TODAY IN HISTORY: JUNE 4

June 4 1876: Express train crossed the nation in 83 hours
A mere 83 hours after leaving New York City, the Transcontinental Express train arrived in San Francisco. That any human being could travel across the entire nation in less than four days was inconceivable to previous generations of Americans. During the early 19th century, when Thomas Jefferson first dreamed of an American nation stretching from “sea to shining sea,” it took the president 10 days to travel the 225 miles from Monticello to Philadelphia via carriage. Even with frequent changing of horses, the 100-mile journey from New York to Philadelphia demanded two days hard travel in a light stagecoach. At such speeds, the coasts of the continent-wide American nation were months apart. How could such a vast country ever hope to remain united?

As early as 1802, Jefferson had some glimmer of an answer. “The introduction of so powerful an agent as steam,” he predicted, “[to a carriage on wheels] will make a great change in the situation of man.” Though Jefferson never saw a train in his lifetime, he had glimpsed the future with the idea. Within half a century, America would have more railroads than any other nation in the world. By 1869, the first transcontinental line linking the coasts was completed. Suddenly, a journey that had previously taken months using horses could be made in less than a week.

Five days after the transcontinental railroad was completed, daily passenger service over the rails began. The speed and comfort offered by rail travel was so astonishing that many Americans could scarcely believe it, and popular magazines wrote glowing accounts of the amazing journey. For the wealthy, a trip on the transcontinental railroad was a luxurious experience. First-class passengers rode in beautifully appointed cars with plush velvet seats that converted into snug sleeping berths. The finer amenities included steam heat, fresh linen daily, and gracious porters who catered to their every whim. For an extra $4 a day, the wealthy traveler could opt to take the weekly Pacific Hotel Express, which offered first-class dining on board. As one happy passenger wrote, “The rarest and richest of all my journeying through life is this three-thousand miles by rail.”

The trip was a good deal less speedy and comfortable for passengers unwilling or unable to pay the premium fares. Whereas most of the first-class passengers traveled the transcontinental line for business or pleasure, the third-class occupants were often emigrants hoping to make a new start in the West. A third-class ticket could be purchased for only $40–less than half the price of the first-class fare. At this low rate, the traveler received no luxuries. Their cars, fitted with rows of narrow wooden benches, were congested, noisy, and uncomfortable. The railroad often attached the coach cars to freight cars that were constantly shunted aside to make way for the express trains. Consequently, the third-class traveler’s journey west might take 10 or more days. Even under these trying conditions, few travelers complained. Even 10 days spent sitting on a hard bench seat was preferable to six months walking alongside a Conestoga wagon on the Oregon Trail.

Railroad promotions, however, naturally focused on the speedy express trains. The arrival of the Transcontinental Express train in San Francisco on this day in 1876 was widely celebrated in the newspapers and magazines of the day. With this new express service, a businessman could leave New York City on Monday morning, spend 83 hours in relaxing comfort, and arrive refreshed and ready for work in San Francisco by Thursday evening. The powerful agent of steam had effectively shrunk a vast nation to a manageable size.

June 4 1969

Joseph-Désiré Mobutu's troops killed over 100 students during a demonstration in the Congolese capital Kinshasa.

June 4 1973

Over four thousand French troops were to be withdrawn from Madagascar at the request of Gabriel Ramanantsoa, the head of the however imposed military government.

June 4 1975

Severe drought was reported in Ethiopia, over 800,00 people were in urgent need of supplies.

June 4 1975: Angelina Jolie was born

On this day in 1975, the Academy Award-winning actress Angelina Jolie (Voight) was born in Los Angeles, California.

Jolie’s father, the actor Jon Voight, had been nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for Midnight Cowboy (1969); he won the award for Coming Home (1978). Her mother, Marcheline Bertrand, was also an actress; the couple divorced when Angelina was still an infant. As a young girl, Jolie worked as a model and appeared with her father in the 1982 film Lookin’ to Get Out. She later studied acting at the famed Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and New York University. After appearing in a small role in Cyborg 2 (1993), Jolie landed a sizeable part in the better-known Hackers (1995), which co-starred the British actor Jonny Lee Miller. Jolie and Miller married that year but split in 1997 and later divorced.

After a string of forgettable films, Jolie was nominated for an Emmy and won a Golden Globe for her role as the wife of the segregationist Alabama governor, in the television movie George Wallace. She earned another Emmy nod the following year for her portrayal of the troubled bisexual model Gia Carangi in the TV biopic Gia. Suddenly very much in demand, Jolie landed roles in higher-profile big-screen projects such as Playing By Heart (1998), Pushing Tin (1999) and The Bone Collector (1999).

It was Jolie’s mesmerizing turn as the charismatic sociopath Lisa in Girl, Interrupted, however, that catapulted her to A-list Hollywood stardom. She won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the role, and characteristically raised eyebrows by locking lips with her older brother, James Haven, at the 2000 Oscar ceremony. That May, Jolie again generated a flurry of headlines when she wed Billy Bob Thornton, her much older, four-times-married co-star in Pushing Tin (1999), in a quickie ceremony in Las Vegas. Later in 2000, Jolie starred in the fast-paced hit Gone in Sixty Seconds and the thriller Original Sin. During a brief reconciliation with her father, the two appeared together in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), a blockbuster action film in which Jolie performed the majority of her own stunts. Despite poor reviews, Tomb Raider and its 2003 sequel were both huge box-office hits. Less successful was the romantic comedy-drama Life or Something Like It (2002).

The press painted a vivid picture of Jolie and Thornton’s eccentric devotion to each other, including the fact that they wore vials of each other’s blood around their necks. Still, Jolie filed for divorce in mid-2002. By that time, she had been appointed a goodwill ambassador by the United Nations, having first made goodwill trips while researching her role as an aid worker in 2003’ Beyond Borders. She also adopted a son, Maddox, from Cambodia.

In April 2004, Jolie began filming Mr. & Mrs. Smith, in which she and Brad Pitt played a married couple who are secretly both hired assassins. Rumors soon began flying about their off-screen romantic involvement, and only intensified after Pitt and his wife Jennifer Aniston announced their separation in January 2005. Two months after his divorce from Aniston was finalized, Pitt petitioned to adopt Maddox and Jolie’s daughter Zahara (adopted in June 2005 in Ethiopia). In January 2006, during a visit to the Dominican Republic, the now-official couple–dubbed “Brangelina” by the press–announced that Jolie was pregnant. Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt was born that May in Namibia. Jolie adopted another son, Pax Thien, from an orphanage in Vietnam in March 2007; she gave birth to twins, Knox Leon and Vivienne Marcheline, in France in July 2008.

Though her film career often seemed to take a backseat in the headlines to her globetrotting lifestyle and ever-expanding family (not to mention her romance with the equally photogenic Pitt), Jolie continued to work steadily in films, notably in the spy drama The Good Shepherd (2006) and A Mighty Heart (2007), in which she played Mariane Pearl, the wife of a Wall Street Journal reporter who was killed by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. In 2008, she starred in the summer action film Wanted and the crime drama Changeling, directed by Clint Eastwood.

June 4 1978

Despite the official announcement of the end of the Shaba War by the Zairian government, Moroccan troops were to be airlifted in to help peace keeping efforts.

June 4 1979

Balthazar Johannes Vorster, non-executive president of South Africa, resigned after only eight months in office (he had previously been prime minister for 12 years). Ill health and the on-going exposure of the 'Information Scandal' were given as the reason for his departure.

June 4 1989: Tiananmen Square massacre took place

Chinese troops storm through Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing, killing and arresting thousands of pro-democracy protesters. The brutal Chinese government assault on the protesters shocked the West and brought denunciations and sanctions from the United States.

In May 1989, nearly a million Chinese, mostly young students, crowded into central Beijing to protest for greater democracy and call for the resignations of Chinese Communist Party leaders deemed too repressive. For nearly three weeks, the protesters kept up daily vigils, and marched and chanted. Western reporters captured much of the drama for television and newspaper audiences in the United States and Europe. On June 4, 1989, however, Chinese troops and security police stormed through Tiananmen Square, firing indiscriminately into the crowds of protesters. Turmoil ensued, as tens of thousands of the young students tried to escape the rampaging Chinese forces. Other protesters fought back, stoning the attacking troops and overturning and setting fire to military vehicles. Reporters and Western diplomats on the scene estimated that at least 300, and perhaps thousands, of the protesters had been killed and as many as 10,000 were arrested.

The savagery of the Chinese government’s attack shocked both its allies and Cold War enemies. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared that he was saddened by the events in China. He said he hoped that the government would adopt his own domestic reform program and begin to democratize the Chinese political system. In the United States, editorialists and members of Congress denounced the Tiananmen Square massacre and pressed for President George Bush to punish the Chinese government. A little more than three weeks later, the U.S. Congress voted to impose economic sanctions against the People’s Republic of China in response to the brutal violation of human rights.

Source: history.com, africanhistory.about.com