Testing Now (Week 42)

A Columbus Day correction, plus: What's that in the night sky?

Or was it 1971?

In my Monday post, I mentioned that Columbus Day didn’t become a national holiday until 1937. My source was History.com. But Wikipedia disagrees. Its article on the holiday says that, for one thing, President Roosevelt made his proclamation in 1934, not 1937. It also says that this “did not lead to the modern federal holiday.” No, apparently it wasn’t until 1968 that President Lyndon Johnson signed legislation making Columbus Day an official holiday “to be effective beginning in 1971.”

I also should have mentioned that the first president to proclaim a Columbus Day (as a one-time national holiday) was President Benjamin Harrison in 1892. The event was meant to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s famous voyage, but it was also a political move as it followed a mob lynching of 11 Italian immigrants down in New Orleans. “The proclamation was part of a wider effort after the lynching incident to placate Italian Americans and ease diplomatic tensions with Italy,” Wikipedia says.

But that isn’t the kind of history you read The SciMark Report to learn about it, is it? Today, you want to know what’s testing and what DRTV history suggests will happen with those tests. Well, let’s see. It just so happens that I have an interesting industry history lesson for you…