History Notes this week of Aug18

43BC: Octavian exercises his influence to get himself elected as part of the Second Triumvirate (i.e., three-way dictatorship) of the Roman Senate. He was born into a noble household as Gaius Octavius Thurinus; adopted in 44BC by Julius Caesar, he became known as Gaius Julius Caesar, and after the battle in Egypt, Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus. Historians use a three part shorthand to designate the phases of his life: Octavius (64-44), Octavian (44-27), and Augustus (27BC- 14AD). Hope that clears things up for you.

1227: Traditional date for the death of Genghis Khan (b. circa 1162), the great Mongol warlord and leader of an empire that spread from China’s coastal plains, across the steppes of central Asia to the banks of the Dnieper River and the gates of Kiev. He is credited on the positive side with consolidating the Silk Road into a peaceful trading confederation*, for instituting a nominal level of meritocracy in his governmental postings, and for creating a unifying political structure across a fractious region. On the other hand, he is also correctly portrayed as a brutal conqueror who gained most of his distant territories through genocide and random murder. As a military commander he had no peer during his lifetime. 

1587: Birth of Virginia Dare, granddaughter of the governor Roanoke Colony, John White. Miss Dare was the first English child born in the Americas. One of our DLH colleagues recently suggested that she was the first “anchor baby,” but we won’t go there.

1607: Death of Bartholomew Gosnold (b.1562). An early gentleman-explorer of the New World, he sailed with Walter Raleigh and was friends with Richard Hakluyt, who wrote extensive volumes on the early voyages of discovery. Gosnold pioneered a direct route to New England in 1602, touching in Maine, identifying and exploring Cape Cod, naming Martha’s Vineyard after his daughter, and returning back to England where he became the prime mover and planner for the eventual Virginia Colony at Jamestown in 1607. He commanded the expedition’s ship Godspeed on the transit to the New World. Although opposing John Smith’s initial location of the colony on Jamestown island, he nevertheless took a strong leadership role in making it a permanent settlement. He died of dysentery only four months after the landing.  

1754: Birth of Banastre Tarleton (d.1833), the British Lieutenant-Colonel who distinguished himself during the American Revolution as an exceptionally brutal commander during the British Southern Campaign. His actions in that theater earned him the nickname of “Bloody Ban,” a result of the mass killing of American militia who were in the act of surrendering at the Battle of Waxhaw Creek in North Carolina. The action inflamed the rest of the colonies and led to the battle cry of “Tarleton’s Quarter!” when Americans came back into contact with the Redcoat army. 
 
1774: Birth of Meriwether Lewis (d.1809), the other half of the leadership team that surveyed the new Louisiana Territory in the great Corps of Discovery expedition of 1803.

1812: Captain Issac Hull, commanding the frigate USS Constitution, engages the British heavy frigate HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia and blasts her into a useless and splintered hulk, killing a third of her crew and sending shock waves throughout the Royal Navy and joy throughout the United States. Continuing to close through the Briton’s early cannonades, Hull withheld the order to fire back until they were a mere 25 yards off, at which point he ordered a shattering broadside that swept Guerriere’s decks and almost immediately began her dismasting. Though damaged in the rigging, Constitution comes out of the battle essentially intact. During the battle, Guerriere’s cannonballs were seen bouncing off the stout oaken sides of the Constitution, prompting the cry, “Huzzah! Her sides are made of iron!”

1831: In Southampton County, VA, the slave Nat Turner leads what he believes will be a God-inspired revolt to throw off the chains of slavery. After months of planning, he and a handful of compatriots during the night of 20-21^st of August begin to gather an “army” by stealthily moving from farm to farm, killing the whites with knives, axes and blunt instruments, and enjoining the now-freed slaves to join them to continue the process until they have enough forces for an expected stand-up fight with the inevitable militia pursuit. By the time militia formed up in the morning, Turner’s forces had killed 55 whites and swelled their own ranks to approximately 70 slaves and free blacks. The rebellion was quickly suppressed the day after it started, but Turner escaped the dragnet until October 30^th, after which he was tried and executed on November 5^th.

1834: Birth of Samuel Pierpont Langley (d.1906), astronomer, physicist, and aviation pioneer, whose unsuccessful attempts at flying a man-carrying heavier-than-air machine spoiled an otherwise distinguished career in science and as head of the Smithsonian Institution. The Aerodrome on which he staked his professional reputation was overweight, under-powered and under-controllable; it nearly killed its pilot twice. Its catapult launch from the roof of houseboat on the Potomac River was described as having flight characteristics akin to “a shovelful of mortar” as its ballistic trajectory took it directly to a watery grave. The Smithsonian Institution spent years in a sometimes vicious campaign to prove Langley’s success ahead of the Wright Brothers, a campaign which they only recently* conceded as false.

1838: Wilkes Expedition. In a long-delayed follow up to the Corps of Discovery, six US Navy ships of the United States Exploring Expedition weigh anchor from right here in Hampton Roads to begin a four-year journey around the American continents and into the Pacific basin. Their mission was to create accurate surveys of newly found lands, promote American commerce abroad, and conduct scientific surveys of resources in previous discoveries. The expedition was under the command of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes, USN, for whom the expedition is named.

1839: The French government, after granting Louis Daguerre a lifetime pension for his invention, announces that the Daguerreotype photographic process is “Free to All.” This is great news except in England, where Daguerre filed a patent a year earlier, which limited the island to only one licensed photographer through the life of the patent.

1848: Eight months after the discovery of loose gold near Coloma, California, the New York Herald becomes the first East Coast newspaper to announce the news to the rest of the world. The gold rush that began during this summer became a veritable flood of Easterners chartering clipper ships to San Francisco, which transformed the city from a sleepy fishing town and army post to a booming den of iniquity and gold-fueled wealth. Because of the one-way nature of the commerce, hundreds of ships were left abandoned on the San Francisco waterfront, where their remains are still excavated today during many construction projects.

1851: After sailing across the Atlantic to meet the gentleman’s challenge issued by the Royal Yacht Squadron, the New York based racing yacht America competes in the 53 mile Around the Isle of Wight sailing race to decisively win the silver cup, the “Auld Mug” that now bears its name: America’s Cup. The New York Yacht Club brings the trophy back to the United States, where they hold onto it until 1983: 25 separate competitive regattas spanning 132 years, comprising the longest winning streak of any sport in history. Witnessing the race finish, and listening to the dismay of her countrymen, Queen Victoria turned to the RYS commodore and asked who finished second. His famous reply: “There is no second, Your Majesty.”

1863: Raid by rebel-Rebel gunmen, led by William Clark Quantrill, attacks the anti-slavery town of Lawrence, Kansas, burning a quarter of its buildings to the ground, killing over 200 military-aged men, and pillaging whatever remained. Quantrill’s Raid, also known as the Lawrence Massacre, became one of the bloodiest events in Kansas’ history, which had seen more than its share of abolitionist violence since the first Sack of Lawrence in 1856, and helped cement the title of “Bleeding Kansas” on that front line of the ongoing battle between expanding or restricting slavery in the western territories.

1902: Theodore Roosevelt becomes the first US President to ride in an automobile.

1914: Two weeks after Albert I, King of Belgium, denies the Imperial German Army passage into France, the Germans occupy Brussels.

1920: Founding of the National Football League. 

1920: The final ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing women’s suffrage.

1938:  New York Yankee Lou Gehrig, smashes his 23^rd grand slam home run, a record that stood until the former Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez hit his 24th in the 2013 season. At the close of his career in 2016, Rodriguez finished with a total of 25 of them.

1940: Death of Leon Trotsky (b.1879),  Vladimir Lenin’s top lieutenant, organizer and commander of the Red Army, Commissar of Foreign Affairs who negotiated the Brest-Litovsk Treaty with Imperial Germany, and staunch opponent of Joseph Stalin’s rise to power in the Communist Party leadership. Trotsky resented Stalin’s emphasis on consolidating Communism in Russia, rather than continuing along the pure path of global revolution: “In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a “dictator” substitutes himself for the central committee.”  Trotsky wrote against Stalin after he was exiled to Mexico: “Bureaucracy and social harmony are inversely proportional to each other… In Stalin each [Soviet bureaucrat] easily finds himself. But Stalin also finds in each one a small part of his own spirit. Stalin is the personification of the bureaucracy. That is the substance of his political personality.”  This week, the bureaucracy had had enough, and NKVD agent Roman Mercader made his way into Trotsky’s Mexican home and plunged an ice-axe into his head. Amazingly, it did not kill him immediately; after a futile surgery, Trotsky’s last words were, “Stalin has finally accomplished the task he attempted unsuccessfully before.”

1947: Death of Ettore Bugatti (b.1881), Italian engineer and automobile designer, who set up a French company bearing his name that produced some of the most successful and beautiful cars of the 1920s-30s. The name Bugatti was associated with precision and high performance throughout the pre-war period. The marque was revived in 1987 by an Italian entrepreneur who, in 1996, designed and built the stunning EB 110 supercar. Volkswagen Group acquired the marque in 1998 and used its engineering prowess to produce the Veyron 16.4, the world’s fastest production car (top speed just shy of 270 mph).

1953: In coordination with Great Britain’s MI-6, the CIA assists in the coup d’etat of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh, a virulent Persian nationalist who campaigned incessantly against Britain’s economic ties with Iran. His 1951 election brought with it a host of Progressive social reforms and wholesale nationalization of the oil industry, which was not seen in Britain’s best interests. Winston Churchill let it be known to the U.S. that Mosaddegh was also leaning heavily communist, which of course helped secure American interest.

1962: The technological tour de force NS Savannah completes her maiden voyage. The nuclear powered merchant ship never made a cent, but remains a symbol of the potential for peaceful uses of the atom. After de-fueling her reactors in January, 1972, she became a museum ship in Charleston’s Patriot Point, but was transferred back to the supervision of the Maritime Administration in 1994. She remained in the inactive fleet up the James River until mid-2008, when she was towed to Baltimore for complete de-nuclearization, where she remains in preservation layup.

1968: Increasingly concerned about the dangerous liberalism undertaken by Czech premier Alexander Dubcek, the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia in a vivid demonstration of the Brezhnev Doctrine, wherein the USSR retains the right to “protect the gains of the socialist revolution” in any country it could reach.

1977: Death of Groucho Marx (b.1890), who famously quipped, among other famous quips, “Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member” 

1981: Two F-14 Tomcats flying from USS Nimitz (CVN-68) shoot down two Libyan SU-22 Fitters during a Freedom of Navigation exercise in the Gulf of Sidra.

1991: The August Coup– First full day of the coup attempt by Soviet hardliners against the reform government of Mikhail Gorbachev. On this day the Red Army was ordered into Moscow to shell the “White House” parliament building. Moscow mayor Boris Yeltsin climbs up onto a tank with a bullhorn and exhorts the crowd of over 100,000 to keep demonstrating for reform and freedom.

1991: Estonia releases a statement re-asserting its status as an independent Baltic nation, in defiance of the Soviet Union’s 1941 annexation of it and its two sister republics.