1297: The Genovese warlord and leader of the Guelph* faction, Francesco Grimaldi, disguises himself as a monk and ingratiates his way into the fortress at the Rock of Monaco, capturing it along with his cousin Rainier I and a small group of armed men. He held the citadel for four years, and on his death in 1309 deeded it back to his cousin Rainier I, from whom the current Grimaldi ruling family is descended.
1349: A pogrom sweeps through the Jewish sector of Basil, Switzerland, triggered by a panic over the onset of Black Death in the city. The Jews provided a convenient scapegoat to explain forces that were beyond people’s control. Virtually the entire Jewish population of Basil is rounded up and taken to an island in the middle of the Rhine River, where the children are separated from their parents and forcibly baptized. The remaining Jews, more than 600 of them, are crammed into a specially built wooden barn, into which they are subsequently locked, and then burned alive. The Basil pogrom is the first of a series of pogroms that swept through the Rhine valley in subsequent months, with massacres occurring even in towns where there was no Black Death.
1412: Birth of Joan of Arc (d.1431), the young French girl who rallied French troops at the siege of Orleans and found herself martyred by the British who eventually captured her.
1527: The city government of Zurich arrests Felix Manz, co-founder of the Swiss Brethren Anabaptist movement (precursors to the Mennonites), and finds him guilty of heresy by his refusal to recant his demand for adult re-baptism after conversion.He suffers the prescribed punishment for the offense: death by drowning. The city authorities truss up his arms behind his back, tying them to a long stick lashed to his legs. They then row out into Lake Zurich and throw him over the side to his watery fate. Once dead, Zurich confiscated all his property, and buried his body in a local cemetery. Manz becomes the first martyr of the Radical Reformation, the movement that believed the Reformation was not moving fast enough or far enough. The irony of his death at the hands of other Protestants should not be lost.
1536: Death of Catherine of Aragon (b.1485)Henry VIII’s first wife, and mother of his first heir to the English throne.
1540: Henry VIII marries his fourth wife, Ann of Cleaves, a German princess whom he admired politically, but whom he found repellent physically. Their marriage was never consummated, and after four months was annulled. Ann remained in England, taking the title of Beloved Sister of the King, and was, in fact, beloved by the mercurial king as a friend and confidant until his death. She had the satisfaction of outliving all of his other wives, and the man himself.
1610: Galileo makes his first telescopic observation of the moons of Jupiter.
1642: England’s King Charles I, surrounds himself with soldiers and enters into the Parliament Chamber to arrest key Members, all of whom slipped away before the arrest could be made. The act is widely considered the opening act of the English Civil War.
1735: Birth of John Jervis, 1st Earl St. Vincent, one of the Royal Navy’s greatest commanders, and primary mentor of Horatio Nelson.
1759: Virginia planter and surveyor George Washington exchanges nuptial vows with Martha Dandridge Custis.
1778: Birth of explorer Zebulon Pike (d.1813).
1790: Under the requirement of Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, President George Washington delivers his first State of the Union address to Congress, at the time meeting in the temporary capitol in New York City.
1806: A massive State Funeral is conducted for Horatio Lord Nelson, killed at the Battle of Trafalgar on the 21st of October. More than 10,000 sailors surged into London to escort his casket* from lying in state at Greenwich to the service at St Paul’s Cathedral, where he was entombed.
1809: Birth of Louis Braille (d.1852), blinded in an accident as a child, Braille developed an alternative alphabet that enabled the blind to “read” with their sense of touch.
1815: Led by General Andrew Jackson, American forces decisively defeat an invading British force at the Battle of New Orleans, the largest and final land battle of the war of 1812, fought a month after the formal conclusion of peace at the Treaty of Ghent on December 24th. The lopsided victory helped propel Jackson into a political career that eventually led to the Presidency. The U.S. suffered 333 casualties (55 dead) against the British 2459 (386 dead).
1873: Death of Napoleon III (b.1808), nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the only French leader to carry the titles of both Emperor and President of the Republic.
1884: In London, founding of the Fabian Society, a collection of intellectuals who sought to create a socialist society by all means short of violent revolution. The named themselves after the Roman General Fabius, who used delaying tactics and attrition to wear down and defeat Carthaginian General Hannibal. The Fabians function as a left-wing think tank today, closely aligned with Britain’s Labour Party.
1895: Birth of the pioneering aeronautical engineer and industrialist Leroy Grumman (d.1989) whose company built some of the most legendary aircraft in U.S. Navy history, including the F-6F Hellcat of WWII fame, and the A-6 Intruder and F-14 Tomcat that spearheaded Naval Aviation during the Cold War.
1903: Death of Topsy the Elephant (b.(c)1870), electrocuted by Thomas Edison, using alternating current (part of the AC-DC “electricity wars” at the dawn of the electrical age). The circus elephant had in the preceding year killed three men and grievously wounded another, and the circus was concerned how to safely put her down. Edison fed her a dose of 460 grams of potassium cyanide prior to sending 6,600 volts of electricity into her. She died in seconds, witnessed by around 1,500 people. Edison also made a short movie of the event.
1905: Russian workers, infuriated by the slow pace of reform and brought to a fever pitch of discontent by communist agitators, storm the Czar’s Winter Palace in a short, sharp action now known as the Revolution of 1905. Order is restored by Czarist soldiers, but at the cost of scores of civilian lives. This short revolution resulted in the establishment of both a constitutional monarchy and of a Duma (representative assembly), and reforms to conscription and workers rights. The fact that changes could actually be forced on the sclerotic Russian government opened the door for further agitation, particularly from the nascent communist movements.
1909: The South American nation of Columbia recognizes the independence of its breakaway province, Panama.
1909: The Great White Fleet of the U.S. Navy transits the Suez Canal, marking ¾ of its politico-military circumnavigation of the globe.
1914: Industrialist Henry Ford announces that Ford Motor Company will initiate an 8-hour work day, with a minimum wage of $5.00 per day.
1918: In his State of the Union message, President Woodrow Wilson introduces his 14 Points to guide postwar international relations, ten months before the actual armistice which halted the fighting. The Points will form the basis for the Versailles peace negotiations in the aftermath of The World War. I won’t go over all of them, but will highlight here several of the points that tend to come up from time to time:
1) “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at…” laying down the ideal of complete openness in international negotiations;
2) Absolute freedom of navigation on the high seas, with a caveat about closures in support of international covenants. Great Britain objected to the exception clause, and as the U.S. maritime power increased, we adopted the British position;
3) Free trade between nations as a foundation of peaceful relations.
The majority of the other points concerned disposition of territories displaced by the war, with final lines drawn under the principle of national self-determination, a term which came into prominence during the Conference. The 14th point opened the discussion of an international organization to enforce the peace.
1933: Construction begins on the Golden Gate Bridge, connecting San Francisco to Marin County, California.
1940: The army of Finland completely halts a Soviet offensive along the Raate-Soumussalu Road. The Winter War, unfortunately for Finland, their opposition to Russian aggression put them on the same “side” as Nazi Germany, even though they never formed a formal alliance with Germany.
1942: The Japanese army, having swept virtually all of the Philippine Islands under its control in less than two months, opens its final siege on the remaining American forces on the Bataan Peninsula.
1947: Pan American Airlines begins scheduling full around-the-world service.
1964: In his first State of the Union message, President Lyndon Johnson declares a “War on Poverty” that will eventually metastasize into the Great Society program he introduced the following year.
1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson gives his State of the Union speech, in which he announces a legislative program he dubs “The Great Society.” Johnson insisted this massive expansion of federal social programs could be accomplished simultaneously with massive expansion of U.S. engagement in the Vietnam War, a guns-AND-butter decision that set the country on an unsustainable financial course that now appears to be reaching the end of its viability.
1973: Opening arguments in the case of the nine Watergate conspirators.
1974: In response to the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, the U.S. government mandates Daylight Savings Time to begin four months earlier than normal.
1980: President Jimmy Carter signs a $1,500,000,000 bailout of Chrysler Corporation.
1989: Two F-14 Tomcats flying from the USS Nimitz (CVN-68), intercept and shoot down two Libyan MiG-23 Floggers in international airspace over the Gulf of Sidra.
2005: The nuclear powered attack submarine USS San Francisco (SSN-711), making a high speed submerged transit in Pacific Ocean waters south of Guam, slams- at flank speed- into an un-charted seamount, crushing the sonar dome and bow compartment, and flinging crewmen against equipment and bulkheads as she comes to a sudden stop. The pressure hull is not breached, and the crew manages to get the ship to the surface despite the sudden loss of her forward ballast tank. One sailor was killed, and dozens injured with broken bones and lacerations. At the shipyard in Guam, the ship is fitted with a temporary bow and forward ballast tank in order to make a safe transit back to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, where her entire bow section was removed and replaced with the bow section of the newly decommissioned USS Honolulu (SSN-718).
2021: Just two weeks away from becoming the former president, Donald J. Trump holds a campaign rally on the Ellipse just outside the White House gates. He regales the several thousands in attendance with a recitation of his complaints about the conduct and outcome of the presidential election back in November, and encourages the crowd to “peacefully” walk over to the Capitol- where the electoral votes are being formally tallied- and let the Congress know what they think about it. They do, and the excitement builds until the overwhelmed Capitol Police simply pull aside the barricades and tell the protesters to be careful inside the building. The event quickly roils out of control, and despite the preternatural quiet from the White House, police finally begin to disperse the crowd and arrest hundreds of the more, most of whom by this point (2024) have been tried and convicted of multiple disorderly conduct charges. The president is subject to a second (ad hoc, chaotic, over-wrought and poorly thought out) impeachment by the House, he dodges the bullet again, this time by two votes. None of the convicted rioters, nor the former president himself, have been charged with “insurrection” from the Capitol riot. There’s a reason for that, and it should be a source of encouragement that our legal system, and the responsible souls in multiple departments of justice who administer it, understand that the word means much more than frightening congressional staffers and putting your feet on the Speaker’s desk. Once the mob was dispersed from the building, Congress re-convened and completed their electoral count. The Vice President then signed off on the results, they went into the Congressional Record, and two weeks later a new President was inaugurated on the Capitol steps.
About the Author
Why do you say richly deserving ?
Apparently you haven’t figured out that this worked against the Democrats in the current election. He is reelected by a majority from the people.
Editor’s Note: Agreed, poor choice of words, and bad editing on the Mirror’s part.