History Notes this Week of Nov 15

164 B.C. The Jewish general Judas Maccabeus restores proper worship to the Temple in Jerusalem. The event is celebrated annually during Hanukkah. I won’t vouch for the 11/21 date at this point, other than to say it is probably close. The Maccabean Revolt (167-60 B.C) was one of the signal events of Jewish history, and represents one of the last periods of Jewish independence prior to Roman subjugation of the region.

316 A.D.: Consecration of Old Saint Peter’s Basilica in the outskirts of Rome. The building was a classical Romanesque structure, heavily timbered, and built over the tomb of the relatively recently martyred Apostle Peter (who was crucified upside down). 

1095: The First Crusade: In response to a request from the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I, Pope Urban II convenes the Council of Clermont, in the French city of that name. For the next week, over 300 prelates and nobles from across France review the state of play within the Catholic Church, and more importantly, the request from Alexius for military assistance to help eject the Seljuk Turks from Byzantine Anatolia.
The Byzantine Empire was explicitly Christian and was, in fact, the last surviving remnant of the Eastern Roman Empire. During the Council, the arguments in favor of assisting militarily against the Turks quickly evolved into what was seen as a God-directed desire to re-capture the Holy City of Jerusalem from the Muslims who had controlled it for the previous 350 years. The council will end on the 27^th with Urban II’s famous speech calling for a Crusade.

 1307: Traditional date when Swiss patriot William Tell refused to bow down to the hat of Hermann Gessler, one of the functionaries of the Hapsburg Empire who was trying to cow the Swiss confederation into submission. Arrested for this disrespect, Gessler promised Tell his freedom if he could shoot an apple off his (Tell’s) son Walter’s head. With Walter tied to a stake, Tell drew out two bolts for his crossbow, and successfully split the apple. When Gessler asked why he drew two arrows instead of one, Tell replied defiantly that if he failed his shot at his son, the next one would be into the heart of Gessler himself.

1421: The Saint Elizabeth’s Day Flood inundates a huge section of Zeeland and Holland as the storm-driven Zuider Zee breaks through several dykes and floods the surrounding lands. Casualty estimates range from 2000, to 10,000, and the ruined villages and farmlands in the flooded polders remained underwater for decades. Most of the flooding concentrated in the areas of Dordrecht and North Brabant.

1626: After 120 years of construction (begun in 1506) the new Basilica of Saint Peter is consecrated in Rome’s Vatican City, replacing the crumbling 1300 year old original basilica. The complications of its design and construction, being built over and around the original while leaving key sections of it in place, set the scope and scale of this project above and beyond anything that had been planned before. In the end, it is a magnificent piece of work, host to some of the most beautiful and famous artwork in the world, to say nothing of the staggering Christian heritage resident within its walls and catacombs. It was also breathtakingly expensive, and the “creative financing” it took to complete its construction set the stage for a train of corruption and abuses that led to the Protestant Reformation.

1694: Birth of the brilliant French intellectual and writer Francois-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (d.1778).  He was famous for his acerbic wit, and was an outspoken advocate for civil liberties, free trade, freedom of religion, all of which were prominent among the core values of the Scottish Enlightenment, except that Voltaire wrote in France. He moved in the highest circles of intellect and politics, spending over two years in the court and the private table of Prussian King Fredrick the Great, among others. His work greatly influenced the thinking of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson and other leading lights of the American Revolution.

1703: Death of The Man in the Iron Mask, held in a variety of French prisons under the supervision of Cardinal Richelieu during the reign of Louis XIV. His identity has never been confirmed, and the conditions of his 34 years in somewhat stately captivity created a cottage industry of novels, plays and monographs attempting to deduce his identity and his supposed crimes.

1739: Ships of the Royal Navy descend on and capture the Spanish fortress city of Porto Bello in Panama. The lopsided battle was hailed as a great victory in England, and served as the first step of revenge in the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-1748) between Spain and Great Britain. 

1789: New Jersey becomes the first state to ratify the Bill of Rights. 

1820: The Nantucket whaling ship Essex, on station in the South Pacific, is repeatedly rammed by an enraged sperm whale and sinks. The story of the sinking and the subsequent survival of members of the crew was part of Melville’s inspiration for Moby-Dick. The searing story generated renewed public interest with the 2000 publication of historian Nathaniel Philbirck’s gripping best seller, In the Heart of the Sea. A movie of the same name was released in 2015 for the Christmas blockbuster season.

1855: Scottish explorer and missionary David Livingstone becomes the first European to see Victoria Falls. He becomes “lost” a decade and a half later.

1863: President Abraham Lincoln, presiding over the dedication of a new national cemetery where are buried the Union dead from the great battle of four months prior, delivers his Gettysburg Address. It remains quite possibly the most profound two minutes in American History, providing the intellectual underpinnings for not only the post-Civil War reconstruction, but for the very nature of the United States as it went forward from that cataclysm.The speech got into the press quickly and became talked about, argued about, and dissected every which way to find a flaw in its logic. It remains a pitch-perfect expression of the highest aspirations of this nation.

1865: Mark Twain publishes in the New York Saturday Press the short story that put him on the map: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

1869: Inauguration of commercial shipping traffic through the Suez Canal.
 
1871: The National Rifle Association is chartered by the State of New York. This might be a good time to comment on the organization’s recent move to the Great State of Texas, but I won’t.
 
1887: Birth of Bernard Montgomery (d.1976), British Field Marshal during the Second World War, hero of El Alamein, Sicily, Normandy, and the British drive against the German army across the northern tier of Europe.

1901: The Riker Torpedo Racer sets a world speed record for electric cars at 57 mph. 

1916: Commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in Flanders, Field Marshall Douglas Haig, orders a halt to the First Battle of the Somme, which began, you’ll recall, on July 1^st “when the barrage lifts…” The four and a half months since of nearly continuous combat yielded for the combined Anglo-French force a total of six miles over the ground, without having gained any of the originally planned objectives, at a cost of over 146,000 dead and just under 624,000 wounded. For their part, the Germans lost 164,000 dead and 465,000 wounded defending their earlier gains.

1920: In Dublin, the Irish Republican Army assassinates 12 British informants who worked with the Royal Irish Constabulary to help put down rebellion that was raging throughout Ireland. In response, a vigilante militia group of “Black & Tans” from the RIC burst into a stadium during a football match and fired several hundred rounds into the crowd, killing 14 and wounding upwards of 80 civilians. The event became known as Bloody Sunday*, and served to harden against the Crown those souls whose earlier sympathies during the revolt had been ambivalent.  

1928: Walt Disney releases into movie theaters his third animated short, Steamboat Willie, which combines synchronized sound with the dancing images of his soon-to-be famous mouse. 

1933: After sixteen years of increasingly futile opposition* to the entrenchment and bureaucratization of the Bolsheviks into Russian society and government, the United States finally recognizes the Soviet Union. The intelligentsia in the United States had been lobbying for this recognition for years, epitomized by muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens visiting Russia in 1921 and coming back gushing, “I have seen the future and it works.”

1945: Working under the cover of secrecy, mostly to avoid the awkwardness of having formerly mortal enemies working for the US Government, 88 German rocket scientists are spirited from their cells in occupied Germany and into the United States. US officials remain cagey about where they went, saying things like, “They volunteered to come here,” and avoiding mention that they remained in “protective custody” while they performed work on technology of “vital national interest.” The scientists were specifically tasked to develop a rocket program faster, farther and better than the Soviets could get with THEIR captured Nazis. The two groups remained a fascinating subtext of the US-Soviet space race for decades.

1947: Great Britain’s Princess Elizabeth weds Phillip Mountbatten.

1955: First publication of William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine, in which the erudite conservative Yale graduate declaimed that his (and his magazine’s) purpose was to “Stand athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’” You know why, of course: the institutional Left- which constituted most of post-WWII academia and media- almost always framed their arguments on the basis of the inevitability of history showing they were right. Buckley initiated the “not so fast” movement that continues to this day.

1961: President John F. Kennedy, in order to avoid an open-ended commitment of combat forces, orders an increased contingent of military advisors to aid the government of South Vietnam.