History Notes this week of July 12

100BC: Birth of Julius Caesar (d.44BC), first Dictator of the Roman Republic.

1099:  After four years of intrigue, violence, betrayal, death, war, negotiations, prayer and fervor, the First Crusade enters Jerusalem as a conquering army. The ensuing slaughter of Saracens and Jews on the Temple Mount was such that contemporary witnesses wrote that the knights rode in blood up to their stirrups. The full story is violent and complex, and if you ask me what I think of the Crusades I will tell you it was, at its core, a counter-offensive against years of Muslim aggression against not only Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land, but territorial aggression in Europe that spread across the Pyrenees in the west and to the gates of Vienna in the east.

1203: Venetian armies of the Fourth Crusade capture Constantinople, driving the sultan into exile and setting into motion the eventual death of the Christian Byzantine Empire. 

1576: Explorer Martin Frobisher sites the poorly-named landmass of Greenland. I’ve sighted the place myself a couple times from the Learjet I was flying; we even landed and re-fueled north of the Arctic Circle once on a west coast airfield called Sonde-Sondefjord. Interesting place to visit.  The ice embedded in the rocks has a turquoise hue like nothing you’ve ever seen.

1606: Birth of Rembrandt van Rijn (d.1669). The great Dutch painter was one of those rare artists who was both a commercial and critical success in his own lifetime, to say nothing of his stunning reputation and acclaim today. His masterpieces epitomize the dramatic use of light, composition and mood.

1762: Catherine the Great assumes the throne as Empress of all the Russias after the assassination of Peter III.

1769: Father Junipero Serra, a Spanish Franciscan monk, founds Mission San Diego Alcala, the first of 21 Franciscan missions in Alta California. The missions are carefully sited approximately one long day’s ride (or a three day walk) from each other, and formed the nucleus of most of California’s early cities. The trail between them became known as the El Camino Real (“The Royal Road”), which also became the first historically commemorated road* in the country. The only surviving original adobe mission structure remains at San Juan Capistrano. The missions themselves run north between San Diego and Sonoma. 

1776: Captain James Cook departs Plymouth on his third journey of exploration of the Pacific Ocean. 

1789: AfterLouis XVI dismissed his long-time Finance Minister, Jacques Necker; the news got into Paris early on the 12^th, causing immediate consternation from the various mobs* who were continually gathered on the grounds of Palais Royale and other venues. They grew deeply concerned that the Royal troops gathering in Versailles from their border outposts would be used to suppress the mobs (i.e., themselves) and take over the National Assembly. Further, most of the “Royal” troops on station in Paris proper were Swiss and German mercenaries, the result of the king and his advisors being uneasy with entrusting the capital city to native French troops of uncertain loyalty. General riots broke out all around the city on the 12^th with virtually no reaction** from the army or police. On the 13^th, with further fears growing of an impending attack, the mob was then incited by Camille Desmoulins, a Masonic agitator, who mounted onto a table, pistol in hand and exclaimed: “Citizens! There is no time to lose- the dismissal of Necker is the knell of Saint Bartholomew for the patriots! This very night all the Swiss and German battalions will leave the Champ de Mars to massacre us all; one resource is left: to arms!” The mob roared its approval and surged to the massive arsenal of Saint-Lazaire and stole hundreds of muskets, pistols, and barrels of powder. Early in the morning of the 14^th, 500 or so of the more energized among them appeared before the gates of the medieval-era Bastille prison, which held only seven prisoners but also contained a large cache of weapons and ammunition.   After fruitless negotiations with the warden, the mob finally attacked. The ensuing one-sided battle killed 98 of the attackers to one of the prison guards. But recognizing the inevitable, the warden, Governor de Launay, surrendered the facility around 3:00 in the afternoon. The mob then bundled him back to the square at Palais Royale, where they jostled him around as they tried to determine his fate. Exasperated, he finally cried out “Enough! Let me die!” and he kicked a baker named Dulait in the groin. The enraged mob then began stabbing him and sawed off his head, which they mounted on a pike and paraded through the streets. As evening closed in, the mobs established barricades in the streets to protect themselves from an expected counterattack. In the end, the Fall of the Bastille had zero military effect, but because of the symbolism of a royal facility falling to the citizens of the country it became the touchstone for the entire French Revolution, and is celebrated today as the National Holiday, Bastille Day.

1793: Death of Jean Paul Marat (b.1743), a fiery member of the French National Assembly and the ruling Directorate. A member of the Jacobin faction who favored radical implementation of revolutionary principles, he was a particular opponent of the Girondan faction, who were looking more for major reform than actual revolution. Marat was afflicted with a withering skin disease that caused him to spend most of his days in a therapeutic bath. On this day, he was called upon by Charlotte Corday, who claimed to have evidence of Girondan movements outside of Paris. As she finished making her case, Marat exclaimed, “Their heads will fall in ten days!” at which point Corday pulled a knife from her corset and plunged it into Marat’s chest, severing his aorta. Executed by guillotine on the 17^th, she never denied her guilt: “I killed one man to save 10,000!” The Directory decided to make Marat a martyr to the Revolution, and commissioned Jean Louis David to assist in burnishing his image with an iron death mask.

1793: Four days after sending Marat to his reward, Charlotte Corday is executed via guillotine. Immediately after her head fell into the basket, the executioner’s associate pulled it out and slapped her cheek, and the Jacobin council ordered an autopsy to determine if she was a virgin (she was, to the council’s great disappointment).
France’s post-Revolutionary decades saw Corday’s legacy undergo a major revision. After being the she-devil incarnate and Enemy of the People, she became more widely known as a woman of integrity and virtue who sacrificed herself to halt the gross excesses of le Terreur.  In 1860 the French painter Paule Jacques Aime Baudry summarized her enduring reputation by altering the perspective of David’s famous painting, to show Corday as a principled heroine of the people of France (the map on the wall) against the monstrous Marat.

1798: President John Adams signs into law the fourth of four bills collectively known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, passed in response to a high level of Francophile agitation against the Quasi-War [DLH 7/7] with that country. The Sedition Act signed today made it a federal offense to write, publish or utter a false or malicious statement against the United States government. Thomas Jefferson was particularly vocal against the law, a dispute which cause a deep breach in their friendship. This law, although it had an expiration date of the last day of Adams’ term, was eventually overturned based on a 10^thAmendment ruling on Congress overstepping its enumerated powers, rather than a more predictable First Amendment argument.

1799: In the Egyptian village of Rosetta (a.k.a. Rashid), French Captain Pierre-Francois Bouchard finds a portion of an ancient stele, with inscriptions in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptian Deotic script, and ancient Greek. The common inscriptions, written in honor of the 13 year old Ptolemy V, provided the first viable translations of hieroglyphics. When the British army defeated the French in Egypt in 1801, they assumed possession of the Rosetta Stone as part of the Treaty of Alexandria. It was immediately put on display in the British Museum, where it remains to this day.

1815: Four weeks after his decisive loss at Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte surrenders himself aboard HMS Bellerophon, which immediately transports him and a small retinue into permanent exile on the tiny island of Saint Helena, deep in the South Atlantic. 

1853: Commodore Mathew Perry, USN, sets foot in Araga, Japan and begins his first negotiations to open that country to outside trade interests, i.e., the United States.

1958:  A military coup, led by Major General Abdul Karim el Qasim, overthrows the Iraqi monarchy, killing the young king and his uncle the crown prince. Qasim himself is overthrown in a 1963 coup led by the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. 

1861: Two and a half months after the secession crisis degenerated into the Confederate firing on Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln orders a Union army of 35,000 under Brigadier General Irvin McDowell to begin a march into Virginia, with the object of defeating the gathering Confederate army and putting pressure on Richmond. McDowell heads west out of Washington, DC toward the Manassas junction, with the joyful cries of “On to Richmond!” from the press and fellow citizens ringing in the army’s ears.

1862: Captain David Farragut is promoted to Rear Admiral, becoming the United States Navy’s first flag officer.

1863: New York Draft Riots–July thirteenth saw the draft’s second lottery drawing, and it wasn’t complete before a mob of over 500 Irish immigrant laborers converged on the building where the drawing was underway and began shattering windows with paving stones, eventually setting the building ablaze. NYC’s police were inadequate to quell the riot and it ended up spreading uptown. Over the next three days over 120 civilians were killed, scores of buildings destroyed, and the riots degenerated into a near-pogrom against the city’s black population, against whom the Irish competed for the low-paying entry jobs.

1870: Georgia becomes the final former Confederate state re-admitted to the Union.

1917: Three years into the shocking bloodletting of the Great War, King George V issues a proclamation that his descendants will bear as their surname “Windsor,” after the castle in which the family lived, vice “von Saxe-Coberg and Gotha” which derived from Queen Victoria’s Germanic consort Prince Albert.

1923: Official dedication of the HOLLYWOOD sign, up on the hill above the Los Angeles suburb. Yes, it originally said “Hollywoodland”.

1938: After a solo transcontinental flight from Long Beach to Floyd Bennett Field in New York in an airplane of his own design, aviation mechanic, pilot, handy-man and barnstormer Douglas Corrigan takes off again through cloud cover on a flight plan filed for a return trip to California. He lands instead, in Ireland, and earns everlasting public acclaim as “Wrong-Way Corrigan.”

1941: The New York Yankee’s “Joltin’ Joe” DiMaggio hits safely for his 56th consecutive game, a record that stands to this day.

1942: Opening guns of the German army’s assault on Stalingrad. This is the start of the Kursk campaign, which sealed Germany’s defeat in the south of Russia. German assault got underway: the siege lasted nearly a full year through a bitter winter of inadequate clothing, sniping and counter-assaults by the Red Army.

1944: A massive explosion at the US Navy ammunition pier at Port Chicago, California obliterates two ships, immediately kills 320 workers and creates a seismic wave that is felt in Boulder City, Nevada. Eyewitnesses reported a solid column of flame and debris rising over 200 feet into the air, on top of which rode the still intact bow section of the SS E.A. Bryan. The blast caused damage 48 miles away in San Francisco and a chunk of the ship’s anchor was found on Mount Diablo, 25 miles from the blast site.

1945: Prime Minister Winston Churchill, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin, and President Harry S. Truman meet in Potsdam, in the outskirts of the ruined capital of Berlin, to discuss and decide on the fate of post-war Germany and the rest of Allied-occupied Europe.

1945: Scientists from the Manhattan Project detonate the world’s first atomic blast, code named Trinity, in the desert wastes of White Sands, New Mexico. President Truman, notified of the successful test during his summit meeting in Potsdam, told Stalin on the 25th “We have a new weapon of unusually destructive force.” Stalin, showing no emotion during the exchange, privately held his own explosion with his aides and American interlocutors that he was not told of it sooner.

1955: Opening day for Disneyland, built from scratch in a parcel of distant orange groves in Anaheim, California.

1960: Death of Joy Gresham, (b.1915), former socialist author, best known for her Christian conversion and marriage to British author C.S. Lewis, who chronicled her suffering and death from cancer in the book, A Grief Observed.  

1960: USS George Washington (SSBN-598) conducts the first underwater launch of a ballistic missile, the Polaris A1. 

1969: Apollo 11 launches to the moon with astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Mike Collins.

1975: First docking between American and Russian spacecraft. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) tested the limits of Soviet-American cooperation in each nation’s premier technology demonstration project. In addition to fundamental issues of trust and language compatibility, technical hurdles included differing measuring systems, different spacecraft and therefore different mating adapters and docking systems, different air pressures and different gas mixtures. 

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Wayne Creed

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