History Notes this week of Dec 1

267 AD: Traditional date of the martyrdom of Saint Barbara. Although her actual provenance was suspect enough to be removed in 1969 from roster of official Saints, she remains the Patron Saint of artillerymen, miners, explosive workers, and others whose jobs carry with it the risk of sudden and violent death.

771: Death of Carloman I (b.751), younger brother of Charlemagne, who held half of the Frankish kingdom on the death of their father. The brothers did not get along well, and when Carloman died- rather conveniently, but not the result of foul play– Charlemagne forcefully annexed the region to become the sole king of the Franks.

799: King of the Franks, Charlemagne, grandson of the great Charles “The Hammer” Martel holds an audience in the north-central German city of Paderborn with the embattled Pope Leo III, who fled Rome under persecution by the nobility of that city. Leo requested the protection of the powerful French king, and Charlemagne reciprocated with a vow of fealty to the papacy, which included a promise to forcibly re-install Leo in Rome. The meeting today began a chain of events that culminated in Leo’s re-installation as Pope, and him, in turn, proclaiming Charlemagne as the Protector of the Roman Empire. He thus became the first Holy Roman Emperor, a title that remained essentially intact through multiple dynasties over the course of 1,120 years, finally ending with the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which stripped the Austrian Royal family of any lingering claim to the throne. 

1095: The First Crusade: In response to a request from the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I, Pope Urban II convenes the Council of Clermont, in the French city of that name. For the next week, over 300 prelates and nobles from across France review the state of play within the Catholic Church, and more importantly, the request from Alexius for military assistance to help eject the Seljuk Turks from Byzantine Anatolia.

1703: Death of The Man in the Iron Mask, held in a variety of French prisons under the supervision of Cardinal Richelieu during the reign of Louis XIV. His identity has never been confirmed, and the conditions of his 34 years in somewhat stately captivity created a cottage industry of novels, plays and monographs attempting to deduce his identity and his supposed crimes.

1763: Dedication of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, the oldest such assembly in the United States.

1775: Lieutenant John Paul Jones hoists the Grand Union Flag aboard USS Alfred, a Philadelphia-built merchantman, converted to a 10-gun warship under the command of John Barry. Jones, recently commissioned as First Lieutenant aboard Alfred, had the honor of ordering the new national flag raised on the new national warship.

1783: With the Revolutionary War successfully concluded, General George Washington bids farewell to his military staff at New York City’s Fraunces Tavern.

1804: Fresh from his consolidation of dictatorial power as First Consul of the Directory, and fresher still from his recent gutting of a major Jacobin-inspired coup d’etat plot, Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself Emperor of the French, the first since the demise of the Charlemagne’s dynasty a thousand years earlier. Napoleon assumed the title and crown as a specific means to re-establish a hereditary monarchy without the complications of getting the Bourbons back in the mix. There remains widespread belief that Napoleon grabbed the crown from the hands of Pope Pius IV to negate the idea that the French monarch was subservient to the authority of the Church, but evidence to support the supposition remains apocryphal at best, although it is consistent with his character. Be that as it may, after crowing himself, the new Emperor then crowned as Empress, his wife Josephine.

1823: During his annual State of the Union address to Congress, President James Monroe outlines a new doctrine that asserts a fundamental change in the relationship between the United States and the nations of Europe. It boils down to two parts:
     1) European colonization of the Western Hemisphere is over, and the United States will actively resist any further European military intrusion on this side of the Atlantic, and;
     2) The United States will remain studiously neutral across the full range of real and potential European conflicts. The Monroe Doctrine was essentially the bedrock foreign policy of the U.S. through the Great War and well into the 1930s.

1824: The 1824 presidential election is sent to the House of Representatives for decision under the terms of the 12^th Amendment. Four men ran for the office: General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee; former Senator John Quincy Adams, son of President John Adams and long-serving envoy of the United States; former Senator William H. Crawford of Georgia; and Kentucky Representative Henry Clay, “The Great Compromiser” and Speaker of the House of Representatives. None of the men achieved a majority of Electoral votes, although Jackson received a plurality, with Adams a close second. When the vote finally came on February 9^th, Adams won on the first ballot.

1829: British Governor-General of India, Lord William Benetick issues an edict that all who abet suttee will be guilty of Culpable Homicide. British administrators in India were disgusted and vexed by the seemingly intractable practice of new widows being burned alive on their husband’s funeral pyre. Nearly thirty years later, General Charles Napier, serving as Commander-in-Chief India, was quoted with a thought that should remain front and center when arguments move towards multi-culturalism and political correctness: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

1859: Abolitionist John Brown is hanged by the neck until dead for his role in fomenting the bloody raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia back in October 

1863: President Abraham Lincoln, presiding over the dedication of a new national cemetery where are buried the Union dead from the great battle of four months prior, delivers his Gettysburg Address.

1866: Death of Colonel Sir George Everest (b.1790), Surveyor-General of India 1830-43. The mountain was named after him, much to his objection.

1872: 600 nautical miles west of Portugal, the British merchantman Dei Gratia discovered the brigantine Mary Celeste abandoned, drifting under shortened sail, with no sign of a struggle on board or any damage beyond slightly torn and weathered sails. The ship’s longboat was also missing, and three barrels of its cargo of denatured alcohol were broken open. The ship’s log remained aboard, although the ship’s papers were gone.  A prize crew sailed her to Gibraltar, where an Admiralty court tried to make sense of the mystery of her abandonment and the proper disposition of the vessel after her discovery. The ship continued in service for the next 13 years under 17 different owners, and ended up wrecked on a reef near Port-au-Prince, most likely as part of an insurance fraud scheme. 

1877: Inventor Thomas Edison demonstrates his gramophone for the first time.

1885: The U.S. Patent Offices recognizes Dr Pepper as a commercial drink. It beat Coca-Cola by a year.

1912: Birth of Medal of Honor and Navy Cross awardee,  Greg “Pappy” Boyington (d.1988), Marine Corps aviator and skipper of the famous Black Sheep squadron that chewed up Japanese forces throughout the Pacific theater in World War II. He recorded 26 confirmed kills before being shot down himself, spending the final 20 months of the war in Japanese POW camps. 

1913: The nation’s first drive-in gasoline station- designed, owned and operated by the Gulf Refining Company- opens in Pittsburgh. Prior to its opening, gasoline was usually purchased at pharmacies or hardware stores. Price at the time was $0.27/gal, or about $6.25/gal in current prices.

1917: The new communist government of Russia signs an armistice with the Central Powers. The cease-fire leads immediately to negotiations for a separate peace, ratified in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March, 1918. The cessation of hostilities allowed the Bolsheviks to concentrate their energies on their own increasingly bloody civil war, and gave the Germans in particular a boost of forces back into the Western Front.

1918: President Woodrow Wilson departs by ship to participate in the Versailles Conference, becoming the first President to travel to Europe while in office.

1927: After 19 continuous years of Model T production, Ford Motor Company begins sales of its next design, the Model A.

1929: Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd becomes the first to fly over the South Pole. After learning to fly during the World War, the Virginia native pursued solutions to increasingly difficult flying problems, most notably long-range navigation. He developed a number of navigation instruments, including the bubble sextant, with which he proved that planes could be safely flown across great distances with reasonable accuracy. Byrd played a key role in developing the routing for the Navy’s first trans-Atlantic flight in 1919. In May, 1926, he planned- and took credit for- a flight from Spitsbergen Norway to the North Pole and back, a feat for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor. In 1928 he led a two-year Antarctic expedition of two ships and three airplanes which surveyed and photographed vast areas of that frozen continent. The South Polar flight today was well-documented and earned Byrd a gold medal from the American Geographical society. 

1935: Birth of film-maker Woody Allen. Woody Allen has acted in, directed, and written over 60 films starting in the 1960s. His first film was the 1965 comedy What’s New Pussycat?

1955: Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on the bus, and is subsequently arrested. Her run-in with white authorities was not the first of its kind, but it was carefully designed to force a confrontation and to present the problem of segregation to a national stage. It succeeded, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the months that followed.

1955: First publication of William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine, in which the erudite conservative Yale graduate declaimed that his (and his magazine’s) purpose was to “Stand athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’” You know why, of course: the institutional Left- which constituted most of post-WWII academia and media- almost always framed their arguments on the basis of the inevitability of history showing they were right. Buckley initiated the “not so fast” movement that continues to this day.

1959: The Antarctic Treaty is signed by the 12 nations participating in the International Geophysical Year (IGY), opening it for ratification by member states and others who will abide by its provisions. Antarctica remains the only land mass on the planet that is considered non-sovereign, and thus is part and parcel of the Global Commons– the regions of earth and space that, by belonging to no-one, are free to be used and exploited by everyone. The other Commons are the high seas (including the airspace over the high seas), exo-atmospheric space, and increasingly, the realm of cyber-space.

1961: Two years into his Cuban Revolution, strongman Fidel Castro notifies the world that he was a Marxist-Leninist, and that Cuba under his rule would be built into a communist state. 

1964: 800 protesters from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement are arrested on Sproul Plaza and the Administration Building at UC Berkeley, where they occupied the building and staged a “sit-in” to protest the UC Chancellors’ decision to limit protests on campus.

1970: Under Republican President Richard M. Nixon, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) opens its doors. 

1977: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat becomes the first Arab leader to visit the State of Israel, making an unprecedented speech to the Israeli Knesset, calling for peace between Israel and its neighbors. For this act of grace and strength, he was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

1990: “Chunnel” drilling machines from France and England meet 120 feet under the seabed of the English Channel.

2001: Death of George Harrison (b.1943), youngest of The Beatles.

About the Author

Wayne Creed

Administrator

View All Posts