1187: The
Saracen general Saladin established a military siege of Jerusalem in a bid to break the nearly 100-year reign of Christian kings over the city.
1254: Birth of Venetian explorer Marco Polo (d.1324).
1519: Portuguese explorer and navigator Ferdinand Magellan, on commission Spanish King Carlos I (later Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire), departs on a voyage of circumnavigation in order to confirm a westward connection between Spain and the Spice Islands of the South Pacific. Magellan’s fleet consists of five ships and 270 men.
1676: At the climax of three months of agitation by 29 year old planter Nathaniel Bacon, a makeshift “army” of nearly a thousand angry Virginia frontiersmen and farmers, furious that Governor William Berkeley will not stand with them against Indian harassment and raids, storm into the colonial capital at Jamestown and burn the city to the ground. Although Bacon’s Revolt (a.k.a. Bacon’s Rebellion) represented a clear danger to the colonial government, it rapidly fell apart when Bacon himself contracted dysentery and died in late October.
1715: Death of French Benedictine monk Dom Pierre Perignon (b.1638), widely credited with inventing the process of producing sparkling wines in the Champagne province of France.
1752: The British Empire adopts the Gregorian Calendar as its standard, replacing the historic Julian Calendar. This act has the unusual effect of causing eleven days to vanish into thin air. In early American texts and many other documents referencing the 18th century, you will see the annotation “O.S.” which designates the date as using the “Old Style” calendar. Thomas Jefferson’s birth date is shown on his grave site as April 2, 1743 (O.S.), but if you look in most biographies, they show it as April 13th.
1776: Guarding the northernmost portions of Alta California, Spain establishes the Presidio of San Francisco on the tip of land that borders the entrance to San Francisco Bay. It remained in Army hands until the BRAC rolled through in 1988. The facility was turned over to the National Parks Service in 1994 as mixed use historic, recreational, and commercial sector of the City.
1789: Representatives from the Several States, in congress, after over two years of intense discussion and negotiation, sign The Constitution of the United States in Philadelphia, and send the document to the States themselves for ratification.
1793: George Washington lays the first cornerstone for the capitol building in the District of Columbia.
1812: A week after his victory over the Russian army at Borodino, Napoleon Bonaparte and his Grande Armee enter Moscow and take possession of the Kremlin.
1812: A day after Napoleon’s entry into Moscow, a series of fires begin just after midnight, spreading and building into a three day firestorm that consumes nearly ¾ of the mostly wooden city. The French evacuate until the fire is contained, but remain in occupation of the Russian capital.
1814: Georgetown lawyer and amateur poet Francis Scott Key, held overnight as a prisoner aboard HMS Tonnant in Baltimore Harbor, observes with trepidation the all-night British bombardment of Fort McHenry. Not knowing the outcome of the American defense from the British assault, he waits on deck, and as the dawn breaks, the 15-star flag of the United States remains aloft over the fort. He scratches down a few notes, and after returning home, completes a four-stanza poem called The Defense of Fort McHenry, set to the tune of a popular English drinking song. We know it, of course, as the Star Spangled Banner.
1850: As part of the Compromise of 1850 Congress passes the Fugitive Slave Act.
1862: As part of the plan exposed by Robert E. Lee’s “lost dispatch”, a Confederate detachment under Stonewall Jackson captures the town of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, snagging with it a huge number of U.S. forces (12,419 Federals), the largest ever capture of American soldiers until the Japanese overwhelmed Bataan in 1942.
1862: The Union Army of the Potomac halts Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s first foray into the northern states a the Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg), the single bloodiest day of combat in American history, with 23,000 casualties (10,000 Union, 13,000 Confederate).
1863: The Battle of Chickamauga is fought on the approaches to Chattanooga, Tennessee. The huge clash is a pyrrhic Confederate victory that halts a major Union advance, but at such a cost that the Confederates never really recover their full fighting capability in the Western theater. The battle carries the distinction of creating the second-highest number of casualties in the entire Civil War, (Union 16,170 (1,670 KIA), Confederate 18,454 (2,312 KIA)), second only to the casualty count at Gettysburg in July
1875: Birth of James C. Penny (d.1971), who opened his first dry-goods store in Kemmerer, Wyoming, in 1902.
1881: Death of President James Garfield (b.1831), eighty days after being shot by a disgruntled federal employee. Garfield’s major accomplishment during his short term as President was initiating a massive civil service reform program, beginning with the post office.
1891: Birth of Karl Donitz (d.1980), German submariner and intellect behind the highly effective “Wolfpack” strategy in World War II. Donitz had the dubious distinction of being named in Hitler’s will as his successor as head of the Third Reich. He issued the surrender order to the German armed forces after a week in office, carefully working the timing of the event so that the bulk of the German armed forces would fall under the control of the Western Allies instead of the Soviet Union.
1893: American bicycle maker and inventor Charles Duryea, along with his brother Frank, perform a road test on their first gasoline-powered vehicle, a 4-horsepower single-cylinder model.
1901: Death of President William McKinley (b.1843), felled by an assassin’s bullet.
1908: On an Army demonstration flight at Fort Meyer, Virginia, the Wright Brothers’ first commercial aircraft Model A, piloted by Orville Wright, crashes when one of the propellers breaks, slicing a guy wire and severing the rear control surfaces of the machine. Wright is severely injured by the plunge into the ground, and his passenger, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge dies, becoming the world’s first aviation fatality.
1914: Birth of my favorite author of children’s books, Robert McCloskey (d.2003).
1916: After two and a half months of unrelenting combat in the Battle of the Somme, British forces introduce the “tank” to the battlefield. The machine is impervious to barbed wire and rifle & machine gun fire, but is very slow moving (3 mph) and notoriously unreliable. That being said, it does the job of creating a clear path for supporting infantry to break through German defenses in several portions of the battle line.
1917: The Russian parliament officially declares itself a republic. Go figure. You probably recalled that the February Revolution earlier this year was something less than a resounding success, but the Karinski government kept bumbling along up to this point. The communist cretin who will turn the country upside down next month had been agitating for a full-on socialist revolution since April, and this month began throwing down markers that could only be met with violence.
1919: Congress officially authorizes U.S. veterans of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), fresh from their victorious return from the Great War, to incorporate The American Legion as a veterans support group under Title 36 U.S.C.
1939: First broadcast by Nazi propagandist Lord Haw Haw, who railed against British combat and diplomatic activities across the European continent.
1940: The most active day of the Battle of Britain– the first day of Germany’s final “decisive” air assault on England.
1944: Birth of Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner, first man to climb all of the world’s 14 peaks over 8,000 meters (26,000 feet), and the first to solo to the summit of Mount Everest (29,029 feet) without supplemental oxygen.
1945: Opening assault in the brutal Battle of Pelileu in the South Pacific. The HBO mini-series The Pacific centered its narrative on 1st Marine Division that spearheaded this campaign.
1948: The North American Aviation F-86 Sabrejet sets a world speed record of 671 mph. The design, particularly the swept-back wings, was derived from captured German aerodynamic research dating from 1940.
1950: After nearly four months of catastrophic defeats and retreats at the hands of communist North Korea’s juggernaut, and with the entirety of his active forces engaged holding onto the Pusan perimeter by their fingernails, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur orders up his final reserves (1st Marine Division and Army 7th Infantry Division) to make an amphibious landing at Inchon, Korea, the west coast port city just a few miles from the conquered capital city of Seoul, and hundreds of miles behind the North Korean front to the south. The invasion, timed to arrive between thirty foot (true) tide cycles and covering three separated landing areas, caught the NORKS completely unawares and overwhelmed by the naval and military power suddenly thrust into the strategic heart of the peninsula. The attack broke the back of North Korean logistics support to their overstretched and exhausted forces battling at Pusan, and within weeks the UN forces began rounding up over 135,000 NORK prisoners, followed by dramatically launching into a counter-attack that pushed the communist armies all the way back the border with China on the Yalu river. MacArthur’s strategic sense and timing overcame strong opposition from USN and Army leadership and gave the UN (make no mistake, it was overwhelmingly a US battle) forces a military and moral victory at the point when it appeared all was lost.
1952: American silent film icon and long-time left wing political advocate Charlie Chaplin leaves for a trip to England, and is immediately barred from re-entry to the United States by the Immigration and Naturalization Service at the behest of the House Un-American Activities Committee and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
1962: Civil rights activist James Meredith is barred from entering the University of Mississippi.
1970: Jordan’s King Hussein declares martial law in response to an attempted fedeyeen coup against his Hashemite throne. The conspirators, organized around Yassir Arafat’s Fatah movement, vow revenge over their failure and formed a new militant group known as the Black September Organization in memory of this day. Two years later, the Black September kidnapped and assassinated eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich, ensuring that the terms “Palestinian” and “terrorist” would be forever linked.
1970: Death of guitarist Jimmi Hendrix (b.1942), by heroin overdose.
1975: Kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst is arrested a year after her inclusion on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
1984: Retired USAF test pilot Joe Kittenger completes the first solo balloon crossing of the Atlantic Ocean.
1991: Discovery of 5,300 year old Copper Age mummy, “Otzi the Iceman” by German mountaineers.
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