Today’s Notable Birthdays and Events
U. S. Birthday
Lyndon Johnson – 36th President of the United States
Lyndon Baines Johnson (August 27, 1908 – January 22, 1973), often referred to as LBJ, served as the 36th President of the United States from 1963 to 1969 after his service as the Vice President of the United States from 1961 to 1963.
Johnson, a Democrat, succeeded to the presidency following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, completed Kennedy’s term and was elected President in his own right, winning by a large margin in the 1964 Presidential election. Johnson was greatly supported by the Democratic Party and, as President, was responsible for designing the “Great Society” legislation that included laws that upheld civil rights, Medicare, Medicaid, aid to education, and his attempt to help the poor in his “War on Poverty.” Simultaneously, he greatly escalated direct American involvement in the Vietnam War.
Georg Hegel – Influential writer of modern Western dialectical philosophy.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher, and along with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, one of the creators of German idealism.
Hegel influenced writers of widely varying positions, including both his admirers (Bauer, Feuerbach, Marx, Bradley, Dewey, Sartre, Küng, Kojève, Žižek), and his detractors (Schelling, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Peirce, Russell). Hegel developed a comprehensive philosophical framework, or “system”, to account in an integrated and developmental way for the relation of mind and nature, the subject and object of knowledge, and psychology, the state, history, art, religion, and philosophy. In particular, he developed a concept of mind or spirit that manifested itself in a set of contradictions and oppositions that it ultimately integrated and united, such as those between nature and freedom, and immanence and transcendence, without eliminating either pole or reducing it to the other. His influential conceptions are of speculative logic or “dialectic,” “absolute idealism,” “Spirit,” negativity, sublation (Aufhebung in German), the “Master/Slave” dialectic, “ethical life,” and the importance of history.
U. S. Contemporaries: Revolutionary War Cycle – Compromise Generation – Artist (Adaptive) (1767-1791)
Today’s Memorable U. S. Event
The First Oil Well – In the late 1850s Seneca Oil Company (formerly the Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company) sent Col. Edwin L. Drake, to start drilling on a piece of leased land just south of Titusville, Pennsylvania near what is now Oil Creek State Park. Drake hired a salt well driller, William A. Smith, in the summer of 1859. They had many difficulties, but on August 27 at the site of an oil spring just south of Titusville, they finally drilled a well that could be commercially successful. This is considered to be the first commercial well in the United States.
Civil War Cycle – Era of Slavery Expansion – Third Turning, Unraveling (1838-1859)