On August 15

On this day in ...
... 1939 (70 years ago today), The Wizard of Oz premiered at the Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, California. This IntLawGrrl grew up loving the movie as a perennial Easter TV treat -- and did not discover till her college arthouse days that halfway through, Dorothy's adventure switches from B&W to amazing "Over the Rainbow" Technicolor! (credit for photo, from film's trailer, of Judy Garland playing Dorothy)
... 1924 (85 years ago today), Phyllis McAlpin Stewart was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She went to Catholic schools, worked as a model, and earned a master's degree from Radcliffe and her bachelor's and law degrees from Washington University. Best known by the name she took after marriage, Phyllis Schlafly (left) has been involved in politics since her 1st unsuccessful run for Congress in 1952. By 1964 she was a Barry Goldwater devotee, and has since remained a vocal member of the conservative wing, as this list of her recent columns shows.

(Prior August 15 posts are here and here.)

On October 26, ...

... 1947 (60 years ago today), Hillary Diane Rodham (right) was born in Chicago to a businessman and a homemaker. Growing up in a conservative household in suburban Park Ridge, she was a Goldwater Girl inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr. As a student at Yale Law School, she met the man whom she would marry and with whom she would move to Arkansas, where he served twice as Governor. A Senator from New York since 2001, Hillary Clinton was 1st Lady during Bill Clinton's tenure as U.S. President. She is now seeking to succeed her husband as the next Democrat to serve as President of the United States.
... 1977 (30 years ago today), smallpox struck for the last time, as "a hospital cook in Merka, Somalia" contracted "variola minor." The case marked the final eradication of smallpox, and a victory for a concerted campaign of vaccination.

On September 13, ...

... 1993, the Oslo Accords on the Middle East were announced at the White House. A "Declaration of Principles on Palestinian self-government in Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank" was signed by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian Liberation Organization foreign policy aide Mahmoud Abbas. Onlookers included their superiors, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Yasir Arafat, as well as past and present U.S. Presidents. Despite initial successes, the Accords failed to achieve peace in the region.
... 1948, Maine voters elected Margaret Chase Smith (left), then a Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, to the Senate, where she served 24 years, following the death of the incumbent, her husband Clyde. She became the 1st woman to serve in both houses of Congress; her aims were higher, though, as indicated by this note from the website of the Margaret Chase Smith Library:

Senator Smith came to national attention on June 1, 1950, when she became the first member of the Senate to denounce the tactics used by colleague Joseph McCarthy in his anticommunist crusade. Following her "Declaration of Conscience" speech, some pundits speculated that she might be the vice-presidential candidate on the 1952 Republican ticket. The opportunity, however, never materialized. In 1964, Senator Smith pursued her own political ambitions, running in several Republican presidential primaries. She took her candidacy all the way to the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, where she became the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for the presidency by either of the two majority parties. In the final balloting, Smith refused to withdraw and so wound up coming in second to the Republican nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater.