History Notes this week of Jan 18

1419: Britain’s King Henry V completes his re-conquest of Normandy as he accepts the surrender of Rouen.

1265: Convening in Westminster of the first English “Commons” Parliament, consisting of representatives from the boroughs who had no formal Royal authorization. The gathering lasted only through mid-February, but it established the legitimacy of a representative assembly as a viable and correct form of government. The expansion of governance in the Westminster Parliament began the process of transforming the British monarchy into a constitutional form.

1502: Portuguese explorer Gaspar de Lemos begins a formal survey of the lands around the magnificent harbor of Guanabara Bay. His work will lay the foundation for the establishment of Rio de Janeiro in 1565.

1535: Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizzaro, newly named Royal Governor of the newly conquered Inca lands in Peru, selects a well-watered and wooded coastal site for his capital and dedicates it on this date. He initially names it Cuidad des los Reyes, later re-named Lima.

1649: King Charles I is put on trial for “high crimes.” Charles was charged with high treason ‘against the realm of England ‘. Charles refused to plead, saying that he did not recognise the legality of the High Court (it had been established by a Commons purged of dissent, and without the House of Lords – nor had the Commons ever acted as a judicature).

1670: In one of the final acts of a swashbuckling career spent plundering the Spanish Main, the British pirate Henry Morgan, captures and sacks the city of Panama, burning it to the ground after taking anything and everything of value. For nearly 10 years, multiple Royal Governors of Jamaica ignored repeated edicts from the Crown to suppress piracy. Instead, they encouraged Morgan to range throughout the Caribbean basin attacking Spanish ships and port cities under Jamaican Letters of Marque, which provided a veneer of legitimacy to his activities. Morgan kept his crews occupied with adventure and plunder, while enriching himself, his Governors, and the Crown itself with tremendous hauls of looted Spanish treasure. Today’s sack of Panama, however, was the last straw for Britain’s diplomatic dance with their Spanish counterparts: the country was formally at peace with Spain in 1670, and the Spanish Crown demanded Morgan’s head. In 1672 he was arrested for the act, and returned to England for an expected trial and hanging. Instead, King Charles II knighted him for Services to the Crown and appointed him Lieutenant-Governor of Jamaica, where he served until 1683, living in pampered dissolution until his death in 1688. His grave in the pirate haven of Port Royal, Jamaica, disappeared beneath the sea in the great earthquake of 1692.

1778: On his third Voyage of Discovery, Captain James Cook discovers a Central Pacific island chain he names the Sandwich Islands. They have since reverted to their native name, Hawaii. As an aside, the people who consider themselves the indigenous natives of the chain are working to further devolve the name back to a near-phonetic transliteration of the Polynesian Hawai’i, which is itself derived from O-havai’i.

1783: Over two years after Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown, the British government signs the Treaty of Paris, formally recognizing its former American colonies as independent states.

1793: France’s King Louis XVI was put on trial for treason. On January 15^th the National Assembly voted on the charges: 693 found him guilty, 0 found him innocent, and 23 abstained. Given the overwhelming evidence of Louis’ collaboration with various foreign governments to invade France and put down the Revolution, the verdict was pretty much assured. What was not assured was what to do next.  On the 16^th a voice roll-call vote was held on the penalty, and the closeness of the vote underscores the drama of the final decision: 361 voted for immediate execution, 288 voted against execution, and 72 voted for death in principle, but with modifications and delays built into their vote. In the end, the King was formally stripped of all titles, and Citizen Louis Capet mounted the scaffold on this day. He gave a brief speech forgiving his executioners and praying that other citizens of France would be spared his fate. Then the drums rolled, Louis knelt into the stocks, and Madame Guillotine ended his life.
       

1806: Great Britain captures and occupies the Cape of Good Hope, re-capturing it (after an earlier capture and return) from the Batavian Republic which, you no doubt recall, was the name given to the former Dutch kingdom after being occupied by Napoleonic France.

1807: Birth of Robert E. Lee (d.1870).

1830: Birth of French post-Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne (d.1906). Wikipedia-Paul Cézanne bridged the gap between 19th-century Impressionism and 20th-century Cubism. His innovative use of color, line, and form, and his unique combination of classical painting and bold brushstrokes, revolutionized art and influenced generations of artists. Cézanne was more interested in capturing the essence of nature and how something made him feel, rather than painting realistically. 

1839: British East India Company captures (and occupies) the seaport of Aden, Yemen. We’ve noted before how Britain’s colonial possessions increasingly focused on ensuring safe passage between Great Britain’s home islands and its Indian markets. The Capetown grab in 1806 (above) secured the trans-African oceanic choke point, and now, possession of Aden on the Red Sea at the southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula anticipated the opening of Suez Canal route. 

1840: Captain Claude Wilkes, USN, completes his circumnavigation of Antarctica, claiming Wilkes Land for the United States.

1861: Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis resigns from the United States Senate.

1862: Death of the 10^th President of the United States, John Tyler (b.1790), who became the first to arrive at the office by succession from the Vice-Presidency, on the death of President William Henry Harrison. Tyler was born into the “Virginia aristocracy” but served out a relatively nondescript presidency, highlighted by his entire cabinet resigning in protest of particular veto, and a subsequent near-impeachment.  Declining to run for a second term on his own, he retired back to his Virginia estate, Sherwood Forest*, where he stayed away from politics until being elected to the Confederate House of Representatives in 1861. He died before being seated in Richmond, but his reputation was permanently stained by his overt association with the Lost Cause. 

1871: As the Franco-Prussian War reaches is culmination with his armies having recently captured the French Emperor Napoleon III and with Paris under siege by German guns, King of Prussia Wilhelm I is proclaimed Emperor of the German Empire, beginning an era known as the Second Reich. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck exploits a newly available venue to publicly reinforce Germany’s position of dominance over its western rival: the proclamation ceremony is held in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, with virtually the entire leadership of Bismarck’s government, the General Staff and the Hohenzollern royal family in attendance.

1887: 18.3 inches of rain falls on Brisbane, Australia in one day.

1911: After his takeoff from USS Birmingham (CL-2) here in Hampton Roads in November), Eugene Ely lands his Curtis Pusher aeroplane on a platform built aboard USS Pennsylvania (ACR-4), anchored in San Francisco Bay. After a light meal, and with the crew having turned the machine around, Ely fires up the engine and takes off again, demonstrating a viable capability for launch and recovery of airplanes aboard ship.

1920: The U.S. Senate, after 55 days of debate and two separate votes, rejects ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations by 8 votes. Opposition to the Treaty was spearheaded by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who framed his arguments in terms of  “14 Reservations” that mirrored President Wilson’s 14 Points, around which the treaty was negotiated.

1921: Establishment of the First Turkish Constitution, the product of the vision and drive of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The constitution is built from 23 short articles, the core of which is that Turkish sovereignty belongs to the nation, not the Sultan.

1924: Death of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as V.I. Lenin (b.1870).Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist who was the founder and first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death.

1937: Movie mogal and aviation enthusiast Howard Hughes set a non-stop transcontinental speed record, flying from Burbank, California to Newark, New Jersey in 7 hours 28 minutes 25 seconds in a plane of his own design, The H-1 Racer. Average speed was 332 MPR, a long-distance record that stood for another 10 years.

1943: Start of the First Warsaw Uprising in the Jewish Ghetto. After four years of sullen acceptance at being crammed into a single ghetto, the Jews of Warsaw begin a clandestine revolt against their Nazi overseers. Armed only with a few pistols, rifles and Molotov cocktails, the fighters seek to forcibly oppose the renewed transports of the Jewish population to the death camps. The rising lasted through May, when the Germans make a full-on military operation against the rag-tag irregulars of the Ghetto.

1943: Birth of Janis Joplin (d.1970), American singer and songwriter known for her powerful, blues-inspired vocals and electrifying stage presence. Joplin rose to fame in the late 1960s as the lead singer of the psychedelic rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company. Her raw, emotionally charged voice, influenced by Bessie Smith, Leadbelly, and Big Mama Thornton, made her a headliner at festivals like Monterey and Woodstock. 

1945: An almost-defeated Germany begins a forced evacuation of its 1.8 million citizens from its lands in East Prussia. The evacuation was planned earlier by the General Staff with the understanding that East Prussia could not be defended against concentrated assault. The event was triggered by reports of Soviet atrocities as the Red Army entered into its easternmost frontiers. The maritime portion of the evacuation used around a thousand vessels for nearly 15 weeks, transporting 350,000 soldiers and upwards of 800,000 civilian refugees to mainland Germany. One of the ships, the passenger liner SS Wilhelm Gustloff, was hit by three torpedoes from a Russian submarine and sank in less than 45 minutes, taking an estimated 7,000 lives to the bottom, the worst maritime disaster in history. After the armistice in May, the Soviets began their own forced expulsion of the remaining civilian Germans, resulting in even more misery, including an estimated 300,000 deaths from starvation and exposure. When trying to get your head around the scope of this event, it is important to understand that the numbers are highly speculative, and depending on the source, either inflated or deflated to reflect a particular political position. But for the territory known as East Prussia, the bottom line is this: a region whose German population was 2,200,000 in 1940, was reduced to a mere 193,000 by May of 1945.

1950: Former State Department diplomat Alger Hiss is convicted of perjury. Unfortunately for Hiss the Soviet files that have been released to date confirm the charges. Hiss was an American government official accused in 1948 of having spied for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The statute of limitations had expired for espionage, but he was convicted of perjury in connection with this charge in 1950.

1954: USS Nautilus (SSN-571) is launched in Groton, Connecticut by First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. The modified “Guppy” class submarine was the first ship powered by nuclear energy. She went on to set a number of endurance records and set the stage for a revolution in submarine strategies worldwide.

1961: Newly elected President John F. Kennedy gives his famous “ask not” inaugural address.

1978: The last German-built Volkswagen Beetle rolls off the assembly line in Emdon, West Germany. The Mexican line continues production through 2003.

1981: Thirty minutes into the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, Iran agrees to release the 52 American hostages it has held for 14 months.

1983: Death of Ham (Project Mercury) (b.1956), the chimp whose survival on a January 1961, Mercury capsule shot into space, paved the way for the manned program later in the year.

1984: Death of Olympic gold medalist and Tarzan movie star Johnny Weissmuller (b.1904). 

1993: Death of Audrey Hepburn (b.1929), British actress and fashion icon who became a dedicated humanitarian for children. Hepburn, a film and fashion legend, won an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and BAFTA for her role in Roman Holiday (1953). She set fashion trends as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and won a Tony Award for her performance in Ondine.