3761 BC: The “epoch reference date” for the modern Hebrew calendar. The epoch reference date for the modern Hebrew calendar is sunset on October 7, 3761 BCE, which corresponds to the calculated date of the world’s creation according to the Anno Mundi (year of the world) system. This epoch marks the beginning of the first year (1 Tishrei, AM 1) and is a key reference for dating all subsequent years in the calendar.
680: Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the prophet Mohammad, is decapitated in battle against the army of Caliph Yazid I. Ali’s death is one of the defining events in Islam’s great Sunni-Shi’a split. The core of the dispute centers on who rules as the legitimate successor to the prophet himself: blood heirs (Shi’a position) or political-scholarly leaders (Sunni position). The death is commemorated as the feast of Ashurah.
732: A Frankish army of 30,000 under the command of Charles “The Hammer” Martel, decisively defeats the invading Muslim army of Abdul Rah. The Battle of Lepanto, this victory was one of three- many would say it was the most important- engagements that halted the militant spread of Islam in its tracks, and ensured that Europe would continue to develop as a collection of explicitly Christian kingdoms. The conventional wisdom over the last century or so is that had Martel’s army not been successful here, the tallest towers in the cities of Europe would have been minarets instead of church steeples.
1226: Death of the monk Francis of Assisi (b.1181), who renounced a life of wealth and soldiering in favor of a life of pious poverty and prayer. His Franciscan Order grew to be one of the most influential in Europe, with its ministry structured on the simple precept: “To follow the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ and to walk in his footsteps,” the injunction being drawn from Francis’ reading of Matthew 10:9. The recent Bishop of Rome took Francis’ name when he ascended to the papacy in 2013.
1535: Publication of the Coverdale Bible, the first English printing of the complete 66 canonical books plus the Apocrypha. Translator Miles Coverdale used William Tyndales’s New Testament translations, in addition to Tyndale’s translation of the book of Jonah. The rest of the Old Testament he translated himself from German texts and the Latin Vulgate.
1571: Battle of Lepanto– The last exclusive galley-versus-galley naval battle, fought between the navies of the Ottoman Turks and a Christian coalition formed by Don Juan of Austria. The lopsided victory stopped the Ottoman coastal surge in its tracks, and is considered one of the three* great battles that ensured the continued development of a Christian Europe under the spiritual guidance of the Pope, as opposed to a Muslim Europe under the political and spiritual control of the Caliphate of Ottoman Turkey.
1574: Six years into what would become the Eighty Years War (also known as the Dutch War of Independence) a flat-bottomed fleet of boats and ships, collected and led by Prince William the Silent of the House of Orange, and manned by the Watergeuzen*, lifts the Siege of Leiden, and saves the university city from certain desolation from the hand of the Spanish Duke of Alva. The dynastic ebbs and flows of the 16th and 17th Centuries provide much fodder for our lingering cultural sense of what is good and what is not. It always struck me as odd that the 17 provinces of the Netherlands were under Spanish rule, unless you remember that Spain was, itself, ruled by princes from the Austrian House of Hapsburg, who schemed long enough to see their dynasty completely surround their arch-enemy, France and the House of Bourbon. The economic power of this tiny region provided an unusually lucrative income for the Spanish throne, who took great pains to keep it under the Spanish thumb, both politically and economically. William of Orange tapped into the stirrings of Dutch nationalism and led a rebellion against Spanish rule that would eventually lead to the independence of the Netherlands in 1648, but that’s another story. Back to the Siege of Leiden: this beautiful and strategically located city was a hotbed of independent thinking and support for the rebellion, and Alva was especially ruthless in his attempts to beat them down. The city’s outstanding defensive dispositions- walls and moats- protected it from Alva’s first investment a couple years earlier, and again during this siege. But the city’s situation also made them terribly isolated from William’s relieving force. William finally sent a carrier pigeon into the city, telling them to hang on for three more months, at which point he would arrive by boat with a relieving force. To do so, he broke the dykes between the North Sea and Leiden, and systematically sailed his fleet across the flooded polderland, driving Alva’s forces from the field and relieving the city, eventually unloading tons of herring and white bread for the starving citizens. The event remains a Big Deal in the Dutch psyche, and includes those odd little bits that you sometimes wonder about. For example, if Dutch children are bad at Christmastime, they are threatened with being fed to the Black Prince (Alva always wore black), or they are threatened with being sent off to Spain, which would have been a terrifying proposition in 1574.The day is celebrated today with meals of herring and white bread, and a carrot & onion stew called “Hutspot,” which was actually a Spanish meal, abandoned hot by the defending army at the sudden appearance of the rising waters that carried in the Watergeuzen.
1600: The tiny principality of San Marino, a small Tuscan city tucked on the side of a cliff, adopts a written constitution, making it the first republic of the modern age.
1604: A star in the constellation Ophiuchus explodes in a paroxysm visible to the naked eye, the brightest star in the night sky, rivaling even Venus. The astronomer Johannes Kepler observes the star for over a year, detailing its intensity and movement in such detail that it was named Kepler’s Supernova. Located ~20,000 light-years from Earth, it is the most recent supernova to have occurred in our own Milky Way galaxy.
1691: Great Britain issues a Royal Charter establishing the Province of Massachusetts, ‘way across the sea in the New World, where the Plymouth Plantation was continuing to prosper.
1701: Connecticut colony issues a charter to the Collegiate School of Connecticut, located in Old Saybrook. Yale University.
1763: King George III issues the Royal Proclamation of 1763 stating, among other things, that aboriginal lands north and west of the Appalachians and Alleghenies were closed to white settlement. The edict came on the heels of the Treaty of Paris that ended the 7 Years War (a.k.a. French and Indian War), which ceded to Britain all French claims to the eastern drainage of the Mississippi River. The king and Parliament reasoned that by keeping white settlers out, it would not only stabilize relations with the Indian tribes of the Ohio Valley, but also would inhibit the rampant land speculation that was sure to get worse as the new territory was surveyed. British colonists along the seaboard did not see it quite that way, helping set the conditions for further unrest and dissatisfaction with the Crown in the years to come.
1780: At the Battle of Kings Mountain, near Blacksburg, South Carolina, an American Patriot militia, loosely organized as a collection of scores of smaller militias from “over the mountain” regions, and under the nominal command of ten different colonels, decisively defeat a superior force of Loyalist militia under the command of British Major Patrick Ferguson. The Loyalist force was part of Lord Cornwallis’ Southern Strategy, which attempted to exploit Loyalist sentiment in the coastal regions by creating local militias that would take the fight to- and thence out of- their Patriot-leaning neighbors inland, led and supported by British Regulars. The previous months saw repeated vindication of this strategy with the capture of Charleston, the Battle of Camden, the Battle of Waxhaws, and Tarleton’s Massacre. Major Ferguson expected to make a short, violent thrust inland from the Waxhaw area to put down the last of the Patriots. What he didn’t know is that the news of Tarleton’s Massacre inflamed Patriots hundreds of miles away, and the intervening weeks gave the distant militias time to gather and loosely organize a defense. Ferguson finally learned of the gathering force, and took a strong defensive position atop Kings Mountain. When the Patriot attack started, Ferguson rode up & down the line, fully exposed to fire, blowing commands with a silver whistle. The Patriot militias, meanwhile, broke into 20 separate groups and charged screaming up the hill, pausing behind rocks to load their rifles, carefully aiming at and picking off individual Loyalists, and eventually Ferguson himself. It was a terribly lopsided victory, completely unexpected by either side, but it unleashed Patriot momentum throughout all the colonies, and most especially in the Carolinas, where Cornwallis’ Regulars were on the cusp of an even more strategic defeat at Cowpens.
1780: A massive hurricane tears through the Lesser Antilles, creating a swath of destruction from the Grenadines to Bermuda that leaves 23,200 souls dead and no fewer than 65 naval vessels from France, the Netherlands and Great Britain lost at sea or smashed to splinters on a lee shore, to say nothing of the devastation ashore, where thousands of homes and business were swept away by the storm’s surge. The Great Hurricane of 1780 remains the single most destructive weather event in the history of the Atlantic Ocean.
1789: President George Washington signs the first Thanksgiving Day proclamation.
1793: Death of the John Hancock(b.1737). John Hancock is known for his prominent signature on the Declaration of Independence, which became a synonym for a person’s signature. He was also a wealthy merchant, a leader in the American Revolution, the first signer of the Declaration, and served as the first governor of Massachusetts.
1793: In France , the National Convention formally adopts a legislative program to de-christianize [sic] France. Rather than pursuing the American precedent of separating the offices of Church and State, and thus allowing free exercise of religious conviction, the Convention reasoned that there should be no public acknowledgement or display of religion at all, even in churches.
The program opening this day entailed:
1) Confiscation of all church properties, to be held by the State as collateral on its new currency;
2) Removal of all silver, gold, art and any other iconography from places of worship;
3) Removal and destruction of any crosses, bells or other external signs of worship being conducted;
4) Establishment of civic cults, specifically designed to incline the heart toward the virtues of the benevolent State through the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being (more in November);
5) Most importantly, holding all non-jury (i.e., will not vow obedience to the jury of the civil government) priests liable for death.
1795: The young French general (age 26 (correct (what were you doing at 26?))) Napoleon Bonaparte, fresh from suppressing counter-revolutionary insurrection down in Toulon, arrives in Paris to suppress an even more dangerous insurrection that physically threatens the National Convention. He orders several batteries of artillery into position in the streets of the capital to protect the Tuilieries Palace. The cannons are not loaded with normal cannonballs, but with thousands of small pellets, making them the equivalent of giant shotguns. Bonaparte’s artillery mows down over 1,400 royalists, tidily ending the revolt. His actions today quickly became known as the “whiff of grapeshot…” the expression of which you will still hear bandied about today.
1812: In the Battle of Lake Erie, an American squadron of 9 ships under Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry achieves a decisive victory against a fleet of 6 British gunboats, ensuring American control of the entire southern coastline of the Great Lakes for the remainder of the war. Perry’s formal report of the battle is brief: “Dear General, We have met the enemy and they are ours. Two ships, two brigs, one schooner, and one sloop. Yours with great respect and esteem, O.H. Perry”
1813: Death of the great Indian warrior Tecumseh (b.1768), in the Battle of the Thames, near present-day Chatham, Ontario. Tecumseh was a Shawnee chief and warrior who promoted resistance to the expansion of the United States onto Native American lands. A persuasive orator, Tecumseh traveled widely, forming a Native American confederacy and promoting intertribal unity.
1845: The first class of The Naval School is seated in Annapolis, Maryland; 50 midshipmen and 7 instructors begin the process of formalizing the training of nascent officers of the U.S. Navy.
1861: Birth of the American artist Fredric Remington (d.1909). American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in the genre of Western American Art. His works are known for depicting the Western United States in the last quarter of the 19th century and featuring such images as cowboys, Native Americans, and the US Cavalry.
1863: President Abraham Lincoln signs a proclamation designating the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day.
1871: Three days after “Mrs. O’Leary’s cow” knocked over the lantern in the barn, The Great Chicago Fire finally burns itself out. The cataclysm took over 300 lives, left nearly three and a half square miles of the city center in cinders, and displaced over 100,000 people from their homes. The cow story, by the way, was fabricated by a journalist, knowing it would play well against the latent anti-Irish sentiment that infected much of Chicago society.
1879: At the Battle of Angamos, the Chilean Navy defeats the Peruvian navy in a crucial action that opened up the Bolivian port of Antofagasta to eventual occupation and annexation by Chile. I count myself among those of us Norte Americanos whose knowledge of South American history ends somewhere in the early 1800s when Simon Bolivar forced Spain to begin breaking up their centuries-old overseas empire. Without Spain to enforce colonial borders, the newly independent states resorted to the traditional methods of inter-state war to settle competing claims and boundary disputes. In this case, the issue at hand was the lucrative mining regions of the central Pacific coast, nominally under Bolivian control, but claimed as well by Peru and Chile. The naval battle this day provided a huge strategic advantage to Chile, which was eventually codified in the treaty that ended the 1879-83 War of the Pacific, also known colloquially as “The Saltpeter War” or “The Guano War,” due to the nature of one of the mining products in the region.
1883: First continuous run of the Orient Express, that is, the original Orient Express, which set the standard for intrigue and luxury travel between Paris and Istanbul.
1884: Under the tutelage of Commodore Stephen Luce, the United States Naval War College is established in Newport, Rhode Island. The school nurtured among it first faculty Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, one of the most brilliant intellects ever to don a Navy uniform, and developer of the seminal theory of naval warfare that holds naval fleets as the key to controlling events ashore. A “Mahanian Navy” is one comprised primarily of capital ships that can duke it out on the high seas with other capital ships, after which they can turn their attention to the land campaign, if necessary.
1888: Birth of Henry Wallace (d.1965). Wallace served as Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice President, 1941-45**. He was the 1948 nominee for President of the Progressive Party. He was a Socialist through and through, regularly alienating his own Democrats, to say nothing of the rest of the country, with his outspoken admiration for the advances of the Soviet Union.
1888: The recently completed Washington Monument opens to visits by the general public.
1889: American inventor Thomas Edison publicly displays his motion picture device for the first time.
1892: Death of British Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson (b.1809). 1st Baron Tennyson FRS was an English poet. He was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom during much of Queen Victoria’s reign. In 1829 he was awarded the Chancellor’s Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, “Timbuktu”. Some famous lines, famous quote by Alfred Tennyson is, “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”. Another well-known line is, “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”. Other notable quotes include “Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers” and “Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control”.
1902: Birth of Ray Kroc (d.1984). Know as the “fast food’s founding father”, was a businessman who played a key role in McDonald’s becoming the world’s most successful fast food chain. While not the founder, Kroc was a milkshake mixer salesman who convinced the McDonald brothers to franchise their restaurant nationwide in 1955. He served as CEO from 1967–1973 and developed the McDonald’s Corporation franchising program.
1905: During their Huffman Prairie flying period outside of Dayton, Wilbur Wright sets an airplane endurance record of 26 miles traveled over the ground in 39 minutes. You math people can probably figure out his ground speed from those numbers.
1908: The government of Austria-Hungary annexes Bosnia and Herzegovina into their polyglot empire.
1912: Opening guns of the 1st Balkan War, where the Balkan League (Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria) initiated combat in a bid for independence from the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were no match for the multi-front armies of the four allies, who relatively swiftly defeated their Turkish overlords and then settled into their own rounds of territorial squabbling, aided and abetted by the Great Powers of Europe. You are correct to assume that the formal cessation of hostilities only shifted the focus of long-simmering regional anxieties.
1914: Less than 10 years after Wright’s record flight, a French pilot, Louis Quenact, opens fire with a machine gun to shoot down a German pilot interfering with his reconnaissance duties. This is widely regarded as the first day of intentional aerial combat.
1919: The Chicago White Sox throw the final game of the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, cementing for themselves the opprobrium of the nation, and the permanent moniker of the Black Socks.
1927: Opening night for The Jazz Singer, starring the versatile Al Jolson. The movie was the first commercial presentation of a “talkie” where sound and music were synchronized with the visual images on the screen.
1928: Three years after the death of his long time mentor, Sun Yat Sen, General Chang Kai Shek becomes Chairman of the Republic of China.
1935: Fascist Italy, governed by the internationally popular Progressive reformer Benito Mussolini, opens its invasion of Abyssinia, an eight month conflict that ended with the region’s annexation into the Italian Empire as Italian East Africa. The glory days were brief, as the colonies were stripped away from Italy by the Allies of World War II, and later granted independence as Ethiopia and Somalia. As if more evidence were needed, this war also underlined the futile efforts of the League of Nations to create a viable forum for settling international disputes. And for us language mavens, the independence of these two new countries (of itself a good thing) also foreclosed on two more of those East African place-names that are so entertaining to pronounce: Somaliland and Abyssinia.
1939: Nazi Germany annexes western Poland into the Third Reich, conveniently setting the conditions, per the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty, for the Soviet Union to occupy the eastern half of that long-suffering country.
1940: Publication of a secret memorandum by LCDR Arthur H. McCollum, in which he outlines the depth and breadth of the Japanese Empire’s advance throughout “the Orient,” and offers a prescription for what the United States should do about it, namely, generate enough of a confrontation with Japan that they will attack U.S. interests somewhere. Such an attack would ease the U.S. entry into the burgeoning World War, and free us up to materially and overtly support Britain in her life & death struggle with Germans. The McCollum Memo is often bandied about as a “smoking gun” that proves Roosevelt knew about the Pearl Harbor attack in advance and did nothing to stop it, among other flawed theories. McCollum worked as an analyst at the Office of Naval Intelligence on the desk that monitored the Orient.
1945: In the aftermath of the Japanese surrender, the Communist Chinese under Mao Tse Tung and the Kuomintang of Chang Kai Shek sign an agreement on the post-war future of China. The “Double Tenth” agreement confirmed that the Kuomintang was the de facto ruling party of China, and that the Communists were a legitimate opposition party.
1955: First television broadcast of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club.
1956: In the fifth game of the World Series against their arch-rivals the Brooklyn Dodgers, NY Yankee’s pitcher Don Larsen launches 97 pitches over the plate in Yankee Stadium, and with seven strikeouts and the help of a handful of World Series-level field plays as an assist, knocks 27 batters back to the dugout; three up, three down for nine innings. It was the first Perfect Game in 34 years. It remains the only Perfect Game in World Series history.
1957: The Soviet Union successfully launches Sputnik 1 into orbit, creating a little beep heard ‘round the world. You youngsters may find it hard to believe, but that little ball of aluminum turned the United States inside out until we launched a little satellite of our own. Part of the angst was the realization that the Russians had the rocket technology to lob a bomb across the planet at us, and we had nothing in return.
1957: The first broadcast of Leave it to Beaver. The program ran 234 episodes, up through 1963. [“With Tony Dow, Barbara Billingsley, Hugh Beaumont… and Jerry Mathers, as The Beaver”]
1962: Navy Commander Wally Schirra blasts into orbit aboard Sigma-7 the fifth flight of the Mercury space program. The six-orbit mission lasted a little over 9 hours. The Sigma-7 mission was distinctive from the engineering perspective as it tested the suitability of spacecraft systems for progressively longer duration missions. The tests did not make for much drama (other than the fact of orbiting in space), as Schirra spent much of the mission doing essentially nothing, either permitting the spacecraft automated flight controls to maintain its positioning, or shutting down the system entirely for hours at a time, and then seeing what happened when it was re-engaged. It provided proof-of-concept for the remaining Mercury flight (22 orbits) and the much more ambitious planning for the Gemini program. Schirra was the only one of the original astronauts to fly on all three of the United States’ original space programs.
1962: Opening night for the first James Bond story converted to the big screen, Dr. No.
1967: The communist warlord Che Guevarra, having worn out his welcome in Cuba, is finally captured in Bolivia. Guevara was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, politician and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylized visage has become a countercultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia in popular culture. Guevara, who has been considered Cuba’s most militant revolutionary spokesman, disapproved of Castro’s alignment with the USSR in the Sino- Soviet dispute and of his willingness to diminish Cuba’s role as a catalyst and supporter of revolu- tions in Latin America and Africa. He was killed by the Bolivian army, with U.S. and CIA support, after being captured while leading a failed guerrilla campaign in Bolivia. He was executed on October 9, 1967, after his guerrilla group was defeated and he was captured the day before.
1967: The Outer Space Treaty goes into effect. The parties to the treaty agree to not place nuclear weapons into orbit, and to refrain from using the moon or other celestial bodies as military testing or staging areas. The treaty is often misconstrued as prohibiting the “militarization” of space, but this is not the case. It does provide a framework for consultation and non-interference between spacefaring nations; it considers space part of the global commons, and the moon and other celestial bodies as part of the “common heritage of mankind,” a locution that is rife with good intentions and very difficult applications.
1973: Opening guns in the Yom Kippur War, with coordinated Egyptian and Syrian attacks across the Suez Canal into Israeli-occupied Sanai Peninsula and Golan Heights respectively. Catching the Israeli Defense Forces off-guard on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, both Arab armies made significant territorial gains during the first three days of the fighting. Three weeks later (10/25), with the Israelis having crossed the Suez Canal themselves to completely encircle the Egyptian Third Army and advancing within artillery range of Cairo, and in the northern fight having recovered all the ground initially lost to Syria and then expanded their hold to the entirety of the high ground within sight of Damascus, all parties accepted a brokered ceasefire that ended the war.
1973: U.S. Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew resigns from office. The former Governor of Maryland was a lightning rod for the Left, acting as President Nixon’s verbal hatchet man, using mockery and incisive rhetoric to attack the radicals at their own game. What finally brought him down, was an eventual indictment for federal tax evasion. When faced with a potentially long and ugly public trial, Agnew did stepped aside, granting the Administration’s many enemies the first of several prominent heads to roll.
1977: The Supreme Soviet adopts the 4th Soviet Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
1981: Death of Anwar Sadat (b.1918), President of Egypt, at the hand of a core of Army officers egged on by an Islamist fatwa issued by Omar Abdel-Rhaman, a.k.a. “The Blind Sheikh” who also was also convicted for the first attack on the World Trade Center. Sadat’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel negated in Islamist’s eyes any gains he made by launching the 1973 Yom Kippur War against the Jewish state. In 2017 Abdel-Rhaman died in a federal prison in NC, finally putting to an end issuing fatwas against the West and any Muslim who would dare to resist the Islamist movement.
1985: The Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro is hijacked by terrorists of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The terrorists who captured the ship took wheelchair-bound American tourist Leon Klinghoffer to the upper deck, shot him in the head, and then rolled him and his chair into the sea.
1990: The final day of existence for the German Democratic Republic.
1993: After 103 days of rain, broken levees and farms and towns wiped off the map, the Mississippi River at Saint Louis finally dips below flood stage.
1995: The blood-soaked and shrunken leather glove didn’t fit, so Heisman Award winner O. J. Simpson is acquitted of murdering his wife and houseguest, freeing him to find the “real killer” on golf courses and memorabilia shows all around the warmer tier of the country.
2001: NATO confirms Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty for the first and only time. You remember that Article 5 is the core of the treaty, stating that an attack on one is an attack on all. Although it was designed to counter a Soviet attack on Western Europe, it was actually the United States who invoked it after 9/11. Germany responded right away by deploying NATO AWACS to U.S. airspace, and the rest of the European allies did their bit by supporting our engagement in Afghanistan.
2001: One month after the horrific attacks of 9/11, the Executive Branch of the US government, with the massive concurrence of both houses of Congress, establishes the Office of Homeland Security, led by former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, and charged with doing for domestic security what DOD does for international security. Late Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), during the debate on transforming this Office into a Department, he labeled the massive bureaucratic reorganization in a Bill 1,500 pages deep, “…this monstrosity,”…he may not have been entirely wrong.
2004: Death of actress Janet Leigh (b.1927), probably best known for her shocking movie death in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), and for being the mother of Jamie Leigh Curtis.
About the Author
It is easier to fool and idiot than to convince them that they have already been fooled.
PLEASE...Stop the Insanity!
Oh Stuart, bless your heart!
She is dead. You people need help.
Rent free, 24/7.