742: Birth of Charlemagne, King of the Franks, Lombards, and the first Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. If you want to demonstrate to your friends your exceptional historical erudition, you should now smugly say something along the lines of, “…and it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor was it an empire.”
1453: Ottoman Turk Mehmed II begins his siege of Constantinople, which finally falls in May, ending the Christian Byzantine Empire and establishing the Muslim Ottoman Empire (which survived through the Great War as “The Sick Man of Europe,” but was finally dismembered via the Treaty of Versailles (1919)). Mehmed is credited with adopting many aspects of Byzantine administration over a fractious empire. His religious tolerance enabled one of his key methods for keeping the Christian remnants under control: kidnap the brightest Christian children from the provinces and train them up to serve in the Sultan’s court or as his personal bodyguards, the Janissaries.
1743: Birth* of Thomas Jefferson (d.1826), or should I say, Saint Thomas of Montecello…
1801: The British Channel Fleet, with Horatio Lord Nelson second in command, destroys the majority of the Danish fleet in the Battle of Copenhagen. During the battle, Nelson refused an order to withdraw, instead turning with renewed fury to pound the line of moored Danish ships. At the height of this renewed engagement, Nelson suddenly ceased fire and opened negotiations with the Danes, who in the end agreed to a fourteen-week armistice. The victory was a blow to French interests in the Baltic and gave the British breathing room to re-fit and continue their seaborne pressure on trade with the French Republic.
1860: Pony Express mail service begins between St. Joseph, Missouri and Sacramento, California. The money-losing service inspired the country with its dramatic rides and colorful riders (including William “Buffalo Bill” Cody), but quickly lost its reason for being with the rapid expansion of the telegraph and railroad services. The last horses ran in October, 1861.
1865: Union troops overrun Confederate defenses at Petersburg. Lee orders a strategic retreat up the Appomattox River.
1865: On news of the fall of Petersburg, President Jefferson Davis and his war cabinet abandon Richmond in the hopes of re-establishing a functioning Confederate government in Mississippi.
1865: Union forces enter Richmond, where they find little but the burned out shells of its downtown buildings, fired by the retreating Confederates. Robert E. Lee leads the remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia up the Appomattox River to meet with a promised supply train near Lynchburg.
1882: Former Confederate guerrilla (and participant in the 1863 massacre at Lawrence, Kansas) Jesse James is shot in the back by a member of his own gang, Robert Ford.
1917: President Woodrow “He Kept Us Out Of War” Wilson asks Congress for a declaration of war against Imperial Germany.
1917: Vladimir I. Lenin arrives in St. Petersburg from Switzerland, via Germany and Sweden. There is a fascinating sub-plot to this story, in that the putative leader of Russia’s Bolsheviks was in exile in Switzerland when the original Russian Revolution broke out in February, and was thus unable to influence the immediate course of events. As the Kerensky government vainly tried to find its post-czarist footing, the Imperial German government sensed a unique opportunity to consolidate its dominant military victories on the eastern front with a decisive political victory that would decapitate the Russian government. The Germans made secret arrangements for a guarded “extra-territorial” train to transport a small cadre of their nominal Russian enemies from their Swiss exile in order to foment continued revolution, with the goal of generating a separate peace between Russia and Germany.
The plan worked exactly as expected, with Lenin’s Bolshevik faction seizing power in October and making it their first order of business to conclude the Treaty of Brest-Litvosk in March, 1918. Russia thence continued its descent into Soviet Communism, prompting Winston Churchill to offer his typically concise summation of how it started:
“Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.” (–Speech to the House of Commons, November, 1919)
1922: Joseph Stalin becomes General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
1936: Richard Bruno Hauptmann is executed by the electric chair for the kidnapping and murder of Charles and Ann Morrow Lindbergh’s baby. Although the term “media circus” had yet to be invented, media coverage of the kidnapping and trial defines the genre to this day.
1966: Death of British author C.S. Forester (b.1899), best known for the stories of Captain Horatio Hornblower, a Royal Navy hero loosely modeled after the life of Nelson. He also wrote The African Queen (1935).
1982: The United Kingdom deploys the initial flotilla of the Royal Navy task force ordered to re-take the Falkland Islands from Argentina.
1996: Theodore Kaczynski is arrested. The Unabomber sent his first letter bomb in 1978; his casualties totaled 3 dead and 26 wounded.
2005: Death of Polish prelate Karol Jozef Wojtyla, better known as Pope John Paul II (b.1920), and canonized as Saint in April of 2014.
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