History Notes this week of DEC 24

336AD: First recorded celebration of the Christmas feast, 3 years after Emperor Constantine’s conversion to the faith.

537A.D.: Dedication of the world’s largest Christian Church, the Hagia Sophia, in Constantinople. This was the third iteration of the center of imperial Byzantine worship to be constructed on the site and is the structure still standing in Istanbul. During the Moslem conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Sultan Mehmet II allowed his troops three days of unbridled looting of the city, including the Hagia Sophia, where thousands of Christians sheltered themselves behind their prayers and the massive walls of the church. The invaders eventually battered down the doors and proceeded to do what invading armies did: killing, rape, torture, looting, and taking into slavery those that they did not kill. The priests in the church continued to perform their duties at the altar until cut down by the Moslem conquerors. Once the prescribed looting was complete, Mehmet ordered the church converted to a mosque, melting gold fixtures and plastering over the centuries-old mosaics that decorated the domes and pillars of the structure. It remained an active mosque until 1935, when the father of modern, secular Turkey, Kemal Attaturk, expelled the Moslem staff and converted the structure to a museum that explicitly recognized its powerful Christian roots. The current government of Turkey, while leaving the structure open as a museum, has reinstituted muezzin calls from the minarets, and a debate is in progress with both Muslim and Christian groups demanding the building be re-opened as a place of worship.

1065: Formal consecration in London of Westminster Abbey, site of the coronation of every English and British monarch beginning with William the Conqueror in 1066. 

1066: Two and a half months after his decisive victory at the Battle of Hastings, and with no viable English opposition to halt his plundering progress from the Channel coast up to London, William the Conqueror is crowned king of England by the Archbishop of Canterbury in London’s Westminster Abbey.

1446: Death of the Antipope Clement VIII (b.1369), one of the last of the Avignon Popes who sat for nearly 130 years across 12 papacies in opposition of the Bishop of Rome. The period of the late Middle Ages not only sowed the seeds of the later Protestant Reformation, it also saw the separation of the political and military power of the Roman Curia from its spiritual power. Perpetual flashpoints arose with every royal coronation, especially for the Holy Roman Emperor and for the King of the Franks. There were also competing papal family dynasties at play during the selection of a new pope, and the tension grew so great that in 1305, the Frenchman elected as pope, Clement VII, declined to move to Rome and instead established the curia in papal properties in Avignon, now part of southern France.

1492: Christopher Columbus’ flagship, the carrack Santa Maria, runs aground on a reef off the coast of Haiti close to Cap Haitien. The wreck was a classic case of poor watch-standing: The captain himself, having been up for two full days, retired to his cabin to get some sleep on a calm night. His helmsmen decided to catch a few winks himself after the captain went below, and ordered a young cabin boy to steer for a while. A classic lack of skill, lack of seaman’s eye, shifting (light) winds and (not light) currents, and crunch- Santa Maria is hard aground with a broken keel and sprung planking. All the crew makes it ashore* before the ship breaks up during the day.

1512: Imperial Spain promulgates the Leyes de Burgos, a set of laws that codifies humane relations between the Spanish colonial overlords and the indigenous peoples of the conquered territories. Although it was designed to ensure a decent level of stewardship and care for the people, it was largely honored in the breech and was soon derided as simply the rationalization for the widespread abuses that characterized the Spanish Empire in the Americas.

1635: Death of Samuel de Champlain (b.1567), French soldier, draftsman, cartographer and explorer of France’s New World territories; Founded Quebec City in 1603, continued to explore and map the Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River, and established a tight web of trading relationships with the various Indian tribes of the upper Mississippi watershed. You correctly recognize that that long, beautiful waterway between Vermont & NY is named after him. One of the Greats from the Great Age of Exploration.

1776: After a treacherous overnight crossing from Pennsylvania across an ice-choked Delaware River, General George Washington leads 2,400 Continental Army troops into action against Hessian mercenaries stationed in Trenton, N.J. The Hessians, caught completely off-guard by the attack, put up a short, sharp resistance and fighting withdrawal from their initial positions north of the city. But after several moves and counter-moves, the Hessian commander realizes the Americans have completely cut off all chance of escape or reinforcement, and surrenders his 1,500 professional troops to Washington. The victory galvanizes American support and morale throughout the colonies, and confirms Washington’s unique effectiveness in exploiting the strengths of the relatively weak Continental Army against the potential weaknesses of his enemies.

1783: General George Washington resigned his commission as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, an act that stunned the aristocracy of Europe, and caused none other than King George III to declare him “the greatest character of the age” because of it. The event was memorialized by a massive portrait by the great John Trumbull, which now hangs in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. 

1809: Birth of legendary frontiersman, trapper, Indian fighter, scout and soldier, Kit Carson (d.1868). 

1814: British and American diplomats sign the Treaty of Ghent, formally ending the War of 1812. The terms of the agreement essentially return the belligerents to the status quo ante bellum, which reinforces the notion that this two-year long conflict, never politically popular nor strategically coherent, really was a wasted effort in lost political will, lost commerce, and lives. On the positive side, the US naval victories at sea and the astonishing victory at the Battle of New Orleans convinced Britain that although they need not become close allies with the United States, they now respected us as legitimate power players on the international stage.

1822: Birth of Louis Pasteur (d.1895), whose studies in chemistry and microbiology created the basis for understanding the germ theory of disease, and the principles of vaccination and sterilization of milk and wine to prevent the spread of bacterial infections, a process now known as pasteurization.

1826: The Corps of Cadets at the United States Military Academy flaunted the school’s rules against the consumption of alcohol in a level of binge drinking that earned an actual place in history as The Eggnog Riot. There are plenty of nit-picking and gory details of the night’s revelry, painstakingly summarized in the subsequent court-martial of 24 of the most culpable young gentlemen. One of the participants, who was not one of the court-martial-ees, was the future President of the Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis.

1832: U.S. Vice-President John C. Calhoun resigns his position, the first sitting VP to do so. Having served as VP for the presidencies of both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, Calhoun’s belief in the absolute supremacy of the States over the federal government led him into increasingly bitter conflict with President Jackson’s policies and certain members of his Cabinet. The Nullification Crisis; Calhoun’s resignation this day, along with the majority of Jackson’s Cabinet, was the climax of that event.

1912: San Francisco’s Municipal Railway opens for business, taking over the management of not only electric trolleys but also the soon-to-be-famous cable cars on street-level tracks throughout the hilly city. 

1929: Chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Joseph Stalin, announces “The liquidation of the Kulaks as a class” as a means to bring socialist collective production into the agricultural sector. The Kulaks were independent farmers who had little time or inclination to join in with the communist movement that had been violently sweeping through the major industrial cities of Russia since 1917. With civil war still festering between the communist Reds and the anti-communist Whites, Stalin took the opportunity to completely consolidate the communist model across the entirety of Russian society, particularly the agricultural heartland. The brutality of this order cannot be overstated: by the end of January, a formal resolution “On measures for the elimination of kulak households in districts of comprehensive collectivization” was issued, and offered local commissars three alternatives for dealing with their restive farmers:
        1) Be shot or imprisoned based on the judgment of the commissar;
        2) Be sent to prison camps in Siberia after confiscation of all property;
        3) Be evicted from their property and used as forced labor at collective farms in their local districts. Resistance to the order was widespread, particularly in Ukraine, where the events through 1933 are memorialized as the Holodomor, the starvation-induced genocide of over 5,000,000 Ukrainians in the heart of “Russia’s Breadbasket.” The sheer numbers of intentional deaths of Russian citizens at the hand of its own government: conventional estimates have settled on 14,500,000 deaths nationwide by famine and “judicial” deaths under the order. Stalin himself was unmoved, “If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs” and “A single death is a tragedy. A thousand deaths is a statistic.” Stalin’s legacy was overshadowed by the Nazi holocaust of the Jews, conducted in the heart of Europe and exposed by the conquering Allied armies. Russia’s self-genocide, on the other hand, remained shrouded by the remoteness and secrecy of the Soviet state.

1845: New York Morning News journalist John O’Sullivan published an editorial advocating for the admission of the Oregon Territory into the United States as the logical result of the country’s manifest destiny to rule the entire continent of North America. It is the first explicit use of the term, which eventually helped rationalize the virtues and scale of our Western expansion all through the 19th Century.

1868: President Andrew Johnson grants an unconditional amnesty to all former Confederate soldiers.

1878: Birth of Louis Chevrolet (d.1941), Swiss-American race car driver and businessman. The auto company unit still bears his name.

1898: Concluding a year of experimentation and discovery on the properties of radioactivity, Marie and Paul Curie announce the isolation of Radium, the central element of their comprehensive analysis of uranium, X-rays, and other naturally occurring “electrical” transmissions, which they recognized as fundamentally different than electricity, and for which they coined the term “radiation.”

1905: Birth of movie mogul, aircraft designer, pilot, and businessman, Howard Hughes (d.1976). 

1913: President Woodrow Wilson signs into law the Federal Reserve Act, which establishes the Federal Reserve, creating a U.S. Central bank. The “long title” of the law, helpfully included with the Wikipedia entry, reads: “An Act to provide for the establishment of Federal reserve banks, to furnish an elastic currency, to afford means of rediscounting commercial paper, to establish a more effective supervision of banking in the United States, and for other purposes.” 

1914: Five months into the widely spreading combat of the Great War, and just weeks after completing the “Race to the Sea” that established a continuous line of trenches from the Swiss border to the North Sea, on this Christmas Eve, soldiers from both sides of the trenches find themselves singing Christmas carols to each other, and then tentatively, but with increasingly greater frequency, climbing out of their trenches under an unofficial truce to exchange cigarettes and small gifts with soldiers from the other side.
Christmas Day began a generalized truce that saw not only light fraternization, but also several episodes of soccer games between British and German soldiers in No Man’s Land. The Christmas Truce was a completely spontaneous and un-authorized pause in the fighting that the soldiers who were there remembered for the rest of their lives. In subsequent years, particularly after the shocking bloodletting and gas attacks of 1915, there was little need for the commanders on both sides to remind their soldiers that their job was to kill, not socialize with, the enemy on the other side of the trenches.

1919: Boston Red Sox first baseman George ‘Babe’ Ruth is sold to the New York Yankees.
 
1923: Birth of Vice Admiral James Stockdale (d.2005), one of the Navy’s greats, whose life defined both the glory and the agony of our country’s Vietnam experience. Stockdale was flying one of the two F-8s dueling with North Vietnamese patrol boats during the first Gulf of Tonkin event, and was again overhead when the destroyers USS Maddox & Turner Joy were blazing away at the empty ocean two nights later during an event President Johnson used to justify a massive expansion of the US military engagement in that benighted country. He was shot down over the North in September of 1965, and was quickly recognized as a uniquely effective leader by both his POW peers and their North Vietnamese captors. The distinction earned him exceptional levels of beatings and torture; his resistance and strength of character under extraordinary duress became a touchstone for all of us in Naval Aviation.  Stockdale remained on active duty, despite the lingering physical limitations from his imprisonment, and advanced him to the rank of Vice Admiral and Presidency of the Naval War College. His public life ended on something of a sour note, when Ross Perot asked him to run as Vice President in his Quixotic third-party stab during the 1992 election. Never an actual politician, at the first Vice Presidential debate with Al Gore and Dan Quayle, the moderator asked him to introduce himself. Stockdale smiled and said, “Who am I? Why am I here?” using a rhetorical device designed to lead to follow-up explanations, but the levity that surrounded those questions, and his verbal fumbles later in the debate, made him appear to be a bumbling old man, instead of the towering intellect and brilliant leader he was. 

1938: In South Africa, discovery and documentation of the first “modern” coelacanth, a fossil fish long believed to be extinct. The story of its re-discovery is a terrific fish tale, blending the somewhat obscure disciplines of paleontology and ichthyology. 

1939: Finnish soldiers hold off advancing Soviet troops in the Battle of Kelja, part of the Winter War with the Soviet Union. Despite huge pressure and overwhelming odds from the Red Army and air force, Finland was never conquered by the Soviets, eventually ceding only about 10% of its territory at the conclusion of hostilities in 1940. Finland remained, like Spain, neutral in the continuing war between Germany and the Allied forces, which tainted them as pro-Nazi for years after the fact. They also walked a fine line during the Cold War, leaning West but warily looking East until the final collapse of the Soviet Union, after which they enthusiastically participated NATO’s Partnership For Peace exercises, with an eventual goal of actually joining the alliance by the mid-‘20s.

1941: Admiral Chester Nimitz arrives in Hawaii to take command of what’s left of the still-smoldering Pacific Fleet of the United States Navy.

1943: American General Dwight D. Eisenhower is named Supreme Commander for the Allied invasion of Normandy. Ike’s skills in planning and diplomacy with the fractious British and French allies were the key to creating success from this complex operation.

1944: Just days after General McAuliffe’s dismissal of German surrender conditions, Lieutenant General George S. Patton’s Third Army breaks through the encircling German lines to relieve the American garrison in Bastogne.

1946: Birth of legendary songman Jimmy Buffet (d.2023), whose music provides the soundtrack to approximately 98.86% of the boating world’s Margaritaville plunders. 

1947: Death of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy (b.1869), in exile in Alexandria, Egypt, after abdicating the throne of Savoy in favor of his son Umberto III. After a 46-year reign, his abdication was an attempt to build post-war unity around the Italian monarchy in the face of a burgeoning referendum movement to abolish it. His efforts failed on both counts, and his move to Alexandria was in accordance with one of the stipulations of the referendum that every male from the House of Savoy had to leave the territory of Italy and never return.

1963: The Beatles release their first two musical cuts for the American market. The songs “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There” represented the beginning of Beatlemania and the British Invasion of the 1960s.

1968: Three days after making their trans-lunar injection (TLI) rocket firing,  the astronauts of Apollo 8 fire their Service Module’s main engine and enter a stable lunar orbit. If you were sentient at the time, you will remember the stunning live color TV transmission* from the Command Module, when we earth-bound travelers witnessed with the astronauts the first “earth rise” over the limb of our celestial partner, punctuated with breathtaking poignancy as Mission Commander Frank Bormann read the opening verses of the Book of Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…” Jim Lovell and Bill Anders took turns with subsequent readings of the Creation story, closing with, “…and from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.“

1968 : After 20 hours in orbit around the Moon, the crew of Apollo 8 fires its service module main engine to perform a trans-earth injection burn, putting the craft onto a perilous trajectory back to our home planet. It is probably worth repeating: the re-entry window from the lunar orbit to the earth’s atmosphere is a mere 2.5 degrees. Anything less than that, and the capsule will skip off the outer fringes of the atmosphere to be lost in an indefinite solar orbit; any more than that would cause massive deceleration and structural failure, with the re-entry heat completely consuming the capsule and crew.

1968: Two and a half days after their telecast from lunar orbit, the crew of Apollo 8 makes a re-entry into the earth’s atmosphere, splashing down within two miles of the Pacific Ocean recovery ship, USS Yorktown (CV-10). The most crucial engineering test from this mission was the ability of the Apollo capsule to accurately navigate to the narrow re-entry window into the atmosphere: too shallow an angle and the capsule would skip off and drift into eternity; too steep and it would be crushed by the deceleration and burned to a cinder. In the end, it was a 6G deceleration, as planned, with the system’s automated systems working without a hitch.

1970: The north tower of the World Trade Center is topped off at 1,368 feet, making it the tallest building in the world.

1973: Congress passes the Endangered Species Act.

1977: Death of Charlie Chaplin (b.1889) One of the first “superstars” of the movie era, he parlayed his successes in silent movies into a controlling stake in the new United Artists studio (along with D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford). His transition to the “talkies” began with the political satire The Great Dictator, in which he closes with a direct dialog encouraging theatergoers to oppose national fascism. His leftist leanings thus exposed, his position became untenable after the 1947 release of Monsieur Verdeux, which led to outright accusations of being a communist. When he left for a London premiere in September 1952, the U.S. Attorney General revoked his return visa, putting Chaplin into a comfortable but still controversial exile in Switzerland, where he lived out the rest of his life with his wife Oona and their 8 children. 

1983: Pope John Paul II visits in his prison cell the man who was convicted of his attempted murder, Mehmet Ali Agci, and forgives him for shooting him in St. Peter’s Square two years earlier. 

1991: Former First Secretary of the Supreme Soviet,  Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as President the Soviet Union, at the same time declaring the end of the Soviet Union and beginning of the non-communist Russian state. He turned over his office and the launch codes for the Soviet nuclear forces to the popular former mayor of Moscow, Boris Yeltsin, who became President of Russia. To punctuate the moment, the red flag was lowered from the Kremlin, and the traditional tricolor of Russia was raised in its place. This effectively ended the Cold War, leaving the United States as the sole superpower as the already tottering Russian state slipped inexorably into financial collapse.