Historical Notes: All Saints Day

This happened on November 1st, All Saints Day.

1512: The Sistine Chapel in the Vatican opens for public visitation for the first time since completion of the great ceiling fresco by Michelangelo.

1520: Ferdinand Magellan enters the narrow strait that now bears his name. While not as navigationally straightforward as the route around Cape Horn, and it avoids the ferocious westerlies and high sea states of the Horn passage. However, the narrowness of the channel and the prevailing westerlies make the strait a particularly difficult passage in a sailing vessel, especially for a square-rigged design that does not go well to windward.

1790: British author and political philosopher Edmund Burke publishes his letter, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which he examines the French body politic and its leadership through the lens of the same Natural Law that guided the original revolution in the former British colonies. Burke argues that the abstract foundations of the French revolution could not account for the complexity of human nature, and the enterprise was doomed to lead to tyranny. Critical of the rule of intellectuals, and pointing out the dangers, “What is the use of discussing a man’s abstract right to food or to medicine? The question is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In this deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor.”

The mushroom cloud created at Eniwetok Atol.

1952: The United States detonates its first hydrogen bomb, Operation IVY MIKE, at Eniwetok Atoll. The blast came in at 10 megatons.