History Notes this week of Feb 16

399BC: Socrates is sentenced to death. A glass of hemlock seals his fate in the presence of his students. Do you ever wonder about this? Me too. Socrates was one of the leading intellectual lights of classical Athens. As a philosopher, he questioned almost everything and everyone, forcing men- not just students, but political leaders- to confront their own false thinking. The Socratic Method is a way of discerning Truth, particularly on moral issues, by asking a series of questions that individually are relatively insignificant, but which collectively lead the questioner to the truth he seeks. Socrates actually enjoyed skewering the big shots of Athenian society: he called himself  “Athens’ gadfly” (like the fly that stings a horse into action). Eventually, his annoyances became too much for the Administration, and he was convicted at a kangaroo court of: 1) “corrupting youth” and, 2) “failing to honor Athens’ gods.

600AD: Pope Gregory the Great issues a decree that confirms, “God bless you” is the correct response to a sneeze.

1473: Birth of Nicolas Copernicus (d.1543) in Torun, Poland. Polish astronomer and mathematician who is known as the “father of modern astronomy”. He is best known for his controversial heliocentric theory, which proposed that the sun, not the Earth, is at the center of the universe. Copernicus’s major work, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres’), was published in 1543. 

1564: Birth of Galileo Galilei (d.1642) in Pisa, Italy.

1621: The newly arrived Plimoth Colony elects Myles Standish as its Commander, a position to which he was repeatedly re-elected to the end of his life.

1801: After 35 ballots in the House of Representatives, and only 15 days before the inauguration, Thomas Jefferson is elected 3rd President of the United States, finally defeating his running mate, Aaron Burr. The November 4th general election gave both Burr and Jefferson 73 electoral votes each, thus sending the vote to the House. The winner needed a majority of state votes (9 needed (Jefferson had 8))- kept the election in turmoil for over three months. The logjam was broken when the Federalists reasoned that a peaceful turnover of power required that the majority party be allowed to have its choice for President. The following vote gave Jefferson 10 states, Burr 4, and two states voted “blank,” thus launching Jefferson into the presidency.

1804: American naval captain Stephen Decatur leads a daring nighttime raid in Tripoli harbor. He and a hand-picked cadre of men re-board and set fire to the former American frigate USS Philadelphia, which grounded last October and was subsequently captured by the Pasha of Tripoli. The raid climaxes by burning the ship to the waterline to prevent its use by the Barbary pirates. None other than Horatio Lord Nelson called Decatur’s work “The most bold and daring act of the Age.” Decatur himself returned to the United States a national hero.

1846: The United States Navy issues a General Order replacing the term “larboard” with “port.”

1847: The first rescuers reach the remnants of the Donner Party, a group of pioneers who left the Midwest the previous July for the promise of California. In late October, they became stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains by an early snow. The ensuing four months saw them reduced to cannibalism as all of their supplies and oxen were consumed during the brutal winter. Of the original 89 who set out, only 45 made it to the Golden State. Donner Pass and Donner Lake are named for the tragedy.

1864: Under the command of Lieutenant George Dixon, and with a volunteer crew of seven others, the Confederate submarine CSS Hunley sinks USS Housatanic in Charleston harbor. After completing the attack, the hand-crank powered sub mysteriously sank and remained unlocated until 1995. On recovery, her entire crew of 8 was found entombed on board. They were subsequently re-buried with full military honors in a Confederate cemetery in Charleston. The submarine itself is now on display in the recovery laboratory on the grounds of the former Charleston Naval Base. This was not her first sinking; twice before, she flooded and went to the bottom, the first time killing five, and the second time killing all 8 aboard, including the designer himself.

1865: General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army sacks Columbia, SC, creating havoc that consumes more than 2/3 of the city by fire. Commenting later, Sherman said, “Though I never ordered it and never wished it, I have never shed any tears over the event because I believe it hastened what we all fought for, the end of the War.”

1867: The first ship passes through the Suez Canal. 

1898: The American battleship USS Maine mysteriously blows up in Havana harbor. In the United States, William Randolph Hearst led the journalistic hysteria in demanding a declaration of war with Spain, not only to avenge the loss of the ship and its sailors but to free Cuba and the Philippine Islands from the yoke of Spanish colonial oppression. The “Splendid Little War” that follows gives us Colonel Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders’ charge up San Juan Hill, the battle of Manila Bay (“You may fire when your are ready Gridley…”) and new American possessions of Cuba, the Philippine Islands and Puerto Rico.

1898: Birth of il Commendetore, Enzo Ferrari (d.1988), the Italian race car driver for Alfa Romeo, who went on to produce his own series of rolling and shrieking works of art that bear his name.

1902: Birth of photographer Ansel Adams (d.1984). His consistently spectacular work was the result of exceptional patience and a deep understanding of the interplay of light within both the scenes themselves and on the emulsion of his film. Besides his superb eye for composition, his photos technically represent the ultimate in depth, contrast and clarity. His camera of choice was almost always large format (70mm) because of the negatives’ sharpness when enlarged

1915: Gallipoli Campaign: Opening guns of what will become a futile 8-month Anglo-French campaign to capture Constantinople and secure the Bosporus and Dardanelles for transit of the Russian fleet. On this day, British warships begin shelling* Ottoman coastal artillery positions on the Gallipoli peninsula.

1933: President-elect Franklin Roosevelt survives an assassination attempt in Miami. An unemployed bricklayer named Guiseppe Zangara shouts “Too many people are starving!” and fires six shots toward FDR, who had just finished a speech from the back of his car. Five people were hit, including the mayor of Chicago, who was mortally wounded. Zangara was executed for the killing on March 5^th, four weeks after the event.

1936: Death of Army Air Service Brigadier General Billy Mitchell (b.1879), an “outspoken advocate” over the nascent capabilities of air power as an arm of combat. He pretty much set the tone for future Air Force-Navy relationships throughout 1921, when both the Army and Navy were conducting tests on the vulnerability of battleships to aerial bombardment. By July, 1921, with the sinking of the ex-German battleship Ostfriesland, the public dispute between Mitchell and the leadership of the Navy and Army reached its peak. He was court-martialed and convicted for insubordination in 1925, and suspended from active duty on half pay for five years. After his death, and with the rise of the actual viability of air power, Mitchell’s legacy was rehabilitated, including having the B-25 named after him.

1939: Launch of the German battleship Bismarck. 

1941: Birth of North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il (d.2012).

1942: Singapore falls to Japanese forces. Continuing their juggernaut throughout the western Pacific region, the Japanese army’s Malay Peninsula campaign ends with the surrender of over 60,000 British and Imperial forces defending Singapore. The most famous “…doh!” from the battle was the defender’s realization that virtually all of Singapore’s defenses were designed to repel an attack from seaward. The Japanese arrived instead from the landward approaches and entered the island opposed only by small arms fire across the single small bridge connecting it to the mainland.

1942: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, ordering the forcible relocation of citizens of Japanese descent into remote internment camps. Nearly 120,000 were arrested in the ensuing dragnet. Great Britain issued a similar order for Canada on the 24^th of the month. 

1942: Lieutenant Commander Edward “Butch” O’Hare, flying on defensive Combat Air Patrol (CAP) from USS Lexington (CV-2), personally shoots down five Japanese “Betty” bombers in four minutes. His action earns him a Medal of Honor in addition to becoming the first U.S. fighter ace of WWII. He was lost at sea on a night combat mission in November of 1943. Chicago’s major airport was named in his honor.

1943: First day of the Battle of Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, the first major engagement of American units against German forces. The battle ended in a rout, with the combined Anglo-American force pushed back nearly fifty miles from their starting positions. The German commander, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, was contemptuous of the Americans but wary of their potential. In the aftermath of the defeat, General Eisenhower relieved the Corps commander and replaced him with Lieutenant General George S. Patto

1953: Baseball great and USMC combat pilot Ted Williams is shot down over Korea. He rejoined the Red Sox late in the 1953 season.

1959: Fidel Castro is sworn in as Prime Minister of Cuba after forcing former dictator Fulgencio Batista into exile in the Dominican Republic. The event is the culmination of the three year guerrilla campaign that Castro, his brother Raul and Che Guevarra, the hard-line Argentine Marxist, led from the Sierra Maestra mountains. Fidel’s dictatorship was the first Communist government in the western hemisphere. At this writing (2025) the hard line communists are still in power opposite the fourteenth U.S. president since Fidel’s ascension.

1962: In the United States’ first orbital mission and Project Mercury’s third manned space flight, Marine LtCol John Glenn makes three orbits of the earth in his capsule “Friendship-7.” His Atlantic Ocean recovery ship, was USS Noa (DD-841).

1963: Birth basketball hall of famer, Michael Jordan.

1963: The San Francisco Giants sign Willy Mays for a record $100,000 per year contract.

1965: Canada adopts the Maple Leaf flag.

1967: Death of American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (b.1904), who served as head of the Manhattan Project in WWII. Following the war he served as chief advisor to the Atomic Energy Commission. He lost his security clearance in 1954, in part for opposing continuing development of the hydrogen bomb. The other part was his outspoken political opinion-making during the Red Scare, a position deemed inappropriate for someone in the AEC. After the 1945 Trinity detonation, Oppenheimer stated that one of the first things he thought of was a quote from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

1972: Wilt Chamberlain scores his 30,000^th point in a game against the Phoenix Suns, completed in 941 games. Five of the remaining six players with that point total took well over a thousand games to get there; the sixth, Michael Jordan, took 960.

1972: President Richard Nixon departs on his historic trip to Communist China.

1976: President Gerald Ford rescinds Executive Order 9066 with Presidential Proclamation 4417, which opens the door for reparations to surviving Japanese internees.

1997: The San Francisco Giants sign Willy Mays’ godson Barry Bonds for a record $22,900,000 per year contract.