753BC: Traditional date of the founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus, orphaned brothers, suckled by a she-wolf.
303 A.D.: Death of George of Lydda, who became revered as Saint George, patron saint of ten countries (we’re most familiar with England), no fewer than 19 cities (including Moscow, Russia), and numerous professions, most notably soldiers. 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 draw water, so every day they offer a sacrifice of a sheep, or if none is 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, saving her life and ending the dragon’s hold on the city. 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, with St. Andrew’s cross (white X on blue field) and the Cross of St. Patrick (narrow red X on a white field).
1519: 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.
1529: Signing of the Treaty of Saragossa, which plays out as the third diplomatic act between Spain and Portugal, dividing the world into their “legal” spheres of influence and colonization. Portugal, you’ll recall, 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 called 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 and colonial outposts.
First Act: In May of 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued a papal bull Inter Caetera, which defined the Line of Demarcation as a pole-to-pole meridian located halfway between the Cape Verde Islands (Portuguese) and the easternmost islands claimed by Columbus (Spanish).
Second Act: The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in June of 1494, cleaned up some of the ambiguity of the papal bull regarding pre-existing Spanish and Portuguese settlements on the “wrong” sides of the Line. It also moved the line a hundred miles or so westward, which magically gave Portugal a substantial toe-hold in South America, which they parlayed into the massive colony of Brazil. The meridian of Tordesillas did not- alas- extend all the way around the earth, and between Magellan’s (Spanish) claim on the Philippines and Portugal’s claims on the Moluccas, the need for an antipodal line of demarcation resulted in today’s treaty.
1558: At age 16, Mary, Queen of Scots, marries the Dauphin of France. This is the first of three marriages for the Catholic monarch who, you will recall, created no end of intrigue and real and implied threat to the (Protestant) English throne of her cousin Elizabeth I. The dynastic wheelings and dealings around her would make your head hurt, so I won’t bother you with it all. Suffice it to say, 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.
1564: Birth of William Shakespeare (d.1616).
1574: Death of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, one of the leading lights and great patrons of the Italian Renaissance in Florence.
1599: Birth of Oliver Cromwell (d.1658), alternately remembered as: a) Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of Great Britain, Scotland and Ireland, or; b) Regicide for overseeing the execution of King Charles I.
1731: Death of Daniel Defoe (b.1659), novelist best known for his tale of the castaway, Robinson Crusoe.
1770: Captain James Cook in HMS Endeavour arrives at New South Wales and begins exploration and survey of the Great Barrier Reef.
1792: Three years into the social cataclysm that became the French Revolution, Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle composes La Marseillaise, the new national anthem of the French Republic.
1836: Battle of San Jacinto. Led by Sam Houston, the Army of Texas completely surprises and routs the Mexican army of General Santa Ana, 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!” 18 minutes later, the fight is over, with over 700 Mexicans dead and what remains of Santa Ana’s army completely shattered and fleeing into the countryside. Santa Ana himself is captured, and Houston negotiates a complete Mexican withdrawal from Texas. Although Mexico does not recognize it until 1848, Santa Ana’s defeat effectively marks the beginning of Texas as an independent republic.
1856: Birth of Henri Philippe Petain (d.1951), Marshal of France during the Great War and hero of the 9-month long Battle of Verdun in 1916, where he is credited with the inspirational quote: “Ils ne passeront pas!” (They shall not pass!”). Petain’s reputation was damaged in 1940 when he refused to countenance continued resistance to the German onslaught across the northern tier of France. He signed an armistice with the Germans and was elected to head the collaborationist French government, headquartered in the city of Vichy. His latent Fascist instincts then took over as he set about abolishing what he considered the republican excesses and weaknesses of the Third Republic, which he believed led to the failure of the French army to halt the German’s Blitzkrieg at the Maginot Line.
1861: 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.
1861: Birth of General Edmund Allenby (d.1936). The British general fought in the Boer War, and at the outbreak of the Great War, fought on the Western Front. In June of 1917 he took command of the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force (EEF) which fought the Ottoman Turks from Cairo in a campaign to dislodge them from their Middle Eastern empire. Allenby was the key supporter of Colonel T.E. Lawrence’s efforts with the Arabs in Sinai and the upper Arabian Peninsula. As Turkish resistance crumbled, Allenby specifically targeted the capture of Jerusalem as his key strategic goal, which he accomplished in December of 1917. Out of respect to the spiritual significance of the city, he and his staff entered through the Jaffa gate on foot, a display that paid huge dividends as he set about un-doing several centuries of Turkish domination.
1870: Birth of Vladimir Lenin (d.1924).
1874: Birth of Gugliemo Marconi (d.1937), Italian-born inventor and recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics for his studies of electromagnetic radiation. Marconi migrated to Great Britain and founded the radio manufacturing (now electronics) company that still bears his name. He developed, demonstrated and marketed the first successful long-distance wireless telegraph and in 1901 broadcast the first transatlantic radio signal. His company’s Marconi radios ended the isolation of ocean travel and saved hundreds of lives, including all of the surviving passengers from the sinking Titanic. In 1909 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for his radio work.
1889: 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.
1889: Birth of Adolf Hitler (d.1945), in the little town of Braunau am Inn, in Austria-Hungary.
1898: 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.
1910: Death of Samuel L. Clemens (b.1835), a.k.a. Mark Twain, rumors of whose death are no longer greatly exaggerated. Interestingly, 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. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”
1912: First publication of Pravda (“Truth”) as the official newspaper of the Russian Communist Party.
1916(a): 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.
1916(b): British explorer Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 5 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 in a feat of astounding seamanship, navigation and endurance, landing safely on the southern shore of South Georgia Island. Knowing there is a whaling station on the north shore, Shackleton and one other man hike across the island to alert the station. They spend only three days recovering, and then lead a volunteer expedition back around the island by ship to pick up the rest of their party. Only days later, they take another volunteer party back to Elephant Island where all of the remaining Endurance crew is rescued from their survival huts (built from their overturned lifeboats).
1915: Opening of the amphibious ground assault* on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula by a British Commonwealth force, primarily troops from Australia and New Zealand- “ANZACs” who took ferocious casualties during the course of the futile nine month campaign. The attack on the Bosporus and Dardanelles was the brainchild of First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill (the same), who believed the Central Powers could be defeated through the “soft underbelly” of their putative ally, the Ottoman Empire, also widely known as “The Sick Man of Europe.” After the initial landings, the Turks proved themselves not so sick after all, eventually forcing an ANZAC withdrawal under fire in January, 1916. The battle is credited with awakening the nationalist impulses of Australia and New Zealand, and is celebrated in those countries as ANZAC Day.
1917: Birth of the First Lady of Song and the Queen of Jazz, Ella Fitzgerald (d.1996).
1917: Birth of Dorian Leigh (d.2008) who, during the 1940s and’50s, defined glamour photography and is considered the first “supermodel.”
1918: 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 shoot down this day to Canadian Captain Roy Brown, but much controversy surrounds this 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. After recovering his body, the British squadron gave him a funeral with full military honors.
1918: First direct tank-versus-tank combat, during the second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux, France: three British Mark IV fought three German A7Vs.
1920: 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 was a letter written by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lionel Walter Rothschild, in which he expressed the British government’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
1945: Soldiers of the Red Army enter Berlin.
1947: Death of Willa Cather (b.1873), American author of frontier life on the Great Plains. Her most popular novels include O Pioneers, My Antonia and The Song of the Lark.
1953: USS New Jersey (BB-62) shells communist forces in and around Wonsan Harbor from Wonsan Harbor itself.
1960: Brazilia, a completely artificial city carved out of the jungle, is commissioned as the new capital of Brazil, replacing Rio de Janero. The governing idea was to build a functional city completely from scratch, with every aspect subject to strict design approval, and localized zones established for every manner of commercial and governmental function; banking sector, hotel sector, government sector, etc. It was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986 in recognition of its modernist architecture and “artistic” city planning. You can’t make this up.
1970: The first “Earth Day”.
1972: 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 (LM) 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 instrumentation set up and 212 pound haul of lunar rocks made the mission an outstanding scientific success. [Young and his wheels; Service Module (SM) Casper going solo in lunar orbit- note the jettisoned exterior panel, exposing the array of lunar surface survey equipment and the singed exhaust horn of the SM rocket engine; the landing site, taken from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter; the Lunar Rover after being pulled out from the LM lower stage storage lockers; LM ascent stage Orion during the final rendezvous with the CM Casper.
1978: A Korean Air Lines jetliner is forced down by the Soviet Air Force. Deviating with a sudden turn to the east from its normal Paris-Seoul polar flight route, the aircraft was intercepted 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. Soviet authorities were “amazingly unhelpful” in helping to understand the incident. This episode is not to be confused with the September, 1983 shootdown of a KAL 747 over Sakhalin Island, at the other end of the 11-time-zone-country.
1989: End of the first week of a student-led mourning period over the death of Chinese reformer Hu Yaobang, who earlier resigned in protest from the Chinese Central Committee in January. On this day, over 10,000 students poured into Tienanmen Square to not only mourn, but to protest the lack of reform promised by the government. The protests would continue to grow, but remained peaceful until early June, when the communist government began its crackdown.
1993: An IRA bomb explodes in the Bishopsgate section of London.
1994: Death of Richard Nixon (b.1913).
2000: Federal Agents seize at gunpoint six-year-old Elian Gonzalez from his relative’s home in Miami and return him to the Worker’s Paradise in communist Cuba. Remember: this action took place in the United States of America.
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