History Notes this week of August 23

79 AD — On the feast day of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and blacksmiths, an earthquake is felt on Mount Vesuvius, along with a small plume of ash that does not linger. Revelers in Pompeii and Herculaneum continue the feast. (The equivalent god in the Greek pantheon is Hephaestus.)

79 AD — 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 Alaric, begins a three-day sack of Rome — the first time in nearly 800 years the city had fallen to a foreign enemy.

1346 — Nine years into the Hundred Years’ War, English longbowmen deliver a decisive victory for King Edward III and a shattering defeat for French King Philip VI at the Battle of Crécy, just south of Calais in northern France. The battle confirmed the effectiveness of massed longbow attacks against armored knights and is widely viewed as marking the beginning of the end of classical chivalry, since over 1,500 French knights fell not in honorable hand-to-hand combat but to arrows fired from a distance. After the battle, the English also killed rather than captured and ransomed wounded French knights — another break from the knightly code. In modern terms, the battle was won by organization, tactics, and equipment rather than valor. Casualties (consensus figures): English — 2 knights and roughly 300 soldiers killed. French — 11 noblemen (including King John of Bohemia), 1,542 knights, and 2,300 Genoese crossbowmen killed, plus several thousand infantry.

1456 — Completion of the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible, the first major book printed in Europe using movable type.

1498 — Michelangelo receives a papal commission to carve the Pietà. The sculpture now stands in the first gallery on the right as one enters St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

1577 — Death of the great Italian Renaissance painter Titian (b. 1488), known for his portraits of European royalty, including Emperor Charles V.

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, chronicler of early voyages of discovery. Gosnold pioneered a direct route to New England in 1602, touching Maine, exploring Cape Cod, and naming Martha’s Vineyard after his daughter. Back in England, he became the chief planner behind the Virginia Company’s Jamestown expedition of 1607 and commanded the ship Godspeed on the crossing. Though he opposed John Smith’s choice of Jamestown Island as the settlement site, he took a strong leadership role in making the colony permanent. He died of dysentery just four months after landing.

1609 — Galileo Galilei presents his first telescope to the Doge of Venice: a 3x-magnification instrument with hand-ground lenses that produced an upright (non-inverted) image. The devices proved popular for surveying and navigation, providing Galileo income to support his other research. Using a later, 30x instrument, he discovered four of Jupiter’s moons; tracking their orbits helped confirm Copernican heliocentrism. Galileo is widely regarded as the father of modern science. Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel (1999) draws on his extensive letters to his convent-bound eldest daughter to frame his life, including his persecution by the Inquisition.

1768 — Captain James Cook departs Plymouth aboard HMS Endeavour on his first voyage of discovery. The official purpose was to observe the Transit of Venus from Tahiti for the Royal Society, part of a global effort to calculate the distance between the sun and Earth. After completing the observation the following April, Cook opened sealed Admiralty orders directing him to chart the unknown South Pacific and search for the long-theorized but never-confirmed continent of Terra Australis on Britain’s behalf.

1776 — General George Washington and the Continental Army suffer a strategic defeat at the Battle of Brooklyn Heights when British forces under General William Howe outflank his defenses and nearly encircle the Americans as they retreat to prepared positions on the heights. By late afternoon, Washington recognizes the position is untenable and orders a retreat across the East River to Manhattan. While Howe digs in for a siege, Washington evacuates the entire army overnight without further loss of life. Facing Howe’s superior force and a British fleet controlling New York Harbor, Washington later concludes he must abandon New York entirely — but the successful evacuation keeps the Continental Army intact as a fighting force the British cannot ignore.

1789 — The French National Assembly, in a deliberately symbolic act, approves and publishes the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Grounded in natural law, it echoes the preamble of the American Declaration of Independence but emphasizes popular sovereignty over divine right and individual liberty over monarchy. Though noble in intent, it later became associated with mob rule and 19th-century revolutionary movements.

1793 — The French National Convention decrees a levée en masse, the first nationwide military draft, to build an army large enough to fight the wars triggered by the overthrow of the monarchy. Prussia and Austria had declared war on revolutionary France in April 1792 in defense of monarchy generally; by summer 1793 they were joined by Spain, Great Britain, Piedmont, and the Netherlands. The levée held that new political rights carried new civic obligations, mobilizing nearly all of French society for the war effort. The result was the world’s first citizen army, whose performance startled Europe’s smaller professional forces and paved the way for France’s later domination of the continent.

1819 — Death of Oliver Hazard Perry (b. 1785), hero of the Battle of Lake Erie, from malaria while surveying Venezuela’s Orinoco River. After his decisive 1813 victory over the British on the lake, his battle report read simply: “We have met the enemy and they are ours; two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.” Perry’s younger brother, Commodore Matthew C. Perry, later opened Japan to U.S. trade in 1854. Later descendants included Commander John Rogers, the U.S. Navy’s second aviator, and Calbraith Perry Rogers, the first person to fly across the continental United States.

1834 — Birth of Samuel Pierpont Langley (d. 1906), astronomer, physicist, and aviation pioneer whose failed attempts to fly a manned heavier-than-air machine tarnished an otherwise distinguished scientific career and tenure as head of the Smithsonian Institution. His “Aerodrome” was overweight, underpowered, and difficult to control, and it nearly killed its pilot twice; catapult-launched from a houseboat on the Potomac, it was said to fly like “a shovelful of mortar” before crashing into the river. The Smithsonian spent years arguing Langley had beaten the Wright Brothers to flight, a claim it only recently retracted.

1839 — Great Britain captures and occupies Hong Kong Island as a staging base ahead of the First Opium War. (2019/2020 note: mainland China’s tightening grip on Hong Kong — including the imposition of a national security law — has steadily eroded the “one country, two systems” arrangement established with Britain.)

1914 — The Battle of Mons, Belgium: days after Britain’s declaration of war, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) under General Sir John French crosses the Channel to hold the left flank of the French line. At roughly 80,000 men in two corps, the BEF was small but among the best-trained professional armies in the world, prized for rapid rifle marksmanship. After first contact with German scouts on the 21st, the BEF dug in along the Mons–Condé Canal to block the German advance. Though outnumbered roughly 3:1, they inflicted heavy casualties and halted the initial German assault. A renewed German attack in open order made the British position untenable, and the BEF withdrew overnight to a planned fallback line — which, with the French also retreating, could not be held either. The retreat continued for two weeks and covered over 250 miles. Mons is considered a tactical British success: the BEF held its ground for 24 hours, inflicting serious delay and casualties, and it bolstered confidence in the British soldier — while also proving, like the Union’s First Bull Run, that the war would be neither quick nor glorious.

1851 — After crossing the Atlantic to answer a challenge from the Royal Yacht Squadron, the New York-based yacht America wins the 53-mile Round the Isle of Wight race, taking home the silver cup now known as the America’s Cup. The New York Yacht Club held the trophy until 1983 — 25 defenses over 132 years, the longest winning streak in sports history. Watching the finish, Queen Victoria reportedly asked who had come in second; the reply: “There is no second, Your Majesty.”

1857 — The Panic of 1857: a wave of bank failures driven by a year-long recession, the Crimean War’s disruption of U.S. trade, a collapsing railroad-fueled real estate bubble, falling grain prices, the loss of a gold shipment from California, and doubts about the government’s ability to back its debts in specie. By this date the stock market had lost 66% of its 1852 value, a level it would not recover until years after the Civil War — against a backdrop of rising abolitionist violence and looming Southern secession.

1859 — The first commercial oil well is drilled near Titusville, Pennsylvania, launching the American petroleum industry — and, indirectly, Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller.

1883 — The Indonesian volcanic island of Krakatoa self-destructs in a series of explosions so violent the landmass largely vanishes beneath the Sunda Strait. The final blast was heard clearly in Perth, Australia (1,930 miles away) and on Rodrigues Island, over 3,000 miles across the Indian Ocean — among the loudest sounds in recorded history. The explosion is estimated at roughly 200 megatons, equivalent to about 13,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs, and ejected some five cubic miles of ash and pumice into the atmosphere, producing vivid sunsets and cooler global temperatures for years afterward. Since 1927, volcanic activity has been building a new island on the site, Anak Krakatau (“Child of Krakatoa”), which grows roughly 5 meters a year and remains active — a December 2018 eruption caused its crater to collapse and triggered an 18-foot tsunami that struck Indonesia. Recommended reading: Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded by Simon Winchester (2003), which weaves the eruption together with the history of Dutch colonization of the East Indies.

1896 — The shortest war in recorded history is fought between Great Britain and the Sultanate of Zanzibar, sparked by a dispute over succession to the throne. When a British ultimatum expired at 9:00 a.m., a Royal Navy squadron opened fire on the palace, setting it ablaze, destroying Zanzibar’s artillery, and sinking a royal yacht. The Sultan’s flag was shot down at 9:40, ending hostilities after roughly 40 minutes. A subsequent diplomatic negotiation among Britain, Germany, and Zanzibar installed Britain’s preferred candidate as sultan.

1899 — Birth of British author Cecil Louis Troughton Smith (d. 1966), better known by his pen name C. S. Forester. He wrote the eleven Horatio Hornblower novels and created Charlie Allnut, the anti-hero of The African Queen (1935). His novel The General (1936) is a sharp satire of a WWI-era British general, credited with originating the now-familiar stereotype of the military commander as a hidebound, unimaginative figure insulated by rank — though Forester’s portrait, set as the general paces the grounds of a veterans’ home, remains sympathetic to him as a person.

1902 — Theodore Roosevelt becomes the first sitting U.S. President to ride in an automobile.

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

1911 — Birth of North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap (d. 2013), who defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and later oversaw the final conquest of South Vietnam in 1975, after the United States declined to honor its commitments to the South Vietnamese government.

1927 — Execution of Italian-American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, convicted of murder in a case that remains disputed and controversial to this day.

1928 — The Kellogg-Briand Pact is signed by the United States and 14 other nations, negotiated outside the League of Nations. The treaty renounces war as an instrument of national policy except in self-defense — a piece of diplomatic idealism honored mostly in the breach, though it remains technically in force and later provided the legal basis for the “crimes against peace” charges at the post-WWII Nuremberg trials.

1930 — Birth of Sean Connery (d. 2020).

1930 — Death of Lon Chaney (b. 1883), the “Man of a Thousand Faces” of the silent-film era.

1938 — Birth of guitarist and composer Mason Williams, best known for his 1968 instrumental “Classical Gas.”

1939 — Germany and the Soviet Union sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, a public non-aggression treaty with a secret protocol dividing the Baltic states, Finland, Romania, and Poland between the two dictatorships.

1939 — The Wizard of Oz, starring Judy Garland, opens. It lost the Best Picture Oscar to Gone with the Wind but went on to become a beloved television perennial in the decades that followed.

1942 — Opening shots of the Battle of Stalingrad — a decisive turning point that would soon put to rest any illusions left over from the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact.

1944 — After four years of German occupation, and two and a half months after the Normandy landings, Allied forces liberate Paris. The German commander, defying orders, does not burn the city as he withdraws.

1945 — Death of Baptist missionary and OSS operative John Birch (b. 1918), killed by Chinese communist forces — often cited as the first casualty of the Cold War. Fourteen years later, a staunchly anti-communist organization adopted his name, an association that has somewhat overshadowed his legacy; during his years in China, Birch did dedicated work for his faith and country and was outspoken against Chinese communist abuses in the wake of the Japanese occupation.

1948 — The House Un-American Activities Committee holds its first televised congressional hearing, featuring the dramatic confrontation between former Communist Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, who denied the charge.

1962 — NS Savannah, the world’s first nuclear-powered merchant ship, completes her maiden voyage. Though never commercially profitable, she remained a symbol of the potential for peaceful nuclear power. Defueled in 1972, she became a museum ship at Charleston’s Patriots Point before returning to federal custody in 1994. She was towed to Baltimore in 2008 for full decommissioning and remains there in preservation layup.

1968 — France detonates its first thermonuclear weapon, the CANOPUS test, at its Pacific test site in French Polynesia, becoming the fifth nation to develop hydrogen bomb capability.

1974 — Death of aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh (b. 1902), the first person to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic.

1991 — Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, a pivotal step in the USSR’s collapse later that year.

1992 — Hurricane Andrew, a Category 5 storm, slams into South Dade County, Florida — one of the most destructive hurricanes in U.S. history.

1995 — Death of Prussian-born photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt (b. 1898), famed for his 1/125-second photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day, 1945.

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Wayne Creed

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