3761 BC: The “epoch reference date” for the modern Hebrew calendar. The calendar’s epoch, corresponding to the calculated date of the world’s creation, is equivalent to sunset on the Julian proleptic calendar date 6 October 3761 BC. The new year begins at Rosh Hashanah, in Tishrei.
539 BC: Cyrus the Great of Persia captures Babylon, adding another huge swath of fertile territory to what became the largest unified empire on earth up to its time. Cyrus maintains an honored place in Western Civilization as one of the early progenitors of a centralized state managed by the rule of law. He integrated conquered peoples into the empire with a high degree of sensitivity to their customs, strengths and weaknesses, developing a system of local Satraps to administer the lands in the name of the King. Cyrus also has a place of honor in the Bible, being the referred to as “God’s anointed,” who not only freed the Jews from their Babylonian exile, but financed their return to their homeland.
680: Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the prophet Mohammad, is decapitated in battle against the army of Caliph Yazid I. Ali’s death is one of the defining events in Islam’s great Sunni-Shi’a split. The core of the dispute centers on who rules as the legitimate successor to the prophet himself: blood heirs (Shi’a position) or political-scholarly leaders (Sunni position). The death is commemorated as the feast of Ashurah.
732: A Frankish army of 30,000 under the command of Charles “The Hammer” Martel, decisively defeats the invading Muslim army of Abdul Rahman al Ghafiqi at the Battle of Tours (also known as the Battle of Poitiers (pronounced “pwat’-teeaay”)). As I mentioned a few days ago with the Battle of Lepanto, this victory was one of three- many would say it was the most important- engagements that halted the militant spread of Islam in its tracks, and ensured that Europe would continue to develop as a collection of explicitly Christian kingdoms. The conventional wisdom over the last century or so is that had Martel’s army not been successful here, the tallest towers in the cities of Europe would have been minarets instead of church steeples.
1307: King Philip the Fair of France, with the begrudging support of the Pope, sends out swarms of secret agents to arrest over 400 Knights Templar on charges of treason, blasphemy, and a dozen or so other spurious charges. You probably remember back to DLH 3/18, when the last Grand Master of the order, Jacques de Molay was burned at the stake: this was the moment when Philip’s crusade against the Crusaders came to fruition, with torture, forced confessions and brutal executions following in the wake of this night
1492: Five weeks after heading west from the Canary Islands, Christopher Columbus makes landfall near Samana Cay in the southern region of the Bahamas Islands. He spends the next three months exploring primarily along the north coast of Cuba and the island of Hispaniola, trading with the natives, taking careful soundings while noting the locations of the harbors and availability of provisions for follow-on exploration. NOTE: There is a strain of revisionist history that is working to debunk Columbus’ colossal achievement in planning and successfully executing this unprecedented voyage, in addition to working to intellectually neutralize the impact of his other two voyages and attempts to establish a Spanish colonial regime over a people who were hitherto completely ignorant about European power and politics. Depending on how you frame it, Columbus’ voyages to the New World can be a story that exposes the ugly underside of power and corruption, i.e., the normal human condition, or it can be a story of vision and courage and endurance against unknown and often fatal odds. I strongly favor the latter view. Columbus may not have been the first European to set foot in the Americas (and I believe that Lief Erricson has that honor, even though he didn’t know it), but he was certainly the first to do it intentionally as the leader of a truly national undertaking. Today’s discovery was the trigger for the Great Age of Exploration and the scientific revolution that swept into its wake. It is also not much of a stretch to credit the Reformation and the Enlightenment to the exploratory impulse of this great mariner, whom the Spanish Crown named “Admiral of the Ocean Seas.”
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.
1600: The tiny principality of San Marino, a small Tuscan city tucked on the side of a cliff adopts a written constitution, making it the first republic of the modern age.
1654: A huge explosion in the beautiful Dutch city of Delft kills over a hundred people, injures hundreds more, and levels the central business district. The blast occurred during an inspection of a gunpowder magazine in the city center. Interestingly, the Delft University of Technology maintains an explicit and popular major in the science of explosions, a direct result of this tragedy.
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.
1739: Birth of Grigory Potemkin (d.1791), Russian nobleman, military leader, and lifelong “favorite” of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. The idiom that now bears his name came from his time as Governor-General of the newly annexed Crimea region. On the eve of renewed war with the Ottoman Empire, the Empress made an “unannounced” visit up the Dnieper River with her Court, multiple ambassadors, and a disguised Austrian Emperor Joseph II to show them the strength of her new territories. Potemkin painted up actual riverfront villages to make them look better, and also created a kind of mobile village that could be set up quickly and populated with members of his army and staff dressed up as peasants as the royal flotilla went by. It could just as quickly be knocked down and moved to the next location.
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 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.
1775: The Continental Congress, recognizing the need to do something to protect American trade on the high seas, authorizes and purchases two vessels to act as the Continental Navy, progenitor of the United States Navy, which recognizes this date as its formal beginning. The tiny American fleet eventually grew to 65 vessels, mostly converted merchant ships, all of which provided the command and operational experiences for the cadre of captains who distinguished themselves in later naval conflicts with both France and Great Britain. 11 ships finished the war basically intact, with the final one, frigate Alliance, being sold off to a private buyer for $26,000* in 1785
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.
1780: A massive hurricane tears through the Lesser Antilles, creating a swath of destruction from the Grenadines to Bermuda that leaves 23,200 souls dead and no fewer than 65 naval vessels from France, the Netherlands and Great Britain lost at sea or smashed to splinters on a lee shore, to say nothing of the devastation ashore, where thousands of homes and business were swept away by the storm’s surge. The Great Hurricane of 1780 remains the single most destructive weather event in the history of the Atlantic Ocean.
1792: In the District of Columbia, the cornerstone is laid for the Executive Mansion, known today as the White House.
1810: Crown Prince Ludwig I of Bavaria invites all the citizens of Munich to a fair just outside the city gates to celebrate his wedding to Princess Therese of Saxe- Hildburghausen, celebrating in a meadow they named Threseinweise (Therese’s meadow), the same name as it has today. The celebration has an agricultural fair, horse races, fresh beer, and a general celebration of all things Bavarian, that the good citizens of Munich have continued it to this day (well, except this day in 2020), as the annual Oktoberfest, where you can eat traditional Bavarian food, drink traditional Bavarian beer, and marvel at the traditional capacity of those Bavarians to keep pounding down the food and drink.
1823: Scotsman Charles Macintosh patents and sells his first raincoat, a garment whose virtues are a direct result of Macintosh’s invention of a method to blend rubber into cotton and linen threads, thus finally creating a wearable outer shell that actually repels water.
1844: Birth of Henry J. Heinz (d.1916). The logo on his ketchup bottles says “57 Varieties.”
1845: The first class of The Naval School is seated in Annapolis, Maryland; 50 midshipmen and 7 instructors begin the process of formalizing the training of nascent officers of the U.S. Navy.
1871: Three days after “Mrs. O’Leary’s cow” knocked over the lantern in the barn, The Great Chicago Fire finally burns itself out. The cataclysm took over 300 lives, left nearly three and a half square miles of the city center in cinders, and displaced over 100,000 people from their homes. The cow story, by the way, was fabricated by a journalist, knowing it would play well against the latent anti-Irish sentiment that infected much of Chicago society.
1879: At the Battle of Angamos, the Chilean Navy defeats the Peruvian navy in a crucial action that opened up the Bolivian port of Antofagasta to eventual occupation and annexation by Chile. I count myself among those of us Norte Americanos whose knowledge of South American history ends somewhere in the early 1800s when Simon Bolivar forced Spain to begin breaking up their centuries-old overseas empire. “And what happened then?” we ask. Without Spain to enforce colonial borders, the newly independent states resorted to the traditional methods of inter-state war to settle competing claims and boundary disputes. In this case, the issue at hand was the lucrative mining regions of the central Pacific coast, nominally under Bolivian control, but claimed as well by Peru and Chile. The naval battle this day provided a huge strategic advantage to Chile, which was eventually codified in the treaty that ended the 1879-83 War of the Pacific, also known colloquially as “The Saltpeter War” or “The Guano War,” due to the nature of one of the mining products in the region.
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.
1910: At Kinloch Field just west of Saint Louis, Theodore Roosevelt climbs aboard a Wright Model B aeroplane with pilot Archibald Hoxey and becomes the first (ex-)President to go flying.
1912: Opening guns of the 1st Balkan War, where the Balkan League (Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria) initiated combat in a bid for independence from the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans were no match for the multi-front armies of the four allies, who relatively swiftly defeated their Turkish overlords and then settled into their own rounds of territorial squabbling, aided and abetted by the Great Powers of Europe.
1919: Birth of Doris Miller (d.1943), a cook aboard USS West Virginia (BB-48). During the attack on Pearl Harbor, Miller dashed up to the bridge after his normal General Quarters station was hit by a Japanese torpedo, and helped move his captain from the path of direct fire from the Japanese aircraft. Then, on his own initiative, he started firing one of the bridge machine guns at the attacking planes. He was presented the Navy Cross by Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz. His citation reads, in part:
““…[his] distinguished devotion to duty, extraordinary courage and disregard of his personal safety during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. While at the side of his Captain on the bridge, Miller despite enemy strafing and bombing, and in the face of serious fire, assisted in moving his Captain, who had been mortally wounded, to a place of greater safety and later manned and operated a machine gun until ordered to leave the bridge.”
2020 Update: Last January the Navy announced that the newest nuclear aircraft carrier in the new Ford class will be named USS Doris Miller (CVN-81).
1928: First use of an Iron Lung for therapeutic respiration, at Children’s Hospital, in Boston.
1928: Three years after the death of his long time mentor, Sun Yat Sen, General Chang Kai Shek becomes Chairman of the Republic of China.
1939: After a hard-fought but clean victory over the Polish army, Nazi Germany annexes western Poland into the Third Reich, conveniently setting the conditions, per the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty, for the Soviet Union to occupy the eastern half of that long-suffering country.
1940: Publication of a secret memorandum by LCDR Arthur H. McCollum, in which he outlines the depth and breadth of the Japanese Empire’s advance throughout “the Orient,” and offers a prescription for what the United States should do about it, namely, generate enough of a confrontation with Japan that they will attack U.S. interests somewhere. Such an attack would ease the U.S. entry into the burgeoning World War, and free us up to materially and overtly support Britain in her life & death struggle with Germans. The McCollum Memo is often bandied about as a “smoking gun” that proves Roosevelt knew about the Pearl Harbor attack in advance and did nothing to stop it, among other flawed theories. McCollum worked as an analyst at the Office of Naval Intelligence on the desk that monitored the Orient.
1941: Birth of singer-songwriter Paul Simon.
1943: After running Il Duce (Mussolini) out of office and putting his corpse on public display on a meat hook, the new government of suddenly non-Fascist Italy turns on their former Pact of Steel partner and joins the Allies against Nazi Germany. The occupying German army is not impressed, and fought a bitter and basically successful retrograde action up the Italian peninsula for the next two years, with the Germans still holding much of northern Italy when the war ended.
1945: In the aftermath of the Japanese surrender, the Communist Chinese under Mao Tse Tung and the Kuomintang of Chang Kai Shek sign an agreement on the post-war future of China. The “Double Tenth” agreement confirmed that the Kuomintang was the de facto ruling party of China, and that the Communists were a legitimate opposition party.
1960: At the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Premier Nikita Khrushchev, becomes incensed with statements made by the Philippine ambassador about the lack of political freedom in the nations of Eastern Europe. Khrushchev, furious, leaps to the podium to forcefully object to the statements, pounding his fist for emphasis, and as he continued, picked up his shoe and continued the diatribe until the embarrassed UN Chairman of the meeting declared the session over. In the U.S., the event became an iconographic shorthand for our view of the mercurial Soviet leader.
1962: Pope John XXIII convenes the Second Vatican Council, the first “summit conference” of the Roman Catholic Church since the First Vatican Council of 1878, and only the 21st Council since the beginning of Roman Christianity. Called with the specific intent of better aligning Catholic practice with the modern, post-World War II world, it remains a flashpoint of principled dissent within the traditional wing of the larger church body. Two primary arguments against the Council assert that:
1) Since there was no formal doctrinal statement supporting the dilution of longstanding traditions of the Church, those changes were therefore not binding for faithful Catholics, and;
2) Building even further on this thought, a small but intense school of thought believes that since the leadership of the Church broke with tradition with the work of the Council, the subsequent Popes have no canonical standing and cannot legitimately claim the papacy, thus legally rendering the office vacant.
Of particular note is the post-John XXIII fate of four of the participants of the Council: Cardinal Giovanni Montini (Paul VI), Bishop Albino Luciani (John Paul I), Bishop Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II), and Father Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI).
1967: The communist leader Che Guevarra, after leaving Cuba, is captured in Bolivia by soldiers of the next government to whom he was addressing his ministrations.
1967: The Outer Space Treaty goes into effect. The parties to the treaty agree to not place nuclear weapons into orbit, and to refrain from using the moon or other celestial bodies as military testing or staging areas. The treaty is often misconstrued as prohibiting the “militarization” of space, but this is not the case. It does provide a framework for consultation and non-interference between spacefaring nations; it considers space part of the global commons, and the moon and other celestial bodies as part of the “common heritage of mankind,”
1969: This day marks the opening of the “Days of Rage,” a “direct action” protest against the war in Vietnam, the draft, corporations, Wall Street, the “man,” suburban life, capitalism, bicameral legislature… Organized [sic] by the Weather Underground, its guiding principle (quoted in Wikipedia) is quite clear: “The Elections Don’t Mean S**t—Vote Where the Power Is—Our Power Is In The Street!”
1972: A race riot breaks out aboard the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk (CVA-63) while conducting Operation Linebacker in the Gulf of Tonkin. With resentment simmering from a recent racial incident on shore leave in Subic Bay, Philippines, nearly 200 black sailors assaulted and injured a number of white crewmen, several of whom had to be evacuated to shore-based hospitals for treatment. Post-event investigation exposed resentment at perceived assignment of black sailors to menial and degrading duties, and the perception that white sailors got more lenient treatment at Captain’s Mast (non-judicial punishment under the UCMJ). CDR Benjamin Cloud (who was black), the Executive Officer of the ship, helped diffuse the situation and got most of the malcontents back to their stations prior to the next day’s flight operations. Nineteen sailors were eventually found guilty of charges related to the riot. It does not take much linguistic imagination to call this event a mutiny, but you won’t hear the word from official Navy sources. What the event did trigger was hair-trigger awareness of any perceived racial slights between black and white sailors. A second, eerily similar mutiny occurred within a month aboard USS Constellation (CVA-64).
1975: First broadcast of Saturday Night Live, with hosts George Carlin and Andy Kauffman.
1977: The Supreme Soviet adopts the 4th Soviet Constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
1984: Terrorists from the Provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army set off a massive time bomb at a hotel in Bristol, UK, where the Conservative Party is holding a conference. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was the explicit target of the blast, but she survived. 5 others were killed, 31 wounded. Mrs. Thatcher took pains to hold the next day’s meetings on schedule in defiance of the terrorists.
1985: The Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro is hijacked by terrorists of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The cretins who captured the ship took wheelchair-bound American tourist Leon Klinghoffer to the upper deck, shot him in the head, and then rolled him and his chair into the cold Mediterranean.
1993: After 103 days of rain, broken levees and farms and towns wiped off the map, the Mississippi River at Saint Louis finally dips below flood stage.
2000: During pierside refueling in the port of Aden, Yemen, two Islamic terrorists carefully moor what looks like a service barge alongside the USS Cole (DDG-67). They pass lines across to the sailors on deck, step back toward the center of their craft, smile and salute the Americans. Then they trigger a huge explosion that blows themselves to smithereens, also killing 17 American sailors, injuring 39, and opening a 40-foot gash in the side of the ship. Quick response from the ship’s damage control teams helped control the flooding and fire, saving the ship from what could easily have been a mortal wound. Cole was lifted back to the States for repairs and upgrades, and was back in service after 14 months. She is currently homeported in Norfolk, VA.
2001: One month after the horrific attacks of 9/11, the Executive Branch of the US government, with the massive concurrence of both houses of Congress, establishes the Office of Homeland Security, led by former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, and charged with doing for domestic security what DOD does for international security.
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