of state for the colonies. Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son, New Jersey Royal Governor William Franklin, writes that the violence at Lexington and Concord greatly diminishes the chances of reconciliation between Britain and her North American colonies. Reconciliation between Britain and America was not the only relationship at stake for Franklin. He would never repair the damage done to his relationship with his father, famed Patriot Benjamin Franklin, when he decided to remain loyal to the crown;
1833 – John Deere makes the first steel plough;
1840 – Britain’s first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black, officially went into circulation five days after its introduction;
1861 – During the American Civil War, Arkansas becomes the ninth state to secede from the Union;
1882 – President Chester Alan Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which barred Chinese immigrants from the U.S. for 10 years. Arthur had opposed an earlier version with a 20-year ban;
1915 – In World War I, after a first attempt to capture the village of Krithia, on the Gallipoli Peninsula, failed on April 28, 1915, a second is initiated on May 6 by Allied troops under the British commander Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston. Facing superior enemy numbers and suffering from a shortage of ammunition, the Allies were able to advance some 600 yards, but failed to capture either Krithia or the crest of Achi Baba after three attempts in three days. The British regional commander-in-chief, Sir Ian Hamilton, after pushing for more supplies and ammunition, ordered Hunter-Weston to continue the pressure on Achi-Baba; a third attack on the ridge was launched in early June. As heavy casualties continued to be sustained across the region, with little real gains for the Allies, it became clear that the Gallipoli operation—an Allied attempt to break the stalemate on the Western Front by achieving a decisive victory elsewhere—had failed to achieve its ambitious aims;
1933 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA was just one of many Great Depression relief programs created under the auspices of the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act, which Roosevelt had signed the month before. The WPA, the Public Works Administration (PWA) and other federal assistance programs put unemployed Americans to work in return for temporary financial assistance. Out of the 10 million jobless men in the United States in 1935, 3 million were helped by WPA jobs alone. Opponents of the New Deal in Congress gradually pared back WPA appropriations in the years leading up to World War II. By 1940, the economy was roaring back to life with a surge in defense-industry production and, in 1943, Congress suspended many of the programs under the ERA Act, including the WPA;
1937 – The German airship Hindenburg, the largest dirigible ever built, explodes as it arrives in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Thirty-six people died in the fiery accident that has since become iconic, in part because of the live radio broadcast of the disaster. The dirigible was built to be the fastest, largest and most luxurious flying vessel of its time. It was more than 800 feet long, had a range of 8,000 miles, could carry 97 passengers and had a state-of-the-art Mercedes-Benz engine. It was filled with 7 million cubic feet of hydrogen, even though helium was known to be far safer, because it made the flying ship more maneuverable. On WLS radio, announcer Herbert Morrison gave an unforgettably harrowing live account of the disaster, “Oh, oh, oh. It’s burst into flames. Get out of the way, please . . . this is terrible . . . it’s burning, bursting into flames, and is falling . . . Oh! This is one of the worst . . . it’s a terrific sight . . .oh, the humanity.” You can watch the video by clicking here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgWHbpMVQ1U;
1941 – Comedian Bob Hope gives his first USO show at California’s March Field;
1942 – In World War II, U.S. Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright surrenders all U.S. troops in the Philippines to the Japanese. The island of Corregidor remained the last Allied stronghold in the Philippines after the Japanese victory at Bataan (from which General Wainwright had managed to flee, to Corregidor). Wainwright had little choice given the odds against him and the poor physical condition of his troops (he had already lost 800 men). He surrendered at midnight. All 11,500 surviving Allied troops were evacuated to a prison stockade in Manila. General Wainwright remained a POW until 1945. As a sort of consolation for the massive defeat he suffered, he was present on the USS Missouri for the formal Japanese surrender ceremony on September 2, 1945. He would also be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor by President Harry Truman;
1954 – In Oxford, England, 25-year-old medical student Roger Bannister cracks track and field’s most notorious barrier: the four-minute mile. Bannister, who was running for the Amateur Athletic Association against his alma mater, Oxford University, won the mile race with a time of 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds;
1960 – President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the Civil Rights Act of 1960;
1962 – During the (first) Cold War, in the first test of its kind, the submerged submarine USS Ethan Allen fired a Polaris missile armed with a nuclear warhead that was detonated above the Pacific Ocean;
1970 – During the Vietnam War, back home in the United States, hundreds of colleges and universities across the nation shut down as thousands of students join a nationwide campus protest. Governor Ronald Reagan closed down the entire California university and college system until May 11, which affected more than 280,000 students on 28 campuses. Elsewhere, faculty and administrators joined students in active dissent and 536 campuses were shut down completely, 51 for the rest of the academic year. A National Student Association spokesman reported students from more than 300 campuses were boycotting classes. The protests were a reaction to the shooting of four students at Kent State University by National Guardsmen during a campus demonstration about President Nixon’s decision to send U.S. and South Vietnamese troops into Cambodia. Four days later, a student rally at Jackson State College in Mississippi resulted in the death of two students and 12 wounded when police opened fire on a women’s dormitory;
1972 – In the Vietnam War, the remnants of South Vietnam’s 5th Division at An Loc continue to receive daily artillery battering from the communist forces surrounding the city as reinforcements fight their way from the south up Highway 13. The South Vietnamese had been under heavy attack since the North Vietnamese had launched their Nguyen Hue Offensive on March 30. The communists had mounted a massive invasion of South Vietnam with 14 infantry divisions and 26 separate regiments, more than 120,000 troops and approximately 1,200 tanks and other armored vehicles. The defenders suffered heavy casualties, including 2,300 dead or missing, but with the aid of U.S. advisers and American airpower, they managed to hold out against vastly superior odds until the siege was lifted on June 18;
1981 – Yale architecture student Maya Ying Lin was named winner of a competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial;
1991 – 51-year-old race car driver Harry Gant racks up his 12th National Association of Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) Winston Cup career victory in the Winston 500 in Talladega, Alabama. In doing so, Gant bettered his own record as the oldest man ever to win a NASCAR event. Gant retired as a driver at the end of the 1994 season and was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in April 2006;
1992 – After the end of the (first) Cold War, in an event steeped in symbolism, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev reviews the Cold War in a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri—the site of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech 46 years before. Gorbachev mixed praise for the end of the Cold War with some pointed criticisms of U.S. policy. Gorbachev declared that the end of the Cold War was the “shattering of the vicious circle into which we had driven ourselves” and a “victory for common sense, reason, democracy, and common human values.” In addressing the issue of who began the Cold War, Gorbachev admitted that the Soviet Union had made some serious mistakes, but also suggested that the United States and Great Britain shouldered part of the blame;
1994 – In a ceremony presided over by England’s Queen Elizabeth II and French President Francois Mitterand, a rail tunnel under the English Channel was officially opened, connecting Britain and the European mainland for the first time since the Ice Age. The channel tunnel, or “Chunnel,” connects Folkstone, England, with Sangatte, France, 31 miles away. The Chunnel cut travel time between England and France to a swift 35 minutes and eventually between London and Paris to two-and-a-half hours. As the world’s longest undersea tunnel, the Chunnel runs under water for 23 miles, with an average depth of 150 feet below the seabed. Each day, about 30,000 people, 6,000 cars and 3,500 trucks journey through the Chunnel on passenger, shuttle and freight trains. Freight traffic was suspended for six months after a fire broke out on a lorry in the tunnel in November 1996. Nobody was seriously hurt in the incident. In 1996, the American Society of Civil Engineers identified the tunnel as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World;
1994 – Former Arkansas state worker Paula Jones filed suit against President Bill Clinton, alleging he’d sexually harassed her in 1991. Jones reached a settlement with Clinton in November 1998;
2004 – President George W. Bush apologized for the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers, calling it “a stain on our country’s honor”; he rejected calls for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation;
2013 – Wal-Mart revenue exceeds that of Exxon Mobil, becoming the largest company by revenue on the Fortune 500 list;
2013 – Three women are rescued from a Cleveland, Ohio house where they had been imprisoned for many years by their abductor, 52-year-old Ariel Castro, an unemployed bus driver. The women—Michelle Knight, Amada Berry and Gina DeJesus—went missing separately between 2002 and 2004, when they were 21, 16 and 14 years old, respectively. Also rescued from the house was a 6-year-old girl born to Berry while she was being held captive and fathered by Castro. On July 26, 2013, in a deal that allowed Castro to avoid a possible death sentence, he pleaded guilty to more than 900 charges against him, including kidnapping, rape and aggravated murder (for causing Knight to miscarry). On August 1, a judge sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus 1,000 years. A month later, on September 3, Castro was found dead in his prison cell after hanging himself with a sheet;
2013 – It was one year ago Today!!!
One of Fifty Beautiful Pictures From Fifty States
Monte Sano State Park, Alabama
Sad because it’s only Tuesday and just so many more days before your next weekend? Take a minute to watch this and it’ll cheer you back up a bit!!! Click Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QZv70PG9eXM
To Close, It’s Time To
With a thought
To confess our sins means we do two things with our sin: 1) we recognize sin for what it is in God’s eyes and 2) we get rid of our secrets and are honest with another Christian about our weakness, vulnerabilities, failures, and sins. James’ language is powerful. He mentions that this confession doesn’t just bring forgiveness, it also brings healing.
That brings a verse
Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective.
– James 5:16
That offers a prayer
Holy Father, I have sinned. I now confess my own personal sin. I ask for your forgiveness and for your Spirit to strengthen me in overcoming temptation. I want to live for you and not let my sin, any sin, entangle me and draw me away from you. Through the mighty name of Jesus I pray. Amen
Until the next time – America, Bless GOD!!!
