History Notes this week of May 11

1536: Opening day of Anne Boleyn’s trial for treason, adultery and incest. It does not go well for Henry VIII’s young queen.

1602: English navigator Bartholomew Gosnold discovers Cape Cod.

1643: Four-year-old Louis XIV ascends to the throne of France on the assassination of his father, Henry IV. Dubbed “The Sun King” by the media of the time, he famously responded when asked about the nature of the State, “L’etat, c’est moi! [I am the state]”

1647: Peter Stuyvesant arrives in Nieu Amsterdam to serve as governor of the Dutch New Netherlands colony.

1655: The island of Jamaica captured by a 50 ship British fleet under Admiral William Penn.

1752: American Renaissance man Benjamin Franklin tests his first lightning rod. 

1775(a): Led by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold, American militia crosses Lake Champlain to capture Fort Ticonderoga from the British.

1775(b): The Second Continental Congress names Virginian George Washington as Supreme Commander of the newly formed Continental Army.

1776: The Virginia Convention instructs its delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to propose a resolution of independence from Great Britain.

1863: Stonewall Jackson dies of pneumonia, contracted subsequent to his Confederate-inflicted wounding. When he first heard of Jackson’s wounds, General Robert E. Lee said, “Jackson has lost his left arm; I have lost my right.” His loss will be particularly felt when the Army of Northern Virginia begins its northward march next month.

1864: The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, the third sequential battle in U.S. Grant’s Overland Campaign to capture Richmond. Coming a week after the Wilderness fight, the battle was characterized by horrific bloodletting and unprecedented firepower that flattened the landscape and destroyed every tree and bush in the battle area. The battle’s climax occurred at the Bloody Angle, where hand-to-hand fighting occurred back and forth across trench lines and muddy fields completely filled with the corpses of the fallen. The mud was so thick that men who lost their balance were trampled and drowned before they could get back up. Because Lee was able to hold his position, and because the number of casualties was heavily weighted against the Union, it was technically a Confederate victory. But the battle was so costly to Lee that he was never able to re-gain the initiative against Grant, who continued to shift his army to the left and continue to probe and plunge against Lee’s ever-weakening right flank, eventually leading to the establishment of the siege line around Petersburg.

1865: U.S. Army soldiers capture Confederate President Jefferson Davis at Irwinville, Georgia. He spends two years in custody at Fortress Monroe in Hampton. You can visit his cell today in the Casemate Museum inside the fort.

1869: Meeting at Promontory Point, Utah, the nation’s first transcontinental railroad is completed with a golden spike. The ceremonial hammer and spike are connected to telegraph wires that relay the historic impacts back to Washington, DC. The three year project of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads was largely financed by generous federal land grants.

1884: Death of inveterate tinkerer and inventor Cyrus McCormick (b.1809). McCormick is best known as the inventor of the mechanical reaper, which enabled viable economic growth for the huge farms of the Great Plains. His company formed the foundation of today’s International Harvester.

1871: The Treaty of Frankfurt am Main ends the Franco-Prussian war. In addition to ceding to Germany the German-speaking French provinces of Alsace and Loraine, France is saddled with reparations of 5 billion Francs. German forces remain in strategic occupation positions across the north of France, right up to the outskirts of Paris, until September of 1873 when the last payment is finally made. The crushing German victory at the Battle of Sedan (DLH 9/1) triggered the overthrow of the French government, and set the stage for the simmering resentment and thirst for revenge that exacerbated the onset of the Great War in 1914.

1888: Birth of Irving Berlin (d.1989). The Russian immigrant became the quintessential American songwriter, producing over 1500 pieces over a 60 year career, including Alexander’s Ragtime Band (his first song (1911), Easter Parade, White Christmas, and God Bless America (1938).

1889: Death of John Cadbury (b.1801), English grocer whose temperance beliefs led him to explore cocoa and chocolate as an alternative to the alcohol he saw ravaging the lives of the poor. Cadbury PLC is now one of the world’s premier chocolate manufacturers. One of my many mottoes is, “Too much chocolate is not enough.”

1914: Birth of the great heavyweight boxer Joe Louis (d.1981), known popularly as The Brown Bomber. He was heavyweight champion from 1937 to 1949, successfully defending his title 26 times. In a memorable career, probably the most memorable of his bouts were the two fights with the German heavyweight champion Max Schmeling. The first meeting occurred in June, 1936, when the canny German exploited a quirk in Lewis’ style that allowed him to land a knockout blow.They met for a re-match two years later, before a crowd of over 70,000 in Yankee Stadium and a huge international radio audience- pretty much “the fight of the century” in reality, despite the hype. Lewis smashed Schmeling to the mat three times in just over two minutes, until the German’s manager threw in the towel and called it quits. Lewis himself was at the leading edge of the de-segregation of professional sports, not only in boxing, but also in golf, which he took up toward the end of his boxing career.

1928: Mickey Mouse makes his first appearance in a cartoon, the originally silent short Plane Crazy. The more popular Steamboat Willy came out in November.

1940: The German Wehrmacht crosses the Muse River into France, bypassing the vaunted Maginot Line and underlining the brutal reality that the war in the west was not going to end with the occupation of the Netherlands and Belgium.

1940: The submarine USS Sailfish (SS-192), is commissioned into the US Navy. The ship was formerly USS Squalus, which sank off the coast of Portsmouth, NH a year earlier on a test dive, shortly after her original commissioning. 26 sailors drowned in the sinking, but 33 survived in the forward compartments, communicating with a sister ship via an experimental emergency buoy, which riveted the nation during the course of a heroic rescue effort from 245 feet of water. The ship was later raised, with an engineering investigation conclusively determining the cause of the sinking. Re-designs were then incorporated throughout the new fleet boats. After repairs and re-fitting, the new Sailfish went on to a distinguished career in the Pacific war, earning 10 battle stars. During the war, the captain had standing orders that if anyone mentioned the name Squalus, he would be marooned in the next liberty port. Sailors being what they are, they began using the term, Squallfish, which didn’t sit any better with the CO.

1941: Nazi Deputy to the Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess, parachutes into Scotland to attempt peace negotiations with the government of Great Britain. The flight, staged just prior to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, continues to stir controversy over whether this was an official, but clandestine attempt by Hitler to make peace with his “natural ally” in England. Hess remained in British custody throughout the war, and was convicted at Nuremberg for crimes against the peace and conspiracy. After the 1966 release of Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach, Hess remained imprisoned at Spandau- the only prisoner in the facility- at the insistence of the Soviet Union- until his death in 1987.

1948: With the expiration at midnight of the League of Nations mandate to British Palestine, David Ben-Gurion proclaims the State of Israel from a museum in Tel Aviv. Guns from Syria, Jordan and the United Arab Republic (Egypt) are already firing artillery in the background of his announcement.

1949: Frustrated and embarrassed by the stunning success of the nearly year-long Berlin Airlift (where air deliveries of food and supplies eventually surpassed pre-blockade rail shipments) the Soviet Union ends the Berlin Blockade, which is now recognized as the first battle of the Cold War. The success of the airlift compounded the political failure of the Soviets to intimidate the Western powers and led to the establishment of a separate West Germany on the 23^rdof May.

1957: Great Britain detonates its first hydrogen bomb, a high altitude air burst, over Christmas Island in the South Pacific.

1963: Last flight of Project Mercury, with Gordon Cooper completing 22 earth orbits over the course of a 34 hour flight. It’s probably worth noting that Cooper was the first astronaut to sleep in space, and the final American to go into orbit solo. His re-entry course landed him in the Pacific recovery zone only four miles from the prime recovery ship, USS Kearsarge (CVS-33). 

1981: Death of Jamaican icon Bob Marley(b.1945). Robert Nesta Marley was a Jamaican singer, songwriter, and guitarist who became an international star in the 1970s. A pioneer of reggae, he blended elements of ska, rocksteady, and reggae into an electrifying rock-influenced sound. His distinctive vocals and songwriting style, along with his introduction of Rastafarianism to the world, made him Jamaica’s most impactful export. 

1981: Pope John Paul II survives an assassination attempt by Turkish terrorist Mehmet Al Agca, part of a plot that originated in Bulgaria. The Pope forgave Agca and visited him on a number of occasions in his prison cell. 

1988: Death of Kim Philby (b.1912), British spy who served the Soviet Union as a mole in the British government from the mid-1930s until his eventual defection to Moscow in 1963. He was the infamous “Third Man” at the heart of the mid-50s spy scandal that exposed compatriots Donald McLean and Guy Burgess as Soviet agents. Among the positions he held in British Intelligence (MI-6) was the head of “Section IX,” from which he had access to the names and locations of all British intelligence agents operating abroad, and hundreds of classified documents from the Foreign Office, the War Office and the Admiralty. Although his life ended as an alcoholic wreck, he was honored by the Soviet Union in 1990 on a stamp.

1994: Nelson Mandela is inaugurated as the first black President of South Africa.