History Notes this week of Oct 3

3761 BC: The “epoch reference date” for the modern Hebrew calendar.

1187: After three weeks of siege, the Saracen warlord Saladin captures Jerusalem, ending 88 years of Crusader rule over the Holy City. In contrast to the Crusaders’ bloodletting and mayhem when they entered the city in 1092, Saladin permitted the option of an orderly departure of its citizens, or a hefty dhimmi tax. Thirty days after the fall, Jerusalem’s gates were opened and the vast majority of the city left under Saladin’s guarantee of safe passage to Antioch and other Christian strongholds along the Levant coast.

1226: Death of the monk Francis of Assisi (b.1181), who renounced a life of wealth and soldiering in favor of a life of pious poverty and prayer. His Franciscan Order grew to be one of the most influential in Europe, with its ministry structured on the simple precept: “To follow the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ and to walk in his footsteps,” the injunction being drawn from Francis’ reading of Matthew 10:9. The recent Bishop of Rome took Francis’ name when he ascended to the papacy in 2013.

1535: French explorer Jacques Cartier lays claim to the area now known as Montreal, Canada.

1535: Publication of the Coverdale Bible, the first English printing of the complete 66 canonical books plus the Apocrypha. Translator Miles Coverdale used William Tyndales’s New Testament translations, in addition to Tyndale’s translation of the book of Jonah. The rest of the Old Testament he translated himself from German texts and the Latin Vulgate.

1571: Battle of Lepanto- The last exclusive galley-versus-galley naval battle, fought between the navies of the Ottoman Turks and a Christian coalition formed by Don Juan of Austria. The lopsided victory stopped the Ottoman coastal surge in its tracks, and is considered one of the three great battles that ensured the continued development of a Christian Europe under the spiritual guidance of the Pope, as opposed to a Muslim Europe under the political and spiritual control of the Caliphate of Ottoman Turkey.

1574: Six years into what would become the Eighty Years War (also known as the Dutch War of Independence) a flat-bottomed fleet of boats and ships, collected and led by Prince William the Silent of the House of Orange, and manned by the Watergeuzen*, lifts the Siege of Leiden, and saves the university city from certain desolation from the hand of the Spanish Duke of Alva.

The dynastic ebbs and flows of the 16th and 17th Centuries provide much fodder for our lingering cultural sense of what is good and what is not. It always struck me as odd that the 17 provinces of the Netherlands were under Spanish rule, unless you remember that Spain was, itself, ruled by princes from the Austrian House of Hapsburg, who schemed long enough to see their dynasty completely surround their arch-enemy, France and the House of Bourbon.

The economic power of this tiny region provided an unusually lucrative income for the Spanish throne, who took great pains to keep it under the Spanish thumb, both politically and economically. William of Orange tapped into the stirrings of Dutch nationalism and led a rebellion against Spanish rule that would eventually lead to the independence of the Netherlands in 1648.

Back to the Siege of Leiden: this beautiful and strategically located city was a hotbed of independent thinking and support for the rebellion, and Alva was especially ruthless in his attempts to beat them down. The city’s outstanding defensive dispositions- walls and moats- protected it from Alva’s first investment a couple years earlier, and again during this siege. But the city’s situation also made them terribly isolated from William’s relieving force. William finally sent a carrier pigeon into the city, telling them to hang on for three more months, at which point he would arrive by boat with a relieving force. To do so, he broke the dykes between the North Sea and Leiden, and systematically sailed his fleet across the flooded polderland, driving Alva’s forces from the field and relieving the city, eventually unloading tons of herring and white bread for the starving citizens. The event remains a Big Deal in the Dutch psyche, and includes those odd little bits that you sometimes wonder about. For example, if Dutch children are bad at Christmastime, they are threatened with being fed to the Black Prince (Alva always wore black), or they are threatened with being sent off to Spain, which would have been a terrifying proposition in 1574.

The day is celebrated today with meals of herring and white bread, and a carrot & onion stew called “Hutspot,” which was actually a Spanish meal, abandoned hot by the defending army at the sudden appearance of the rising waters that carried in the Watergeuzen.

1604: A star in the constellation Ophiuchus (nope, I’ve never heard of it before…) explodes in a paroxysm visible to the naked eye, the brightest star in the night sky, rivaling even Venus. The great astronomer Johannes Kepler observes the star for over a year, detailing its intensity and movement in such detail that it was named Kepler’s Supernova. Located ~20,000 light-years from Earth, it is the most recent supernova to have occurred in our own Milky Way galaxy.

1691: Great Britain issues a Royal Charter establishing the Province of Massachusetts, ‘way across the sea in the New World, where the Plymouth Plantation was continuing to prosper.

1701: Connecticut colony issues a charter to the Collegiate School of Connecticut, located in Old Saybrook (although it probably wasn’t quite so old back in the day). You would probably recognize the school as Yale University.

1763: King George III issues the Royal Proclamation of 1763 stating, among other things, that aboriginal lands north and west of the Appalachians and Alleghenies were closed to white settlement. The edict came on the heels of the Treaty of Paris that ended the 7 Years War (a.k.a. French and Indian War), which ceded to Britain all French claims to the eastern drainage of the Mississippi River. The king and Parliament reasoned that by keeping white settlers out, it would not only stabilize relations with the Indian tribes of the Ohio Valley, but also would inhibit the rampant land speculation that was sure to get worse as the new territory was surveyed. British colonists along the seaboard did not see it quite that way, helping set the conditions for further unrest and dissatisfaction with the Crown in the years to come.

1780: Death of British spy John Andre (b.1750), hanged by the neck until dead. You’ll remember that he was closely aligned with Benedict Arnold’s plan to turn over West Point to the British. Although he proclaimed his innocence of espionage, his plea was undone by having the plans for West Point tucked into his socks, which did not go over well with the military tribunal who sentenced him. Interestingly, everyone associated with him between his arrest and his hanging agreed that he remained the consummate gentleman, facing death like a true soldier, despite not being allowed a soldierly death by firing squad.

1780: At the Battle of Kings Mountain, near Blacksburg, South Carolina, an American Patriot militia, loosely organized as a collection of scores of smaller militias from “over the mountain” regions, and under the nominal command of ten different colonels, decisively defeat a superior force of Loyalist militia under the command of British Major Patrick Ferguson.

The Loyalist force was part of Lord Cornwallis’ Southern Strategy, which attempted to exploit Loyalist sentiment in the coastal regions by creating local militias that would take the fight to- and thence out of- their Patriot-leaning neighbors inland, led and supported by British Regulars. The previous months saw repeated vindication of this strategy with the capture of Charleston, the Battle of Camden, the Battle of Waxhaws, and Tarleton’s Massacre.

Major Ferguson expected to make a short, violent thrust inland from the Waxhaw area to put down the last of the Patriots. What he didn’t know is that the news of Tarleton’s Massacre inflamed Patriots hundreds of miles away, and the intervening weeks gave the distant militias time to gather and loosely organize a defense. Ferguson finally learned of the gathering force, and took a strong defensive position atop Kings Mountain. When the Patriot attack started, Ferguson rode up & down the line, fully exposed to fire, blowing commands with a silver whistle. The Patriot militias, meanwhile, broke into 20 separate groups and charged screaming up the hill, pausing behind rocks to load their rifles, carefully aiming at and picking off individual Loyalists, and eventually Ferguson himself. It was a terribly lopsided victory, completely unexpected by either side, but it unleashed Patriot momentum throughout all the colonies, and most especially in the Carolinas, where Cornwallis’ Regulars were on the cusp of an even more strategic defeat at Cowpens.

1789: President George Washington signs the first Thanksgiving Day proclamation.

1793: In a continuing effort to ensure the citizens of France believe and behave as rationally as possible, the National Convention formally adopts a legislative program to de-christianize [sic] the country. Rather than pursuing the American precedent of separating the offices of Church and State, and thus allowing free exercise of religious conviction, the Convention reasoned that there should be no public acknowledgement or display of religion at all, even in churches.

The program opening this day entailed:

1. Confiscation of all church properties, to be held by the State as collateral on its new currency;
2. Removal of all silver, gold, art and any other iconography from places of worship;
3. Removal and destruction of any crosses, bells or other external signs of worship being conducted;
4. Establishment of civic cults, specifically designed to incline the heart toward the virtues of the benevolent State through the Cult of Reason and the Cult of the Supreme Being (more in November);
5. Most importantly, holding all non-jury (i.e., those who refuse to vow obedience to the jury of the civil government) priests liable for death.

1795: The young French general (age 26 (correct (what were you doing at 26?))) Napoleon Bonaparte, fresh from suppressing counter-revolutionary insurrection down in Toulon, arrives in Paris to suppress an even more dangerous insurrection that physically threatens the National Convention. He orders several batteries of artillery into position in the streets of the capital to protect the Tuilieries Palace. The cannons are not loaded with normal cannonballs, but with thousands of small pellets, making them the equivalent of giant shotguns. Bonaparte’s artillery mows down over 1,400 royalists, tidily ending the revolt. His actions today quickly became known as the “whiff of grapeshot…” the expression of which you will still hear bandied about today.

1799: HMS Lutine founders and sinks off the Frisian Islands in the North Sea, taking with her to her watery grave 240 souls and £1,200,000 pounds in gold bullion. You’ll remember that Lutine’s bell was recovered in 1858 and is displayed in the central hall of Lloyds of London, where until 1986 it sounded a single toll on news of a lost ship, and two when a missing ship was reported safe. No fewer than 14 salvage attempts have been made to recover the treasure. The most successful was the 1857-58 expedition, which brought up 45 gold bars, 64 silver bars, and over 15,000 coins of various denominations, yielding the investors a return of 136%. The last salvage attempt was in 1933.

1812: In the Battle of Lake Erie, an American squadron of 9 ships under Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry achieves a decisive victory against a fleet of 6 British gunboats, ensuring American control of the entire southern coastline of the Great Lakes for the remainder of the war. Perry’s formal report of the battle is deliciously brief: “Dear General, We have met the enemy and they are ours. Two ships, two brigs, one schooner, and one sloop. Yours with great respect and esteem, O.H. Perry”

1813: Death of the great Indian warrior Tecumseh (b.1768), in the Battle of the Thames, near present-day Chatham, Ontario.

1861: Birth of the great American artist Fredric Remington (d.1909) whose eye for our Western heritage was unparalleled.

1863: President Abraham Lincoln signs a proclamation designating the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day.

1871: Birth of Nobel Laureate Cordell Hull (d.1955), who carries the distinction of being the nation’s longest-serving Secretary of State- 11 years- during the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. He is credited with being the “Father of the United Nations,” a role for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1945. In my mind, his best moment occurred on the morning of December 7th, 1941, when he received word about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at the very moment two Japanese diplomats were in his anteroom awaiting an audience regarding continuing negotiations. From Wikipedia:

“Roosevelt advised him not to tell them about the raid but ‘to receive them formally and coolly bow them out’. After he had glanced at their copy of the fourteen-part message [Japan’s declaration that negotiations were at an end], Hull’s anger burst forth. ‘In all my fifty years of public service,’ he told the astonished diplomats, ‘I have never seen such a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehood and distortion.’ Nomura and Kurusu, who had not been told of the attack, bowed themselves out in an embarrassed fluster. A department official overheard Hull muttering under his breath as the door closed, ‘Scoundrels and piss-ants.’”

1883: First continuous run of the Orient Express, that is, the original Orient Express, which set the standard for intrigue and luxury travel between Paris and Istanbul. There probably weren’t any murders on board this run, but you can never tell.

1884: Under the tutelage of Commodore Stephen Luce, the United States Naval War College is established in Newport, Rhode Island. The school nurtured among it first faculty Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, one of the most brilliant intellects ever to don a Navy uniform, and developer of the seminal theory of naval warfare that holds naval fleets as the key to controlling events ashore. A “Mahanian Navy” is one comprised primarily of capital ships that can duke it out on the high seas with other capital ships, after which they can turn their attention to the land campaign, if necessary.

1888: Birth of Henry Wallace (d.1965). Wallace served as Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice President, 1941-45**. He was the 1948 nominee for President of the Progressive Party. He was a Socialist through and through, regularly alienating his own Democrats, to say nothing of the rest of the country, with his outspoken admiration for the advances of the Soviet Union.

1888: The recently completed Washington Monument opens to visits by the general public. Have you ever hiked up that stairwell? It is very cool- well worth the effort, not only for the view, but also to see the complex interior structure of the obelisk, which was at the time of its opening the tallest man-made structure in the world.

1889: American inventor Thomas Edison publicly displays his motion picture device for the first time.

1892: Death of British Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson (b.1809). You probably remembered that he wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade, but if you ever took an English Lit class, you’d be able to name a few other works as well. He is a master of lyric and cadence, even outside of actual poetry.

1899: Birth of Bruce Catton (d.1978), American historian and author of the gripping Civil War vignette, A Stillness at Appomattox, the third installment of his Civil War trilogy after Mr. Lincoln’s Army and Glory Road. Most of my generation probably also remember him as the author of the American Heritage series of history books we devoured in junior high.

1902: Birth of Ray Kroc (d.1984). Remember what his canny business model was? Still works, best I can tell.

1904: Death of Austrian chemist Carl Bayer (b.1847).

1905: During their Huffman Prairie flying period outside of Dayton, Wilbur Wright sets an airplane endurance record of 26 miles traveled over the ground in 39 minutes.

1908: The government of Austria-Hungary annexes Bosnia and Herzegovina into their polyglot empire. The two provinces are normally always mentioned in tandem, although those of you who have been over there know that the people who actually live in the places would rather not be connected with each other.

1914: Less than 10 years after Wright’s record flight, a French pilot, Louis Quenact, opens fire with a machine gun to shoot down a German pilot interfering with his reconnaissance duties. This is widely regarded as the first day of intentional aerial combat.

1919: President Woodrow Wilson suffers a massive stroke that paralyzes the left side of his body, rendering him essentially incapacitated for the remaining year and a half of his Presidency. His wife Edith completely controlled his schedule and access to anyone outside the immediate White House circle, particularly the Vice President, the entire Cabinet, and visiting Members of Congress. After several months, she arranged for journalist Louis Sibold to write a false account of his health. Toward the end of his term, he would be wheeled into the Cabinet Room, where he would preside but only make the most perfunctory remarks.

1919: The Chicago White Sox throw the final game of the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, cementing for themselves the opprobrium of the nation, and the permanent moniker of the Black Socks.

1921: Birth of North American Aviation test pilot Scott Crossfield (d.2006), who alternated with fellow test pilot Chuck Yeager in setting altitude and speed records in increasingly spectacular and dangerous test aircraft during the 1950s. He was the first to reach Mach 2.0. He was intimately involved in the design and test flights of the X-15 rocket plane, flying the machine 14 times to verify systems and procedures, without making any record-breaking flights himself. His own X-15 records are Mach 2.97, and an altitude of 91,800 feet; not too shabby in any pilot’s logbook.

1927: Opening night for The Jazz Singer, starring the versatile Al Jolson. The movie was the first commercial presentation of a “talkie” where sound and music were synchronized with the visual images on the screen. It didn’t take long for the silent movies to go away, along with a number of silent movie stars whose voices didn’t quite fit in with their on-screen images.

1935: Fascist Italy, governed by the internationally popular Progressive reformer Benito Mussolini, opens its invasion of Abyssinia, an eight-month conflict that ended with the region’s annexation into the Italian Empire as Italian East Africa. The glory days were brief, as the colonies were stripped away from Italy by the Allies of World War II, and later granted independence as Ethiopia and Somalia. As if more evidence were needed, this war also underlined the futile efforts of the League of Nations to create a viable forum for settling international disputes. And for us language mavens, the independence of these two new countries (of itself a good thing) also foreclosed on two more of those East African place-names that are so entertaining to pronounce: Somaliland and Abyssinia.

1950: First installment of the Peanuts cartoon strip, written and drawn by Charles Schultz.

1955: First television broadcast of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club.

1956: In the fifth game of the World Series against their arch-rivals the Brooklyn Dodgers, journeyman pitcher Don Larsen launches 97 pitches over the plate in Yankee Stadium, and with seven strikeouts and the help of a handful of World Series-level field plays as an assist, knocks 27 batters back to the dugout; three up, three down for nine innings. It was the first Perfect Game in 34 years, and the place went nuts. It remains the only Perfect Game in World Series history.

1957(a): The Soviet Union successfully launches Sputnik 1 into orbit, creating a little beep heard ‘round the world. You youngsters may find it hard to believe, but that little ball of aluminum turned the United States inside out until we launched a little satellite of our own. Part of the angst was the realization that the Russians had the rocket technology to lob a bomb across the planet at us, and we had nothing in return.

1957(b): Happily for the rest of us, this evening gave us the first broadcast of Leave it to Beaver. The program ran 234 episodes, up through 1963.

1962: Navy Commander Wally Schirra blasts into orbit aboard Sigma-7 the fifth flight of the Mercury space program. The six-orbit mission lasted a little over 9 hours. The Sigma-7 mission was distinctive from the engineering perspective as it tested the suitability of spacecraft systems for progressively longer duration missions. The tests did not make for much drama (other than the fact of orbiting in space), as Schirra spent much of the mission doing essentially nothing, either permitting the spacecraft automated flight controls to maintain its positioning, or shutting down the system entirely for hours at a time, and then seeing what happened when it was re-engaged. It provided proof-of-concept for the remaining Mercury flight (22 orbits) and the much more ambitious planning for the Gemini program. Schirra was the only one of the original astronauts to fly on all three of the United States’ original space programs.

1962: Birth of American race car driver Michael Andretti, son of Mario, father of Marco.

1967: A day after his capture by the Bolivians, Che Guevara learns conclusively if there is a greater Judge of life and death.

1973: Opening guns in the Yom Kippur War, with coordinated Egyptian and Syrian attacks across the Suez Canal into Israeli-occupied Sanai Peninsula and Golan Heights respectively. Catching the Israeli Defense Forces off-guard on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, both Arab armies made significant territorial gains during the first three days of the fighting.

Three weeks later (10/25), with the Israelis having crossed the Suez Canal themselves to completely encircle the Egyptian Third Army and advancing within artillery range of Cairo, and in the northern fight having recovered all the ground initially lost to Syria and then expanded their hold to the entirety of the high ground within sight of Damascus, all parties accepted a brokered ceasefire that ended the war.

1981: Death of Anwar Sadat (b.1918), President of Egypt, at the hand of a core of Army officers egged on by an Islamist fatwa issued by Omar Abdel-Rhaman, a.k.a. “The Blind Sheikh” who also was also convicted for the first attack on the World Trade Center. Sadat’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel negated in Islamist’s eyes any gains he made by launching the 1973 Yom Kippur War against the Jewish state. In 2017 Abdel-Rhaman died in a federal prison in NC, finally putting to an end to his issuing fatwas against the West and any Muslim who would dare to resist the Islamist movement.

1990: The final day of existence for the not-to-be lamented German Democratic Republic. VESTRI ANIMUS MOS PUTESCO IN ABYSSUS.

1995: The blood-soaked and shrunken leather glove didn’t fit, so Heisman Award winner O. J. Simpson is acquitted of murdering his wife and houseguest, freeing him to find the “real killer” on golf courses and memorabilia shows all around the warmer tier of the country.

2001: NATO confirms Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty for the first and only time. You remember that Article 5 is the core of the treaty, stating that an attack on one is an attack on all. Although it was designed to counter a Soviet attack on Western Europe, it was actually the United States who invoked it after 9/11. Germany responded right away by deploying NATO AWACS to U.S. airspace, and the rest of the European allies did their bit by supporting our engagement in Afghanistan.

About the Author

Wayne Creed

Administrator

View All Posts