The Thursday Quiz XX

The Thursday Quiz!

The Thursday Quiz is an "Is It or Isn't It" game. From the list of twelve items, your job is to determine whether each IS or ISN'T a true example of the week's category.

Remember always Article VII of the Constitution:

No research, Googling, Wikiing, or use of reference books. The Thursday
Quiz is a POP quiz. Violators will be stripped of their citizenship.

This Week's Category is closer to home, if you happen to live in the United States of America:

Real and Bogus: American History

Significant events, all of them. The question is, which ones went down more or less as they are described here?

1. Battle of Red Cliffs – In 1856, 600 soldiers of the U.S. Calvary, along with their horses, supplies, and ammunition, are traveling the upper Missouri on a flotilla of rafts, which are all lashed together for stability. As the river passes thorough a narrow canyon, a group of Lakota Sioux launch burning boats into the Calvary rafts, setting them ablaze. In the resulting chaos, all but six of the U.S. soldiers are killed or taken prisoner. The victory will preserve the independence of the Lakota for another decade, but will be their last major military success.

2. The California Republic – In the summer of 1846, a couple dozen American hotheads in Northern California make a flag with a bear on it and declare California's independence from Mexico. They cancel their project a few weeks later, when news arrives that the U.S. has declared war on Mexico and is obviously going to be absorbing California in the near future anyway.

3. "Dewey Defeats Truman" – Misled by public opinion polls, the Chicago Tribune prematurely announces Thomas Dewey as the landslide winner of the 1948 presidential election. The real winner, Harry Truman, ends up with one of the best photo ops of the century. Oddly, polls continue to be treated as if they were relevant.

4. The Ford Administration – Public outrage over the Watergate Scandal fuels a landslide victory for Gerald Ford over rival George McGovern in the 1974 election. Although he presides over a period of great economic growth in the United States, Ford's popularity plunges when he appears unable to mount a response to the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Iran by student radicals. Acknowledging his own likelihood of defeat, he chooses not to run for reelection.

5. Hawley-Smoot Tariff – In a characteristically clever 1930 reaction to the onset of the Depression, the Hoover administration enacts a stiff increase in tariffs in order to protect American manufacturers. The predictable retaliatory tariff hikes enacted by other countries kills the global market for American export manufacturers and pretty much guarantees that the Depression will be around for many years to come.

6. James K. Polk – The eleventh President (1845-1849) is seen by some historians as one of the most successful. In four shorts years he met his every goal: He seized the whole Southwest from Mexico, made sure the tariffs fell, and made the British sell the Oregon Territory. He built an independent treasury. Having done all this, he sought no second term.

7. Millard Fillmore – Fillmore is generally thought to have won the 1884 election solely on the strength of what, in a later era, would have been his movie-star good looks. However, Americans quickly realized they had elected a man of little substance. Corruption and incompetence, culminating in the infamous "Teapot Dome" scandal, plagued his administration, and the concerns of office sapped his health. His death in a riding accident six months after leaving office is widely considered to have been suicide.

8. Passage of The Twenty-Eighth Amendment – In the flurry of political reaction to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center buildings in 2001, numerous federal agencies, policies, and practices are reworked or reorganized. The change reaches the Constitutional level in the autumn of 2002, as the 28th Amendment, creating the Department of Homeland Security, is ratified by the necessary ¾ of the state legislatures in just a month and a half – making it by several years the fastest passage ever of a Constitutional amendment.

9. Pullman Strike – An 1894 pay cut for workers at America's largest manufacturer of rail passenger cars triggers a strike and lockout; many railroad workers quickly join sympathy strikes and work stoppages. With the economy, completely dependent on rail transport, at risk, President Cleveland uses the U.S. Army to break up the strike. The showdown demonstrates the growing power of the labor movement, but also the power of the establishment to resist its demands.

10. Shay's Rebellion – In the waning days of the Civil War, Tennessee governor James Shay sees the writing on the wall and "rebels" from the Confederacy back to the union in late 1864. As a result, Tennessee escapes much of the misery experienced by the rest of the South during the post-war years.

11. Whiskey Rebellion – With the new central government of the United States still establishing itself 1788, settlers in the Whiskey River basin of western Virginia, still loyal to the British crown, petition London to be chartered as a British colony. Federal troops led by Thomas Jefferson himself lead a brief siege of the valley, and the rebels submit to the new regime with no loss of life.

12. The XYZ Affair – With French-American relations deteriorating, an American delegation visits Paris in 1797 to negotiate a peaceful settlement. The delegation is not allowed to even speak to the French foreign minister without first paying a substantial bribe. They refuse and return home; subsequently, the United States and France enter an undeclared state of war, fighting numerous naval battles in the Caribbean and Atlantic over the next three years.

Submit your answers to L&TM5K Quiz Headquarters, located here in the beautiful United States of America, in the comments.