History Notes this week of Feb 25

303AD: Roman Emperor Diocletian issues the first official Roman edict calling for the persecution of Christians. The decree gave license to hitherto unknown rampages against the Christian community, many of whom were now in significant positions within Roman society. It is often spoken that people would die for their faith. These people did. In droves.

1504: Spanish navigator and Admiral of the Ocean Seas Christopher Columbus, having been stranded on the island of Jamaica since June the year prior, and facing a native population who were fed up and done provisioning him and his crew while they awaited rescue, overawes the locals with a demonstration of his superior powers by predicting a lunar eclipse, which occurs on schedule this night.

1570: Pope Pius V excommunicates Elizabeth I, Queen of England. Although one could speculate on the actual spiritual result of this action, the political end ably served to consolidate her position on the then-still-tenuous Protestant hold on the English crown.

1644: Dutch navigator and explorer Abel Tasman sets sail for his second Pacific voyage of discovery on behalf of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The Dutch were making money from their commercial-colonial foothold in Batavia (now Jakarta) Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Tasman’s first lap in 1642 around the East Indes and Australia started to dissolve the long-running belief of a Terra Australis covered in gold somewhere in the southern reaches of the globe, but they sent him out again with the specific task to find and claim the long-sought land. Instead, he made a thorough survey of the Indonesian archipelago, New Guinea, and the northern coast of Australia, the mapping of which filled in the reality of the geography in this hitherto unknown part of the world. Although the VOC was openly disappointed that he failed to discover the imagined gold fields, his discoveries and mapping of this complex geography created the standard for follow-on voyages of exploration.

1704: French troops, augmented by Indian warriors, conduct a raid in Deerfield, Massachusetts Bay Colony, killing 46 settlers and taking 112 captives on a 300 mile winter march to Montreal. The raid assumed legendary status by the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries as a tale of the bravery of frontier settlers against the dangers of native warriors and the treacherous French. It remains a singular cultural touchpoint in the story of the American founding.

1732: Birth of South Carolina militia commander and progenitor of the modern concept of irregular warfare, Francis Marion (d.1795). Marion’s nickname, “Swamp Fox,” gives a hint of the persistent threat he created for the British forces who had earlier routed the Continental Army at the Battle of Camden.

1779: Virginia Militia Colonel George Rogers Clark, the elder brother of William, captures Fort Vincennes (Indiana) from the British after a dramatic 180 mile march through the flooded flatlands of Illinois.

1786: Wilhelm Grimm, brother of Jacob, is born (d.1859). This is not a fairy tale.

1815: Napoleon Bonaparte effects an escape from his island exile on Elba, not far from the coast of southern France.

1836: Lieutenant Colonel William Barret Travis, whose small Alamo garrison went under siege this week, dispatches courier Albert Martin with a letter announcing his urgent need for supplies and reinforcements to maintain a strategic American presence in the Texas territory north of the Rio Grande. Martin rode 70 miles to Gonzalez, which served as a rallying point for reinforcements over the next week. Travis’ words electrified the population, setting the stage for the upcoming battle to sear itself into the memories of every Texan since that day. 

1836: Samuel Colt is granted a US patent for the Colt revolver.

1854: The Republican Party of the United States is organized in Ripon, Wisconsin. The party coalesced around anti-slavery activism, and held as its motto: “Free labor, free land, and free men,” all of which was oriented on encouraging the growth of small business, including giving away government land, in order to overwhelm slavery with the reality of entrepreneurial success throughout the expanding nation. In 1856, John C. Fremont was it first Presidential nominee. In 1860 it was Abraham Lincoln.

1860: Abraham Lincoln gives a speech at the Cooper Union in New York City that is largely credited with ensuring his Republican Party nomination to the presidency.

1868: The US House of Representatives votes 11 Articles of Impeachment against President Andrew Johnson.

1882: Birth of Husband E. Kimmel (d.1968). Admiral Kimmel was in command of the Pacific Fleet on December 7^th, 1941. From his headquarters he watched as Japanese carrier aircraft systematically destroyed the Navy’s complete line of battle. He and Army Lieutenant General Walter Short were both court-martialed for their roles in the disaster. Kimmel went into forced retirement as a two-star (his temporary 4-star rank stripped after the trial), and spent his remaining years in an ultimately fruitless attempt to rehabilitate his legacy.

1898: Birth of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty (d.1963), Irish priest from Killarney in County Cork, best known as “The Scarlet Pimpernel of the Vatican,” whose work in the diplomatic corps of the papal nuncio during the 1920s and 1930s climaxed in 1943-45 when he spearheaded Vatican resistance to the Nazi occupation of Rome. O’Flaherty sheltered and transferred to safety over 6,500 Allied POWs who escaped from their camps when the Italian government capitulated in September, 1943. His work was explicitly targeted by the head of Rome’s Gestapo, who failed to make a dent in the flow of prisoners sheltered by O’Flaherty’s organization.After the war, O’Flaherty was honored by Great Britain with the Order of British Empire (OBE) and in the United States by the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Gregory Peck starred in a 1983 movie dramatization, The Scarlet and the Black,  of the rescue operation. 

1914: Death of Joshua Chamberlain (b.1828), Colonel of 20^th Maine Volunteer Infantry during the War Between the States, hero of Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg, and the officer designated to receive the surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. After the war he returned to his professorship at Bowdoin College, and was elected to four terms as Governor of Maine. His Civil War wounds continued to bother him after the war, finally leading to the complications that brought his eventful life to a close at age 85, adding one more footnote as the last Civil War veteran to die of his wounds.

1914: Launch of HMHS Britannic, sister ship to RMS Titanic. Although she was fitted with improvements designed to mitigate the issues that doomed her elder sibling (double-hull sheathing around the engine rooms, water-tight bulkheads raised to the B-deck, extensive lifeboat capability), she nonetheless met a violent end in her role as a hospital ship, hitting a German mine near the Greek island of Kea just south of Athens in November of 1916. The mine ripped a massive hole in her bow, and she plunged to the bottom in less than an hour. Thankfully, of the thousand people aboard, only 30 people lost their lives.

1916: South Carolina raises the minimum age for child labor in factories, mills, and mines from twelve to fourteen.

1917: The Zimmermann Telegram is exposed, making public Germany’s attempts to engage Mexico as an active belligerent ally in the Great War. In the coded message, Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann promised money and arms to Mexico if they would make war on the United States. One of Zimmerman’s key “sweeteners” was his suggestion that Germany would fully support a Mexican reconquista of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. The telegram was electronically intercepted by British Intelligence when it was sent on 16^thJanuary, and the fully de-coded text was finally shown to the American embassy staff in London on 17^th February. The message circulated through classified U.S. Government channels until this day, when the Hearst newspaper chain broke the story. Not surprisingly- and pleasantly for His Majesty’s Government- it created immediate outrage in the United States against Germany, and was one of the triggers for our eventual entry into the Great War in April.

1919: The State of Oregon puts a 1cent per gallon tax on gasoline, becoming the first state in the Union to levy a gas tax.

1935: After 12 years of running a “civilian” flight training service, and two years operating the German Aviation Sport Unit (DLV), German Chancellor Adolf Hitler orders Hermann Goering to form a formal air force in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. The Luftwaffe’s rapid growth and fitting out with the most modern combat aircraft in Europe was met with shock, but no sanctions, by the League of Nations.

1945: Turkey, recognizing the inevitable, declares war on Germany. Thanks for the help, Pasha.

1954: The United States detonates its first deliverable hydrogen bomb, code named “Shrimp,” as part of the CASTLE BRAVO series of nuclear tests at the Bikini atoll. The bomb yielded 15 megatons of energy, over twice what was predicted. This was both the most powerful explosion in U.S. nuclear testing, and also the worst radiological disaster, as a snow-like fallout mist irradiated an area of over 7000 square miles downwind of the blast. The Marshall islands were evacuated (too late) and the crew of a Japanese fishing vessel suffered severe radiation burns, to say nothing of offloading their cargo of radioactive fish into the local market. I’ll have some other atomic bomb info later on in the year. 

1860: Abraham Lincoln gives a speech at the Cooper Union in New York City that is largely credited with ensuring his Republican Party nomination to the presidency. 1860: Abraham Lincoln gives a speech at the Cooper Union in New York City that is largely credited with ensuring his Republican Party nomination to the presidency. 1860: Abraham Lincoln gives a speech at the Cooper Union in New York City that is largely credited with ensuring his Republican Party nomination to the presidency.

1964: 22 year old Cassius Clay defeats Sonny Liston for the boxing heavyweight title. This was the first bout between the two, and after Liston retired after seven rounds, Clay darted around the ring screaming, “I am the greatest! I must be the greatest!” Clay and Liston would meet again in May for one of the most iconic fights of the century.

1968: After a vicious three week battle, South Vietnamese and US Marines re-capture Hue City, thus ending the Tet Offensive. You would have never known the American forces won this one if you watched TV news during the period. Even the 50^th anniversary remembrances in 2018 had a hard time admitting the truth that we won the battle.

1984: President Ronald Reagan orders U.S. forces to withdraw from their tenuous toe-hold at the Beirut airport, where they had been under essentially constant attack for the last two years.

1991: President George H. W. Bush announces on national television: “Kuwait is Liberated!” The Hundred Hour (ground) War is over.

1993: Inspired by the “blind sheikh” Omar Abdul Raman, Islamic terrorists detonate a massive truck bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center’s north tower. Seven people are killed and over a thousand are injured by the attack. After his trial and conviction, his co-conspirators went on to finish the job eight years later. Raman passed to his (hopefully fiery) reward in 2017 after two decades in a U.S. prison where he continued to issue fatwas against the infidel West.