History Notes this week of Aug 23

79AD: Mount Vesuvius erupts in a cataclysmic explosion of ash and pyroclastic flow that obliterates the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

410: The Visigoth army, under the command of Aleric, begins a three-day sack of Rome.

 1346: Nine years into the Hundred Years War, British Longbowmen create a decisive victory for King Edward III and a shattering defeat for French King Philip VI at the Battle of Cresy, just south of Calais, in northern France. The battle confirmed the validity of massed longbow attacks against armoured knights, and is widely viewed as the beginning of the end of the period of classical chivalry, since the 1500(+) French knights who fell were killed not in honorable hand-to-hand combat, but by randomly fired arrows puncturing their armour. After the battle the British also dispatched, rather than captured and treated, wounded French knights, another violation of the knightly code. In modern terms of the battle, it was organization, tactics and equipment that carried the day.        Casualties (these are consensus numbers): British- 2 knights and approximately 300 soldiers killed. French- 11 noblemen (including King John of Bohemia), 1542 knights and 2300 Genoese crossbowmen killed, in addition to “several thousands” of infantry killed. 
 
1456: Completion of the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible.

1498: Michelangelo receives a papal commission to carve the Pieta. The magnificent sculpture now sits in the first gallery on the right on entering St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

1609: Operating under contract to the Dutch East India Company, English explorer Henry Hudson discovers the Delaware Bay. The Company originally hired him to explore the route for the North-EAST passage to Asia, expecting he could find his way through the ice around the north of Russia to the riches of the Orient. After rounding the North Cape of Norway, the ice pack completely blocked his path. Hudson then turned his ship Halve Mean (Half Moon) westward to search for the expected Northwest Passage. He made landfall in Nova Scotia in early July, and worked his way as far south as Cape Charles. Turning north without exploring the mouth of the Chesapeake, he then began his survey, entering on this day the Delaware Bay. He continued northward up the coast, eventually exploring the river that now bears his name all the way up to the site of present-day Albany. His trade with the natives and his careful charting of the coastline secured the Dutch claim to the region.

1645: Death of the great Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (b.1583). A child prodigy who entered the University of Leiden at age 11, Grotius developed what we know now as the core principles of international law, including the law of war and the rights of belligerents on the high seas. Grotius’ was responsible for the codification of the idea of Mare Liberum, the Free Sea, published in 1609, whereby all nations are free to use the high seas as a pathway for trade as they see fit, a concept which became the foundation of what we now know as the global commons. Also, the definition of territorial waters as being under the sovereignty of a coastal state only to the extent that the state can actually control it. Using the “the fall of cannon shot” as the measure, it led to the long-running (over 300 years) acceptance of the three mile limit* offshore as the boundary of a state’s territorial waters.

1768: Captain James Cook, in HMS Endeavour, departs Plymouth on his first voyage of discovery.  The ostensible reason for the voyage is to observe for the Royal Society the Transit of Venus across the face of the sun. In Cook’s case this will be from Tahiti, which is one of dozens of pre-planned locations around the globe to observe and record the event, with the eventual goal of using the data to determine the exact distance between the sun and the earth. Once the observation was completed the following April, Cook opened his sealed Admiralty orders, which directed him to map the unknown regions of the South Pacific, in particular to search for and claim for Great Britain the fabled Terra Australius, which had long been mapped but never seen. 

1776: General George Washington and the Continental Army suffer a strategic defeat at Brooklyn Heights when the British army under General William Howe outflanks his defenses and almost completely encircles the American forces as they retreat to prepared position on the heights. By late afternoon Washington recognizes they cannot hold the ground at Brooklyn and orders a retreat across the East River to Manhattan Island.  While Howe is carefully digging in for a siege of the American redoubts, Washington evacuates the American army without further loss of life. Between the excellence of the Howe’s forces and the strength of the British fleet that controls New York harbor, Washington eventually realizes he will have to completely evacuate New York. On the positive side, the successful evacuation from Brooklyn ensures that the entire Continental Army remains a viable force-in-being that the British will not be able to ignore as the war deepens.

1789: The French National Assembly, in an intentionally symbolic moment, approves and orders published The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It is designed around the principle of Natural Law, similar in concept to the preamble of our own Declaration of Independence, but focuses more on popular sovereignty as the antidote to the divine right of kings, and on individual rights and democracy. Although noble in intent, it nonetheless became associated with mob rule and many of the anarchistic and subversive movements of the 19th century.

1799: Part of the continuing wars of the various anti-France coalitions (in this case, the Second Coalition), a British fleet under the command of Vice Admiral Andrew Mitchell captures an entire Batavian Dutch fleet of twelve ships under the command of Rear Admiral Samuel Story without firing a shot. The victory hinged on an outstanding intelligence estimate, the Brits’ timely and correct application of diplomacy, a credible threat of devastating force, and a civil-military “strategic communications” plan that played directly into the nationalistic sentiments of Dutch sailors who served under the French-ruled Batavian Republic. The action took place near present-day Den Helder at the mouth of the Zuider Zee. A British army made a landing three days earlier on the North Sea side of the peninsula. The fleet then made its way into the Helder roadstead, flying the flag of the Hereditary Stadtholder, the Prince of Orange. The knowledge of the British landing, combined with the sight of the British fleet and the knowledge that their actual sovereign was within range, triggered a spontaneous mutiny of the Dutch sailors and most of their officers against the hated French. Admiral Story, recognizing that resistance would be fruitless, offered to surrender his fleet to the Stadtholder and himself and his men to the British as Prisoners of War. Admiral Mitchell made a point of delaying the decision, but then took it before the French had an opportunity to re-establish their control of the fleet. British prize crews sailed the best of the ships back to England, where they were inducted into the Royal Navy. This event became known as the Vlieter Incident. It was a singular success from an otherwise disastrous 1799 Anglo-Russian Campaign, which began to unravel almost immediately after this victory.

1830: The first steam locomotive built in the United States, the Tom Thumb, performs a demonstration to convince investors of the viability of steam railroads.
 
1857: The Panic of 1857: a series of cascading bank failures brought on by a combination of a year-long recession, the Crimean War’s effect on US trade, collapsing banks, collapsing real estate market speculation brought on by railroad failures, collapsing grain prices, the loss of a ship carrying a huge shipment of gold from California and deep uncertainty about whether the US government could back up its debt obligations in specie. As of this day the stock market lost 66% of its 1852 value, which it did not recover until years after the conclusion of the Civil War. Other than that, things were pretty normal, except for the growing violence of the abolitionist movement and the looming secession of the southern states.
 

1859: First commercial extraction of oil, from a well near Titusville, Pennsylvania. “Pennsylvania grade crude” and “Pennzoil” are a couple legacies of this event, as are Standard Oil & J.D. Rockefeller, among others.

1862: The Battle of Second Manassas (Second Bull Run)- after completely negating Union General George McLellan’s Peninsular Campaign, Confederate General Robert E. Lee takes the offensive against the Union Army of Virginia, now commanded by Major General John Pope, who has to react to Lee’s aggressive thrusts and parries in a northward campaign toward Washington, DC. When Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson captures a Union supply train at Manassas Junction, Pope believes he has trapped the Confederates (counter-intuitive, I know). What Pope doesn’t know is that Jackson is holding a reinforced position behind an unfinished railroad berm, and that James Longstreet has established his 25,000 men on Jackson’s right, completely unknown to Pope. The forces fought a mostly inconclusive battle on this day, but during the night Longstreet’s forces move into an attacking position. The fight that raged throughout the 30^th forced the Union back along the same retreat route it had used 15 months earlier after the Battle of First Manassas.

1883: The Indonesian volcanic island of Krakatoa self-destructs in a paroxysm of explosions that caused the landmass to completely disappear beneath the waves of the Sunda Strait. The final explosion was heard distinctly in Perth, Australia (1,930 miles away) and on Rodrigues Island off the coast of Africa, over 3,000 miles across the Indian Ocean. The force of the detonation is nominally estimated at 200 Megatons, equivalent to about 13,000 “Little Boy” atomic bombs (Hiroshima).

1896: The shortest war in history is fought between Great Britain and Zanzibar, a result of a dispute over the accession of the new Sultan of Zanzibar. With an ultimatum expiring to no effect at 0900, a British task force opened fire on the palace, setting it afire and destroying Zanzibar’s only artillery pieces, in addition to sinking a royal yacht. When the palace flag is finally hit and knocked down at 0940, the Brits cease fire, and a complex diplomatic dance between Germany, Zanzibar and Great Britain ensues, with the British choice for sultan eventually taking the throne. Total time in combat: 40 minutes.

1885: German engineer, designer and handyman Gottlieb Daimler patents the world’s first motor-cycle, powered by a one cylinder, one horsepower gasoline engine he nicknamed the “grandfather clock engine.” You probably knew that he went on to join forces with his fellow small-engine junkie Wilhelm Maybach to form the motor company we now know as Mercedes-Benz (i.e., Daimler, AG).

 1910: Birth of Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (d.1997), the Albanian nun better known as Mother Teresa, who founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India in 1950. Her selfless work with the poor and destitute earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. She died in September, 1997, and was beatified by Pope John Paul II as Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.

1911: Ishi, the last Native American to make contact with American civilization, steps out of the woods near Mount Lassen in northern California to meet his destiny. He immediately became a sensation in anthropological circles, providing demonstrations of a former life completely independent of European influence. He lived at the University of California, San Francisco, until his death from tuberculosis in 1915. 

1914: Battle of Heligoland Bight– the first naval engagement of World War I, where the Royal Navy made a surprise attack against patrolling cruisers and destroyers of the German Imperial High Seas Fleet, sinking three light cruisers, a destroyer and two torpedo boats, and severely damaging six other cruisers and destroyers, at a cost of heavy damage to one light cruiser. By their own admission, the Brits got lucky, but the battle so unnerved the Kaiser that he restricted the German fleet from any further chance at engagement for nearly three months, creating a rift between him and the naval command that never healed. 

1914: Only four weeks into WWI, the Imperial German 8^th Army of 166,000 under the command of Field Marshalls Paul von Hindenburg and Eric Ludendorff, decisively smashes the Russian 1^st and 2^nd Armies in the Battle of Tannenberg. The three-day fight in East Prussia saw Hindenburg take full advantage of the German railroad network to quickly move his forces to a position where Ludendorff could engage them as a singular unit against both Russian groups. Their adaptability and ability to concentrate against the Russian flanks allowed them to completely dominate the battlefield, killing or wounding 78,000 and capturing 92,000 of the 416,000 total Russian force. Rather than report the loss to the Tsar, the Russian commander committed suicide. Over the next three years, Russia was never able to recoup from this defeat and eventually negotiated for a separate peace. 

1928: The Kellogg-Briand Pact is signed by the United States and 14 other nations. The treaty, negotiated outside the jurisdiction of the League of Nations, essentially outlaws war as a legitimate diplomatic tool, except for self-defense. The treaty is the basis for the “crimes against the peace” that underlay the post WWII Nuremburg Trials.

1949: The Soviet Union detonates its first atomic bomb. Despite a significant level of in-house development by Soviet scientists, the event was hastened by broad-based espionage from the Manhattan Project by Klaus Fuchs, who provided the Soviets significant details on gaseous diffusion of uranium isotopes, using plutonium instead of uranium in the fission device, techniques for extracting plutonium through a “uranium pipe,” confirmation of critical mass (determined after years of trial and error by the Manhattan Project), and a complete set of blueprints and schematics for our own atomic bomb.

1966: The Beatles perform their last concert for paying customers, held in San Francisco at Candlestick Park.

1968: At the Democratic National Convention taking place in Chicago, ten thousand anti-war protesters are goaded into violent action by Tom Hayden, triggering a violent counter-action by Chicago police and Illinois National Guard. The riot is remembered in popular folklore as a “police riot” despite the left-wing agitation that threatened the convention in the first place. In a summer of race rioting and anti-war protests all around the country, this one stands out for the callousness of the neo-communist organizers and the ham-handedness of the Chicago political machine, all of which was broadcast “live, in living color”
 
1968: France detonates its first thermonuclear bomb, the CANOPUS test in the Polynesian test range, becoming the fifth nation to do so.

1991: Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

2005: Hurricane Katrina slams into the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama, wreaking havoc. Minimum central pressure was 902 mb, or 26.64 in/hg. You know the rest of the story. She took over 1,800 souls and caused $125,000,000,000.00 in property damage.