History Notes this week of April 17

753 BC — Traditional Founding of Rome

Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortes lands with a small army on the Mexican mainland near present-day Veracruz. To help motivate his men for the task of conquest ahead, he orders his ships scuttled. They are looking for glory and gold, and when they eventually reach the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, they find it.

Rome grew from this mythological beginning into the greatest empire of the ancient world, eventually governing territories stretching from Scotland to Mesopotamia. The she-wolf nursing Romulus and Remus remains one of the most enduring symbols in Western civilization.

303 AD — Death of Saint George of Lydda

Son of a Roman proconsul and his Palestinian wife, both Christians, George was a successful Roman soldier until ordered by the Emperor Diocletian to renounce his Christian faith and make sacrifice to the pagan gods. He refused, and the example of his bravery during the subsequent torture and execution provided strength for a host of subsequent Christian conversions, most notably the Empress herself and a pagan priest of the court. His association with slaying the dragon stems from a legend where he came upon a dragon who made a nest over the water supply of the city of Silene. The citizens had to dislodge the beast to draw water, so every day they offered a sacrifice — a sheep, or if none available, a maiden. George appears as the maiden is about to be sacrificed; he gets between the dragon and the damsel and slays the beast. The grateful citizens abandon their paganism and embrace Christianity. The Union Jack of the UK is designed around the Cross of St. George — the red cross on a white field — combined with St. Andrew’s cross and the Cross of St. Patrick.

Saint George is patron saint of ten countries and nineteen cities, including Moscow. His feast day, April 23rd, is celebrated with particular fervor in England, Catalonia, and Georgia.

1480 — Birth of Lucrezia Borgia (d. 1519)

The illegitimate daughter of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia (later Pope Alexander VI), Lucrezia Borgia was renowned throughout the Renaissance as a wild beauty of voracious sexual appetite, and is often cast as the ultimate femme fatale, central to the politico-criminal machinations of the Borgia family syndicate — the happy clan that provided Niccolò Machiavelli inspiration for his classic treatise, The Prince.

Modern historians have partially rehabilitated Lucrezia’s reputation, arguing that she was as much a pawn of her father’s and brother Cesare’s ambitions as an active schemer. She spent her later years as Duchess of Ferrara, where she was considered a generous and cultivated patron of the arts.

1519 — Hernando Cortés Lands in Mexico

Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés lands with a small army on the Mexican mainland near present-day Veracruz. To help motivate his men for the task of conquest ahead, he orders his ships scuttled. They are looking for glory and gold, and when they eventually reach the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, they find it.

The Aztec emperor Moctezuma II initially received Cortés peaceably, possibly mistaking him for the god Quetzalcóatl. Within two years, the Aztec Empire — one of the most powerful in the Americas — had been utterly destroyed, and New Spain was born.

1529 — Treaty of Saragossa

The Treaty of Saragossa plays out as the third diplomatic act between Spain and Portugal, dividing the world into their “legal” spheres of influence and colonization. Portugal had a long history of seaborne exploration into the southern Atlantic and along the coast of Africa, working to find an oceanic path eastwards to the Spice Islands (then called the Moluccas, later the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia). Spain focused on the direct route westward, and after Columbus’ discoveries in 1492, both countries realized that some means was needed to assign sovereignty to future discoveries. The First Act was Pope Alexander VI’s 1493 papal bull Inter Caetera, defining the Line of Demarcation. The Second Act was the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which moved the line westward — magically giving Portugal a substantial toe-hold in South America that they parlayed into Brazil. Today’s treaty added the long-needed antipodal line in the Pacific.

The Treaty of Saragossa effectively conceded the Philippines to Spain and the Moluccas to Portugal, a division that shaped the colonial map of Asia for the next three centuries. The Spice Islands’ pepper, nutmeg, and cloves were, at the time, worth more than gold.

1558 — Mary, Queen of Scots Marries the Dauphin of France

At age 16, Mary, Queen of Scots, marries the Dauphin of France. This is the first of three marriages for the Catholic monarch who created no end of intrigue and real and implied threat to the (Protestant) English throne of her cousin Elizabeth I. Despite her execution at age 45, in the end her son James VI of Scotland also became King James I of England, punctuating the extinction of the Tudor line when Elizabeth died.

Mary’s marriage to the Dauphin — who became Francis II of France — lasted barely two years before his death in 1560. She returned to Scotland a widow at 18, her life’s turbulent second act just beginning.

1564 — Birth of William Shakespeare (d. 1616)

Birth of William Shakespeare (d. 1616).

Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare produced at least 37 plays and 154 sonnets over roughly 25 years of writing. He died on this same date 52 years later — April 23rd, 1616 — a near-perfect biographical bookend that seems too literary to be coincidental.

1574 — Death of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany

Death of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, one of the leading lights and great patrons of the Italian Renaissance in Florence.

Cosimo consolidated Medici power over Tuscany with iron political skill, transforming Florence into one of the most magnificent cities in Europe. He commissioned Vasari to build the Uffizi — today one of the world’s premier art museums — and presided over a court that attracted artists, scientists, and philosophers from across the continent.

1731 — Death of Daniel Defoe (b. 1659)

Death of Daniel Defoe, novelist best known for his tale of the castaway, Robinson Crusoe.

Defoe was far more than a novelist: he was a prolific pamphleteer, spy, and journalist whose career encompassed bankruptcy, imprisonment, and the pillory before he found lasting fame with Robinson Crusoe in 1719 — often cited as the first true English novel.

1770 — Captain James Cook Arrives at New South Wales

Captain James Cook in HMS Endeavour arrives at New South Wales and begins exploration and survey of the Great Barrier Reef.

Cook’s arrival at what he named Botany Bay — for the extraordinary variety of plant specimens his naturalist Joseph Banks collected there — would eventually lead to the British decision to establish a penal colony at nearby Sydney Cove in 1788, founding the nation of Australia.

1775 — Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride

After intelligence assets confirmed the occupying British army in Boston gathering up for a nighttime march to capture the colonial arsenals at Lexington and Concord, Boston silversmith Paul Revere and his alarm riders set out to warn the militias of the two towns of the impending approach of British forces. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow immortalized the event: “Listen my children and you will hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere; The 18th of April in ’75, hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year…”

Paul Revere was essentially the practical “go to” guy when the big thinkers wanted to get something done. His ride to Lexington and Concord was part of a tightly organized web of Alarm Riders who had already foiled the British on several occasions. One cannot overstate the drama of the subsequent British retreat back to Boston — taking essentially all day under harassing fire along the entire road, after a no-sleep midnight preparation, a wet transit of the Charles River, and a march to Concord and back with no food. A splendid book on the subject is Paul Revere’s Ride by David Hackett Fischer.

Longfellow’s famous 1861 poem, written at the outbreak of the Civil War, took considerable poetic license: Revere was actually captured by a British patrol before reaching Concord. It was fellow rider Samuel Prescott who completed the alarm to Concord. History, as always, is more complicated — and more interesting — than the legend.

1836 — Battle of San Jacinto

Led by Sam Houston, the Army of Texas completely surprises and routs the Mexican army of General Santa Anna — who is also Mexican President. The short, sharp fight opens with the Texas army screaming from the woods adjacent to the Mexican camp with cries of “Remember the Alamo!” and “Remember Goliad!” Eighteen minutes later, the fight is over, with over 700 Mexicans dead and the remainder of Santa Anna’s army shattered. Santa Anna himself is captured, and Houston negotiates a complete Mexican withdrawal from Texas. Although Mexico does not recognize it until 1848, Santa Anna’s defeat effectively marks the beginning of Texas as an independent republic.

The battle lasted just 18 minutes — making it one of the most decisive engagements per unit of time in military history. The Republic of Texas existed as an independent nation for nearly a decade before being annexed by the United States in 1845, an act that contributed directly to the Mexican-American War.

1856 — Birth of Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain (d. 1951)

Birth of Henri Philippe Pétain, Marshal of France during the Great War and hero of the nine-month Battle of Verdun in 1916, where he is credited with the inspirational quote: “Ils ne passeront pas!” (“They shall not pass!”). His reputation took a severe dive in June 1940 when he refused to countenance continued resistance to the German onslaught, signed an armistice, and was elected to head the collaborationist Vichy government. His latent Fascist instincts then took over as he set about abolishing the republican institutions of the Third Republic.

After the Liberation, Pétain was tried for treason and sentenced to death. Charles de Gaulle — once his protégé — commuted the sentence to life imprisonment out of respect for his Great War service. Pétain died in prison on the Île d’Yeu at the age of 95, his legacy forever divided between Verdun and Vichy.

1861 — Union Forces Abandon Gosport Navy Yard

Union forces abandon and burn the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia. Confederate engineers poking through the smoldering wreckage are later able to salvage the lower hull of USS Merrimack and convert it into the ironclad gunboat CSS Virginia.

CSS Virginia would go on to fight the famous Battle of Hampton Roads in March 1862, the first engagement between two ironclad warships. Her duel with USS Monitor rendered the entire world’s fleet of wooden warships obsolete overnight.

1861 — Birth of General Edmund Allenby (d. 1936)

Birth of General Edmund Allenby, who fought in the Boer War and on the Western Front before taking command of the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force in June 1917. He was the key supporter of Colonel T.E. Lawrence’s efforts with the Arabs, and specifically targeted the capture of Jerusalem as his key strategic goal, which he accomplished in December 1917. Out of respect to the spiritual significance of the city, he and his staff entered through the Jaffa Gate on foot.

Allenby’s campaign in the Levant was a masterclass in mobile warfare — a sharp contrast to the static slaughter of the Western Front. His entry into Jerusalem on foot was a deliberate symbolic contrast to Kaiser Wilhelm II, who had ridden into the city on horseback in 1898, an act of imperial swagger the locals had never forgotten.

1870 — Birth of Vladimir Lenin (d. 1924)

Birth of Vladimir Lenin (d. 1924).

Lenin’s seal on the 20th century is incalculable. The Bolshevik Revolution he led in October 1917 created the Soviet Union and spawned a global communist movement that, at its peak, governed roughly a third of the world’s population. His embalmed body remains on public display in Red Square to this day.

1889 — Birth of Adolf Hitler (d. 1945)

Birth of Adolf Hitler, in the little town of Braunau am Inn, in Austria-Hungary.

Few lives have so catastrophically altered human history. Hitler’s rise to power and the war he unleashed resulted in an estimated 70–85 million deaths — roughly 3% of the world’s population at the time. The seeds of that catastrophe were planted in an unremarkable border town on an April morning.

1889 — The Oklahoma Land Rush

The Oklahoma Land Rush, staged at high noon, opened the former Indian Territory for free settlement. Within hours, over 10,000 people coalesced in one spot and founded Oklahoma City.

Those who jumped the starting gun and staked their claims early were called “Sooners” — a name that stuck, and today is proudly worn by the University of Oklahoma’s athletic teams. The land rush was a spectacular and chaotic event, but it also represented the final erasure of treaty promises made to the Five Civilized Tribes who had been relocated there decades earlier.

1898 — U.S. Navy Blockade of Cuba

Two months after the sinking of USS Maine, and one day after Congress declared war on Spain, the US Navy begins a blockade of Cuba.

The Spanish-American War lasted only ten weeks but fundamentally reshaped American foreign policy. At its conclusion, the United States acquired Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines — overnight becoming a Pacific imperial power — while Cuba gained nominal independence under heavy American influence.

1903 — Birth of Eliot Ness (d. 1957)

Birth of Eliot Ness, head of “The Untouchables” of the nascent FBI, who finally nailed Chicago gangster Al Capone on tax evasion charges.

The nickname “Untouchables” referred to the team’s reputation for being unbribable — a rare distinction in Prohibition-era Chicago. Capone’s 1931 conviction on tax evasion (rather than the murders and bootlegging everyone knew he was behind) has since become a byword for prosecutorial creativity.

1906 — San Francisco Earthquake

An earthquake registering 8.25 on the Richter scale strikes San Francisco, leveling masonry buildings, shattering gas and water mains, and igniting a fire that for three days turns the thriving boom town to rubble and ashes. Over 700 residents are killed, 28,000 buildings are destroyed, and damage payments exceed $500,000,000.

The earthquake and the fire that followed remain the deadliest natural disaster in California history and one of the worst in U.S. history. San Francisco rebuilt with remarkable speed, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition a mere nine years later — a triumphant declaration that the city had risen from the ashes.

1910 — Death of Mark Twain (b. 1835)

Death of Samuel L. Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, rumors of whose death are no longer greatly exaggerated. He prophesied a year earlier: “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet.” He did not disappoint himself.

Twain died on April 21, 1910 — one day after Halley’s Comet reached perihelion, exactly as he had predicted. His novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer remain cornerstones of American literature, and his wit remains as sharp and unsettling today as it was in his own time.

1912 — First Publication of Pravda

First publication of Pravda (“Truth”) as the official organ of the Russian Communist Party.

The irony of naming the Soviet state newspaper “Truth” was not lost on Russians, who had a mordant saying: “There is no truth in Pravda, and no news in Izvestiya” (Izvestiya meaning “News”). The paper continued publishing in various forms until the Soviet collapse, and still exists today.

1916 — The Easter Rising, Dublin

The Easter Rising, a revolt against British rule in Ireland, begins in Dublin. The bombings and shootings are coordinated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, precursors to the Irish Republican Army.

The Rising was militarily crushed within a week, and its leaders — including Patrick Pearse and James Connolly — were executed by firing squad. Those executions proved to be a catastrophic British miscalculation: public opinion in Ireland, which had been largely indifferent to the Rising, turned sharply against British rule and set Ireland on the path to independence.

1916 — Shackleton Departs Elephant Island

British explorer Ernest Shackleton and a crew of five depart in an open lifeboat from Elephant Island, Antarctica, on a rescue mission for the crew of their ice-bound ship Endurance. They row and sail across 800 miles of the stormy Southern Ocean, landing on the southern shore of South Georgia Island. Shackleton and one other man then hike across the island to alert a whaling station on the north shore, spend only three days recovering, and return to rescue all remaining Endurance crew from Elephant Island. There were no fatalities.

The open-boat journey of 800 miles across the world’s most violent ocean, in a 22-foot lifeboat with six men and no modern navigation aids, is widely regarded as the greatest feat of small-boat seamanship in history. The entire Endurance saga has become the gold standard of leadership under impossible conditions.

1917 — Birth of Dorian Leigh (d. 2008)

Birth of Dorian Leigh, who during the 1940s and ’50s defined glamour photography and is rightly named as the first “supermodel.”

Leigh’s face graced the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar more times than can easily be counted, and she was the inspiration for the character of Mata Hari in a famous Revlon campaign. Her younger sister, Suzy Parker, followed her into modeling and became equally iconic.

1918 — Death of the Red Baron

Death of Baron Manfred von Richthofen (b. 1892), a.k.a. “The Red Baron.” The German fighter ace amassed 80 confirmed kills of Allied aircraft, leading his Jagdstaffel 2 squadron to consistent successes not by dramatic acrobatics, but by disciplined tactics and superb marksmanship. The RAF credited his shootdown to Canadian Captain Roy Brown, but much controversy surrounds the decision: Richthofen was killed by a single .303 bullet through his chest (shot with an upward trajectory) and he landed his Fokker Dreidecker virtually undamaged in a French field. The British gave him a funeral with full military honors.

The trajectory of the fatal bullet strongly suggests it was fired from the ground rather than from Roy Brown’s aircraft above — most historians now believe Australian ground troops were responsible. Richthofen’s 80 kills remain the highest confirmed tally of any pilot in the First World War.

1918 — First Tank vs. Tank Combat

First direct tank-versus-tank combat, during the second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux, France: three British Mark IV tanks fought three German A7Vs.

The engagement ended inconclusively, but it marked the dawn of armored warfare as we know it. The tank concept had been introduced less than two years earlier at the Somme; within 25 years, armored doctrine would determine the outcome of the Second World War.

1920 — League of Nations Creates British Mandate of Palestine

The League of Nations recognizes the Balfour Declaration and creates the British Mandate of Palestine from lands ceded by the Ottoman Empire at the close of the Great War.

The Balfour Declaration of 1917 had expressed British support for “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine — without prejudicing the rights of existing Arab inhabitants. The impossible tension embedded in that single sentence has animated Middle Eastern conflict ever since.

1942 — The Doolittle Raid

Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, USAAF, leads a flight of B-25s from the flight deck of USS Hornet (CV-8), operating 650 nautical miles east of Japan. Coming five months after the disasters at Pearl Harbor, Corregidor, and Singapore, the raids accomplish little militarily but provide a massive morale boost at home and thoroughly rattle the military junta ruling Imperial Japan. When asked by the press from where the raids were launched, President Roosevelt said they were launched from “Shangri-La.” Later, in September 1944, CV-38 was commissioned USS Shangri-La. Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle was awarded the Medal of Honor.

The Doolittle Raid had consequences far beyond its morale value: Japan, humiliated by the strike on the home islands, accelerated plans to extend their defensive perimeter — leading directly to the Battle of Midway in June 1942, where the Imperial Navy suffered a crippling, war-turning defeat.

1943 — Death of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

Death of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (b. 1884), former student at the U.S. Naval War College and Harvard University, Commander in Chief of the Combined Imperial Fleet and architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor. American intelligence learned of his inspection flight to the Solomon Islands; an assassination attempt was specifically ordered by President Roosevelt and assigned to a squadron of long-range P-38 fighters under “Operation Vengeance.” They were successful.

Yamamoto had presciently warned before Pearl Harbor that attacking the United States would “awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” His assassination was one of the very few in American military history explicitly ordered by a sitting president, made possible by the codebreaking success of signals intelligence.

1945 — Red Army Enters Berlin

Soldiers of the Red Army enter Berlin.

The fall of Berlin was the culmination of the most destructive war in human history. Hitler would commit suicide in his underground bunker nine days later, on April 30th. The city that the Red Army entered was largely rubble; the battle for it cost roughly 80,000 Soviet lives and spelled the end of the Third Reich.

1947 — Death of Willa Cather (b. 1873)

Death of Willa Cather, American author of frontier life on the Great Plains. Her most popular novels include O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark.

Cather’s fiction did more than almost any other writer’s to preserve the experience of immigrant settlers on the American prairie — Bohemian, Scandinavian, and others — giving literary permanence to lives that might otherwise have vanished from memory entirely.

1953 — USS New Jersey Shells Wonsan Harbor

USS New Jersey (BB-62) shells communist forces in and around Wonsan Harbor from Wonsan Harbor itself.

The deployment of Iowa-class battleships in the Korean War demonstrated that the big-gun ships were far from obsolete. USS New Jersey would be called back into service again in Vietnam and once more in Lebanon in the 1980s — a remarkable career spanning four decades of American conflict.

1955 — Volkswagen Opens First U.S. Dealership

Volkswagen opens its first U.S. dealership in Englewood, NJ. An invasion of Beetles follows.

The Beetle’s American success was improbable: a small, underpowered, air-cooled car designed in Nazi Germany conquering the land of the V-8 and the tailfin. Its iconic 1959 “Think Small” advertising campaign, created by Doyle Dane Bernbach, is still taught in marketing schools as a masterpiece of counterintuitive branding.

1960 — Brasília Commissioned as Brazil’s Capital

Brasília, a completely artificial city carved out of the jungle, is commissioned as the new capital of Brazil, replacing Rio de Janeiro. Every aspect was subject to strict design approval, with localized zones established for every manner of commercial and governmental function. It was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986 for its modernist architecture and city planning.

The city was designed by urban planner Lúcio Costa and architect Oscar Niemeyer, whose sweeping concrete curves gave Brasília an otherworldly, futurist aesthetic. When viewed from the air, the city’s layout resembles an airplane or bird in flight — whether this was intentional has been amiably disputed ever since.

1963 — Birth of Conan O’Brien

Birth of Conan O’Brien.

O’Brien graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, where he was president of the Harvard Lampoon, before becoming a writer for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons — then one of television’s most unlikely late-night hosts. His self-deprecating humor and lanky physicality made him a singular presence in American comedy for three decades.

1970 — First Earth Day

The first “Earth Day” makes itself known to an unwitting polity.

Earth Day 1970 was organized by Senator Gaylord Nelson after he was inspired by the devastation of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. An estimated 20 million Americans participated in the first event — one of the largest civic demonstrations in U.S. history. It directly led to the creation of the EPA and the passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts.

1972 — Apollo 16 Lands on the Moon

Apollo 16 successfully lands on the Moon. The landing was delayed 7 hours when a control rocket failed in the command module just after Lunar Module separation. Rather than descend to the surface and risk missing the lunar ascent rendezvous, the LM crew of John Young and Charlie Duke flew formation on Ken Mattingly in the CM until the problem was solved. The delay cut from three to two the number of excursions taken in the lunar buggy, but the 212-pound haul of lunar rocks made the mission an outstanding scientific success.

Charlie Duke, the lunar module pilot who bounced across the Descartes Highlands, remains the youngest person ever to walk on the Moon — he was 36 at the time. He later became a Christian minister, and has said that walking on the Moon was a lesser experience than his subsequent walk with God.

1978 — Panama Canal Treaty Ratified

By a one-vote margin above the required two-thirds majority, the United States Senate votes 68–32 to ratify the Panama Canal Treaty, ceding sovereignty of the Canal Zone and operational control of the canal to Panama. Former President Carter was the sole senior U.S. representative at the final handover ceremonies in 1999.

The treaty was bitterly controversial in the United States: Ronald Reagan had made opposition to it a centerpiece of his near-successful 1976 primary challenge to President Ford. Carter considered its ratification one of his proudest achievements. The canal itself today handles roughly 6% of world trade.

1978 — Korean Air Lines Forced Down Over Soviet Union

A Korean Air Lines jetliner is forced down by the Soviet Air Force after deviating from its normal Paris–Seoul polar flight route and crossing into Soviet airspace. Instead of landing at the airport indicated by the Soviet fighters, the crew put the plane down with a hard landing on a frozen lake south of Murmansk. Two passengers were killed and several others injured.

This incident is not to be confused with the far more lethal September 1983 shootdown of KAL Flight 007 over Sakhalin Island, in which 269 passengers and crew were killed. Both incidents underscore the hair-trigger tensions of Cold War airspace.

1986 — Death of Wallis Simpson (b. 1896)

Death of Wallis Simpson, the American divorcée at the center of the British constitutional crisis of 1936, which led to King Edward VIII’s abdication so he could marry “the woman I love.” His brother became King George VI; Edward was made Duke of Windsor. The high-profile couple moved to Paris, where they expressed considerable admiration for the progressive politics of the Third Reich.

The Windsors’ Nazi sympathies were not merely social — British intelligence considered Edward a genuine security risk. Recently declassified documents suggest the Germans planned to reinstall him as a puppet king following a successful invasion of Britain. He spent the rest of his long life governing the Bahamas (briefly) and attending parties.

1989 — Explosion Aboard USS Iowa

A massive explosion in turret 2 of USS Iowa (BB-61) kills 47 sailors. The initial investigation did not conclusively determine the cause. A second investigation concluded that improper powder storage during Iowa‘s 1988 overhaul created conditions that generated highly flammable ether gas inside the powder bags, originally milled in the 1930s. The ship was decommissioned in October 1990, struck from the Naval Register in 2006, and is now a museum ship at the port of San Pedro, California.

The tragedy prompted a thorough review of safety practices aboard all U.S. Navy battleships, which were already considered by many to be anachronisms. USS Iowa’s decommissioning the following year effectively ended the era of the American battleship, closing a chapter that had opened at Hampton Roads in 1862.

1989 — Tiananmen Square Protests Begin

End of the first week of a student-led mourning period over the death of Chinese reformer Hu Yaobang. On this day, over 10,000 students poured into Tiananmen Square to mourn and to protest the lack of promised reform. The protests would continue to grow, remaining peaceful until early June, when the communist government began its crackdown.

The iconic image of the lone “Tank Man” blocking a column of Type 59 tanks on June 5, 1989, became one of the most reproduced photographs of the 20th century. The Chinese government has never officially acknowledged how many people were killed; estimates range from several hundred to several thousand.

1993 — ATF Raid on Branch Davidian Compound, Waco

Federal agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms storm the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas with Bradley fighting vehicles and tear gas, igniting the compound into an inferno that kills 77 U.S. citizens. Attorney General Janet Reno authorized and defended the action.

The 51-day siege and its fiery conclusion had profound and lasting consequences for American political culture. Timothy McVeigh explicitly cited Waco as his motivation for the Oklahoma City bombing two years later — on the second anniversary of the fire.

1993 — IRA Bomb in London

An IRA bomb explodes in the Bishopsgate section of London.

The Bishopsgate bomb caused approximately £1 billion in damage — one of the most costly terrorist attacks in British history at the time. It paradoxically accelerated the peace process by demonstrating that the IRA could inflict devastating economic damage on the City of London indefinitely, convincing key figures on both sides that a negotiated settlement was the only rational path forward.

1994 — Death of Richard Nixon (b. 1913)

Death of Richard Nixon.

Nixon remains one of American history’s most contradictory figures: the president who opened China, signed the Clean Air and Endangered Species Acts, created the EPA, and negotiated détente with the Soviet Union — and who also authorized a criminal conspiracy that forced the only presidential resignation in U.S. history. No simple verdict has yet satisfied everyone.

1995 — Oklahoma City Bombing

A truck bomb devastates the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 U.S. citizens and injuring 680 others. Timothy McVeigh is later convicted and executed for the crime, which he freely admitted was timed to the Waco raid.

At the time, it was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil in history. Among the 168 killed were 19 children in the building’s day care center. McVeigh showed no remorse, calling the children’s deaths “collateral damage.” He was executed by lethal injection on June 11, 2001 — three months before September 11th.

1999 — German Bundestag Returns to Berlin

The German Bundestag returns to Berlin, the first government to sit there since the Reichstag was dissolved in 1945.

The move from Bonn, the modest Rhineland city that had served as West Germany’s provisional capital for 50 years, back to Berlin was deeply symbolic — the reunified nation reclaiming its historic capital while doing so in a restored Reichstag crowned with a gleaming glass cupola, a deliberate statement of transparency and democratic renewal.

2000 — Seizure of Elián González

Federal agents, acting under orders from Attorney General Janet Reno, seize six-year-old Elián González at gunpoint from his relative’s home in Miami and return him to Cuba. The boy had been rescued from the sea after his mother drowned attempting to flee Cuba; a bitter custody dispute had raged for months between his Miami relatives and his Cuban father.

The armed predawn raid — and the photograph of a federal agent in tactical gear pointing a weapon toward the closet where Elián was hiding — inflamed the Cuban-American community in Miami and became a defining moment of the 2000 presidential election, contributing to Al Gore’s loss of Florida and, arguably, the presidency.

About the Author

Wayne Creed

Administrator

View All Posts