164 B.C. The great Jewish general Judas Maccabeus restores proper worship to the Temple in Jerusalem. The event is celebrated annually during Hanukkah. 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.
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. Tell remains a potent symbol of resistance to capricious authority, and has been the subject of numerous plays and books on the nature of freedom and patriotism.
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.
1594: Death of Martin Frobisher (b.1539), an English sea-dog contemporary of Francis Drake. Frobisher made three trips to the New World, landing principally in Canada, where he explored for both the fabled Northwest Passage, and for the elusive mother lode of gold that was always just one more day away. He was one of the key English leaders during the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
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 French intellectual and writer Francois-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (d.1778). He was an outspoken advocate of 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.
1718: Death of Edward Teach (b.1680), better known as the fabled pirate Blackbeard, who terrorized the southern seaboard of the English colonies, at one point blockading Charleston, South Carolina for ransom. He spent the majority of his pirating career based out of Ocracoke Inlet in North Carolina, using its strategic location to survey the shipping moving up and down the coast and dashing out in his ship Queen Anne’s Revenge to plunder and kill. Teach is finally brought to heel this day by the Royal Navy’s Lieutenant Robert Maynard, who crafted a carefully executed attack that played on Teach’s propensity to attack weak-looking vessels. The surprise appearance of Maynard’s men from below decks fractured the integrity of the pirates’ attack, and Teach himself was mortally wounded with five gunshots and no fewer than 25 severe cuts from swords and cutlasses. Maynard decapitated the corpse and hung the head from a yardarm on his return to Hampton, Virginia to prove to citizens ashore that their nemesis was indeed dead.
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. The war was eventually subsumed by the larger War of Austrian Succession, but I really like the name of the original.
1789: New Jersey becomes the first state to ratify the Bill of Rights.
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.
1869: Launch of the clipper ship Cutty Sark in Dumbarton, Scotland. The ship participated in several great races between the tea markets in China and the London docks, with speeds under sail averaging over 15 knots.
1876: Having earlier escaped on a European tour, the head of New York’s Tammany Hall, the notorious William M. “Boss” Tweed, is returned via extradition to NYC by Spanish authorities, who recognized him from the series of famous Thomas Nash cartoons lambasting his egregious corruption. Tweed escaped from prison a year earlier, where he was serving a sentence after conviction on a number of corruption and money laundering charges. After today, he remained locked up, and died in custody in 1878.
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 1st “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 the 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.
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!’”
1959: French President Charles de Gaulle gives a speech in Strasbourg, France, where he forcefully outlines the ultimate vision of the recently established European Coal and Steel Community and European Economic Community (a.k.a., the Common Market (precursor to today’s European Union)): “Yes, it is Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals, it is Europe, it is the whole of Europe, that will decide the destiny of the world.”
1961: President John F. Kennedy, signs off on his order of two days ago, assigning 18,000 U.S. Army advisors to South Vietnam.
1963: President John F. Kennedy is shot and killed in Dallas, Texas. The assassin, former Marine and communist sympathizer Lee Harvey Oswald, fired from the sixth floor of a book depository above Dealey Plaza. He escaped from the scene, but was captured later in the afternoon.
1975: Death of General Francisco Franco (b.1892). Franco declared himself Caudillo of Spain at the close of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. His close ties with Nazi Germany during the civil war, his studious neutrality during WWII, and his strident anti-communism made him a particular object of left-wing loathing. In his later years he re-established a representative parliament and set the conditions for a restoration of the Bourbons under a constitutional monarchy.
1977: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat becomes the first Arab leader to visit the State of Israel, making an unprecedented speech to the Israeli Knesset, calling for peace between Israel and its neighbors. He was later assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
1990: Death of British writer and WWII fighter pilot Roald Dahl (b.1916). He is probably best known on this side of the pond for his children’s stories, including ones you probably read, like Matilda, The BFG, The Twits, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and perhaps his clear-eyed stories from his time in the RAF: Going Solo, Over to You, and Shot Down Over Libya.
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