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.
1265: The first English “Commons” Parliament, consisting of representatives from the boroughs who had no formal Royal authorization, convenes in Westminster. 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 the constitutional form we recognize today.
1502: Portuguese explorer Gaspar de Lemos begins a formal survey of the lands around Guanabara Bay. His work will lay the foundation for the establishment of Rio de Janeiro in 1565.
1506: The first contingent of Swiss Guards arrives in Vatican City to provide security for the Pope. Swiss mercenaries were legendary for their loyalty to their leadership and ferocious effectiveness in battle. Their appearance at the Holy See during the early rumblings of the Reformation was a perfectly logical extension of their long running mercenary role on the European military scene. They remain the core of the Vatican’s security forces to this day.
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.
1649: Marking the beginning of the end of the long struggle between British monarchs and their increasingly assertive Parliaments, King Charles I is put on trial for “high crimes.”
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.
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: On January 15th the National Assembly voted on the charges against France’s King Louis XVI: 693 found him guilty, 0 found him innocent, and 23 abstained. Evidence of Louis’ collaboration with various foreign governments to invade France and put down the Revolution sealed the verdict. On the 16th a voice roll-call vote, 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 where he gave a brief speech forgiving his executioners and praying that other citizens of France would be spared his fate. The Guillotine ended his life in a single stroke. Despite the ranks of soldiers surrounding the platform, the crowds surged forward to dip their handkerchiefs in the king’s blood as it dripped to the ground below. French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard noted “[the regicide] was the starting point of all French thought, the memory of which acts as a reminder that French modernity began under the sign of a crime.”
1901: Death of Alexandrina Victoria of the House of Hanover, better remembered* for nearly 64 years as Her Majesty Victoria, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland Queen, Defender of the Faith, and after 1876, Empress of India.
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.
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. As the victorious Allies of the Great War dismembered the far-flung remains of the Ottoman Empire (ally of the Central Powers, you remember), Ataturk galvanized the core of Anatolian Turkey to stand up for its sovereign rights as an independent state, designed explicitly to be secular in order to negate all the negative influences of the old Moslem Caliphate, of which the Sultan was Caliph. Two years after adoption of the constitution, the Caliphate was formally ended; the Wikipedia entry puts the end very nicely: “Per the law of March 3, 1924, the last Ottoman Sultan, the last Caliph and all members of their imperial families had their citizenships revoked, were exiled forever from the new Republic and their descendants banned from ever setting foot in its territory. The same law also nationalized all the properties of the Imperial Crown without compensation.”
1924: Death of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as V.I. Lenin (b.1870),
1945: An almost-defeated Germany begins a forced evacuation of its 1.8 million citizens from its lands in East Prussia (DLH 11/15). The evacuation was planned earlier by the General Staff with the understanding that East Prussia could not be defended against concentrated assault. The actual event was triggered by reports of Soviet atrocities as the Red Army plunged into its easternmost frontiers. As civilian panic set in, the orderly, planned evacuation turned into a general rout. 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 193,000 by May of 1945 (Antony Beevor).
1950: Former State Department diplomat Alger Hiss is convicted of perjury. His Progressive fellow-travelers made him something of a cause célèbre, citing his persecution as proof of the evils of McCarthy-ism and the anti-Soviet side of the Cold War. Unfortunately for Hiss and his fellow-travelers, the Soviet files that have been released to date confirm everything Republicans accused him of.
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.
1960 – The Bathyscaph Trieste descends to the deepest part of the ocean — the Marianas Trench, 36,000 feet down.
1961: Newly elected President John F. Kennedy gives his famous “ask not” inaugural address.
1965: Death of Sir Winston Churchill, the greatest Britain, who in life was full of quotes, some listed below:
“How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.” (From: The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan (1899)).
“Politics are almost as exciting as war, and – quite as dangerous… [I]n war, you can only be killed once. But in politics many times.” (From: Conversation with Harold Begbie, cited in Master Workers, (1906))
“Lenin was sent into Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city, and it worked with amazing accuracy.” (Comments on Vladimir Lenin, in the House of Commons, November 5th, 1919, cited in Churchill, by Himself (2008))
Lady Nancy Astor: If I were your wife I would put poison in your coffee!
Churchill: And if I were your husband I would drink it!
2005: Death of President Nixon’s long-serving secretary, Rose Mary Woods (b.1917). During the Watergate hearings, she achieved notoriety for her depiction of how a crucial section of the secretly recorded Oval Office tapes was “inadvertently” erased.
About the Author
Two things I’d like to add to this week’s history notes:
1901) Queen Victoria died in the arms of her favorite grandson – Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. His native language was English, Queen Victoria’s native tongue was German;
1945) The total number of Germans expelled from the lands given to the USSR and Poland and from ethnic German settlements in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia etc was 15,000,000. Of those who fled or were expelled, the West German government maintained that 2,500,000 were killed or died of hunger or the elements. Most of the dead were children and women, since the men were all in military service. The largest ethnic cleansing in European history. As many as 10,000 died on the WIlhelm Gustlof. The sinking of General Von Steuben (named after a US Revolutionary War hero) was almost as high.
As to Daniel Shays, his name turns up fairly often in the writings of those debating the United States Constitution circa 1787.
For example, in Federalist No. 6 Concerning Dangers from Dissensions Between the States For the Independent Journal To the People of the State of New York by Alexander Hamilton, we are told as follows:
THE three last numbers of this paper have been dedicated to an enumeration of the dangers to which we should be exposed, in a state of disunion, from the arms and arts of foreign nations.
I shall now proceed to delineate dangers of a different and, perhaps, still more alarming kind—those which will in all probability flow from dissensions between the States themselves, and from domestic factions and convulsions.
These have been already in some instances slightly anticipated; but they deserve a more particular and more full investigation.
A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other.
To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.
To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.
*****
To multiply examples of the agency of personal considerations in the production of great national events, either foreign or domestic, according to their direction, would be an unnecessary waste of time.
Those who have but a superficial acquaintance with the sources from which they are to be drawn, will themselves recollect a variety of instances; and those who have a tolerable knowledge of human nature will not stand in need of such lights to form their opinion either of the reality or extent of that agency.
Perhaps, however, a reference, tending to illustrate the general principle, may with propriety be made to a case which has lately happened among ourselves.
If Shays had not been a DESPERATE DEBTOR, it is much to be doubted whether Massachusetts would have been plunged into a civil war.
end quotes
In “A Federalist Essay” in the Independent Gazetteer, Philadelphia on October 25, 1787, the writer gives us as follows:
He begins with enumerating “certain privileges secured to you by the constitution of this Commonwealth,” which, notwithstanding his groundless assertions, are not infringed in the smallest degree by the proposed federal constitution, which obliges Congress to guarantee to each State its respective republican form of government.
Whatever he may think of the matter, a firm union of all the States is certainly necessary to procure happiness and prosperity to America.
In vain do we look up to the constitution or legislature of this State; they cannot alleviate our distresses.
Is it in the power of Pennsylvania to protect her own trade, by entering into commercial treaties with the nations of Europe, and thereby to secure a West India or an European market for her produce?
No.
Is it in her power to treat with and obtain from Spain a free navigation of the river Mississippi, to which God and nature have given us an undoubted right?
The impoverished state of our Western country, where the luxuriant crops of a fertile soil are suffered to rot in the fields, for want of exportation, answers No.
Is it in her power to encourage our infant manufactures, to give sustenance to our starving mechanics, to prevent a general bankruptcy, or to raise a revenue, by laying an impost on foreign goods imported into this State?
No.
All her attempts are liable to be counteracted by any neighboring State; for it is well known that the imposts have been frequently evaded in this State, and always will while Jersey and Delaware open free ports for the reception of foreign wares.
So that the exigencies of government must necessarily be provided for by a heavy land tax, which you, my fellow citizens, have groaned under for some years past with surprising patience and resignation.
Should some desperate ruffians, as a Shays or a Wyoming Franklin, with an armed banditti at his back, proceed to murder our defenceless inhabitants, has Pennsylvania the means of speedily repelling their ravages?
No.
Before the necessary steps could be taken for a defence, her towns might be laid in ruins and her fields deluged with the blood of her helpless citizens.
And oh! distracting thought! the citizens of the neighboring States would abandon us to our unhappy fate; nor would they deign to shed a tear of pity on our funeral urn.
end quotes
In “A Landholder V” by Oliver Ellsworth on December 03, 1787, we have this:
I shall, therefore, select two powers given them, which have been more abused to oppress and enslave mankind, than all the others with which this or any legislature on earth is cloathed the right of taxation or of collecting money from the people; and of raising and supporting armies.
These are the powers which enable tyrants to scourge their subjects; and they are also the very powers by which good rulers protect the people against the violence of wicked and overgrown citizens, and invasion by the rest of mankind.
Judge candidly what a wretched figure the American empire will exhibit in the eye of other nations, without a power to array and support a military force for its own protection.
Half a dozen regiments from Canada or New-Spain, might lay whole provinces under contribution, while we were disputing who has power to pay and raise an army.
This power is also necessary to restrain the violence of seditious citizens.
A concurrence of circumstances frequently enables a few disaffected persons to make great revolutions, unless government is vested with the most extensive powers of self-defence.
Had Shays, the malecontent of Massachussetts, been a man of genius, fortune and address, he might have conquered that state, and by the aid of a little sedition in the other states, and an army proud by victory, become the monarch and tyrant of America.
Fortunately he was checked; but should jealousy prevent vesting these powers in the hands of men chosen by yourselves, and who are under every constitutional restraint, accident or design will in all probability raise up some future Shays to be the tyrant of your children.
A people cannot long retain their freedom, whose government is incapable of protecting them.
end quotes
How true that last sentence is.
In concluding “A Landholder V,” Oliver Ellsworth on December 03, 1787 further stated as follows:
We are further told “that the judicial departments, or those courts of law, to be instituted by Congress, will be oppressive.”
We allow it to be possible, but from whence arises the probability of this event?
State judges may be corrupt, and juries may be prejudiced and ignorant, but these instances are not common; and why shall we suppose they will be more frequent under a national appointment and influence, when the eyes of a whole empire are watching for their detection?
Their courts are not to intermeddle with your internal policy, and will have cognizance only of those subjects which are placed under the control of a national legislature.
It is as necessary there should be courts of law and executive officers, to carry into effect the laws of the nation, as that there be courts and officers to execute the laws made by your state assemblies.
There are many reasons why their decisions ought not to be left to courts instituted by particular states.
A perfect uniformity must be observed thro’ the whole union; or jealousy and unrighteousness will take place; and for a uniformity one judiciary must pervade the whole.
The inhabitants of one state will not have confidence in judges appointed by the legislature of another state, in which they have no voice.
Judges who owe their appointment and support to one state, will be unduly influenced, and not reverence the laws of the union.
It will at any time be in the power of the smallest state, by interdicting their own judiciary, to defeat the measures, defraud the revenue, and annul the most sacred laws of the whole empire.
A legislative power, without a judicial and executive under, their own control, is in the nature of things a nullity.
Congress under the old confederation had power to ordain and resolve, but having no judicial or executive of their own, their most solemn resolves were totally disregarded.
The little state of Rhode Island was purposely left by Heaven to its present madness, for a general conviction in the other states, that such a system as is now proposed is our only preservation from ruin.
What respect can any one think would be paid to national laws, by judicial and executive officers who are amenable only to the present assembly of Rhode Island?
The rebellion of Shays and the present measures of Rhode Island ought to convince us that a national legislature, judiciary and executive, must be united, or the whole is but a name; and that we must have these, or soon be hewers of wood and drawers of water for all other people.
end quotes
And then we have the “Cato” Essay from the Country Journal and Advertiser, Poughkeepsie, December 12, 1787, as follows:
It is easy to foresee that the present crisis will form a principal epoch in the politics of America, from whence we may date our national consequence and dignity, or anarchy, discord and ruin; the arguments made use of by a certain class of political scribblers, I conceive calculated (instead of throwing light on the subject) to deceive the ignorant but perhaps honest part of the community; and to misguide the thoughtless and unweary—in our present enquiry it is of no consequence who are the authors of these inflammatory productions, whether they are the result of the vanity of a northern champion to become the head of a party; the expiring groans of a principal magistrate of a state; or the last effort of the patriotic bower of a Treasury to gain popularity; or all together, I trust will bare equal rights on the minds of the public.
It is natural enough to suppose that, when any general plan is proposed, that thwarts the private interests or views of a party, that, such party will draw the most unpleasing picture of the plan, and blacken it with all the false colouring that a gloomy imagination can invent: thus are we told by these evil prospects, that the system is impracticable; smallness of territory being essential to a republican government—in support of this doctrine, Montesquieu (who was born and educated under a monarchical government and knew nothing of any other but in theory) is quoted as an uncontrovertable authority, and after all, I presume they have mistaken the meaning of this author, for if I comprehend him right he is speaking of a pure democracy, such as Athens where the people all met in council; to be sure in such a government, extensive territory would be inconvenient, but a remedy to this evil has long since been found out: when the territory of any state became too large for the general assembling of the people, it was thought best to transact the business of the Commonwealth by representation: and thus large states may be governed as well by delegates from twenty districts, as small ones are from two or three; but this is what we are told by the politicians of the day constitutes a dangerous aristocracy, for say they in their learned definition, it is a government of the few; on this shameful quibble they attempt to ketch the attention of the rabble and frighten them into the measure of rejecting the proposed government.
If I understand any thing of the meaning of the term, aristocracy signifies a government by a body of Nobles, who derive their power either from hereditary succession or from self appointment; and are no way dependent on the people for their rank in the state.
By the plan offered to us, both the legislative and executive, derive their appointments either directly from the people: how this can be called aristocracy exceeds the limits of my comprehension.
It is true that we are told that the better sort of people will be appointed to govern; I pray God the prediction may not be a false one.
But should that be the case, say these political empirics, we shall not have an equal representation.
Why?
Because every class of people will not be represented.
God knows that fools and knaves have voice enough in government already; it is to be hoped these wise prophesiers of evil would not wish to give them a constitutional privilege to send members in proportion to their numbers.
If they mean by classes the different professions in the state, their plan is totally new, and it is to be feared the system once adopted, there would be no end to their democratical purity; to take in every profession from the Clergy to the Chimneysweep, will besides composing a motley assemblage of heterogeneous particles, enlarge the representation so that it will become burthensome to the Community; had the representation in Massachusetts been no larger than that in the proposed government of the Union, Shays would never have had a follower:
This is a thread where the heavy hammer of history comes down on our heads, big time, especially those who think the world was created yesterday just for them.
My goodness, the things people have done in this world of ours.
And they haven’t been nice to each other, either, what a shock.
Who’d have ever guessed!
As to the Turks in the time of Ataturk, at p.p.375, 376 of “This Kind of War” by T.R. Fehrenbach, the author has this interesting assessment of them:
And one fact that stands out starkly among the pieces of evidence is that while 50% of the American (Korean War) POW’s died, and a percentage of British that caused grave concern later to Her Majesty’s government, few South Koreans experienced much difficulty, and not one Turkish prisoner of war died.
Chemistry and culture killed the Americans.
The disciplines, attitudes, and organization that Americans brought into captivity killed many of them.
Only an extremely cohesive group, with tight leadership and great spiritual strengths, coupled with inner toughness and concern for one another, could have survived the shocks visited upon their minds and bodies.
The British sergeants stood like rocks, and did well.
The British other ranks, largely National Servicemen drafted from factory towns, with little sense of purpose or cohesion, did less well.
But is was the Turks who did best of all.
The Turks were a completely homogeneous group, with common background and common culture, and with a chain of command that was never broken.
They remained united against the enemy, and they survived.
The Turks did not come from an admirable society.
Only a few decades back in time (before 1950-53), Turks were slaving in Egypt, and conducting vast pogroms in Armenia.
In the last century Turks still blew living men from the moths of cannon for minor crimes and punished more serious ones by impalement – a peculiarly horrible form of execution, in which a man was seated on a sharpened tapered stake, toes off the ground, and his body weight, and movements, slowly drove him downward.
There never had been anything approaching freedom, or democracy, in Turkey.
Elections have been held, but the losers normally wind up in jail.
Turkey had journeyed partway into the twentieth century only under the iron fist of Kemal Ataturk and his successors, who were just as determined as the Chinese Communists to destroy an ancient, backward, Oriental way of life.
Ataturk was determined to Westernize his people by force.
He broke the power of the Moslem clergy, revised education, changed the traditional headgear and alphabet.
But in the middle of the century the Turkish soldier who served his country’s colors was still a fanatically-devout custom-ridden peasant, close to soil and survival, accustomed to the fiercest discipline all his life, from father, state, and army – but with a barbarian’s pride in himself and his people.
He would take baths only with his clothes on in the prison camps, or allow a nonbeliever friend such as Schlichter to view his Koran only through the seven veils, and he went white with outrage if venereal disease were even discussed.
But he was completely aware of what he was – he was a Turk, and a Turk was unquestionably the finest of all possible things to be, even as there was no God but Allah.
These matters he felt no need to prove or argue; he had imbibed them with his mother’s milk, and his mind had not been cluttered with other notions since then.
He was close to the soil, and knew hardship; he ate what Allah or the dogs of Communist Chinese provided, without complaint.
He also knew to eat any scrap of greenery he could place his hands on, and in the camps, many better-educated Americans watched him eat weeds in amazement.
Later, many of them followed suit.