History Notes this week of Nov 24

1095: At the final convocation of the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II gives an impassioned speech to the assembled nobles and knights, outlining the plea for help from Byzantine Emperor Alexius I. After reviewing the depredations of Moslem armies as they spread into Christian territories, Urban declares a Crusade to turn back the Moslems from Anatolia and eventually to re-take the holy city of Jerusalem. He calls on the assembled knights to “take up the cross” and spend the upcoming winter months collecting the forces they will need for the unprecedented armed march. The crowd enthusiastically responds with cries of “Deus Vult!” (God wills it!).

1095: Following the call for Crusade, Pope Urban II formally appoints Count Raymond IV of Toulouse and Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy to lead the First Crusade, providing the papal imprimatur on the operation.

1729: On the western fringes of colonial settlement, in this case the French territories along the Mississippi River basin, Natchez Indians massacre 138 Frenchmen, 35 French women and 56 children at Fort Rosalie. The fort was the seat of French authority and trade along the river. Relations between the French and the Indians were never entirely peaceful, and the 1720s saw periodic uprisings of increasing violence, culminating in the massacre today. Present-day Natchez, Mississippi, developed from the trade routes that converged on the fort. 

1778: On his third Pacific voyage of exploration, Captain James Cook becomes the first European to land on Maui, in the Sandwich Islands chain.

1833: Birth of gunman, lawman, and newspaperman, Bat Masterson (d. 1921). He achieved particular notoriety in 1881-83 during the height of the lawlessness in Dodge City, and after cementing a reputation as a no-nonsense enforcer in the decreasingly Wild West, he began a career as a newspaper writer in Kansas, Denver, and eventually New York City, where President Theodore Roosevelt recruited him to be Deputy US Marshall for federal grand jury sessions.

1835: The Provincial Government of Texas authorizes the establishment of a core of mounted state law enforcement officers, known as the Texas Rangers.

1859: Publication of Charles Darwin’s magnum opus, The Origin of Species.

1859: Death of American author Washington Irving (b.1783), best known for his depictions of colonial New York in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip van Winkle.

1863: At the Battle of Lookout Mountain, just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee, a Union force of 10,000 under General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker fights an uphill battle through fog and rocky defiles to defeat one of Confederate General Braxton Bragg’s brigades defending the heights. The battle is often called the “Battle Above the Clouds” from the way the two sides blindly fired towards each other during the course of the day. Confederate Brigadier John C. Brown, positioned atop the mountain, was himself unable to see or direct the defenses due to both the fog and the steep geography that blocked sight lines to the fighting below. That night, the Confederate force withdrew to establish a better defensive position on nearby Missionary Ridge.

1877: Inventor Thomas Edison demonstrates his gramophone for the first time. 

1883: Death of abolitionist Sojouner Truth (b.1797), who achieved nation-wide fame for her outspoken advocacy of abolition and women’s rights, particularly her 1851 speech at a woman’s rights convention, where she peppered her extemporaneous review of basic human rights with the phrase, “Ain’t I a woman??” She was a major force in the recruitment of black soldiers for the Union Army, and met President Lincoln while working at the Freedman’s Hospital in Washington.

1895: Completion of the first American automobile race, 54 miles between Jackson Park in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois at an average speed of just over 7 mph. The victor, Charles Duryea won in a motorized wagon of his own design. Second place went to a German car built by Karl Benz, who used it to win the Paris-Rouen race the year prior. Duryea, ever the entrepreneur, recognized the potential of automobile racing on future sales of his machine, immediately began marketing it on the basis of its proven speed and endurance. The old auto aphorism “Win on Sunday, Sell on Monday” began at the very dawn of the automobile age.

1898: Birth of British author C.S. “Jack” Lewis (d.1963), best known over here for his deeply felt Christian conversion (“I went kicking and screaming”), that helped guide his writing of the great Chronicles of Narnia series.

1901: Establishment of the U.S. Army War College in the garrison town of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

1912: As part of Treaty of Fez, signed back in March, Spain assumes a Protectorate role over the northern shoreline of Morocco, sharing the role with France, who has overall responsibility for Morocco’s security. The treaty was of a piece with the great colonial African land grab of the late 19^th Century (DLH 11/15). Morocco, in particular, became an early (1904-06) venue for Germany’s increasing assertiveness in European affairs, particularly regarding France’s claims over the North African kingdom.

1924: Macy’s department store sponsors its first Thanksgiving Day Parade in NYC.

1927: Birth of Vin Scully (d.2022), the voice of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who kept at it until the close of the 2016 season.

1929: Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd becomes the first to fly over the South Pole. After learning to fly during the World War, the Virginia native pursued solutions to increasingly difficult flying problems, most notably long-range navigation. He developed a number of navigation instruments, including the bubble sextant, with which he proved that planes could be safely flown across great distances with reasonable accuracy. Byrd played a key role in developing the routing for the Navy’s first trans-Atlantic flight in 1919. In May, 1926, he planned- and took credit for- a flight from Spitsbergen Norway to the North Pole and back, a feat for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor. In 1928 he led a two-year Antarctic expedition of two ships and three airplanes which surveyed and photographed vast areas of that frozen continent. The South Polar flight today was well-documented and earned Byrd a gold medal from the American Geographical society.

1939: Birth of Anna Mae Bullock (d.2023), better known as the electrifying singer Tina Turner. 

1942: The French Navy in Toulon, largely intact, but idled by its status under the terms of the Vichy agreement with Nazi Germany, is scuttled by the French themselves when they learn of Germany’s attempt to seize the ships in response to the Allied invasion of French North Africa three weeks earlier. The scuttling included three battleships, four heavy cruisers, three light cruisers, thirty destroyers and torpedo boats, fifteen submarines, and a number of support vessels. For Germany, the loss merely confirmed the fecklessness of the Vichy government, and removed the usefulness of the French Navy as a fleet-in-being that had to be guarded against. For the Allies, the loss was also against the potential of transforming that fleet-in-being into an actual fighting force in support of the Free French under Charles De Gaulle.

1963: Dallas police move to transfer Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald from the basement of the Dallas police headquarters to the county jail, when, from out of the crowd of reporters at the door, nightclub owner Jack Ruby* lunges forward and shoots Oswald in the abdomen. He died 90 minutes later in Parkland hospital, the same place where President Kennedy was declared dead two days earlier. All the national networks were broadcasting Oswald’s transfer, providing the country with a live broadcast of the murder that Sunday morning.

1876: New York’s Tammany Hall‘s 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.He remained locked up, and died in custody in 1878.

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.”  
De Gaulle was never one to let truth get in the way of his grand visions; at the time of this pronouncement, France was embroiled in war in Algeria, had recently been forcibly ejected from its colony in Indo-China, and along with the British, failed to prevent Egypt from nationalizing the Suez Canal (DLH 10/29). With the effects of the Marshall Plan starting to show progress in long term postwar recovery, and with the United States and Soviet Union on a nuclear hair-trigger in the Cold War, de Gaulle’s words seemed not only a little out of place, but also a far stretch from geopolitical reality.

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. 

2001: Death of George Harrison (b.1943), youngest of The Beatles, of whom I’m sure you agree with me were the Greatest Rock Band of All Time. He is widely regarded as the best actual musician among the Fab Four.