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Scholz & Friends: "Dramatic shift in marketing reality" from Michael Reissinger on Vimeo

Tonight is Midsummer Night's Eve, also called St. John's Eve. St. John is the patron saint of beekeepers. It's a time when the hives are full of honey. The full moon that occurs this month was called the Mead Moon, because honey was fermented to make mead. That's where the word "honeymoon" comes from.

It's a time for lovers. An old Swedish proverb says, "Midsummer Night is not long but it sets many cradles rocking." Midsummer dew was said to have special healing powers. Women washed their faces in it to make themselves beautiful and young.

It was on this day in 1945 that the U.S. army entered the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. At the time, there had been reports of concentration camps from the field, but no Americans had seen the camps for themselves. The American soldiers who arrived at Buchenwald on this day in 1945 would become the first Western observers of one of the worst atrocities in human history.

Several of the soldiers carried Kodak cameras, and so they took photographs of the surviving prisoners and the dead, so that people would believe what they had seen. Their photographs showed human beings so emaciated that they could barely walk, and victims' bodies stacked around the camp like piles of wood.

One of the children liberated at the camp that day was a teenager named Elie Wiesel, who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He had been forced to march from Auschwitz to Buchenwald a few weeks earlier, and his father had recently died in the camp. In the weeks before the liberation, Wiesel had stopped going to get his food rations, had given up on living. And then, on this day in 1945, Wiesel saw American jeeps rolling into the camps. In his memoir All the Rivers Run to the Sea, Wiesel wrote, "I will never forget the American soldiers and the horror that could be read in their faces. I will especially remember one black sergeant, a muscled giant, who wept tears of impotent rage and shame... . We tried to lift him onto our shoulders to show our gratitude, but we didn't have the strength. We were too weak to even applaud him."

On this day in 1968, the civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a rifleman while standing on the second-story balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He had come to Tennessee to support a strike by the city's sanitation workers. The night before he died, he gave a speech at the Memphis Temple Church in which he said, "I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land."

It was on this day in 1941 that Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor. There were ultimately 2,390 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor and 1,178 wounded.

It's the birthday of the linguist and political analyst Noam Chomsky, born in Philadelphia (1928). Though he's best known today for his leftist political writings, he's also known as the father of modern linguistics.

He grew up during the Great Depression, and growing up with poverty all around him left a deep impression. He said, "My earliest memories are of seeing people coming to the door selling rags; and in a trolley car with my mother, I saw people beating up women strikers outside a textile factory." His father was a Ukrainian immigrant and a famous Hebrew scholar. His family was one of the only Jewish families in the neighborhood, and he was surrounded by anti-Semitism. Some of his neighbors actually threw pro-Nazi beer parties in the late 1930s. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, on his 13th birthday, his neighbors suddenly began to hate the Nazis, and Chomsky was fascinated by how quickly they could change their political sympathies.