History Notes this week of March 22

33 A.D.: In Jerusalem, Roman governor Pontius Pilate confirms the Levitical heresy conviction of itinerant rabbi Jesus of Nazareth and sentences him to death. By Roman law he is flogged and beaten before hauling his cross bar to the execution site. In a shift from normal procedure, the Roman soldiers use nails to pin him into place instead of ropes. After his death, he is buried in an unused tomb owned by businessman Joseph of Aramethia. For security reasons, authorities have sealed the tomb and posted guards. No further action is expected from his followers.

1066:  The 18^th recorded perihelion passage of Halley’s comet. 

1199: While making an un-guarded walking tour around castle Chalus-Chabroi, which he was besieging, Richard Coeur-de-Lion, King of England and hero of the Third Crusade, is struck in the neck by a crossbow bolt fired from the ramparts. His wound quickly turned gangrenous, and he died on April 6^th. Immediately after the shooting his men captured the assailant, who turned out to be a young boy whose father and two brothers were killed during the siege. Richard forgave the boy and gave him 100 shillings to begin his life again. April 7^th, however, the notorious mercenary Captain Mercadier re-captured the boy and had him flailed alive and hanged for regicide. After his death, Richard’s brain was buried at Charray Abbey in Poitou, his heart in Rouen, his entrails in the chapel of Chulus-Chabroi, and the remainder of his mortal remains at the feet of his father’s tomb at Fontevraud Abbey in Anjou. 

1306: Robert the Bruce, after years of political maneuvering with fellow Scottish lords, multiple wars with England’s Edward Longshanks, alliances and betrayals against William Wallace, is crowned King of Scotland.

1513: Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon discovers Florida and claims it for the Crown of Spain.

1584: Sir Walter Raleigh is granted a royal patent to colonize Virginia.

1603: Death of Queen Elizabeth I (b.1533), after 44 years on the English throne. The daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, she oversees the first flowering of the British Empire. Prominent figures during her reign include Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh, and William Shakespeare.  She became known as the Virgin Queen due to her insistence that marriage politics not dilute her authority as sovereign: “I am married to England…” Her immediate successor, Scotland’s James VI, becomes James I of the newly designated United Kingdom. Their combined legacies include the beginning of the end of Spanish dominance of the New World, establishing the colonies of Virginia (get it?), Jamestown, Ulster Plantation, and that peerless standard of the English language, the King James Bible.

1634: The first settlers arrive in Maryland, an English colony established by George Calvert, the Lord Baltimore, as a haven for Catholics in the New World.

1765: Following on the heels of the Stamp Act, Parliament passes the Quartering Act which requires the American colonies to house and feed the British soldiers sent over to keep order. Like the Stamp Act, this law is not received well in the colonies.

1773: Birth of Nathaniel Bowditch (d.1838), American mathematician and navigator, whose books on celestial navigation remain the standard to this day.

1775:  In a speech before the Virginia House of Burgesses, Patrick Henry gives voice to the greatest quote from the American Revolution: “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

1806:  Meriwether Lewis and William Clark reach the Pacific coast at the mouth of the Columbia River. From their journal, “Ocean in view- oh the joy!”

1807: The British Parliament abolishes the slave trade. Slavery per se remained legal, but there was now for the British Empire no further commerce in human beings.

1814: Death of Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin (b.1738) who, as a member of the new French National Assembly in 1791, introduced a six-point legislative package he thought would rationalize the justice system and lead to the eventual end of executions. Only one part of his reform plan was adopted, with the result that the machine now bearing his slightly modified name- guillotine- was quickly designed and built to administer a fast and painless death to anyone, regardless of age, sex, or wealth. In the hands of the revolutionary French government, it eventually killed over 15,000 people between 1792 and the close of the French Revolution in 1799, and remained in regular use through 1930.

1836: Birth of Frederick Pabst (d.1904), brewer of the world’s finest beer.

1847: After a 20-day siege, General Winfield Scott captures the Mexican port city of Veracruz. The battle was the first large-scale amphibious assault in American arms, and to a certain extent was what we would now call a “combined arms” joint operation, using both military and naval forces simultaneously. Scott’s systematic planning and execution skills established uncompromising standards for military operations, standards that were seen again fourteen years later during the War Between the States under the leadership of the scores of junior officers who learned their trade under Old Fuss ‘n Feathers himself during the Veracruz campaign and the subsequent march to Mexico City.

1865: The Siege of Petersburg– Confederate forces temporarily overrun the Union’s Fort Stedman rampart along the southeastern perimeter of the siege line.

1865: In the opening move of the last great campaign of the Civil War, General Grant orders Phil Sheridan’s cavalry to sweep around the southwestern flanks of the Petersburg siege line to block Lee’s expected retreat toward his remaining rail supply line in Lynchburg. A short, sharp fight at Lewis Farm forced the initial turning of the larger Confederate flank.

1866: President Andrew Johnson vetoes a civil rights bill. After his impeachment, Congress sends the same legislation to the States to become the 14^thAmendment to the Constitution. 

1874: Birth of Robert Frost (d.1963), American poet laureate. His most famous poem and my personal favorite is the deceptively simple, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The 86-year-old Frost read from the podium at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in January, 1961, the temperature barely cracking 20 degrees.

1879: Birth of photographer Edward Steichen (d.1973). By profession an artist and curator, Steichen applied his artistic sensibilities to the relatively new medium of the camera and soon became the photographer of choice for American high society.

1886: John Pemberton brews his first batch of Coca Cola in Atlanta, Georgia.

1899: Birth of August Anheuser Busch Jr. (d.1989), brewer of the King of Beers.

1903:  The Wright brothers patent their airplane, specifically the wing-warping control mechanism.

1912:  Birth of German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (d.1977).

1912: The first of 3,020 Japanese cherry trees are planted on the north bank of the Potomac River near the planned site of the Jefferson memorial. 

1917: Birth of Man O’War (d.1947), often considered the greatest race horse of the 20^th century, with a W-L record of 20-1-0, the single loss being a second place deriving from a particularly poor start. Man o’War’s grandson, Seabiscuit, carried on his legacy into the 1940s. 

1928: Birth of James Lovell, one of the second group of astronauts. “The New Nine,” selected for the US space program. He flew on Gemini 7 (first orbital rendezvous), commanded Gemini 12 (rendezvous, docking and three spacewalks from spacecraft to spacecraft, was Command Module Pilot for the dramatic flight of Apollo 8 (first to leave Earth’s gravitational field and first to orbit the Moon), and commanded the even more dramatic but ill-fated Apollo 13.

1939: The Spanish Civil War ends when Madrid falls to Generalissimo Francisco Franco.

1945: Last launch of the Nazi V-2 ballistic missile. Under development since late 1942, its first launch in combat occurred on 6 September 1944. More than 1,100 missiles were fired in the next six months, killing over 2700 Britons. Captured V-2 parts and engineers formed the core of the space programs for both the United States and Soviet Union for the next 25 years. It remains the core technology for the widely deployed SCUD ballistic missile.

1964: The strongest earthquake in American history strikes Alaska at 8.4 on the Richter scale. A 100 foot tsunami devastates coastal towns all around the Gulf of Alaska.

1969: John Lennon and Yoko Ono perform a “Bed-in For Peace”on their honeymoon in the Amsterdam Hilton. 

1971: Three years after the fact, Army 1^st Lieutenant William Calley is convicted of murder in the My Lai massacre. The My Lai massacre was a war crime committed by United States Army personnel on 16 March 1968, involving the mass murder of unarmed civilians in Sơn Tịnh district, South Vietnam, during the Vietnam War. Wikipedia 

1977: A KLM 747 collides with a Pan Am 747 on the foggy runway at Tenerife, Canary Islands killing 583 souls. It remains the single worst disaster in aviation history.

1979: Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat, Israeli Prime Minister Meacham Begin and U.S. President Jimmy Carter sign the Camp David Accords, the first formal peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state since the Jewish state’s founding in 1948.

1979: A series of serious but solvable water system malfunctions, combined with human error, act to prematurely shut down the cooling system in Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island reactor, raising internal core temperatures to over 3000 degrees and releasing a moderate amount of radioactive steam into the atmosphere. No one dies, although some workers inside the plant are exposed to “unhealthy” levels of radiation.

1983:  Death of Barney Clark, 112 days after becoming the world’s first artificial heart recipient. The operation was performed at the University of Utah with Dr. Robert Jarvik’s 7^th model of the mechanical heart, powered by external compressed air.

1989: The tanker Exxon Valdez runs aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, releasing over 11,000,000 gallons of crude oil and contaminating over 1,300 miles of Alaskan coastline. The ship is later repaired and re-named Sea River Mediterranean and worked the Atlantic basin, being prohibited from calling in Alaska.

1999: First night of NATO bombing in the Yugoslavia campaign.