History Notes this week of June 8

1184 B.C.: After 10 years of fruitless siege against the citadel of Troy, the Greek armies of Odysseus set sail from their encampment, leaving behind a huge offering to their goddess Athena, in the form of a massive, wheeled wooden horse. Despite ominous warning from the Trojan priest Laocoon: “Do not trust the horse, Trojans! Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks. even bringing gifts.” (Virgil: Aenid, Book II), the besieged army and people of Troy, realizing their enemy has abandoned their camps, rapturously wheel the statue into the city, and use it as the centerpiece of their victory celebrations. For his efforts, Laocoon is strangled by two snakes. Poor guy, he just tried to warn them. The Trojan “victory” celebration continues into the night, and in the ‘wee hours of morning darkness and quiet, 30 hand-picked Greek soldiers slip out of their hiding places inside the horse to unlock the city gates and signal the Greek fleet to return to the beaches. The result is a complete slaughter of Troy’s population, and a comprehensive sack of its wealth. When the Greek army finally vacated the city, they left it a pile of smoldering rubble.

1184 BC: The ruins of the Hellenic city of Troy are located on the Anatolian coastal plain. It was conclusively discovered in 1873 by German Heinrich Schliemann, one of the fathers of modern archeology. He believed the veracity of The Iliad, by Homer and worked downward from there. If you were educated in the classical tradition, i.e., before the 1960s took hold, you probably read it in the original Greek, and wrote a paper or two about it. Sadly for your DLH Scribe, he was raised in California in the late 1960s, Ground Zero for the “do your own thing” educational philosophy, so he has to rely on the DLH Research Archives to keep learning this stuff. But I digress…  FYI, the precision of the date here can be attributed to the great polymath Eratosthenes, librarian of the Library of Alexandria. 

323BC: Death of Alexander the Great (b.356BC). The young King of Macedon initiated a series of conquests that spread Hellenic civilization essentially throughout the known world of his day. He was never defeated in battle, but died at age 32 in Babylon, in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II, just prior to beginning a planned campaign against Arabia

632: Death of the Arab warlord and putative prophet Muhammad (b.570).

1157: Albert “The Bear” of Saxony, is appointed Margrave of Brandenburg by the Holy Roman Emperor. So what? you might ask. Well, here’s the so what: the margraves were principalities (“marches”)* out on the borderlands of the Empire, tasked with protecting the Empire from invasion. As such, they required and were authorized to maintain significant military forces, with the Margrave himself given a great deal of autonomy to act in defense of the realm. In reality, the margraves  became de facto independent kingdoms. Albert’s accession as Margrave began the process of expanding Brandenburg into the strongest and most prosperous of the northern Germanic sates. Added to this its role as Elector of for the Holy Roman Emperor, meant that Germany’s most powerful and ambitious families would continually seek a role in Brandenburg’s politics. In 1415 the Hohenzollern family was named Prince-Elector of Brandenburg. 

1190: Enroute to the Third Crusade, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Fredrick Barbarossa (name means “red beard”) (b.1122), drowns in the Saleph River. His loss causes his Germanic army to nearly collapse, but the remnants eventually join the armies of France’s Philip II and England’s Richard Coeur de Lion in Acre.

1509: Henry VIII marries his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon.

1770: At the antipodes of his First Voyage of Discovery, Captain James Cook runs aground in HMS Endeavour on the Great Barrier Reef. When the ship does not float off using a kedged anchor during the next high tide, Cook immediately orders the crew to lighten ship, eventually discharging all of Endeavour’s fresh water, stores, and all but four cannons over the side. The weight loss, combined with a Herculean effort with two more kedge anchors, frees the ship from the reef. Now afloat again, but 24 miles from the mainland and with large hole below the waterline, the ship is now in danger of sinking before they can safely beach it for repairs. Midshipman Jonathon Monkhouse was sent over the side with a wadded up mass of old sailcloth and oakum. He swam down to the hole and thrust the mass into the flow, where it acted like a huge cork, staunching the leak long enough that Cook could cut back from three pumps to one. That process, by the way, is called fothering, and it can be done either as a plug or as a gigantic patch, i.e., sliding an entire sail under the ship from one side to the other.

1775: Eight weeks after the failed raids on Lexington and Concord, British General Thomas Gage declares martial law in Massachusetts. He offers amnesty to any of the American rebels who will lay down their arms, except for Samuel Adams and John Hancock, whom he promises to hang on the spot.

1776: The Continental Congress appoints a “Committee of Five” led by Virginian Thomas Jefferson to draft a declaration of independence from Great Britain.

1789: Virginian James Madison submits to the Continental Congress twelve proposed amendments to the Constitution. By 1791, ten of them are ratified by the states as the Bill of Rights. One more is finally ratified by the Several States in 1992, to become the 27^thAmendment- prohibiting changes in Congressional pay and benefits without an intervening election.

1793: The Jacobin faction of the French revolutionary leadership takes over control of the ill-named Committee of Public Safety and converts it into the Revolutionary Dictatorship. You will not be surprised to know that Madame Guillotine begins to increase the pace of her work. 

1809: Death of Thomas Paine (b.1737), one of the intellectual fathers of the American Revolution, whose 1776 broadside, Common Sense, laid down in clear rhetoric the foundation for the Colonies making a complete break with the United Kingdom. By 1789 he became an early enthusiast for the French Revolution and was in fact “elected” to the French Assembly, even though he spoke no French. As an ally of Robespierre, he eventually fell into disfavor and was imprisoned in 1793. While in prison he penned The Age of Reason, which excoriated the teachings of the Church in favor of “free rational inquiry” into any and all subjects. But before descending into the mire of revolutionary France, and during the course of the American Revolution, he published a lucid series of pamphlets called The American Crisis. You may recognize these words:
“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”

1825: The cornerstone is laid for Fort Hamilton, sited on the north shore of the Verazzano Narrows, protecting the approaches to New York’s great harbor. [The original classical redoubt, now completely subsumed by the much larger Army post; Fort Wadsworth (multi-level Battery Weed) sits on the opposite shore of the Narrows, providing interlocking fields of artillery fire with Hamilton across the strait.

1837: In Boston, a race riot breaks out between “native” Yankee firefighters and immigrant Irish. The commotion began in the afternoon as a group of Yankee firemen left a pub together and forced themselves through a line of mourners in an Irish funeral procession. The whole interaction went peacefully, until, well, it didn’t. Estimates suggest there were about 800 principal pugilists, and another 10,000 or so cheering and egging them on. I have NO IDEA whether alcohol was a factor, but it may have been. The Broad Street Riot lasted around three hours, was finally broken up by the mayor calling up several National Guard (-type) units, both cavalry with lances and infantry with fixed bayonets. As the dust settled, the city decided it was time to professionalize and to a certain extent integrate the fire and police departments in the city.

1854: First graduation of midshipmen from the new US Naval Academy. 

1891: Birth of songwriter and lyricist Cole Porter (d.1964) whose works include such classics as Begin the Beguine, Just One of Those Things, Anything Goes, In the Still of the Night.

1903: Deaths of Serbian King Alexander Obrenovic (b.1876) and his wife, Queen Draga Masin. Their murders were part of a general restlessness within the officer corps of the Serbian army over Serbia’s status vis-à-vis the decaying Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Balkan League, the Russian Pan-Slavic movement, and their own irredentist goals regarding Bosnia & Herzegovina.  As a group, the officer corps strongly objected to the marriage of their young king (an only child) to a foreign widow 12 years his senior, who was therefore unlikely to produce a legitimate heir. One of her brothers was rumored to be named as heir apparent at some point, which finally triggered the conspiracy between the officers and members of (believe it or not) the Black Hand: you’ll recall them as the anarchists that planned the 1914 assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Although the formal Balkan wars didn’t start for another 8 years, this event can be seen as one of the myriad facets of the buildup to the eventual Great War. 

1913: Birth of Vince Lombardi (d.1970), whose life defined the sport of professional football as player, coach and general manager. 

1915: Birth of Les Paul (d.2009), prolific musician and inventor of the legendary Gibson solid body electric guitar that bears his name. If you ask A.J., he could probably tell you what one of Paul’s guitars is worth today. Probably a lot, I’m guessing. Post-Script, from AJ himself a couple years back: “The Gibson company owes quite a lot to Mr. Paul, but the music industry even more.  Not only did he develop one of the greatest electric guitar designs (I’ve seen vintage LPs listed for $50,000+ on eBay), but his contributions to the recording industry have had a much greater impact.  He pioneered multi-track recording, and pioneered the use of effects to enhance music recordings.”

1918: Birth of Robert Preston (d.1987), the versatile stage and screen actor immortalized as The Music Man.

1919: Thoroughbred 3-year old Sir Barton wins the Belmont Stakes, becoming the first horse to win the Triple Crown of American horse racing (Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont). Between the Preakness and Belmont races, he also won the Withers Stakes, making it four wins in 32 days.

1920: At the Republican National Convention in Chicago, party leaders gather in a small meeting room in the Blackstone Hotel to privately come to consensus on the eventual Republican nominee, Warren G. Harding.

1922: Birth of John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (d.1941), 19 year old author of aviation’s most quoted poem, High Flight. “Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth…” The son of Anglican missionaries in Shanghai, China, he took training with the Royal Canadian Air Force and served in England prior to America’s entry into the war. His inspiration for the poem came as he took his Spitfire Mk1 to 33,000 feet and felt the exaltation of high altitude flying. He later died in a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire.

1924: Death of George Mallory (b.1886), the great British explorer and mountaineer who, with his climbing partner Andrew Irvine, attempted an ascent to the summit of Mount Everest this day and never returned. Irvine’s ice axe was discovered in 1933, but no trace of either man was found except for a cryptic Chinese report of finding “an English dead” on the north face above 26,000 feet. Mallory’s body was eventually found during a dedicated search mission in 1999, although the question of whether he and Irvine actually achieved the summit remains one of mountaineering’s great mysteries.

1929: Birth of Dutch diarist Anne Frank (d.1945). Annelies Marie Frank was a German-born Jewish girl who gained worldwide fame posthumously for keeping a diary documenting her life in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands.

1937: Soviet premier Joseph Stalin, increasingly frustrated at the slow pace of communism’s acceptance by Russian society, initiates the military phase of the Great Purge, when he put on trial for treason the brilliant Marshall** of the Soviet Army Mikhail Tukhachevesky and 8 other Soviet Generals. The Purge is one of those astonishing facts that today’s leftist and Progressive stooges often refuse to acknowledge, other than to repeat Stalin’s pathetic quote: “If you want to make an omelet, you have break a few eggs.” Unfortunately for the voluptuaries of collectivism, that omelet never turned out much better than scrambled eggs, and runny ones at that (with no salt and pepper). Total arrests during the Purge reached over 1.5 million nominal “citizens” of the Soviet Union, 680,000 of whom were summarily shot for the “crime” of disagreeing with the direction Stalin and his leadership circle were taking the Soviet state. As in the case of Marshall Tukhachevesky, you didn’t even have to actually disagree- simply the threat of potential disagreement in the mind of Stalin was enough to initiate torture to extract a confession, preparatory to the inevitable bullet to the head at the hands of the NKVD (a.k.a. KGB, a.k.a SVD today). 

1940: Using as cover the Pact of Steel with Germany, Italy declares war on France and Great Britain.

1940: Under the command of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the German Wermacht reaches the English Channel.

1940: Canada declares war on Italy.

1940: Norway surrenders to Germany.

1940: Only days after the British evacuation from Dunkirk, the roughly 50,000 remaining Allied troops on the continent surrender to the overwhelming juggernaut of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. French General Maxime Weygrand orders Paris to be an open city- “A cessation of hostilities is compulsory-” to save it from certain destruction. Weygrand bitterly blames the British for France’s defeat. France formally capitulates to German arms on the 25^th. 

1955: Two hours into the 24 hour race at Le Mans, a Mercedes-Benz doing 150 mph on the front straightaway clips an Austin Healey, launches into the air and careens into the grandstand, exploding into a fireball of burning magnesium and debris that kills 77 spectators and injures scores of others. Mercedes withdrew entirely from racing at the close of the season and did not return until 1987. The crash spurred a huge review and overhaul of auto racing safety procedures, including the creation of catch fences and restrictions on crowd placement, among others. Because of this crash, Switzerland immediately banned auto racing on its territory; a ban still in effect to this day. 

1962: Three men escape from Alcatraz prison using sharpened spoons and an improvised raft. They are never found and are assumed dead from drowning in the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay.

1963: President John F. Kennedy announces from the Oval Office that his administration will seek a comprehensive Civil Rights Bill in order to guarantee equal access to public facilities, ending segregation in education, and guaranteeing federal protection for voting rights.

1964: Senate majority whip Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) finally sits down after 14 hours and 13 minutes of continuous talking at the end of a marathon 57 day Democratic filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. Once the “Conscience of the Senate” yielded the floor, his colleague Senator Richard Russell (D-GA) made his closing argument against the bill. Minority Leader Senator Everett Dirksen (R-IL) then took the floor to invoke cloture: “The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing in government, in education, and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here!” The final vote was 71-29, the first time since civil rights bills began moving through Congress in the 1950s that a cloture motion actually ended a filibuster.

1964: Nelson Mandella and others from the African National Congress are sentenced to life in prison for treason and sabotage. Mandella never denies the charge and in fact proudly asserted that the violence planned by the ANC was a legitimate reflection of South African blacks’ grievances. After 27 years of hard labor he is released in 1990 and four years later is elected President of the now-desegregated country.

1966: One of two prototype North American XB-70 Valkyrie supersonic bombers is destroyed in a mid-air collision with an F-104 chase aircraft during a photo shoot. Both crews are killed, and the XB-70 program is cancelled shortly thereafter. The remaining Valkyrie is on display at the USAF Museum at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio. 

1967: The US Navy intelligence gathering ship, USS Liberty (AGTR-5) is bombed and strafed in a coordinated Israeli air attack. 34 crew members are killed and 17 wounded.

1967: Five days into the war with its Arab neighbors, having conquered all of Sinai and the Jordanian territory west of the Jordan River, Israel opens a large-scale armor assault on Syria’s Golan Heights, from which the Syrians had been raining artillery shells on Israeli towns in the Galilee region.

1967: With the complete collapse of Syrian defenses in Golan, and the frontiers with Jordan and Egypt stabilized, Israel signs a ceasefire with Syria, thus ending the Six Day War.

1973: The Virginia race horse Secretariat wins the third race of the Triple Crown at the Belmont Stakes.

1987:  Ronald Reagan stands in the shadow of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate and issues his stirring call to Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

2018: U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean tyrant Kim Jon Un meet face to face in Singapore.