Community Corner

Five Things to Know Today, Jan. 25

Guaranteed to tell you something you didn't know yesterday.

Welcome to Wednesday. Here are some things to know today.

The weather: Some sunshine with a high of about 64. There's a 30 percent chance of rain tonight or the wee hours of tomorrow and the low will be around 50.

Gas prices are little changed from yesterday, with the highest reported to www.georgiagasprices.com for Lilburn ranging from $3.41 (at Kroger, 4155 Lawrenceville Highway at Beaver Ruin, and eight other stations) to $3.46 (at Citgo, 4967 Lawrenceville Highway at Holly Ridge Drive).

Find out what's happening in Lilburn-Mountain Parkwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

It’s ringing. AT&T Corp. had already been around for 30 years and was still pushing for wider use of its technology when it made the first coast-to-coast phone call from Georgia’s Jekyll Island on this day in 1915. The company’s president, Theodore Vail, called Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant Thomas Watson in San Francisco. No word on what the call cost.

Burns Night. It’s the birthday of Scottish national poet Robert Burns, whose 18th century works including “A Red, Red Rose” and “To a Mouse” are still widely read and recited. Many fans follow a tradition of holding a Burns Supper or Burns Night to mark the occasion, with speeches, readings of his verse, and Scots food, notably the haggis, or sheep’s innards minced with oatmeal, onion and spices. Cheers!

Find out what's happening in Lilburn-Mountain Parkwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Rebellion. In the years after the American Revolutionary War, recession and war debts bedeviled ordinary people, many of them veterans of the war. In Massachusetts they petitioned the state government for debt relief but were turned down. Eventually hundreds of people formed popular militias calling themselves Regulators. From August 1786 they got into increasingly open armed conflict with the courts and state government in what came to be called Shay’s Rebellion, after Capt. Daniel Shay, a small-scale farmer. On Jan. 25, 1787, Shay’s militia and others tried to storm an armory for its stocks of clothes and equipment. They were beaten back and ultimately put down, but the rebellion helped sway the new country towards a stronger form of federal government to help maintain stability. It also prompted Thomas Jefferson to write, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”


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