History Notes this week of Feb 3

1468: Death of Johannes Gutenberg (b.1398), who invented re-usable, movable type for printing presses, launching an information revolution. In 1455 he published his first major project, the Holy Bible, of which about 180 were produced. The last sale of a complete Gutenberg Bible was for $2,200,000 in 1978. Many of the other surviving copies have been broken apart for sale of individual leaves or sections; an estimated 21 remain intact as complete.

1478: Birth of the counselor to Henry VIII, Sir Thomas More (d.1535), who called himself “The King’s good servant, but God’s first.”

1488: Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Diaz lands at Mossel Bay in what is now South Africa, becoming the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope and sail into the Indian Ocean.

1497: In Florence, Italy, the Dominican Friar Girolamo Savonarola instigates from the pulpit a quest for purity from “moral laxity,” calling for systematic destruction of any items that might lead to sin: mirrors, cosmetics, statuary, fine arts, books, and the like. He ordered the items piled in the central square, and on this day burned them to ashes, in what he called The Bonfire of the Vanities. The event represented the apex of Savonarola’s spiritual and political influence over Florence, whose leading family (the Medici) had been regular targets of his righteous indignation, despite their earlier patronage of his ministry. By May, his exhortations became too much for Pope Alexander VI, who finally excommunicated him. A year later, after torture and confessions, Savonarola himself and two associates were executed, and their bodies burned in the very spot of the Bonfire of the Vanities. To avoid their remains becoming the relics of martyrs for his faithful followers, the corpses were re-burned twice, their bones crushed and thoroughly mixed in with the ashes of brushwood, and then thrown into the River Arno to eliminate the need for a grave site. Savonarola’s apocalyptic preaching remains the archetype for near-cultic demagoguery.

1756: Birth of Aaron Burr (d.1836), one of the key second-level leaders of the American Revolution: soldier, New York politician, and Thomas Jefferson’s Vice President. Best remembered today for the duel he fought with former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who died of his wounds.

1794:On this day the National Assembly abolishes slavery throughout the territories of the French Republic.

1869: In Victoria, Australia, discovery of the largest single piece of natural gold in history, the “Welcome Stranger” alluvial nugget. The piece weighed in at 2,283 ounces (142.7 pounds), and measured roughly 24 x 12 inches. It was discovered by Cornish miners Richard Oates and John Deason, who eventually were paid just under 9,500 pounds sterling for their efforts.

1885: Belgian King Leopold II establishes Congo Free State as his personal possession, managed by the International African Association, of which he was the sole director and shareholder. The association thence began a systematic exploitation of the Congo River basin’s natural resources, which in short order made Leopold a very, very rich man. It also made him responsible for the systematic exploitation and abuse of Congo’s human resources, creating a system of forced labor that pitted white against black in an increasingly destructive spiral of abuse and brutality unequaled in the colonial world. An illustrative example is the contemporary collage (below) of African workers who failed to meet their rubber harvesting quotas being punished by the loss of their hands. The misery of the Congo became the basis for Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, which in turn was used by the Congo Reform Association to expose the abuses perpetrated by Leopold’s company. Authors Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain added their pens to the burgeoning international movement to end the horror. Leopold himself claimed innocence of intent. By 1908, pressure from the reform movement essentially forced the Belgian government to annex Congo Free State as the Belgian Congo, thus making it (and its overseers) subject to the laws of Belgium rather than the king’s commercial interests.

1895: Birth of George Herman Ruth, Jr. (d.1948), the great slugger for the New York Yankees, NOT the Boston Red Stockings

1898: Opening day of the criminal libel trial of Emile Zola, the French intellectual and journalist who sparked The Dreyfus Affair with a front page, open letter to the President of the French Republic entitled “J’Accuse!” (lit: I Accuse You!) . His accusation was that the French government was intentionally covering up an egregious miscarriage of justice- the conviction of an artillery captain of espionage four years earlier- because the captain was Jewish, and because the government was, at its core, anti-Semitic and reactionary. The ensuing controversy almost immediately polarized French society, and for another eight years l’affaire Dreyfus was bitterly fought out in the press and in the courtrooms of France. Alfred Dreyfus himself was at the time imprisoned on Devil’s Island. When the President eventually offered to pardon him, he refused, insisting on complete exoneration. As Zola predicted, the truth eventually became clear, and Dreyfus was released from prison and re-instated in 1906 as a major. He fought in the Great War from start to finish, and left the army as a lieutenant-colonel. For his part, Zola was convicted on the 23rd of the month and immediately fled to England, where he remained through June 1899. After his return to France he continued to write, but in September 1902, he died suddenly in his apartment, the cause being carbon monoxide poisoning from a blocked chimney. Conspiracy Alert: the roofer who intentionally blocked the chimney took credit for the act as a political statement, as he himself lay on his deathbed ten years later.

1899: Only months after our prying the islands from Spanish colonial rule, Philippine nationalists rebel against nascent American rule, opening the Philippine Insurrection. The war officially lasts through July, 1902, but at that point the rebellion simply moved underground, becoming a terrorist movement.

1902: Birth of Charles Lindbergh (d.1974).

1912: Birth of Eva Braun (d.1945), mistress of Adolf Hitler and for 40 hours in the Fuhrerbunker under Berlin, his wife.

1913: Final ratification of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, full text of which reads: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” You’ll note there is no “temporary” in the text.

1913: Birth of civil rights activist Rosa Parks (d.2005), whose refusal, in December of 1955, to sit in the back of the bus finally sparked the kind of widespread outrage that led to the burgeoning and ultimately successful civil rights movement.

1917: The United States breaks diplomatic relations with Imperial Germany, the day after the Germans announce resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in the waters surrounding Great Britain.

1919: Sensing a tremendous business opportunity, silent movie stars Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin join with director D.W. Griffith to create United Artists, the first comprehensive movie production studio. The studio has gone through a number of ownership and management re-shuffling over the years, and is currently headed by Tom Cruise. Of the hundreds of films produced and distributed by UA, The Great Dictator (1941), African Queen (1952), High Noon (1952), The Great Escape (1962), The Pink Panther (1963), and Goldfinger (1964).

1924: Death of President Woodrow Wilson (b.1856), incapacitated since collapsing of exhaustion in September, 1919. He further suffered a debilitating stroke on October 2nd that year, leaving him paralyzed on the left side and blind in the left eye. From that point, he was essentially sequestered from seeing anyone except his wife and doctor. The isolation most particularly affected the Vice President and Cabinet officers, who carried on their duties with Presidential relations carefully stage-managed by his wife, Edith. His incapacity was a primary argument in support of the 25th Amendment.

1937: Death of Elihu Root (b.1845), who served as Secretary of War under Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt, Secretary of State for President Roosevelt, and Senator from New York, in between practicing law and serving as a member of various commissions and delegations. His was one of the minds who helped define the United States’ coming of age as a world power.

1942: Birth of Naval Academy Graduate and Navy Supply Officer, Roger Staubach, who also played football for the Dallas Cowboys.

1952: Death of Britain’s King George VI (b.1895). Although his declining health from lung cancer was well known, his sudden death at age 57 came as a shock to the nation. His daughter Elizabeth, now suddenly Queen Regent, was out of the country at the time.

1958: After a mid-air collision with its F-86 escort during a night navigation mission, a damaged USAF B-47 jettisons its 7,600 pound Mk-15 hydrogen bomb into the Atlantic Ocean just off the coast of Tybee Island, Georgia. The crew safely recovered their aircraft at Hunter AAF, but the bomb itself has never been found, despite several exhaustive search efforts. Today it lurks in conspiratorial folklore as The Tybee Bomb.

1959: Deaths of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and Big Bopper Richardson in a plane crash in Iowa.

1962: In an attempt to apply economic sanctions against a too-close-for-comfort hostile communist regime, the United States institutes an embargo of imports and exports from Cuba. Its goal, if not to force Fidel Castro from power, was to at least force him to moderate his anti-American rhetoric and activities. Castro, you probably noticed, remained firmly in power (lately using his brother as mouthpiece) until just a couple years ago. The embargo remained in effect through 10 U.S. presidencies, although its effectiveness remains an open question.

1971: Apollo 14 astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell land their lunar module Antares on the Moon’s Fra Mauro highlands, originally selected for the near-disaster of Apollo 13. Command Module pilot Stuart Roosa remained in lunar orbit aboard Kitty Hawk.

2008: Death of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (b.1917), an actual guru, whose Transcendental Meditation techniques gained international fame when the Beatles took up the practice.

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