814 A.D.: Death of Charlemagne, King of the Franks and first to hold the title of Holy Roman Emperor. His conquest and rule over a continuous empire covering most of central and western Europe created, for the first time in the post-Roman era, the political conditions for what we now know as “Europe,” an entity, rather than the plethora of tribes and anarchy that followed the collapse of Roman rule.
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 King Henry VIII (b.1491), leaving in his wake the 6 year old Edward VI as king. His daughter Elizabeth did not secure the throne, it was her half-brother, born of Anne Boleyn’s successor, Jane Seymour, who died only a few days after giving birth to Henry’s only male heir. In fact, not only was Edward in the way, so was her half-sister Mary.
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.
1606: Death of the Gunpowder Plot ringleader, Guy Fawkes (b.1570), the last of the conspirators to be executed. As he mounted the platform he apologized for his part in the plot, and in a final act of defiance, leaped from the scaffold as soon as the noose was around his neck, so he would already be dead before his body was drawn and quartered.
1813: First publication of Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice.
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. He also spend his final 25 years mastering a new art form, photography, creating images of children that are frankly uncomfortable to look at in today’s context, but were in the center of Victorian haute couture when they were made.
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. Gordon fought the guy himself in Sudan, and was killed by an onslaught of Mahdi forces on the steps of the palace in Khartoum.
1853: Birth of Jose Marti (d.1895). Remember Radio Marti, the Miami station that broadcast actual news and information a la Voice of America during the Reagan Administration? It was named after this Cuban nationalist who was unrelenting in working to extract Cuba from Spain’s sclerotic colonial rule.
1865: With the Union noose ever-tightening its death-grip on Richmond, the Confederate government names Robert E. Lee as General-in-Chief of the southern armies.
1865: After passage in the House of Representatives, President Abraham Lincoln signs a bill for the 13th Amendment, ending involuntary servitude in the United States, and sends it to the Several States for ratification. Illinois ratified it the same day, and 10 others followed suit in the first week. Ratification came into force in December, 1865. To date, 36 states have formally ratified the amendment, the latest being Mississippi in March of 1995 (although the state failed to notify the Director of the Federal Register until February of 2013.
1887: Punxsutawney Phil sees or doesn’t see his shadow for the first time.
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 and something of a folk hero to the intelligentsia set. What is the matter with those people? Twice sentenced to death, he spent his entire bird-raising career at Leavenworth Prison, in Kansas, not The Rock, which kind of begs the question of his more famous persona.
1912: Birth of American “artist” Jackson Pollock (d.1956).
1921: Birth of Donna Reed (d.1986). The perfect girlfriend in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), the perfect wife and mother in The Donna Reed Show (1958-66), she also played a “fallen woman” in From Here to Eternity (1953).
1930: Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Corporation, a.k.a. 3M, begins marketing a self-sticking cellophane tape.
1936: In Cooperstown, New Yawk, induction of the the first class into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. You may recognize these names: Ty Cobb (98.2% of the vote), Babe Ruth (95.1%), Honus Wagner (95.1%), Christy Mathewson (90.7%) and Walter Johnson (83.6%).
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.
1943: The U.S. Army’s 8th Air Force launches its first raid into Germany, sending 91 B-17s and B-24s against submarine construction yards in Wilhemshaven.
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.
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.
1953: A combination of new moon spring tides and a severe winter storm push the waters of the North Sea 18 feet above normal overnight, overwhelming the dykes and flood canals of the Netherlands and southeastern England, flooding the sleeping towns and farms of Zeeland in particular, and creating general havoc well down the coast into France. Over 1,800 Dutch citizens lost their lives that night, and hundreds more perished in Belgium and England. Thousands of acres of polder land suddenly were again underwater, tens of thousands of farm animals drowned, and thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed by the flood waters. The disaster triggered the creation of the Delta Works, a massive flood control project consisting of dykes, seawalls, flood gates, and pumping stations across virtually the entire coastline of the Netherlands.
1958: Lego Corporation patents its design for locking bricks.
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.
1971: Ten months after the near-catastrophe of Apollo 13, astronauts Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa, and Edgar Mitchell launch in Apollo 14 for a moon landing mission that will take them to the surface of the Frau Maru highlands. At age 47, Shepard was the oldest man to fly in space, and the only of the original Mercury astronauts to reach the moon.
1979: Ayatola Ruhollah Khomeini returns to Iran after 15 years of exile in France. Rapturous crowds meet him wherever he goes, at least initially, but within months the cold hand of the Islamic Revolution will begin to choke the life out of Persian society.
1986: Space Shuttle Challenger blows up 73 seconds into launch, killing all 7 astronauts aboard.
2003: After a two week-long science mission, Space Shuttle Columbia, the original orbiter in the fleet, disintegrates on re-entry into the atmosphere, killing all 7 astronauts aboard. After completion of the mishap investigation, NASA decided to terminate the Shuttle program in favor of a newly designed Constellation system.The Columbia weighed around 8000 pounds more than the other orbiters, and was thus not suited for high inclination missions. She was also not fitted with an ISS-compatible air lock, so she was never used for an ISS servicing mission, but assumed primary duties for science missions and satellite launches. Columbia flew 28 times, spending just over 300 days in orbit. Due to the annual proximity of the 17 spaceflight deaths of its astronauts, NASA commemorates their memory on January 27th.
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