History Notes this week of March 22

43 BC: Birth of the Roman poet Ovid. 

1066:  This week marks 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. As a final act of chivalry, Richard forgave the boy and gave him 100 shillings to begin his life again. The king’s chivalry did not last past April 7^th, however. In a retaliatory orgy of medieval brutality, 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. Queen Elizabeth I granted Sir Walter Raleigh a royal patent, allowing him to explore, colonize, and rule any “remote, heathen and barbarous lands” in the New World, which he named “Virginia” in honor of the Queen. 

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 a standard of the English language, the King James Bible (“The Authorized Edition”). 

1607: Establishment of the Dutch East India Company.

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. Many sailors have heard “…look it up in Bowditch.”

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!”

1794: Congress authorizes the construction of six frigates, one of which, USS Constitution, is still afloat and in good sailing condition. Their expense caused critics to question the need for a “Six-Ship Navy.” 

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.

1815:  After effecting his escape from the island of Elba and making a dramatic march northward from the coast of Alpes Maritimes and onward through the Alps themselves, Napoleon Bonaparte enters Paris, thus beginning the final period of his reign as Emperor, known as “The Hundred Days.” From his isolation on Elba, Napoleon decided that, given the ongoing diplomatic conflict at the Congress of Vienna, his presence on the mainland would provoke an uprising for his restoration as Emperor of France. He arrived from Elba with only 600 loyal troops, but as word spread of his presence, thousands of volunteers flocked into his train, eventually swelling his army to 140,000 regular forces (turned from Bourbon armies) and over 200,000 volunteer militia irregulars.
“La Route Napoleon”: when Royalist troops attempted to stop him at Lyons, Napoleon stepped out in front of them and ripped open his jacket: “If any of you will shoot your Emperor, shoot him now!” Of course, no one dared to shoot the great man. On his arrival in the capital, he immediately re-established his imperial government. Louis XVIII already fled with his few remaining loyalists to the Vendee region, where he remained a thorn in side of the renewed Empire. Immediately after his escape from Elba, the Congress of Vienna declared war (The Seventh Coalition) on the French Empire, which eventually led to the final battle at Waterloo on the 18^th of June.

1852: Publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. After he became President, Abraham Lincoln invited her to a White House reception and when they met, he warmly shook her hand and said, “So, you are the little lady who started this great war…”

1865: The Siege of Petersburg– Confederate forces temporarily overrun the Union’s Fort Stedman rampart along the southeastern perimeter of the siege line. The next three weeks will bring the War Between the States to its dramatic conclusion.

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. It would be an interesting thought experiment to consider how the interaction between the Several States and the federal government would have developed had the eventual 14th  Amendment been put on the books simply as a federal statute. You would be right that this is a counter-factual line of reasoning, but on the other hand, much mischief has derived from the 14th in the last 50 or so years.

1874: Birth of the illusionist and escape artist, Harry Houdini (d.1926).

1874: Birth of Robert Frost (d.1963), American poet laureate. His most famous poem “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” has been read by almost all Americans. 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.

1902: Death of Cecil Rhodes (b.1853), the great Briton who founded the DeBeers diamond mines, and whose name still defines the peak of scholarship. The fertile country north of South Africa was for decades named for him, although today it is divided between Zambia and Robert Mugabe’s basket case of socialist irresponsibility, Zimbabwe. Rhodes was a lifelong proponent of the virtues of British colonialism: “Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.”

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

1912:  Birth of German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun (d.1977).He played a key role in the development of rocket technology in both Nazi Germany and the United States. During World War II, he led the “rocket team” that created the V-2 ballistic missile for the Nazis. The V-2 became the foundation for intercontinental ballistic missiles and space launch vehicles in the U.S. and Soviet Union. 

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.

1922: Commissioning of USS Langley (CV-1) at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. The world’s first aircraft carrier was converted from the collier USS Jupiter (AC-3), which was itself the Navy’s first electric-drive ship. To accommodate her new mission, Langley was fitted with a wooden platform for the flight deck, folding funnels (a.k.a., smokestacks) to keep the boiler gasses and the stacks themselves out of the airplanes’ way, a retractable navigation tower, and a trolley system suspended underneath the flight deck to move aircraft from the centerline elevators to the “hangar” areas in the former cargo holds.  Langley served as a test bed for a number of seaborne aviation operations, including catapult launches and arrested landings, among others. She participated in all of the major fleet exercises of the inter-war years, first by simply providing spotters for the fall of battleship shot, but soon providing long range striking capability in her own right. Of particular note, Langley and the other carrier conversions Lexington (CV-2) and Saratoga (CV-3), conducted surprise aerial attacks on both the Panama Canal and Pearl Harbor during the mid-30’s, but the “White Cell” referees of the exercises negated the tactics as invalid.

1923: Death of Sarah Bernhardt (b.1844), Over the course of a long stage and screen career, “The Divine Sarah” defined the term “drama queen.” Mark Twain described her: “There are five kinds of actresses: bad actresses, fair actresses, good actresses, great actresses— and then there is Sarah Bernhardt.” 

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 fist to orbit the Moon), and commanded the even more dramatic but ill-fated Apollo 13 (Service Module explosion, trans-lunar return via Lunar Module as a lifeboat).

1929: Death of General Ferdinand Foch (b.1851). One of the great thinkers and innovators of French military thinking in the post Franco-Prussian War (1876) era, he aggressively pursued doctrinal changes that inadvertently** led to a French army pre-WW1 fetish of “L’attaque! Toujours l’attaque!” (…like it sounds: “Always attack!”). Foch ended the Great War as the Allied Supreme Commander, and took the surrender of the German commander in November 1918. After the negotiations of the Versailles Treaty, Foch made the comment, “This is not a peace, it is an armistice for twenty years.” 

1944: 76 Allied officers escape from Stalag Luft 3 (The Great Escape). The prisoners were incarcerated after being interrogated by the Luftwaffe who operated the camps. The prisoners of Stalag Luft III escaped through a 111-yard-long tunnel code-named “Harry.” Within days, most were recaptured.

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.

1958: Private Elvis Presley is inducted into the Army. 

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. 

1977: A KLM 747 collides with a Pan Am 747 on the foggy runway at Tenerife, Canary Islands killing 583. 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.

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. In 2012, she was sold for scrap.

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