History Notes this week of Oct 17

202 B.C. — The Battle of Zama. Deep within the (now) Tunisian territory of Carthage, Roman General Scipio Africanus engages and decisively defeats the great Carthaginian General Hannibal Barca, who for some 15 years had marched, raided and won battle after battle up and down Italy itself, after his dramatic crossing of the Alps with war elephants in 218 B.C. Hannibal’s domination of the battlefield (cf: Cannae (DLH 8/2), where he encircled and annihilated a Roman army of perhaps 50,000 in a single afternoon) turned many of Rome’s Italian allies and city-states into Carthage’s vassals, a fact that drove the Senate to distraction and led to both periodic armistices and more aggressive military resistance to the hated North Africans.

By 203 B.C., Hannibal was recalled to Carthage to defend the homeland, because the Senate had dispatched Scipio to land in North Africa (204 B.C.) and bring Carthage to heel once and for all. At Zama, Hannibal opened with a charge of some 80 war elephants, but Scipio had arranged his legions with open lanes between the units; the trumpeting beasts were funneled harmlessly through the gaps or stampeded back into their own lines. Scipio’s Numidian ally, the cavalry king Masinissa, then swept the Carthaginian horse off the field and returned to hit Hannibal’s veterans from behind — Cannae in reverse. The battle broke the back of the Carthaginian state, and the brutal Roman terms (a huge indemnity, surrender of the fleet, no war without Rome’s permission) ushered in more than 50 years of peace.

Carthage’s continued existence, however weakened, was unacceptable to many in the Senate. The great orator Cato the Elder reportedly once dropped a ripe, fresh Carthaginian fig on the Senate floor to show how close the old enemy still was, and he ended every speech, whatever the topic, with the phrase “CARTHAGO DELENDA EST,” which you’ve already translated as “Carthage must be destroyed!” He got his wish in 146 B.C., when Rome razed the city at the end of the Third Punic War.

1097 — The Siege of Antioch begins. Opening moves of the First Crusade’s Siege of Antioch, the ancient Greek and Roman metropolis that dominated the trade routes of the upper Levant, and which is distinguished in the New Testament (Acts 11:26) as the city where the followers of Jesus were first called “Christians.” Although the city was in commercial decline, it remained a singular strategic prize during centuries of warfare among the Latin Crusaders, the Byzantines, the Seljuk Turks, the Saracens of Syria and later the Mongols of the Asian steppes. The siege dragged on through a starving winter for nearly eight months. It finally ended in June 1098 when the Norman prince Bohemond bribed a disaffected tower commander named Firouz to let his men scale the walls at night. Days later the Crusaders found themselves besieged in turn by a huge relief army, and only the morale boost of the “discovery” of the Holy Lance under a church floor sent them charging out to an improbable victory.

1356 — The Basel earthquake. An earthquake estimated at magnitude 6 to 7.1 flattens the Swiss city of Basel, with the structural damage made far worse by fires started by falling candles and torches; the blaze burned for days. Shaking was felt as far away as Paris, and dozens of castles in the surrounding region were toppled. It remains the most significant seismic event in Central European recorded history, and Swiss insurers still model their worst-case scenarios on it.

1448 — The Second Battle of Kosovo. The Hungarian regent John Hunyadi leads a Christian army of Hungarians, Wallachians and allies against the Ottoman Sultan Murad II on the same plain where the Serbs had been defeated in 1389. After three days of fighting, the Christian armies of Hungary are depleted to the point where they can no longer mount a credible defense, let alone offensive operations, against the victorious Ottomans. Among the Ottoman ranks was the sultan’s teenage son, the future Mehmed II, getting his first taste of battle. The victory gave him the military breathing space for his eventual conquest of the Christian capital of Constantinople in 1453, which earned him the title “the Conqueror.”

1512 — Martin Luther becomes a Doctor of Theology. Augustinian monk Martin Luther is awarded his doctorate and, a few days later, is received into the theology faculty of the University of Wittenberg, where he would hold the chair in biblical studies for the rest of his life. Five years and twelve days later, on October 31, 1517, the young professor posted his Ninety-Five Theses against the sale of indulgences, and the Protestant Reformation was underway.

1540 — The Battle of Mabila. At a location thought to be somewhere near present-day Selma, Alabama (archaeologists are still hunting for the exact site), a 600-man Spanish army of conquistadores led by Hernando de Soto is guided by the Mississippian chief Tuscaloosa to a suspiciously open field directly abutting a suspiciously stout enclosure of stucco-covered log palisade, filled with a suspiciously homogeneous collection of around 3,000 young men, all daubed with war paint and armed with longbows. Chroniclers described Tuscaloosa as a giant of a man, said to stand head and shoulders above the Spaniards; de Soto had taken him hostage days earlier to guarantee safe passage and supplies.

Tuscaloosa lured the Spanish to his “town” of Mabila so they could trade for food, porters and supplies to continue their long march through what we now know as the southeastern United States. It did not take long for negotiations to reach an impasse, at which point one of the Spaniards pulled an Indian’s loincloth off over his head, triggering the first of several volleys of arrows to avenge the insult. After several abortive attempts to breach the walls, the Spanish finally organized themselves as a functional army and waded into the defenders, protected by their armor and horses, laying waste with furious swordplay. They set fire to the “village,” took what loot they could, and moved on, leaving an estimated 2,500 or more dead and dying warriors in the ruins. Tuscaloosa’s fate remains a mystery; his body was never identified. Spanish losses were around 20 killed and some 150 wounded, de Soto among them, and the expedition lost most of its baggage and pearls in the fire. The chief’s name lives on in the city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

1632 — Birth of Christopher Wren (d.1723). The great English architect was also a first-rate astronomer and mathematician and a founder of the Royal Society. After the Great Fire of London in 1666, Wren designed 52 new city churches and his masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral, which took 35 years to build. He is buried in its crypt beneath a famously modest epitaph: “Si monumentum requiris, circumspice” (“If you seek his monument, look around you”). Fun connection: St Paul’s is faced with Portland stone, the same stone that later gave Portland cement its name (see 1824).

1707 (Oct 22, O.S.) — The Scilly naval disaster. The Royal Navy suffers an existential shock when four ships of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s fleet, returning from the Mediterranean, run aground on the rocks off the Isles of Scilly in dirty weather, with the loss of some 1,400 to 2,000 sailors. Shovell’s flagship HMS Association went down with all hands. Shovell’s body washed ashore, and a persistent local legend claims he survived the wreck only to be murdered on the beach by a woman who coveted his emerald ring. Investigations confirmed that a crucial factor was the navigators’ inability to fix their longitude. Parliament eventually passed the Longitude Act of 1714, offering up to £20,000 (millions today) for a practical solution. The prize was ultimately chased down by a self-taught Yorkshire clockmaker, John Harrison, whose H4 marine chronometer finally cracked the problem. Perhaps we’ll read more about this in July.

1720 — Calico Jack is captured. The notorious actual pirate of the Caribbean, John “Calico Jack” Rackham (nicknamed for his gaudy calico clothes), is captured by Royal Navy pirate hunter Captain Jonathan Barnet off Jamaica’s western tip after terrorizing small craft and fishermen along the island’s coast. Barnet reportedly caught the crew mostly drunk. Two of the fiercest fighters aboard were women: Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who were tried separately and escaped the noose by “pleading their bellies” (both were pregnant). Rackham was tried in Spanish Town, found guilty and hanged at Port Royal on November 18, 1720, his corpse then suspended in a gibbet at the harbor entrance on a tiny islet still known as Rackham’s Cay. Bonny’s reported parting words to him: if he had fought like a man, he need not have been hanged like a dog. The skull-and-crossed-swords Jolly Roger is often credited to him.

1721 (Oct 22, O.S.) — Russia becomes an empire. Tsar Peter I (“the Great”), fresh from victory in the Great Northern War, which won Russia four Baltic provinces from Sweden in the Treaty of Nystad, accepts the title of Emperor of All Russia from the Senate, formally creating the Russian Empire with his new city of St. Petersburg as its capital. The empire lasted nearly two centuries, until the February Revolution of 1917 toppled the Romanovs and a short-lived Russian Republic was proclaimed that September.

1746 — The College of New Jersey is chartered. The fourth college in the British colonies receives its founding charter. It moved to Princeton in 1756, into Nassau Hall, which was then the largest building in the colonies, and which briefly served as the U.S. Capitol in 1783 when the Continental Congress met there. You probably knew it became Princeton University in 1896.

1776 — The Battle of Pell’s Point. Just weeks after his victory at the Battle of Brooklyn (DLH 8/27), British General Sir William Howe opens the next phase of his campaign to capture New York by crossing to the mainland to trap General George Washington’s army on Manhattan Island. Thwarted in his first landing attempt at Throg’s Neck (blocked by a flooded causeway and a handful of American riflemen), Howe regrouped and on this day landed 4,000 Redcoats and Hessians on the mainland side of Long Island Sound at Pell’s Point, in today’s Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx.

An American force of about 750 under Colonel John Glover, whose Marblehead, Massachusetts fishermen had already rowed Washington’s army to safety after Brooklyn, established itself behind a series of stone walls. Using a tactic that would be echoed at the Battle of Cowpens, Glover exploited American marksmanship to fire on the advancing British until a position was nearly overrun, then made an orderly retreat to the next stone wall and did it again. After repeated repulses the British halted their advance, which gave Washington time to move the bulk of his force to White Plains. The tactical loss there on October 28 sealed the fate of New York, but allowed Washington to withdraw the intact Continental Army across to New Jersey. Two months later, Glover’s boatmen would row that same army across the Delaware to Trenton. (h/t to the great New Yawker Gary Parson, who hounded the DLH Research Staff to distraction about this battle, which one assumes was fought pretty close to his old stomping grounds.)

1777 — Burgoyne surrenders at Saratoga. Ten days after his cataclysmic defeat at the second Battle of Saratoga (Bemis Heights), British General John “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne surrenders his army of about 5,800 men to American General Horatio Gates. Much of the credit for the victory belonged to Benedict Arnold, who led the decisive charge on October 7 and was badly wounded in the leg; a monument at the battlefield honors that leg, but not his name. The American victory was crucial proof to the French that the Americans had a real chance against the hitherto dominant military and naval might of Great Britain, and France signed a formal alliance within four months.

1781 — Cornwallis asks for terms. Not too far from here in Yorktown, Virginia, with supplies running low and the combined American and French armies under General George Washington closing their siege lines inexorably on the faltering British positions, General Lord Cornwallis sends out a drummer boy and an officer under a flag of truce to ask for terms of surrender. This stunning event was the direct result of the French naval victory at the Battle of the Virginia Capes (September 5), when Admiral de Grasse’s fleet turned back the Royal Navy squadron bringing Cornwallis’s crucial stores and reinforcements, and with them any chance of escape by sea. By coincidence, it was the fourth anniversary of Burgoyne’s surrender.

1781— The surrender at Yorktown. Two days after asking for terms, at 2:00 in the afternoon, the British army at Yorktown, some 7,000 to 8,000 men, marches out of its bivouacs with muskets shouldered and colors cased, between long lines of French and American troops. Tradition holds that the British band played “The World Turned Upside Down” as the men stacked arms and went into captivity, though no eyewitness recorded the tune. Cornwallis himself pleaded illness and sent his deputy, General Charles O’Hara, who tried to hand his sword to the French commander Rochambeau. Rochambeau declined and pointed him to Washington, who in turn directed him to his own second-in-command, General Benjamin Lincoln, the man the British had forced to surrender at Charleston the year before.

1797 — USS Constitution is launched. In Boston, the 44-gun frigate USS Constitution, designed by Joshua Humphreys, is launched at Edmund Hartt’s shipyard. Paul Revere supplied the copper bolts and spikes for her hull. She earned the nickname “Old Ironsides” in 1812 when British cannonballs from HMS Guerriere appeared to bounce off her thick live-oak sides. She never lost a battle and remains afloat and in commission to this day, the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world, regularly overhauled in the dry dock at the old Charlestown Navy Yard.

1803 — The Senate ratifies the Louisiana Purchase. After a relatively short debate, and fully aware of what some argued was the tenuous constitutionality of the purchase (President Jefferson himself, a strict constructionist, privately drafted a constitutional amendment to authorize it before deciding not to risk the delay), the U.S. Senate ratifies the treaty by a vote of 24 to 7. For $15 million, roughly three to four cents an acre, the United States acquired about 828,000 square miles, essentially doubling its land mass without firing a shot. Napoleon, who needed cash for his coming wars with Britain, reportedly remarked that he had just given England a maritime rival that would someday humble her pride.

1805 — The Battle of Trafalgar. Just off the southwest coast of Spain, the 27-ship Mediterranean Fleet of the Royal Navy under Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson engages the larger 33-ship combined French and Spanish fleet under French Vice Admiral Pierre-Charles Villeneuve in the pivotal naval battle of the Napoleonic Wars. Trafalgar was the culmination of months of British blockades, French breakouts, a trans-Atlantic chase to the Caribbean and back, and an ultimately futile attempt by the Allied fleet to break out of its blockaded anchorage at Cadiz and run back into the Mediterranean for rearming and replenishment.

Having finally weighed anchor, Villeneuve realized almost immediately that Nelson’s fleet lay in wait below the horizon. He formed his ships into the conventional line of battle, significantly outnumbering and outgunning his foes. Nelson had anticipated the move. In the weeks before, over dinners aboard his flagship with his captains (he called the plan “the Nelson Touch”), he laid out an audacious scheme to split his fleet into two columns that would run perpendicular to the Allied line, crash through it, and break it into a general melee of individual ship actions, where he was confident British morale, discipline, seamanship and gunnery would carry the day. His written memorandum to the captains was explicit: “No captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of the enemy.”

On the morning of battle, Nelson, aboard HMS Victory, ordered his famous flag hoist: “England expects that every man will do his duty.” (He originally wanted “England confides”; his signal officer suggested “expects” because it was in the signal book and “confides” would have to be spelled out letter by letter.) Nelson led his column straight into the Allied line just ahead of Villeneuve’s flagship, while his second, Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, crashed through about halfway back, cutting the Allied fleet into three parts. British gunners pummeled the French and Spanish ships into charnel houses while the Allied van worked vainly for over 90 minutes in light winds to bring their lumbering ships back into the fray.

The final butcher’s bill underlines the scope of the victory: Allied losses of 21 ships captured and one sunk, some 4,400 sailors dead, 3,800 wounded and over 8,000 captured; British losses of no ships, 458 killed and 1,208 wounded. Prominent among the dead was Nelson himself, felled by a musket ball fired from the mizzen top of the French ship Redoutable. He lived about three hours, long enough to learn of his victory; among his last words were “Thank God I have done my duty.” His body was preserved in a cask of brandy for the voyage home. A violent storm after the battle wrecked or scuttled most of the captured prizes, but the strategic result stood: Britain ruled the seas for the next century.

1812 — Napoleon retreats from Moscow. Five weeks after entering the burning remains of Moscow, with his army already bled by the Battle of Borodino and virtually nothing left to plunder, Napoleon Bonaparte orders the Grande Armée to begin the long retreat back toward France. Tsar Alexander had simply refused to negotiate. The army that crossed into Russia in June numbered over 600,000 men; fewer than 100,000 made it back out, felled by battle, starvation, typhus, Cossack raids and the early, savage Russian winter, including the disastrous crossing of the Berezina River in late November. The losses remain a central case study at American war colleges to this day.

1814 — The London Beer Flood. At the Meux & Co. Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road, a 22-foot-tall vat of maturing porter bursts when one of its iron hoops gives way. The blast splits open several other vats, and over 323,000 Imperial Gallons (about 1.47 million liters) of beer surge into the street, collapsing the brewery’s back wall and flooding the crowded slum of St Giles. The frothy wave killed 8 souls: one, a 14-year-old pub barmaid, was crushed in the wreckage of a collapsing wall, and five others drowned in the basement of a home where they had gathered for a wake. A court ruled the disaster an act of God, and the brewery was even refunded the excise tax it had paid on the lost beer.

1818 — The Convention of 1818. The United States and Great Britain, in a remarkable display of common sense and reciprocal respect, sign the Convention of 1818, setting the boundary between British North America and the U.S. from the northwesternmost point of Lake of the Woods, due south to the 49th parallel, and thence west along the 49th to the Rocky Mountains. West of the Rockies, both sides agreed to joint occupation of the Oregon Country (present-day Oregon, Washington, Idaho and parts of Montana and Wyoming, plus much of British Columbia); the 1846 Oregon Treaty later extended the 49th parallel line to the Pacific. The convention also settled American fishing rights off Newfoundland and Labrador.

Two little warts distract from this otherwise elegant line: a) the Northwest Angle of Minnesota, created by that southward jog at the east end of the line, a holdover from a mapping error in the 1783 Treaty of Paris and the only part of the Lower 48 north of the 49th parallel; and 2) Point Roberts, Washington, the southern tip of a British Columbia peninsula that dips about a mile below the 49th parallel (a product of the 1846 extension) and so belongs to the U.S. It can only be reached by land by passing through Canada twice. It makes a convenient place for Canadians to buy staples (and gasoline) at American prices, not to mention a nominal U.S. address for relatives to mail packages without the annoyances of clearing Canadian customs.

1824 — Portland cement is patented. Leeds bricklayer Joseph Aspdin obtains a British patent for Portland cement, which you may recognize as quite possibly the most important construction material ever invented; today it is the binder in essentially all of the world’s concrete, the most-used human-made substance on Earth. It derives its name not from the lefty city in Oregon, but from its resemblance to the prized building stone quarried on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, England, the same stone Christopher Wren used for St Paul’s (see 1632). Aspdin’s son William later improved the formula into something much closer to the cement we use today.

1833 — Birth of Alfred Nobel (d.1896). The Swedish chemist, engineer and inventor of dynamite (patented 1867) held 355 patents and built an industrial empire of explosives factories. According to a well-known story, when his brother Ludvig died in 1888, a French newspaper mistakenly ran Alfred’s obituary under the headline “The merchant of death is dead.” Whether or not that shaped his thinking, his will left the bulk of his fortune to fund the Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901.

1836 — Sam Houston becomes president of Texas. Six months after his dramatic victory over the Mexican army at San Jacinto, where his men routed Santa Anna’s force in about 18 minutes while shouting “Remember the Alamo!”, Virginia native Sam Houston (born in Rockbridge County) is inaugurated as the first president of the Republic of Texas in the temporary capital of Columbia. Houston remains the only person ever elected governor of two different states (Tennessee and Texas). In 1861, as governor of Texas, he refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy and was removed from office.

1873 — Football rules for the colleges. It wasn’t yet the NCAA, but representatives of Yale, Princeton, Columbia and Rutgers met at New York’s Fifth Avenue Hotel and agreed on a common set of rules for intercollegiate football. The game they codified was much closer to soccer, played with a round ball, 20 men a side, and no carrying or throwing. Harvard declined to attend because it preferred its own rugby-like “Boston game,” and it was Harvard’s version, after a famous 1874 match against McGill University of Montreal, that eventually won out and became American football.

1882 — Birth of Béla Lugosi (d.1956). Born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in Lugos, Hungary (now Lugoj, Romania), from which he took his stage name. He played Dracula on Broadway in 1927 before his defining performance in the 1931 film, learning many of his English lines phonetically. His thick accent remains the standard against which all other Dracula accents are judged. At his request, he was buried in one of his Dracula capes.

1884 — The Prime Meridian is fixed at Greenwich. Meeting in Washington, D.C., delegates from 25 nations at the International Meridian Conference formally adopt the meridian passing through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, then just outside London, as the world’s Prime Meridian (0° longitude). Much of the world’s shipping already used Greenwich-based charts, which helped carry the vote. France abstained and stubbornly kept the Paris meridian on its maps until 1911.

1892 — Dedication of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Dedication ceremonies are held for the enormous world’s fair on the south side of Chicago in Jackson Park, marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage. Construction of the neoclassical exhibition buildings was driven as much by schedule as by engineering, but with the exception of a fire in one of them, all were completed in time for the public opening the following May. The exteriors were painted white, and the grounds were illuminated at night by electric lights, earning it the nickname of the “White City.” The same day, schoolchildren across the country recited Francis Bellamy’s new Pledge of Allegiance for the first time as part of the national Columbus Day celebration. The fair itself introduced the world to the original Ferris wheel and, by most accounts, Cracker Jack and the Pabst Blue Ribbon name.

1897 — Birth of Marjorie Flack (d.1958). Born in Greenport, on Long Island, Flack was a writer and illustrator of some wonderful children’s books, including Angus and the Ducks and Ask Mr. Bear. The Story About Ping (1933), illustrated by Kurt Wiese, tells of a little duck on the Yangtze River who would rather hide than be the last one home and get a spank on the back. It was a staple in our house for all our kids, and now for all our grandkids. I think they identify with the little duck for some reason.

1901 — Birth of Arleigh “31-Knot” Burke (d.1996). Born in Boulder, Colorado, Burke became the American naval officer renowned in WWII for the aggressiveness of his Destroyer Squadron 23, the “Little Beavers,” which fought 22 engagements in the Solomons and capped them with a near-flawless victory at the Battle of Cape St. George in November 1943. The nickname came from Admiral Halsey, who ribbed him after Burke reported he was steaming at 31 knots, a speed his ships could barely make. Burke went on to serve an unprecedented three terms as Chief of Naval Operations (1955–1961), championing the Polaris missile submarine program. In 1991 he attended the commissioning of USS Arleigh Burke (DDG-51) at Norfolk, a rare honor for a living namesake; her class of destroyers is now the backbone of the U.S. surface fleet.

1912 — Birth of Georg Solti (d.1997). The Budapest-born conductor fled Hungary’s anti-Jewish laws in 1939, sat out the war in Switzerland, and went on to become best known over here as Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1969–1991), which he turned into perhaps the most celebrated orchestra in the world. He also made the first complete studio recording of Wagner’s Ring cycle. Solti won 31 Grammy Awards, a record that stood until 2023. His full symphonic recording of Handel’s Water Music was the specific piece that opened my eyes to the wonders of classical music.

1917 — Birth of Dizzy Gillespie (d.1993). Born John Birks Gillespie in Cheraw, South Carolina, the trumpeter and big band leader co-founded bebop with saxophonist Charlie Parker and pioneered Afro-Cuban jazz. His trademarks were his ballooning cheeks and his upturned “bent” trumpet, a shape he adopted after someone accidentally fell on his horn in 1953 and he liked the sound. He’s the one that every other Gillespie on the planet is named after.

1918 — Birth of Rita Hayworth (d.1987). Born Margarita Carmen Cansino in Brooklyn to a Spanish flamenco-dancing father, Hayworth danced professionally in her teens and became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the 1940s, partnering with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Her 1941 Life magazine photo in a satin-and-lace nightgown made her the WWII pinup goddess, second only to Betty Grable, and her image was reportedly painted on an atomic bomb tested at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Her signature role was Gilda (1946). Her later public battle with Alzheimer’s disease helped bring national attention to the illness.

1925 — Birth of Art Buchwald (d.2007). The journalistic bon vivant and humorist ran away from home to join the Marines in WWII, then spent 14 years in Paris writing for the International Herald Tribune before his syndicated Washington column ran in hundreds of papers. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Outstanding Commentary in 1982. He famously sued Paramount, claiming Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America was based on his story treatment; he won, exposing Hollywood’s creative “net profits” accounting. Late in life he checked into hospice, outlived his prognosis by months, and wrote a bestselling memoir about it.

1926 — Birth of Chuck Berry (d.2017). The St. Louis-born guitarist, singer and songwriter (“Maybellene,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Johnny B. Goode”) all but invented the language of rock-and-roll guitar, complete with his signature “duckwalk.” He was in the first class inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, and “Johnny B. Goode” is aboard the Voyager spacecraft’s Golden Record, now beyond our solar system.

1931 — Al Capone is convicted. The notorious Chicago gangland boss and snappy dresser, who could never be pinned for murder or bootlegging, is convicted of income tax evasion, thanks largely to IRS agent Frank Wilson’s painstaking reconstruction of his spending. A week later he was sentenced to 11 years and fined $50,000, then the stiffest tax sentence ever handed down. After a stint in Atlanta he became one of the first inmates of Alcatraz in 1934. Released in 1939, his mind ravaged by untreated syphilis, he died at his Florida estate in 1947.

1931 — Birth of Mickey Mantle (d.1995). The great Yankee slugger was born in Spavinaw, Oklahoma, and named by his baseball-mad father after Hall of Fame catcher Mickey Cochrane. Raised in the lead-mining town of Commerce and dubbed “The Commerce Comet,” Mantle hit 536 home runs, won the Triple Crown in 1956, three MVP awards and seven World Series titles, and still holds the record for most World Series home runs (18). He was arguably the greatest switch-hitter who ever lived.

1933 — Einstein arrives in America. Physicist Albert Einstein, having renounced his German citizenship after the Nazis came to power and seized his property, arrives in New York aboard the liner Westernland and is whisked away by tugboat, avoiding the waiting press, to Princeton, New Jersey, to take up his post at the new Institute for Advanced Study. He never returned to Germany, became a U.S. citizen in 1940, and lived in Princeton for the rest of his life.

1937 — Birth of Juan Marichal. The San Francisco Giants’ great right-hander, “The Dominican Dandy,” was famous for a sky-high leg kick and a bewildering array of pitches and arm angles. On July 2, 1963, he and Milwaukee’s Warren Spahn each threw a complete game through 16 innings before Willie Mays homered to win it for Marichal 1–0, often called the greatest pitching duel ever. He won 243 games and in 1983 became the first Dominican-born player elected to the Hall of Fame.

1938 — Birth of Evel Knievel (d.2007). Born Robert Craig Knievel in Butte, Montana, the motorcycle daredevil became a 1970s icon in a star-spangled jumpsuit. His crash landing after jumping the Caesars Palace fountains on New Year’s Eve 1967 left him in a coma for days; his 1974 attempt to rocket across Idaho’s Snake River Canyon in a steam-powered “Skycycle” ended when the parachute deployed early. He landed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most bones broken in a lifetime.

1947 — HUAC opens its Hollywood hearings. The House Un-American Activities Committee, a standing committee since 1945 and part of a multi-administration effort to root out Communists in the entertainment industry (there were lots of them), the State Department (ibid.), and other influential public and quasi-public organizations, opens its hearings into Hollywood. Friendly witnesses included Walt Disney, Gary Cooper and a young Screen Actors Guild president named Ronald Reagan. Ten writers and directors who refused to answer, the “Hollywood Ten,” were cited for contempt of Congress and jailed, and the studios responded with a blacklist that ended many careers for a decade or more. The next year the committee heard Whittaker Chambers’s testimony against State Department official Alger Hiss.

1956— Dedan Kimathi is captured. British colonial forces and Kenyan tribal police capture the wounded rebel “Field Marshal” Dedan Kimathi, effectively collapsing the brutal Mau Mau Rebellion that had terrorized Kenya since 1952. The insurgency was crushed militarily by the end of the year, though the state of emergency lasted until 1960. Kimathi was tried, convicted of illegal possession of a revolver (a capital offense under emergency rules), and hanged in February 1957. The conflict was brutal on both sides; in 2013 the British government paid about £20 million to more than 5,000 Kenyans who had been abused in detention camps. Kenya won independence in 1963, and a statue of Kimathi now stands in central Nairobi.

1973 — The Arab oil embargo. In the midst of the Yom Kippur War, the Arab members of OPEC (organized as OAPEC) announce cuts in oil production and soon impose a full embargo on the United States, the Netherlands and other countries supporting Israel, in response to the U.S. airlift of arms that helped Israel turn the tide of the war. The shock drove the price of a barrel of crude from about $3 to nearly $12 by early 1974, triggering gas lines, odd-even rationing days, a major stock market decline and a recession. The embargo was lifted in March 1974, but it prompted multiple policy decisions designed to lessen dependence on foreign oil, including the national 55 mph speed limit, fuel economy (CAFE) standards, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and, in 1977, the Department of Energy.

1994 — The U.S.–North Korea Agreed Framework. The United States signs the “Agreed Framework” with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in Geneva, under which the DPRK agrees to freeze its nuclear program in exchange for 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil a year, arrangements for an international consortium to build two light-water reactors, formal assurances against the threat or use of U.S. nuclear weapons, and moves toward full diplomatic and economic recognition. The NORKS, for their part, would “freeze” their graphite-moderated reactors, remain within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, “take steps” toward denuclearizing the Korean peninsula, and dismantle the graphite reactors once the light-water reactors were complete. The reactors were never finished. The deal collapsed in 2002 when the U.S. confronted Pyongyang over a secret uranium enrichment program; North Korea quit the NPT in January 2003 and conducted its first nuclear test in October 2006.

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Wayne Creed

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