History Notes this week of March 10

241 B.C.: Roman triremes sink the Carthaginian fleet in the Battle of the Aegates Islands off the western tip of Sicily, bringing to an end the First Punic War. The First Punic War was the first of three wars fought between Rome and Carthage, the two main powers of the western Mediterranean in the early 3rd century BC. For 23 years, in the longest continuous conflict and greatest naval war of antiquity, the two powers struggled for supremacy.

1276: Augsburg is declared an Imperial Free City. It went on to become home to the Fugger banking empire and a significant mercantile and university industry. It is the only city in Germany to have its own legal holiday, celebrating the Peace of Augsburg on August 8^th every year. The rest of Germany has to work on that day, poor souls.

1507: Death of Cesare Borgia (b.1475), son of Pope Alexander VI, brother of the femme fatale Lucrecia Borgia,  and one of the primary hereditary princes studied by Nicolo Machiavelli in his classic treatise, The Prince. The Borgias represented the epitome of the self-perpetuating religio-politico-criminal power centers in the north-central tier of Italy, coming often into contact and conflict with the equally intense Medici dynasty of Florence. Machiavelli’s interest in Cesare’s princely career zeroed in on the fact that while his ruthlessness and cunning was effective enough to keep himself and his cronies in power, in the end, what Machiavelli described as his “princely virtue,” his political power, was power actually endowed by the pope, power that was lost on Alexander’s death and the accession of a new pope who did not have the Borgia family interest at the center of his papacy. 

1708: Britain’s Queen Anne withholds the Royal Assent for the Scottish Militia Bill, the last time a British monarch vetoes legislation. Coming less than a year after the 1707 Acts of Union with restive Scotland, she was relectant to sanction an independent armed force in the northern reaches of her realm.

1781: German-born British musician, composer, mathematician, and astronomer Frederick William Herschel discovers the planet Uranus, using a telescope of his own design and manufacture. He had been studying and cataloging the rings of Saturn, and more particularly, the phenomenon of double stars, when he happened upon a non-stellar object that appeared to move in the planetary plane. This was the first discovery of a planet visible only through a telescope. Herschel followed this with subsequent discoveries of multiple moons of Saturn, and a large number of nebulae in deep space

1841: The United States Supreme Court rules that the West Africans who mutinied and captured their ship Amistad were enslaved illegally. The case was a huge step forward for the abolitionist movement in the U.S.

1848: The United States Senate ratifies the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This treaty, signed on February 2, 1848, ended the war between the United States and Mexico. By its terms, Mexico ceded 55 percent of its territory, including the present-day states California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.

1855: Birth of American astronomer Percival Lowell (d.1916), who became famous in the public imagination from his detailed observations of the surface of Mars, on which he surmised was the remains of a complex series of canals indicating the presence of a sentient civilization on the red planet. Although his canal theory has since been disproven, it remains a staple of science fiction writing to this day. Lowell’s mathematical modeling of the orbits of Uranus and Neptune set the conditions for the search for Planet-X, a search finally vindicated two decades later by Clyde Tombaugh, working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff.

1862: Fresh from her destruction of the Union blockading fleet off of Newport News Point, and with basic battle repairs made overnight, CSS Virginia steams out of the Elizabeth River to finish the job on the remaining Union ships anchored off of Newport News. But unknown to the crew of Confederate ironclad, the even-more radical USS Monitor had already raised steam off of Fort Monroe and sortied to protect the damaged USS Minnesota and the rest of the Union fleet from their terrifying new nemesis. A furious gun battle raged between the two ironclads for four hours, with neither ship doing appreciable harm to the other. Late in the battle, Virginia scored a hit on Monitor’s pilot house, blinding her captain, Lieutenant John Worden. Command passed to his XO, Lieutenant Samuel Green, who turned the ship back to continue the fight.  Virginia, for her part, was constrained by falling tide to break off her attack on Minnesota, and opted to return to Norfolk for rest and repairs. Monitor, under orders to protect Minnesota, did not pursue the Confederate ship. The battle, watched by thousands on the Hampton Roads shorelines, was the world’s first clash of iron-armored warships. It ended with neither ship decisively victorious. Neither ship engaged in combat again, although Virginia made several defiant sorties over the next few weeks in an attempt to lure Monitor into another fight. As Union forces advanced on Norfolk in May, 1862, the crew of Virginia stripped her of her cannons, ran her aground on the flats at Craney Island, and blew her to smithereens. USS Monitor sank off of Cape Hatteras the following December, en route to further blockading duty in the Carolinas. 

1863: Birth of Casey Jones (d.1900). The railroad engineer for the Illinois Central had already become well-known for his famous whistle and from his driving consistency to “get her there on the advertised”. On April 29^th, 1900 his train, Number 382 (photo) was “cannonballing” a load of passengers to New Orleans at over 70 mph when out of the fog there appeared the taillight of a stalled freight train. Jones ordered the fireman to jump as he immediately slammed the 382 into full reverse and laid on the whistle to warn of the impending impact. The train slowed to around 35 mph by the time it slammed through the caboose and two other freight cars before de-railing against the siding. Jones was killed, but his sacrificial actions that saved his passengers.

1865: With their fighting prowess in dire straits, the Confederate Congress authorizes the enlistment of black troops into the Confederate Army, with the promise of freedom as the primary motivation of the enlistment package.

1876: Alexander Graham Bell makes the first telephone call on his new invention: “Mr. Watson, come here! I want to see you!” Watson responded, thus completing the first electrical transmission of two-way speech.

1879: Birth of Albert Einstein (d.1955).

1883: Death of Karl Marx (b.1818), See: http://www.capecharlesmirror.com/the-forgotten-influence-of-karl-marx/

1888: First day of The Great White Hurricane, also known as the Great Blizzard of 1888. The storm eventually dumped between 40 and 50 inches of snow from the upper Chesapeake through the Canadian Maritime provinces. Forty knot winds whipped up drifts up to 50 feet deep, with numerous reports of three story houses becoming completely covered. Commerce was paralyzed for over a week and over 400 deaths are attributed to the storm, 200 in NYC alone. Minimum central pressure was 29.00 in.Hg or 982 mb.

1899: Birth of Gracie Doll (d.1977), part of a German acting family whose careers climaxed in 1939 with the release of The Wizard of Oz. The Doll Family was an American quartet of sibling entertainers with dwarfism from Stolpen, Germany. They were popular performers in circuses and sideshows in the United States from the mid-1910s until their retirement in 1958. The family members—Gracie, Harry, Daisy, and Tiny—also appeared briefly in films; they were best known as members of The Munchkins in the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz. Harry and Daisy, billed as Harry Earles and Daisy Earles respectively, both starred in the cult classic film Freaks; Tiny also made a brief appearance in the film.

1906: Death of Susan B. Anthony (b.1820), one of the leading forces of the Women’s Suffrage movement, and the first actual woman to be featured on U.S. currency, the quarter-sized 1979 dollar coin.

Born Susan Brownell Anthony on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts, she was the daughter of Daniel Anthony, a cotton mill owner, and his wife, Lucy Read Anthony. She grew up in a politically active family who, as part of the abolitionist movement, worked to end slavery.Anthony’s work helped pave the way for the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote. The amendment was known as the “Susan B. Anthony Amendment” to honor her work on behalf of women’s rights

1913: Death of the abolitionist Harriet Tubman (b.1820), founder of the Underground Railroad, whose personal efforts freed more than 70 slaves from their servitude in thirteen separate expeditions. During the Civil War, Tubman served as a nurse and advisor to Union forces in South Carolina, and acted as a scout on the Combahee River Raid that freed over 700 slaves from their plantations.

1915: The German light cruiser SMS Dresden is abandoned and scuttled by its crew in Cumberland Bay on the Chilean island of Mása Tierra. As the only turbine-powered ship in a German fleet that was otherwise destroyed by the Royal Navy in the Battle of the Falklands Islands the previous December, she escaped virtually unscathed and continued to elude detection, all the while bringing British shipping to a halt in the region. She finally anchored in neutral Chilean territory, out of ammunition, nearly out of coal, and with major wear making her power plant barely usable.Two British cruisers discovered her location, and after a warning shot, Dresden raised the white flag of surrender. Lt. Wilhelm Canaris- later the Nazi’s Chief of Military Intelligence- motored over to the British ships to arrange terms, but it was only a ruse to allow for the rest of the 300+ crew to escape to Chilean territory, where they were interred for the remainder of the war. As the final members of the crew departed, they re-hoisted the German battle ensign, and left the ship defiantly scuttled from the British grip. 

1916: Mexican leader Pancho Villa leads 500 caballeros on a raid into Columbus, New Mexico.

1918: Fresh from their capitulation to the Central Powers in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the new communist government of Russia moved the capital of the country from Saint Petersburg, where it was founded 215 years earlier by Peter the Great, back to the ancient Kremlin fortress of Moscow.

1928: Exactly two years after its completion, the St. Francis Dam in Southern California suddenly collapses, sending a 120-foot tall wall of water tearing down the San Francisquito Canyon, completely wiping the town of Santa Paula off the map, and ending its run into the Pacific Ocean near the border between Ventura and Los Angeles counties. The torrent of 12.4 billion gallons of water killed a confirmed 375 persons, with over 300 more never accounted for in the aftermath of the flood. Bodies washed ashore all along the coast as far south as Mexico. This event is featured in the film Chinatown.

1933: Newly inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt sets up a wireless studio in the White House and makes the first of his 30 Fireside Chats, a media venue that made the most of his dulcet voice and political savvy to speak directly to the American people. It also permitted significant public exposure without the concomitant exposure of his crippling polio.

1934: Birth of Yuri Gagarin (d.1968). In 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut became the first human to “slip the surly bonds of earth” and orbit our planet in the vacuum of space. He died under mysterious circumstances in 1968. Unsurprisingly, the Soviet Union wouldn’t release information on his death.

1938: German troops en masse cross the border with Austria, essentially conquering the country without firing a shot. The Nazi regime refers to the action as the Anschluss, literally a “connection” that had been a pressure point between Germany and Austria since the end of the Great War, and for which a plebiscite was scheduled for the 11th March but then abruptly ignored when the reality of the imminent German occupation took hold. Adolf Hitler himself crossed the border at his home town of Braunau and spent the night in Lintz.  Over the next three days Hitler made an automobile tour of Austria, finishing the annexation of the country at a mass rally in Vienna, no longer the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or the independent nation of Austria, but the newest province of the greater German Reich.

1916: Mexican gang leader Pancho Villa leads 500 caballeros on a raid into Columbus, New Mexico.

1934: Birth of Yuri Gagarin (d.1968). In 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut became the first human to “slip the surly bonds of earth” and orbit our planet in the vacuum of space. He died under mysterious circumstances in 1968. Unsurprisingly, the Soviet Union wouldn’t release information on his death.

1940: Birth of ultimate bad-ass Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris doesn’t read the Mirror. He stares it down until he gets the information he wants.

1941: FDR signs into law the Lend-Lease program to start the process of shoring up Great Britain’s defenses in the face of relentless Nazi pressure. The plan was intended to help Britain beat back Hitler’s advance while keeping America only indirectly involved in WWII.

1942: After two weeks of ignoring FDR’s direct presidential order, General Douglas MacArthur abandons Corregidor under the cover of darkness, leaving command of the besieged U.S.and Philippine armies to Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright. The island fortress had been under essentially continuous Japanese artillery and aerial bombardment since December 29^th, and Roosevelt reasoned that a living MacArthur would be more useful in leading the eventual re-conquest of the Philippines than a captured or killed MacArthur. On his arrival in Australia, MacArthur issued his most memorable promise: “People of the Philippines, I shall return.” Wainwright held out under increasingly dire conditions until surrendering the citadel on May 6^th.

1954: Under the direction of General Vo Nguyn Giap, the communist Viet Minh army opens the siege of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu.

1957: In Havana, Cuban student revolutionaries storm the presidential palace of President Fulgencio Bautista. For the time being, they were unsuccessful in unseating democratically elected, but corrupt kleptocrat.

1959: Birth of Barbie, the fashion doll, designed by Charlotte Johnson. 65 years and 1,000,000,000 (+) (…with a B) sales later, she remains Mattel Inc.’s most profitable line of business.

1964: A Dallas, Texas jury convicts Jack Ruby for the murder of JFK’s presumed killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. 

1985: Accession of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party.