1468: Death of Johannes Gutenberg (b.1398), who invented re-usable, movable type for printing presses, launching an information revolution. In 1455 he published his first major project, the Holy Bible, of which about 180 were produced.
1488: Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz lands at Mossel Bay in what is now South Africa, becoming the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope and sail into the Indian Ocean.
1756: Birth of Aaron Burr (d.1836), one of the key second-level leaders of the American Revolution: soldier, New York politician, and Thomas Jefferson’s Vice President. Best remembered today for the duel he fought with former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who died of his wounds.
1793: Death of New England farmer Samuel Whittemore (b.1696), who, at age 78 was the eldest of the original cadre of Massachusetts militia who fought the British Regulars on their retrograde from the battles of Lexington and Concord on 19th April, 1775. Shot, bayonetted, beaten, and left for dead, he recovered from his wounds and lived to the ripe old age of 96.
1794: From the French Revolution the National Assembly abolishes slavery throughout the territories of the French Republic.
1812: Russian trappers and traders settlers establish Fort Ross on the coast of Northern California, about an hour up the coast from my hometown in Marin County. The site is on a windswept bluff above a small cove, and over the years some very accurate reproductions of the palisades and buildings have been built. Interesting to consider how far south, and how recently, the Russians operated down our western shoreline.
1839: Birth of German aviation pioneer Hugo Junkers (d.1935), whose airplanes include: JU-87 dive bomber, JU-88 multi-role fighter; JU-89 heavy bomber.
1865: After passage in the House of Representatives, President Abraham Lincoln signs a bill for the 13th Amendment, ending involuntary servitude in the United States, and sends it to the Several States for ratification. Illinois ratified it the same day, and 10 others followed suit in the first week. Ratification came into force in December, 1865. To date, 36 states have formally ratified the amendment, the latest being Mississippi in March of 1995.
1869: In Victoria, Australia, discovery of the largest single piece of natural gold in history, the “Welcome Stranger” alluvial nugget. The piece weighed in at 2,283 ounces (142.7 pounds), and measured roughly 24 x 12 inches. It was discovered by Cornish miners Richard Oates and John Deason, who eventually were paid just under 9,500 pounds sterling for their efforts.
1885: Belgian King Leopold II establishes Congo Free State as his personal possession, managed by the International African Association, of which he was the sole director and shareholder. The association thence began a systematic exploitation of the Congo River basin’s natural resources, which in short order made Leopold a very, very rich man. It also made him responsible for the systematic exploitation and abuse of Congo’s human resources, creating a system of forced labor that pitted white against black in an increasingly destructive spiral of abuse and brutality unequaled in the colonial world. An illustrative example is the contemporary collage (below) of African workers who failed to meet their rubber harvesting quotas being punished by the loss of their hands. By 1908, pressure from the reform movement essentially forced the Belgian government to annex Congo Free State as the Belgian Congo, thus making it (and its overseers) subject to the laws of Belgium rather than the king’s commercial interests.
1887: Punxsutawney Phil sees or doesn’t see his shadow for the first time.
1895: Birth of the Babe, George Herman Ruth, Jr. (d.1948), the great slugger for the New York Yankees.
1899: Only months after our prying the islands from Spanish colonial rule, Philippine nationalists rebel against nascent American rule, opening the Philippine Insurrection. The war officially lasts through July, 1902, but at that point the rebellion simply moved underground, becoming a terrorist movement that simmered and flared for two more years. In April, 1904, the Moro Rebellion broke into open warfare against American occupation forces, becoming a bitter jungle war lasting through June, 1913.
1899: The U.S. Senate ratifies the Treaty of Paris, formally ending the “Splendid Little War” between Spain and the United States.
1902: Birth of Charles Lindbergh (d.1974).
1906: Birth of American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh (d.1997), whose search for “Planet X” came to fruition on the 18thof February, 1930. Tombaugh grew up on a farm in Kansas. He became interested in astronomy as a teenager after observing craters on the moon and rings around Saturn through his uncle’s three inch telescope. The family soon ordered a better telescope to encourage their son’s interests. When he was 20, Clyde Tombaugh began building his own telescopes.
By 1928 Tombaugh had built his third backyard telescope and used it to make drawings of Mars and Jupiter. He sent these to Vesto M. Slipher, the director of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, asking for comments. After a short correspondence, Slipher offered him a job at the observatory. His task would be to search for “Planet X.” Planet X had been predicted by Percival Lowell. After months of searching, he had found several asteroids, but nothing that fit the criteria for Planet X. Finally, in February 1930, while scanning the plates he had taken a few weeks earlier, he saw something that moved. He determined that the object had moved about 3 mm on the plates between the two exposures, indicating an orbital distance of about 40-43 AU, putting it outside the orbit of Neptune at about the right place to be the predicted planet. Tombaugh told Slipher he had found Planet X, and on March 13, 1930. Later that month the object was officially named Pluto, after the Roman god of the underworld, who could make himself invisible. The name was suggested by an 11 year old girl in England. Pluto’s mass was not known until 1978, when its moon Charon was discovered. Pluto’s mass is about 0.002 that of Earth, making it much too small to influence the orbit of Neptune. Ultimately, Pluto lost its planet status.
1906: Birth of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (d.1945), whose incisive observations on the nature of the Christian in civil society are cited to this day. One of his core theses was the fight against what he called “cheap grace,” a philosophy that fails to comprehend the extraordinary price paid for God’s real gift of grace. He was an outspoken leader of the German church resistance to the Nazi movement. Bonhoeffer was arrested in April of 1943 as part of bureaucratic infighting between the Abwher (of which he was an agent, and active participant in plots against Hitler) and the SS. After multiple prison transfers, he stood before a kangaroo court, was found guilty, and was executed by hanging only three weeks before the end of the war.
1913: Final ratification of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, the full text of which reads: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”
1913: Birth of civil rights activist Rosa Parks (d.2005), whose refusal, in December of 1955, to sit in the back of the bus finally sparked the kind of widespread outrage that led to the burgeoning and ultimately successful civil rights movement.
1917: The United States breaks diplomatic relations with Imperial Germany, the day after the Germans announce resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in the waters surrounding Great Britain.
1919: Silent movie stars Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin join with director D.W. Griffith to create United Artists, the first comprehensive movie production studio. The studio has gone through a number of ownership and management re-shuffling over the years, and is currently headed by Tom Cruise. Of the hundreds of films produced and distributed by UA include The Great Dictator (1941), African Queen (1952), High Noon (1952), The Great Escape (1962), The Pink Panther (1963), and Goldfinger (1964). More recently, the studio release) and Valkyrie (2008), starring Tom Cruise in the lead role
1924: Death of President Woodrow Wilson (b.1856), incapacitated since collapsing of exhaustion in September of 1919. He further suffered a debilitating stroke on October 2nd that year, leaving him paralyzed on the left side and blind in the left eye. From that point, he was essentially sequestered from seeing anyone except his wife and doctor. The isolation most particularly affected the Vice President and Cabinet officers, who carried on their duties with Presidential relations carefully stage-managed by his wife, Edith. His incapacity was a primary argument in support of the 25th Amendment.
1936: In Cooperstown, New Yawk, induction of the the first class into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. You may recognize these names: Ty Cobb (98.2% of the vote), Babe Ruth (95.1%), Honus Wagner (95.1%), Christy Mathewson (90.7%) and Walter Johnson (83.6%).
1952: Death of Britain’s King George VI (b.1895). Although his declining health from lung cancer was well known, his sudden death at age 57 came as a shock to the nation. His daughter Elizabeth, now suddenly Queen Regent, was out of the country at the time.
1958: After a mid-air collision with its F-86 escort during a night navigation mission, a damaged USAF B-47 jettisons its 7,600 pound Mk-15 hydrogen bomb into the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of Tybee Island, Georgia. The crew safely recovered their aircraft at Hunter AAF, but the bomb itself has never been found, despite several exhaustive search efforts.
1959: Deaths of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and Big Bopper Richardson in a plane crash in Iowa.
1971: Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell land their lunar module Antares on the Moon’s Fra Mauro highlands, originally selected for the near-disaster of Apollo 13. Command Module pilot Stuart Roosa remained in lunar orbit aboard Kitty Hawk.
1979: Ayatola Ruhollah Khomeini returns to Iran after 15 years of exile in France.
1993: Death of American tennis star and Richmond, Virginia native Arthur Ashe (b.1943), winner of not only three Grand Slam titles, but also individual titles at Wimbledon, the US, French and Australian Open tournaments. After retiring from tennis, he became an outspoken advocate for ongoing civil rights issues both in the United States and internationally, particularly during South Africa’s long return from apartheid. He died from complications created during his second open heart surgery, when he was transfused with blood tainted with the AIDS virus. During his decline, his graciousness and lack of public bitterness over his fate was an inspiration to millions.
2003: After a two week-long science mission, Space Shuttle Columbia, the original orbiter in the fleet, disintegrates on re-entry into the atmosphere, killing all 7 astronauts aboard. After completion of the mishap investigation, NASA decided to terminate the Shuttle program in favor of a newly designed Constellation system. You may not have known that Columbia weighed around 8000 pounds more than the other orbiters, and was thus not suited for high inclination missions. She was also not fitted with an ISS-compatible air lock, so she was never used for an ISS servicing mission, but assumed primary duties for science missions and satellite launches. Columbia flew 28 times, spending just over 300 days in orbit. Due to the annual proximity of the 17 spaceflight deaths of its astronauts, NASA commemorates their memory on January 27th.
2008: Death of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (b.1917)whose Transcendental Meditation techniques gained international fame when the Beatles took it up.
Truth lives rent free in their mom's basement.
JD Vance prays for your healing. He loves you.
Rent free, they live in your head, rent free. What a tool, I mean fool you are.
I believe JD Vance would disagree with you.
There are only two genders. Period.