1099: Having subdued all lingering resistance and now controlling Jerusalem, the knights of the First Crusade elect Godfrey de Bouillon as the first Defender of the Holy Sepulchre, creating the first Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem. Godfrey could not bring himself to take the title of “King” in the Holy City- hence the awkward title- but he acted the part, forcing Acre and a dozen other cities to pay tribute to this nascent kingdom.
1715: A Spanish treasure fleet of 11 ships departs Havana, stuffed to the gunwales with gold, silver and precious stones from the New World. Seven days later, the entire fleet founders and is lost in a hurricane off the coast of southern Florida. Treasure hunters have long sought the wrecks, without success.
1725: Birth of John Newton (d.1807), English slave ship captain, redeemed Christian, priest, hymnist who wrote Amazing Grace, and spiritual mentor to the great English Parliamentarian William Wilberforce.
1778: First Battle of Ushant– The French government, taking an early opportunity to stick it in the eye of “L’Albion perfide” in support of their new American ally, sends a fleet of twenty-nine ships to do battle with the Royal Navy. They meet thirty British ships, with HMS Victory in the vanguard, off the French island of Ushant near the western approaches of La Manche (or, the English Channel, if you prefer). Although no ships were captured or sunk on either side, the British suffered over 1100 casualties, including 407 killed, compared to just over 500 casualties in the French fleet.
1794: After a year in office as head of the ill-named Committee of Public Safety, during which he instigated the frenzied bloodletting of Le Terreur, Citizen Maximilian Robespierre is arrested by what passes as responsible authorities in the French Revolutionary government. What finally ended Robespierre’s reign was not just the 17,000+ heads he ordered lopped off already, it was the sudden increase of executions that came from his brainchild, Law of 22 Prarial (10 June). The law established a tribunal that was no more than a court of condemnation which dispensed with the bothersome trouble of evidence and procedures and witnesses: it permitted executions to be carried out under the simple suspicion from any citizen of anti-revolutionary activity by any other citizen. As a result, the intervening six weeks between its passage and his own execution on the 28th saw Robspierre’s new law responsible for 1285 new guillotine deaths. Like his confederates, he attempted to commit suicide with the pistol shown in his right hand, but he succeeded only in shattering his jaw. Executed without trial the next day, he was held in the same dungeon as Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. His last recorded words were to the doctor who held his bloody jaw together with a bandage, a simple “merci.” On the 28th, he was the last one of his group to go to the scaffold. When the blade was drawn into position, he was placed face up, un-blindfolded so he could watch the whole event. The executioner, in clearing away his neck, ripped the handkerchief off of his jaw, causing him to scream in agony until the blade fell.
1812: An Anglo-Portuguese army under the command of Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) defeats a French army in the Battle of Salamanca. The battle cemented Wellesley’s reputation for tactical genius, as he kept his own dispositions hidden from the French while remaining alert and disciplined to watch and wait for opportunities to exploit fleeting French tactical weaknesses. The British Peninsular Campaign remained a constant drain on French resources during Napoleon’s reign. Although neither side won a decisive strategic victory, the constant coalition pressure on the Iberian Peninsula eased French pressure against other coalition allies in the French eastern European campaigns, most notably the French drive deep into Russia.
1834: Death of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (b.1772), English poet, literary critic and debater, best known as the author of epic poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. His writings profoundly influenced both the Romantic movement in Europe and the Transcendentalist movement in the United States. As an aside, as his physical energy began to decay in his 40s, he became attracted to the “medicinal” qualities of opium, eventually becoming an addict who consumed over two quarts of laudanum a week.
1847: Mormon pioneers under the leadership of Brigham Young arrive in the Salt Lake Valley, where they end their flight from Illinois to create a new society in the Utah territory.
1847: Founding day for the Republic of Liberia, organized and funded by freed American slaves through the American Colonization Society (ACS), who in 1822 began repatriating emancipated slaves to the West Africa’s Pepper Coast. They took with them the ideals of freedom from American society, and named their capital city Monrovia, after the fifth President of the United States, who was a prominent supporter of the colonization, along with a huge majority of American leadership and society. By this date, the population of “Americans” was enough to declare independence and form a functioning constitutional government, with the free-born Joseph Jenkins Roberts (1809-1876) of Norfolk, Virginia elected as the first President.
1848: Birth of Arthur Balfour (d.1930), 33rd Prime Minister of Great Britain, and author of the Balfour Declaration.
1849: Birth of American poet Emma Lazarus (d.1887), author of the poem** inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor; your huddled masses yearning to breathe free; the wretched refuse of your teeming soil; bring these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me; I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door.”
1861: After the Union disaster at Bull Run last week, President Lincoln appoints Major General George B. McClellan as commanding officer of the Army of the Potomac. His organizational and motivational skills forge the army into a well-equipped and powerful force, but in the end his leadership in combat was unable to exploit the material advantages he created. In defending him, Lincoln once said, “If he can’t fight himself, he excels in making others ready to fight.” One might consider this faint praise. General U.S. Grant, when asked about McClellan’s role as a general, replied, “McClellan to me is one of the mysteries of the war.”
1866: The Buffalo Soldiers were established when Congress passed the Army Organization Act. This Act authorized the creation of four new cavalry regiments, two of which would be composed of African American troops. This was the historical beginning of the famed 9th and 10th Buffalo Soldier Cavalry regiments. These soldiers represented the military in the finest tradition of bravery and valor in Indian battles in the West, the Spanish American War, maintaining the Mexican border neutrality laws, the Philippines, and with battles with Pancho Villa in the Mexican punitive expedition during 1916.
1893: Birth of noted sociologist and the first African American President of Fisk University, Charles Spurgeon Johnson. Johnson is known for his study on race relations in the United States and in Liberia.
1897: A company of 20 black “Buffalo Soldier” infantrymen stationed in Fort Missoula, Montana, successfully arrive in Saint Louis after a grueling six-week march- on bicycles- across the vastness of Montana (including a stop at Little Big Horn battlefield), Wyoming, Nebraska and Missouri. The bicycle corps was an experimental group formed a year earlier to test the military viability of bikes to speed infantry movements.
1898: Continuing the earlier success of forcibly evicting Spain from her worldwide island empire in Cuba, Guam and the Philippines, the United States invades Puerto Rico, landing at Guanica after two months of preparatory shelling of San Juan and its environs.
1903: The Ford Motor Company sells its first car, a “quadracycle.” They’ve sold a lot more since then.
1909: French aviation pioneer Louis Bleriot, flying a machine of his own design* and construction, takes off from a field in Calais, and 33 minutes later, becomes the first man to fly across the English Channel (ou La Manche, si vous preferez).
1914: The Empire of Austria-Hungary issues an ultimatum to the Republic of Serbia to allow Austria to conduct the investigation and trial of whomever it was that shot Archduke Ferdinand last month. To no-one’s surprise, Serbia rejects the demand, setting in motion Austrian plans that have been in place since 1912 to once and for all crush Serbian nationalism and its constant interference in Bosnia. During the post-assassination dragnet, one of the conspirators spills his guts, leading not only to the arrest of several more conspirators, but also to six bombs built by the Serb arsenal, four pistols, training documentation, suicide pills, and a map, annotated with locations of the Gendarmerie and escape routes out of Sarajevo. Leading up to this ultimatum were a series of diplomatic notes and tense diplomacy between Austria and Germany, the bottom line being that Germany needed to goad Austria into declaring war in order to trigger a wider war with France and Russia for which they were much better prepared than either. From the Austrian perspective, it was crucial to ensure Germany would support an Austrian mobilization for yet another Balkan war, particularly since Russia had signaled its support for Serbia. Germany, in fact, gave a Austria a famous diplomatic “Blank Cheque” to destroy Serbia. To help prop up the façade that Germany was caught completely unawares by the ultimatum, the entire General Staff, the Kaiser, and the majority of his ministers ostentatiously went on vacation on the 23rd.
1914: Continuing the tumultuous descent into world war, Serbia breaks off diplomatic relations with Bulgaria.
1929: The Fascist state of Italy bans the use of foreign words in the Italian language.
1933: Fifty thousand cheering people greet aviation pioneer Wiley Post as he arrives at Floyd Bennett Field in New York City at the completion of his second flight around the world. The distinction here is that he did the feat solo, using a self-developed autopilot and compass instead of a navigator as on his earlier flight. He went on to further acclaim as he investigated the problems of high altitude flight, inventing several varieties of pressure suits to compensate for the physiological dangers of low pressures, low temperatures and low oxygen.
1935: Peak temperature for the Dust Bowl period- 109 degrees recorded in Chicago, 104 in Milwaukee.
1936: With the Spanish Civil War rapidly becoming proxy for all of the political and ideological tensions building throughout Europe, the Axis powers of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy agree to send military aid to the Nationalists of Generalissimo Francisco Franco.
1941: Upping the diplomatic ante in response to Japan’s sudden occupation of Indo-China, President Roosevelt seizes all Japanese assets held in the United States.
1942: The National Socialist German government opens the Treblinka extermination camp.
1943: Birth of British singer & songwriter, Sir Mick Jagger.
1945: USS Indianapolis (CA-35) arrives at Tinian Island with components for the upcoming atomic bomb drop on Hiroshima.
1946: Jewish terrorists of the Irgun movement, including future Prime Minister Manachem Begin, bomb the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, headquarters of the civil and military administration of British Palestine.
1947: President Truman signs into law the National Security Act of 1947, which gives us- among other things- the U.S. Air Force, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Department of Defense and the National Security Council.
1948: President Truman signs an executive order desegregating the armed forces.
1948: Birth of 1968 Olympic Gold Medalist Peggy Fleming.
1962: Baseball great Jackie Robinson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame on July 23, 1962. He became the first African American to play Major League Baseball in the twentieth century on April 10, 1947.
1967: French President Charles de Gaulle, on an official State visit to Canada, gives a rousing speech to over 100,000 French Canadians in Montreal, during which he proclaims: “Vivre le Quebec libre!” (Long live Free Quebec!). The government of Canada is not amused.
1969: The crew of Apollo 11 splashes down in the Pacific Ocean, completing President Kennedy’s goal of sending a man to the moon and safely returning to Earth. In an odd display of the concept of “an abundance of caution” over an unknown threat of extraterrestrial infection, the crew are required to don Biological Isolation Garments before opening the hatch to the Command Module, and a disinfectant crew follows them all the way to an Airstream trailer outfitted as a biological isolation living space, where they remain ensconced with a flight surgeon for 21 days.
1973: Death of Eddie Rickenbacker (b.1890), pioneering race car driver, World War I fighter ace (26 confirmed kills), owner of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and CEO of Eastern Airlines. Rickenbacker also acted as President Roosevelt’s personal courier during World War II, commandeering a B-17 to transport him to meet with General Douglas MacArthur on a subject that remains unknown to this day. During the trip across the Pacific, the crew became lost, and the pilot was forced to ditch the aircraft at sea, which led to an ordeal of survival for 26 days in a rubber raft. Rickenbacker would always credit God-directed miracles for their survival, most notably the time when a seagull alighted on his head and remained there for nearly an hour while Rickenbacker slowly reached up and captured it. They carefully divided all the parts evenly, which kept them alive for several more days. During his time at the helm of Eastern, he wrote in his autobiography what many of us in the aviation world believe is a fundamental truth: “I have never liked to use the word ‘safe’ in connection with either Eastern Airlines or the entire transportation field; I prefer the word ‘reliable.’” There’s something charming about that sentence, but I may be biased. His military awards include the Medal of Honor and Seven Distinguished Service Crosses.
1995: Dr. Bernard A. Harris became the first African American astronaut to perform a spacewalk. During Harris’s second space mission, while a Payload Commander on STS-63 with the Russian space station Mir, Harris walked in space for the first time. During this mission retrieval of the Spartan 204 satellite was implemented by STS 63.
2003: United States troops of the 101st Airborne Division, making a coordinated attack on a protected Iraqi compound, kill Uday and Qusay Hussein.
About the Author
No shame, at all.
You need therapy. You should be ashamed of your illness.
No, I just like the knee-jerk reactions you people provide. You sir, are a fool.
Isn't it interesting how these environmental experts and community organizers appear out of nowhere and suddenly become the last word…
Truth is obviously fixated on homosexuality and transvestites. He cannot control his urges, and relies on the internet to satisfy…