History Notes this week of Jan 16

41 A.D. : Roman Emperor Gaius Caesar (Caligula) is assassinated by members of his Praetorian Guard. Nephew of the great Tiberius Caesar, Caligula’s five year reign quickly degenerated into an orgy of violence and sexual perversion. The Senate conspirators believed that removing him would allow for reinstatement of the Republic, but the army was so incensed by the murder that they spirited away Caligula’s uncle Claudius, rallying the troops to support the imperial throne against the Senate.

1225: Birth of Thomas Aquinas (d.1274), who began his career as an Italian monk, but whose force of intellect and spiritual insights catapulted him to professorship at the University of Paris, where he was prolific in his writings and instruction of the burgeoning cadre of church intellectuals. One of his key philosophical insights was the idea of the validity of truth being known through observation, a process he referred to as “natural revelation,” which helped lay the foundation for the growth and strength of the scientific revolution in Europe.
His taciturn nature caused one of his early professors to declare him a “dumb ox…[whose] teaching will one day produce such a bellowing that it will be heard around the world.” His life and works remain the gold standard for intellectual Christianity. He was canonized in 1323, and is today held as a model teacher for aspiring Catholic priests, and anyone who thinks seriously about the relationship of science and faith. 

1547: Death of the mercurial King Henry VIII (b.1491), leaving in his wake the 6 year old Edward VI as king.

1564: Pope Pius IV issues the decree Benedictus Deus, ratifying the findings of the long-running Council of Trent. The Council was first seated in 1545 to begin a process of answering the practical and theological issues raised by the burgeoning Protestant movement, in particular the aggressive growth of Lutheranism in Germany, much of which was co-opted and exacerbated by the political struggles between Rome and the Empire. Over the course of its eighteen years, the Council of Trent conducted three major sessions and issued numerous canons and decrees, the vast majority of which remain in force to this day. While confirming some level of reform from the more egregious practices of the Church (i.e. indulgences), its primary products clarified and confirmed the beliefs and historical practices of Roman Catholicism, providing a stable catechism of faith for over three hundred years. The next ecumenical council after Trent took place in June 1868 at the First Vatican Council. The Second Vatican Council of 1962-65 is the most recent convocation of this stature.

1579: Three northern provinces of the Spanish Netherlands sign the Union of Utrecht, pledging to help defend each other from Spanish suppression of Reformation elements in the Low Countries. By early summer, 8 more provinces and city-states attached themselves to the Utrecht group, forming the nucleus of an independent and Protestant Netherlands that would in 1581 declare themselves free from Spanish rule under the Act of Abjuration. The Union signed today put Great Britain into play as the guarantor of the Netherlands’ independence from Spain.

1595: Death of Sir Francis Drake (b.c1540), of dysentery while anchored off the coast of Portobela, Panama. After a swashbuckling and heroic career at sea, which included significant harassment of Spanish treasure fleets, secret surveys, a circumnavigation of the globe, and the destruction of the Spanish Armada, Drake’s life ended while engaged on yet another crusade against the treasures of Spanish America. He requested to be buried in his full armour, and was buried at sea in a lead coffin, which is today the object of regular treasure hunts. 

1646: After a reign that saw two vicious civil wars fought between his royalist army and armies of an increasingly assertive Parliament, King Charles I is beheaded for high treason. General Oliver Cromwell assumes a role as Lord Protector of the Realm…a representative Parliament finally facing down a king who believed his decisions and demands were legitimized under the concept of Divine Right.

1661: As part of the settlement leading to the restoration of the British monarchy, the two-years dead remains of Oliver Cromwell are exhumed and ritually executed for regicide, 12 years to the day from Charles I’s beheading at Cromwell’s instigation. After the ceremony, the mutilated corpse was tossed into a common pit grave, and his head was displayed on a pike outside Westminster until 1685. It changed hands several times as a historical curiosity, and was finally buried in 1960.

1756: Birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (d.1791). Beginning at age 5 his musical output numbers over 800 pieces across every musical genre of the time.

1759: Birth of Scottish poet laureate Robert Burns (d.1796).

1787: In the final battle of what today is an obscure incident, an unauthorized militia aligned with Massachusetts farmer Daniel Shays conduct a short, sharp battle with the legitimate Massachusetts Militia at the Springfield Armory. Four of Shays’ men are killed, twenty are wounded, and the rebels flee north, totally disbanded. Shays’ Rebellion grew out of attempts to collect debts left over from the Revolution. European investors were putting the squeeze on Boston business owners, demanding payment in specie. The businessmen, in turn made the same demands on their debtors, mostly small freehold farmers in the central part of the state. The collections quickly descended into complete seizures of properties, including houses of the farmers, who felt helpless to resist. Finally, in August of 1786, Bunker Hill veteran Daniel Shays had had enough, and under the rubric of revolution, organized his first band of militia to force the issue at the Springfield courthouse. The situation festered through the Fall and Winter, leading to the climactic battle this day, where the Massachusetts militia, without authorization, drew weapons and ammunition from the Federal Arsenal to prevent Shays’ group from expropriating it first. The threat of further actions of this nature underscored the fundamental weakness of the Articles of Confederation, and spurred calls for a constitutional convention to draft a more effective form of national government, which we now know as the Constitution.

1801: Birth of Horatia Nelson (d.1881), illegitimate daughter from the torrid and shockingly public affair between Royal Navy hero Horatio Lord Nelson and Mrs. Emma Hamilton, wife of the British Consul in Leghorn, Italy. 

1832: Birth of belle epoch French painter Edouard Manet (d.1883. Manet’s style of relatively rough brush-work on the subjects of everyday life marked the transition between the vivid realism of the early 19^th century and the free-floating forms and moods of the Impressionist period. 

1832: Birth of British author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by his nom du plume, Lewis Carroll (d.1898). His artistic bent was toward word-play and nonsense literature, most famously his Alice books and the Snark and Jaberwocky poems.

1833: Birth of Charles “Chinese” Gordon (d.1885), one of the great British generals from the heyday of Victorian colonial expansion. He had a long and colorful career, which is reflected in his nickname, to say nothing of all the schools and roads named in his honor. And remember all the Islamist quacking about “the Mahdi” coming back after our invasion of Iraq? Gordon fought the guy himself in Sudan, and was killed by an onslaught of Mahdi forces on the steps of the palace in Khartoum.

1848: James W. Marshall finds gold at Sutter’s Mill near Coloma, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. News of the discovery triggered a massive Gold Rush, bringing over 300,000 prospective miners to the Golden State.

1850: The Kentucky senator Henry Clay introduces on the floor of the U.S. Senate The Compromise of 1850, a complicated set of bills designed to diffuse the increasingly volatile issue of slavery within the new territories of the United States. The proximate trigger was the end of the Mexican War, which brought with it a huge acquisition of territory from the Mexican Cession, the status of which could not be adequately defined by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which set the slave-free line in the territories at N36-30*). Without going into all the details- and they are worth the time to study- the bottom lines of the 1850 plan were these:
        a) California is admitted as a free state;
        b) Texas is admitted as a slave state;
        c) Texas drops its claims for territories in New Mexico in exchange for Federal assumption of Lone Star debt (hmm- plus ca change, as they say);
        d) New Mexico and Utah territories are organized to permit popular sovereignty to decide slave or free status;
        e) The importation and sale of slaves is prohibited in the District of Columbia, although slave labor there remains legal;
        f) The Fugitive Slave Act is strengthened.
The final portions of the Compromise passed in September, 1850, nominally cooling emotions for another four years.

1853: Birth of Jose Marti (d.1895). Radio Marti, the Miami station that broadcast actual news and information a la Voice of America during the Reagan Administration, was named after this Cuban nationalist who was unrelenting in working to extract Cuba from Spain’s sclerotic colonial rule.

1861: Kansas is admitted to the Union as a free state.

1862: Launch of USS Monitor at the Brooklyn Navy yard in New York. Built 120 days from the contract signature to launch. Granted, designer John Ericsson had the plans already in hand but it is still an amazing feat of organization to produce such a technically advanced machine in such short order.

1879: Final day of the two-day Battle of Rorke’s Drift in the Anglo-Zulu war. In this battle, 150 British soldiers ostensibly performing civil engineering functions (kind of a 19^th Century “nation-building” exercise) held off multiple waves of over 4,000 Zulu warriors, with only a brief respite from the fighting during the darkness of night. The Zulu leaders halted their attacks after a brief feint just after dawn, leaving behind them nearly a thousand dead and wounded warriors. When the battle ended, the defenders had only 900 rounds of ammunition remaining from the 20,000 rounds stockpiled beforehand. Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded to the British defenders, the highest-ever number for a single battle.

1880: Birth of Douglas MacArthur (d.1964), American General, Medal of Honor recipient, Army Chief of Staff, Governor of the Philippines, chief executive of occupied Japan; a leader whose impact on the 20^th Century rightly earned him the title “American Caesar”.

1887: Birth of Marc Mitscher (d.1947),  American Admiral who led his carrier strike groups through wide-ranging and brutally effective campaigns against Japan’s South Pacific empire. He earned particular distinction when, after ordering a  follow-on strike late in the day after the Marianas Turkey Shoot, he subsequently ordered his carriers to brightly illuminate their ships and the skies around them in order that his returning fighters could find and land aboard their carriers in the dark.
Early in his aviation career, Mitscher piloted the NC-1 flying boat in the Navy’s first attempt to cross the Atlantic by air. He and the NC-1 made it as far as the Azores, while NC-4 continued on to Portugal to complete the mission. The hazards of the mission cannot be overstated, and for his role in it, Mitscher was awarded the Navy Cross. 

1890: Birth of Robert Stroud (d.1963), convicted of manslaughter of a love rival, and later the murder of a prison guard, before becoming The Birdman of Alcatraz. Twice sentenced to death, he spent his entire bird-raising career at Leavenworth Prison, in Kansas, not The Rock, which which makes his nickname seem out of place.

1911: Aviation pioneer Glen Curtiss makes the first American float-plane flight in San Diego harbor.

1912: Birth of American artist Jackson Pollock (d.1956). 

1919: The delegates meeting at the Paris Peace Conference in Versailles approve a motion to develop a League of Nations, based on President Wilson’s 14 Points.

1924: The Russian city of Petrograd, or St. Petersburg, is re-named Leningrad by the Soviet government in honor of the communist cretin who died two days before.

1938: First flight of Lockheed’s P-38 Lightning twin-engine fighter. The airplane was the machine that later carried Major Richard Bong, USAAF to 40 victories in the Pacific theater of WWII, making him the United States’ all-time fighter ace. 

1941: Aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, having recently visited Germany to inspect its aviation industry and capabilities, testifies before Congress in favor of a neutrality treaty with the Nazi government. As with the former Edward VIII of England, Lindbergh believed the Nazi’s program of centralized economics and strident nationalism was a healthy and correct answer to the problems of society. As he more overtly exposed his Progressive views, he became increasingly distrusted by the US government and opinion makers in the popular press. 

1944: After 872 days of creating unrelenting shelling and misery for the population of the former Saint Petersburg, the German Wehrmacht lifts its Siege of Leningrad and withdraws, finally allowing the opening a broad corridor for the Soviet government to re-arm and re-supply the citizens and armed forces of that beleaguered city.

1945: The Red Army liberates the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.

1947: Death of Chicago mobster / businessman / politician / Ward Chairman / Al Capone (b.1899). 

1948: Death of Orville Wright (b.1871).

1951: The U.S. begins nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Range, using a B-50 bomber (a modified B-29) to drop a Mk-4 device, approximately the same size and weight of the Fat Man used at Nagasaki but with new triggering mechanisms and a modified nuclear pit. The vast majority of the 1,054 U.S. live tests were conducted at the Nevada site.

1956: Death of journalist H.L. Mencken (b.1880). He’s someone else who is well worth quoting. For example: “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

1958: Lego Corporation patents its design for locking bricks. 

1960 – The Bathyscaph Trieste descends to the deepest part of the ocean — the Marianas Trench, 36,000 feet down.

1986: Space Shuttle Challenger blows up 73 seconds into launch, killing all 7 astronauts aboard.

1967: The crew of Apollo 1, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, are killed when a fire sweeps through their Command Module during a routine rehearsal prior to the scheduled launch. The ignition source was not conclusively discovered, but the flaws inherent in the initial design were exacerbated by the module being pressurized with pure oxygen to 16 psi to simulate structural pressures in space. Redesign efforts put the program on hold for 20 months. 

1968 – While operating in international waters in the Sea of Japan near the Korean coast, USS Pueblo (AGER 2) is seized by North Korean naval vessels. This is the first U.S. warship captured by an enemy since we were fighting the British. Commander Lloyd Bucher and his crew are imprisoned by the NORKs for nearly a year.

1971: In Uganda, Colonel Idi Amin (1925-2003) leads a coup d’état against Milton Obote, becoming president.

1989: Death of Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquis of Dalí de Púbol, better known to the rest of us as Salvador Dali (b.1904).