History Notes this week of May 20

325AD: Convocation of the First Council of Nicea, one of the earliest attempts to define and formalize Christian church doctrine. It was ordered by Roman emperor Constantine I as a result of a number of competing heresies that were confusing the core truths of Christianity across the empire. 1800 bishops were invited, and anywhere from 250-318 attended. They worked through and resolved a number of significant issues, including the nature of the deity of Christ, condemnation of certain heresies, setting the process for dating Easter, and creating the first draft of what we know now as the Nicean Creed. 

337AD: Death of Constantine the Great, the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity. He aggressively set about un-doing the persecutions carried out by his predecessor, Diocletian. In particular, he issued the Edict of Milan in 313, declaring religious tolerance throughout the Empire as the law of the land. He also rebuilt the ancient Turkish city of Byzantium, re-naming it Constantinople and making it the capital of the eastern portion of the Empire, a position it maintained for another thousand years.

1096: An unauthorized crusade led by Peter the Hermit swarms into the Jewish section of Worms, Germany and begins a pogrom that leaves over 900 dead.

1499: Catherine of Aragon- the same Spanish royalty whom we keep reading about throughout the year- is married by proxy to Arthur, Prince of Wales, son of English King Henry VII. She is 14. He is 13. They have been legally betrothed* for ten years already, the Tudors of England and the Trastamaras of Aragon and Castile reasoning that a marriage of their two families would provide a solid diplomatic bulwark against the territorial claims on both countries by the Valois dynasty of France.

1506: Death of Christopher Columbus, in Valladolid, Spain, thus beginning another adventure regarding the movements of his corporeal remains around the world. He was initially buried in Valladolid, and then was moved to a monastery in Seville. At the request of his son Diego, who had been governor of Hispaniola, his remains were then moved back across the sea to Santo Domingo. When the French took over the island in 1795, Columbus’ remains were moved to Havana, and then after the Spanish-American War in 1898, they were moved again to the cathedral in Seville, where they remain today (we think). The Dominican Republic maintains a huge memorial tomb they call the Faro a Colon (Columbus Lighthouse) in which is buried a small lead box, discovered in Santo Domingo in 1877, inscribed with “Don Christopher Columbus” and containing bone fragments and a bullet. Recent DNA sampling between the bones and Columbus’ descendants is inconclusive.

1536: Death of Anne Boleyn (b.1501), Queen Consort of King Henry VIII, beheaded after conviction on charges of adultery, high treason, and incest.
 
1568: Queen Elizabeth I of England orders the arrest of her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots.

1626: Director-General of the New Netherlands division of the Dutch West Indian Company, Peter Minuit, purchases Manhattan Island from the local indigenous tribe for items valued at 60 Guilders, often mis-represented as $24 of wampum. Records also exist of Minuit negotiating for similar ownership rights on Staten Island in trade for “duffle cloth, iron kettles and axe heads, hoes, drilling awls, Jew’s Harps and other divers items…” Historians Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace in 1999 noted: “…the Dutch were engaged in high-end technology transfer, handing over equipment of enormous usefulness in tasks ranging from clearing land to drilling wampum.”

1738: Christian conversion of John Wesley, who went on to lead the Methodist movement in Great Britain. 

1795: Birth of Baltimore businessman and philanthropist Johns Hopkins (d.1873). One of the all-time wealthiest men in the United States, Hopkins was a keen businessman, parlaying a dry goods business into enough capital that he could invest in the nascent railroad industry, most notably the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, whose success sealed his fortune. Hopkins left a huge endowment to the university and medical school that now bears his name.

1802: Napoleon Bonaparte initiates the French Legion of Honor award. It is the France’s  highest decoration, available for military and civilians who exhibit extraordinary courage or accomplishment in the performance of their duties. It is specifically designed to not confer a title of nobility- the Revolution did away with all that- nor is it infused with any sense of religious legitimacy- the Revolution did away with all that, too. It is explicitly secular (using a 5-pointed star instead of a stylized cross) and based solely on merit, available to all, regardless of birth. The Legion remains active to this day as a functional body of the government, with the President as its head.

1802: Napoleon Bonaparte, acting as First Secretary of the French Directory, re-establishes slavery in French colonies, where it had previously been repealed in 1794 by an early decree of the French Revolution. Many of the colonies, particularly in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), rebel violently at this move. France’s inability to suppress the slave revolt there convinced Napoleon that he could no longer hold onto his American possessions, leading to his eventual decision to sell all of Louisiana to the United States a year later.

1845: The Franklin Expedition– Under the leadership of Arctic explorer John Franklin, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror depart the River Thames with 134 men on what they hope will be a conclusive discovery and transit of the elusive Northwest Passage. They are never heard from again. Their disappearance captures the imagination and curiosity of Great Britain, and multiple rescue and recovery expeditions are launched to find out what happened. Eventually, bits and pieces of evidence are found, including the emaciated and partially cannibalized corpses of several expedition members. The ships remain unlocated for over 150 years, although the documents recovered in earlier searches confirm they had proceeded well into the icy archipelago of northern Canada before they were completely iced in. In 2005, Canada launched a “Franklin 150” expedition using highly technical sensing equipment to search for the ships, in part to solve the historical puzzle and in part to affirm Canadian sovereignty claims in the high north. The search paid off in September, 2014, when Canadian PM Stephen Harper confirmed that the teams had discovered and conclusively identified the wreckage of Terror in the Queen Maude Gulf off the Adelaide Peninsula.

1856: Abolitionist John Brown leads a group that murders five pro-slavery settlers in Pottawatomie, Kansas. Before the secessionist movement took root in the South, “Bleeding Kansas” became the violent first battleground between pro- and anti-slavery forces.

1861: Opening shots in the Battle of Sewell’s Point. Two Federal gunboats from Fort Monroe are dispatched to investigate Confederate activity across the water at Sewell’s Point. When they see two artillery pieces and the beginnings of fortified breastworks, they open fire and scatter the men working there. USS Monticello remains in place overnight and re-commences firing in the morning. The Confederate battery answers back. There are no fatalities on either side. The Confederate position is abandoned a year later when Norfolk is evacuated

1863: General U.S. Grant completely surrounds Vicksburg, Mississippi and begins to lay siege to the city.

1873: San Francisco tailor Levi Strauss patents a rugged style of denim trouser, fastened with copper rivets.

1878: Birth of Glenn Curtiss (d.1930), motorcycle builder and racer, aviation pioneer, and competitor of the Wright Brothers. Barred by the threat of patent infringement of the Wright’s wing warping principles and mechanism, Curtiss invented the aileron as a means of roll control in his airplanes. The Navy was an early purchaser of his machines, which were used for the first launches and recoveries from Navy ships.

1879: Birth in Danville, Virginia of Nancy Langhorne (d.1964), who rose socially and politically to become The Right Honorable Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor. On the accession of her husband Waldorf Astor to the House of Lords, she ran for election for his Commons seat and won, becoming the first woman to be seated in that chamber. She was an exceptionally vocal MP, particularly during the buildup to the Second World War. After a tumultuous period of scathing critiques of just about everyone in the political spectrum, she retired in 1945, but remained in the public eye as something of a public curmudgeon until her death. She is especially remembered for her acerbic wit. Wikipedia: “I married beneath me. All women do.” “One reason why I don’t drink is because I wish to know when I am having a good time.” “We women talk too much, but even then we don’t tell half what we know.”

1881: Birth of Mustafa Kemel Ataturk (d.1938), the First President of the Turkish Republic. General-Pasha of the Ottoman army during the Great War, he was in command of the Turkish forces that held the ANZAC invasion of Gallipoli to nothing more than a toehold until they withdrew under fire nine months later. He then commanded Ottoman armies both in the Levant and on the northern reaches of Anatolia against the Russians. After the war, he served as Aide-de-Camp in the Sublime Porte during the Allied occupation of Constantinople and Izmir as the British and French worked to divide up the outer reaches of the Ottoman Empire. By June of 1919, he had had enough of external meddling, and began a two-pronged Army revolt- both militarily and politically- that eventually led to the establishment in October, 1923 of the explicitly secular Turkish state as we know it today, or at least as we knew it until the current demi-Islamist party got voted into power a few years back. Ataturk is constitutionally the only person who will ever be permitted to assume that title, which means, “Father of Turkey.”

1883: After 14 years of highly technical and complex construction, the Brooklyn Bridge opens for traffic.

1896: Providing yet more proof that the U.S. Supreme Court is capable of error, the Court issues on this day a decision in Plessy v. Ferguson that “separate but equal” facilities for different races are legal.

1906: The Wright Brothers receive U.S. Patent number 821,393 for their “flying machine.” The patent is the result of the Wright’s extensive testing and refinement of aircraft control mechanisms on their basic 1903 design, and was indicative of their decision to leave the bicycle business and make a go of it in the nascent field of commercial aviation.

1915: Eruption of Northern California’s Mount Lassen, the only other U.S. volcano in the lower 48– besides Saint Helens– to blow in the 20^th century. This was the first of 107 separate eruptions that occurred during the next twelve months. 

1921: The US Congress passes the Emergency Quota Act, limiting legal immigration to a small percentage of the current nationalities then residing in the country. The act effectively shut off the flow of immigrants who were streaming into the country from southern Europe and the Balkans.

1921: Opening day in the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, in Boston. The two immigrant Italian anarchists, a shoemaker and a fishmonger, were arrested for robbery and murder and were sentenced to death.        The trial gained notoriety not only for the lurid twists and turns promulgated by both the prosecution and the defense (“someone changed the barrel of his gun!”), but also by the two’s unrepentant status as international anarchists. Further controversy followed as the presiding judge Webster Thayer refused to grant five motions for new trials, later confronting a colleague with, “Did you see what I did with those anarchistic bastards the other day? I guess that will hold them for a while…” Sacco and Vanzetti’s case became a cause célèbre with leftists world-wide, and even non-leftists grew increasingly uncomfortable with the court’s seeming disregard for normal evidentiary rules and appeal procedures. Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted on August 23^rd, 1927. Anarchist riots and bombings broke out in response as far away as Buenos Aires. 

1927: Charles Lindbergh takes off from Roosevelt Field in Long Island in his heavily laden, custom-built Ryan aircraft, the Spirit of St. Louis, in an attempt to become the first to fly solo across the Atlantic, New York to Paris. After only a few hours of fitful sleep, he carries a thermos of coffee and two sandwiches on the flight.

1927: Thirty-three and a half hours after his launch from Roosevelt Field, Charles Lindbergh lands at Le Brouget Airport in Paris. The public acclaim that followed him made him one of the 20^th century’s first media superstars. As National Geographic put it, “he took off as an unknown boy from rural Minnesota and landed 33 1/2 hours later as the most famous man on earth… and sent the world into an unprecedented frenzy.” When he was sighted in the morning crossing the coast of Ireland the news was immediately broadcast worldwide. Over 150,000 Parisians worked their way to his arrival airport to witness the historic event. He reached Paris and spent several minutes circling the Eiffel Tower to get his bearings, during which time the crowds broke through the police lines protecting the landing area, creating a situation that Lindbergh called the most dangerous part of the entire flight. The crowds that surged around his machine as he rolled out cut swaths of fabric off the fuselage for souvenirs.

1932: American aviatrix Amelia Earhart takes off from Newfoundland, enroute to Ireland, in an attempt to become the first female to solo across the Atlantic. 

1932: After a 14 hour flight through turbulence, icing, and un-forecast winds, bad weather finally forces Amelia Earhart down into a farmer’s field near Derry, Ireland, and into history as the first woman to solo across the Atlantic. Although only two locals witnessed her touchdown, the media quickly picked up the story and “Lady Lindy” became the next media sensation. Her Lockheed Vega is on display in the National Air and Space Museum.

1940: The first prisoners arrive at the new Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz, Poland.

1941: German paratroopers invade Crete. The Brits evacuate to fight another day.

1941: Birth of Bob Dylan. Wikipedia–Often considered to be one of the greatest songwriters in history,Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture over his 60-year career. He rose to prominence in the 1960s, when his songs “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1963) and “The Times They Are a-Changin'” (1964) became anthems for the civil rights and antiwar movements. Initially modeling his style on Woody Guthrie’s folk songs,Robert Johnson’s blues,and what he called the “architectural forms” of Hank Williams’s country songs,Dylan added increasingly sophisticated lyrical techniques to the folk music of the early 1960s, infusing it “with the intellectualism of classic literature and poetry”. His lyrics incorporated political, social, and philosophical influences, defying pop music conventions and appealing to the decade’s burgeoning counterculture.

1944: After four months of battle and near-continuous bombing and shelling that obliterated the medieval mountaintop monastery, the German redoubt at Monte Cassino is captured by the Allies. Polish forces lead the climb to the shattered Italian hilltop and raise their flag.

1947: President Harry S. Truman signs into law an economic assistance act for Greece and Turkey that will become the foundation for the Truman Doctrine on controlling the spread of Communism.

1964: President Lyndon Baines Johnson announces the Great Society legislative program, in which he promises to “eliminate poverty and racial injustice in America.”

1968: USS Scorpion (SSN-589) suffers an explosion of unknown origin and sinks with 99 souls on board into 9,800 feet of water, 400 miles southwest of the Azores. The circumstances of its sinking remain partially classified, but all of the evidence points to an on-board malfunction of a torpedo. Then-Captain Robert Ballard and the Woods Hole Institute used their search for the Titanic as cover for their actual search for the remains of Scorpion. The wreckage site is regularly monitored for radioactive contamination from its reactor and torpedoes.

1980: At 0832PDT, Mount St. Helens detonates with an eruption that lasts over 10 hours. The pyroclastic flow, landslides, ash, fire and earthquakes destroy 210 square miles of southwest Washington state wilderness. 57 people are killed, including Mr. Harry Randall Truman, 84 year old denizen of Spirit Lake, who refused repeated entreaties to leave his lodge in the months before the mountain blew.