1394: Birth in Lisbon of a boy who grew to become Prince Henry the Navigator (d.1460). After a career of guiding Portuguese seamen around the coast of Africa, he died 32 years before the greatest Portuguese seaborne discovery by Christopher Columbus.
1475: Birth of the Renaissance Master Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (d.1564).
1493: Christopher Columbus arrives in Lisbon aboard his carrack Nina, thus completing his first of three voyages of discovery to the New World.
1519: Hernando Cortez lands in Mexico, looking for Aztec gold.
1565: Founding of Rio de Janeiro.
1712: In Stockholm (and elsewhere in the realm), the subjects of the kingdom of Sweden celebrate February 30th, bringing the country’s calendar back in line with the rest of Europe, who were still using the Julian dating system.
The Swedish Calendar was planned as a way to slowly- over 40 years- to move international dating over to the better-derived and nominally more accurate Gregorian Calendar. But after 12 years of no one else following their lead, it just got too hard. At this stage, Sweden was a day off from everyone else, and it would only get worse over time. The backwards leap this day brought her back into the mainstream, although when the rest of the world made the sudden 11-day leap in 1753, Sweden waited a year, maybe out of spite. On the other hand, in Russia they waited ‘til they were communist, and the Orthodox Church still hasn’t given it up.
1776: The Continental Navy’s Continental Marines storm ashore in Nassau, Bahamas, under the command of Captain Samuel Nicholas (DLH 11/10). The attack is the Marines’ first amphibious assault. No surprise, they successfully occupied Nassau, spending two weeks loading British guns and powder into the little Navy fleet. For some reason the island’s governor, who so hospitably did not offer significant resistance to the Americans, complained later that the American officers drank their way through the occupation, completely draining his liquor supply.
1776: Fortified by the dramatic and unexpected arrival of artillery from Fort Ticonderoga, General George Washington captures Dorchester Heights, thus dominating the British occupied port of Boston. Realizing the weakness of their now-untenable position, the British return control of the city to its citizens and begin a strategic withdrawal to New York.
1779: Birth of American polymath Joel Roberts Poinsett (d.1851), a congressman, physician, botanist, statesman, and the first U.S. Minister to Mexico (prior to our sending an ambassador), where he spent a significant amount of time cataloging the varieties of flora in the southern part of the country. He is best known today for bringing to the United States the red-leafed “Christmas-Eve flower” that now bears his name.
1781: The Continental Congress adopts the Articles of Confederation. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but their fundamental weakness lead to our current, magnificent Constitution.
1791: The French Republic, in response to an urgent need to deal with persistent English threats along the coast, builds the first of a tightly interlaced series of semaphore towers, or “optical telegraphs,” to rapidly communicate between the frontiers and the capital in Paris. The towers in France used a series of rotating and articulated arms to create coded characters. Other countries used different types of open and closed panels or different types of arms, but the principle remained the same: the most distant lookout would spot some kind of listed activity offshore and immediately report it to the next tower along the line. Not surprisingly, the towers themselves made excellent targets for military and naval raids.
1820: President James Monroe signs into law the Missouri Compromise, passed after months of bitter debate in both the House and Senate. As a political compromise, it did not meet any party’s view of actually solving the festering problem of slavery’s expansion into the new territories of the Louisiana Purchase. The terms of this law prohibited slavery in the western Territories north of 36-30N, except for Missouri, which would be admitted to the Union as a slave state, balancing the concurrent admission of Maine as a free state. Thomas Jefferson despised the compromise: “I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment. But this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.” Debate shifted to Kansas-Nebraska divide, highlighted over the next thirty years by sporadic violence and hardening positions between Northern abolitionists and Southern slaveholders.
1831: Birth of Union cavalry General Phil Sheridan (d.1888). Philip Henry Sheridan (March 6, 1831[1][a] – August 5, 1888) was a career United States Army officer and a Union general in the American Civil War. His career was noted for his rapid rise to major general and his close association with General-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant, who transferred Sheridan from command of an infantry division in the Western Theater to lead the Cavalry Corps of the Army of the Potomac in the East. In 1864, he defeated Confederate forces under General Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley and his destruction of the economic infrastructure of the Valley, called “The Burning” by residents, was one of the first uses of scorched-earth tactics in the war. In 1865, his cavalry pursued Gen. Robert E. Lee and was instrumental in forcing his surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. In his later years, Sheridan fought in the Indian Wars against Native American tribes of the Great Plains. He was instrumental in the development and protection of Yellowstone National Park, both as a soldier and a private citizen. In 1883, Sheridan was appointed general-in-chief of the U.S. Army, and in 1888 he was promoted to the rank of General of the Army during the term of President Grover Cleveland.
1836: The Alamo while still under siege, did not stop the Texas Convention of 1836 from declaring the independence of the Texas Republic from Mexico.
1836: Death of William Travis, James Bowie, Davy Crockett, and 184 other brave Texans, after 13 days of relentless siege of the Alamo mission-fortress by the Mexican army under President General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Travis’s stirring plea for help riveted the nation and led to the rallying cry of “Remember the Alamo!” that finally swept Mexican forces out of the Texas territory and back south of the Rio Grande.
1845: President John Tyler signs a bill authorizing the annexation of the Republic of Texas into the United States. This act was not as simple as it sounds. You may also hear from time to time that Texas is the only one of the Several States to have a legitimate secession clause in its annexation. This is also not as simple as it sounds. Texas is, in fact, the only State that was annexed as a formerly sovereign state, not as a federal territory from which a State would be organized. The decade of high political drama that surrounded Texas’s eventual integration into the United States remains a potent force in the identity of Texans nationwide.
1847: Birth of Scottish-American inventor Alexander Graham Bell (d.1922).
1857: The U.S. Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, rules in the Dred Scott Case, agreeing that:
1) Persons of African descent are not citizens of the United States, therefore the slave Dred Scott had no standing in the court;
2) Property rights are not automatically relinquished crossing jurisdictions. As such, Congress cannot ban slavery in the territories (voiding the Missouri Compromise), and;
3) The Fifth amendment prohibits the freeing of slaves brought into federal territories.
The case provides a cautionary note for those legal voluptuaries who believe that the decisions of the Court permanently trump the deliberations and decisions of the legislative branch, and to those who would exploit the Court to advance a political agenda that would not stand normal deliberative scrutiny in a legislative debate.
1861: Tsar Alexander I abolishes serfdom in Russia. It was a good start, but the edict left the budding revolutionary movement wanting more.
1872: Yellowstone National Park is established.
1890: The longest bridge in Great Britain (at 1710 feet), the Forth Railway Bridge in Scotland, is opened by the Prince of Wales, who later became King Edward VII of the United Kingdom.
1895: Birth of American General Matthew Ridgway (d.1993), best remembered for his command of U.S. 8thArmy in Korea, where he revitalized a demoralized and retreating army and put them on the attack against the communist onslaught from the North. When General MacArthur was relieved of command by President Truman in the Spring of 1951, Ridgway was awarded his fourth star and took over as Supreme Commander of the UN forces engaged in Korea.
1905: In an attempt to build on his assassinated predecessor’s reforms, and to placate nascent agitation by unionists and communists, Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II agrees to create a representative legislature, the Duma.
1912: The National Biscuit Company introduces the Oreo cookie to the mass market.
1918: Only months after completing their overthrow of the Tsar, the new communist government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics sues for peace with the Central Powers and signs the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, ending Russian participation in the Great War.
1924: Birth of Deke Slayton (d.1993), one of the original 7 Mercury Astronauts, who had the distinction of being grounded from the flight program for reasons of a suspected heart murmur. He remained in NASA, however, becoming head of the Astronaut Office, which controlled astronaut selection and flight assignments. After completion of the dangerous and dramatic Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, Slayton was finally released for flight as Docking Module Pilot of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a 1975 earth orbital mission that set the conditions for continued U.S.- Russian cooperation in space.
1925: Calvin Coolidge becomes the first President to have his inauguration broadcast over radio.
1932: Charles Augustus Lindbergh III, infant son of Charles “Lucky Lindy” Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh, is kidnapped from their home in East Amwell, NJ. In mid-May, the boy’s body was discovered not far from the Lindbergh’s home, with death indicated from a massive blow to the head. The crime riveted the national consciousness for over two years.
1938: After five years of dry holes, Standard Oil of California finally discovers oil near Dahran in Saudi Arabia. The American oil consortium who did the exploration and development of the oil industry there went through several iterations, finally becoming the Arabian-American Oil Company, more commonly known as Aramco.
1946: Hanoi native, anti-Japanese guerrilla, anti-colonial nationalist and nascent communist dictator Ho Chi Minh signs an agreement with the exhausted and soon-to-be-post-colonial French government, confirming Vietnam as an autonomous state within the Indochinese Federation and the larger French Union. The postwar stage thus set, “Uncle Ho” commences a reinvigorated guerrilla campaign to forcibly evict France from this now former colony.
1949: A USAF B-50 Superfortress, under the command of Captain James Gallagher, arrives at Carswell AFB in Fort Worth after completing a 94 hour, non-stop circumnavigation of the globe. The crew performed four aerial refuelings, meeting Air Force tankers over Lajes airfield in the Azores, Dahran Airfield in Saudi Arabia, Clark AFB in the Philippines, and Hickam AFB in Hawaii.
1951: Opening arguments in the treason trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg were an American married couple who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, including providing top-secret information about American radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines, and nuclear weapon designs.
1953: Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin collapses from a stroke. He dies four days later.
1981: Long-time CBS Radio and television correspondent Walter Cronkite, signs off on his last broadcast of the CBS Evening News.
2005: Adventurer and aviation enthusiast Steve Fossett (1944-2007) lands at the old Air Force base in Salina, Kansas, to complete the world’s first solo, non-stop, unrefueled powered flight around the world, 67 hours,1 min 13 seconds after takeoff from that same 12,300 foot runway. The plane was a carbon-fiber wonder designed and built by the great Burt Rutan.
About the Author
As I recall the Rosenbergs were exonerated.
Editor’s note: Records declassified after the Soviet Union disbanded include cables showing Julius’s role as a courier and recruiter for the Soviets.Ethel may have been swept up, but she was aware and may aided in the communication. The family has been pushing to exonerate Ethel, and it has come out that Ethel may have been too ill to have helped much.
Bob, so was OJ Simpson, John Hinkley Jr, R Kelly, Casey Anthony and Michael Jackson…