577AD: Death of Saint Brendan the Navigator, the Irish monk whose legendary travels in a leather currach helped establish the idea of a lush and inhabited island across the sea from Europe. “St. Brendan’s Island” often shows up on early maps. One school of thought believes it indicates that Brendan was actually the first European to make landfall in North America. He remains the patron saint of sailors and navigators.
1532: Sir Thomas More resigns as England’s Lord High Chancellor, his second attempt to leave Henry VIII’s court over the issue of papal versus royal supremacy. The sovereign is not amused. More’s “season” approaches its end.
1536: Opening day 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.
1776: The Virginia Convention instructs its delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia to propose a resolution of independence from Great Britain.
1792: Opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange.
1801: Birth of William Seward (d.1872), Secretary of State in the Lincoln Administration, and the official at Lincoln’s deathbed who announced to the press, “Now he belongs to the ages.” During the Andrew Johnson Administration, Seward became the chief advocate of the United States’ purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867. The popularly remembered “Seward’s Folly” cost the country $7,200,000.00, or 2 cents per acre.
1860: Opening day of the Republican National Convention in Chicago. Springfield lawyer and former Member of Congress Abraham Lincoln defeats the front-runner New Yorker William Seward on the third ballot.
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.
1868: President Andrew Johnson is acquitted on his impeachment trial by a single vote in the U.S. Senate.
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.
1886: Death of John Deere (b.1804), American blacksmith who invented and successfully marketed the first cast steel plow.
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.”
1918: As a companion bill to its recently passed Espionage Act, Congress passes, and President Wilson signs, the Sedition Act. It makes it illegal to criticize, e.g.: to“…willfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the U.S. government during time of war. In addition to a $10,000 fine and 20 years in prison, the Postmaster General was tasked to halt mail deliveries to and from any person convicted or associated with a person convicted of the act. Over 1500 were charged and more than 1000 were convicted. Wilson’s Attorney General sought to keep a peacetime version in place after the war, but Congress repealed it in December, 1920.
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 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.
1943: A dramatic RAF raid by “The Dam Busters” smashes three dams in Germany’s industrial heartland. The crews trained in secret for three months perfecting the technique of “skip bombing” to get through German defenses. [
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 23rdof May.
1954: The Supreme Court hands down its decision in Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, overturning the separate-but-equal doctrine previously codified by the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessey vs. Ferguson decision.
1981: Death of Jamaican icon Bob Marley.
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. Those of you with a conspiratorial bent could sniff around for Soviet involvement, via their stooges in Bulgaria, beginning with an alleged quote from the Politburo that echoed Henry II’s lament about Thomas Becket: “Can no-one rid me of this troublesome priest?”
1987: USS Stark (FFG-31) is struck by an Iraqi Exocet missile while monitoring shipping in the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war. 37 sailors are killed, 21 wounded.
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.
2006: A 300 foot slab of rock is growing out of the dome in the crater of Mount St. Helens. The photograph below was taken on the 3rd of this month. The rock is [was] growing at a rate of around 4-5 feet a day, providing a graphic demonstration of the incredible forces still at work under the surface. Raw magma has also been spilling out of the core, helping to rebuild the conical shape of the mountain.
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