622 A.D.: Traditional date of Mohammad’s first arrival in Medina, after being driven out of his hometown in Mecca.
1254: Birth of Venetian explorer Marco Polo (d.1324).
1598: English playwright and poet Ben Jonson is briefly jailed for manslaughter after killing an actor in a duel. He is released after reciting a Bible verse and getting a tattoo on his thumb. Jonson’s career did not suffer from the episode, and he went on to become one of the most popular men of letters during the Elizabethan era in merrie olde England. He was a peer and theatrical competitor of William Shakespeare, and although he always considered himself the better intellect, he eulogized Shakespeare as the “Sweet Swan of Avon” and “Soul of the Age!”
1641: The British merchant ship Merchant Royal founders at sea and sinks off of the coast of Cornwall, with a cargo of £100,000 of gold, 400 bars of Mexican silver, and 500,000 pieces of eight. It has never been found.
1664: As part of the run up to the Second Anglo-Dutch War, four British frigates array themselves off the shoreline of Nieu Amsterdam and demand the surrender of the city. Governor Peter Stuyvesant agrees, and the British take control of the strategic seaport for the first time.
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.
1776: Death of twenty-one year old American patriot Nathan Hale (b.1755), hanged as a spy after being caught scouting around the British encampment of British General William Howe on Long Island. You probably remember his final words as the noose was placed around his neck: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
1779: The Battle of Flamborough Head. This naval battle was a significant American victory during the Revolutionary War, led by Captain John Paul Jones, that boosted American morale and solidified the crucial Franco-American alliance. The battle was a legendary moment of courage, epitomized by Jones’s rallying cry, “I have not yet begun to fight!”. It also demonstrated the growing threat of the American Navy against the British, even though the British ultimately succeeded in protecting their merchant convoy.
1780: Arrest of British major John Andre, General Clinton’s primary aide-de-camp, who coordinated Benedict Arnold’s treasonous surrender of West Point. Andre was captured inside American lines while wearing civilian clothes, along with Arnold’s handwritten copy of the defensive plan for the fort tucked into his stockings. Andre was tried and convicted as a spy, and with the bitter memory of Nathan Hale still fresh, was sentenced to be hanged by the neck until dead instead of being shot like a soldier.
1806: Leaders of the 1803 Corps of Discovery, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, arrive in Saint Louis three years after their westward departure, completing their epic exploration and recording of the United States’ new Louisiana Territory.
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.
1835: HMS Beagle arrives in the Galapagos Islands with naturalist Charles Darwin aboard.
1845: In New York, the Knickerbockers Baseball Club is formed, becoming the nation’s first professional baseball team.
1861: Birth of Robert Bosch (d.1942), who came into prominence in the nascent automobile industry with his invention of a dependable magneto for spark plug ignition. He continued to invent and manufacturer a line of the highest quality electrical equipment in his Stuttgart plant. Today, the company that bears his name has added retail electrical tools and equipment to its product line.
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.
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.
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.
1900: Birth of Ruhullah Khomeini (d.1989). Iranian cleric, politician, political theorist, and revolutionary who founded the Islamic Republic of Iran and served as its first supreme leader from 1979 until his death in 1989.
1904: Death of Chief Joseph, last leader of the Nez Perce tribe of the Pacific Northwest (b.1840).
1916: After two and a half months of unrelenting combat in the Battle of the Somme (DLH 7/1 and Addendum), 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.
1937: Publication of J.R.R. Tolkien’s book, The Hobbit.
1939: Death of Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (b.1856). Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was a physiologist, medical doctor, psychologist and influential thinker of the early twentieth century. Working initially in close collaboration with Joseph Breuer, Freud elaborated the theory that the mind is a complex energy-system, the structural investigation of which is the proper province of psychology. He articulated and refined the concepts of the unconscious, infantile sexuality and repression, and he proposed a tripartite account of the mind’s structure—all as part of a radically new conceptual and therapeutic frame of reference for the understanding of human psychological development and the treatment of abnormal mental conditions. Notwithstanding the multiple manifestations of psychoanalysis as it exists today, it can in almost all fundamental respects be traced directly back to Freud’s original work. Freud’s innovative treatment of human actions, dreams, and indeed of cultural artifacts as invariably possessing implicit symbolic significance has proven to be extraordinarily fruitful, and has had massive implications for a wide variety of fields including psychology, anthropology, semiotics, and artistic creativity and appreciation. However, Freud’s most important and frequently re-iterated claim, that with psychoanalysis he had invented a successful science of the mind, remains the subject of much critical debate and controversy.
1940: The most active day of the Battle of Britain– the first day of Germany’s final “decisive” air assault on England.
1942: First flight of the Boeing B-29 Superfortress, a pressurized, high altitude bomber which provided the Army Air Corps with a dramatic increase in range and payload over their workhorse B-17s and B-24s.
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.
1945: Death of German physicist Hans Geiger. German experimental physicist. He is known as the inventor of the Geiger counter, a device used to detect ionizing radiation, and for carrying out the Rutherford scattering experiments, which led to the discovery of the atomic nucleus.
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 gambler’s 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.
1960: Launch of the United States’ first nuclear powered aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise (CVAN-65), just up the river a couple miles from here at Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company.
1981: The Senate unanimously confirms Sandra Day O’Connor as the first female Justice of the Supreme Court.
1991: Discovery of 5,300 year old Copper Age mummy, “Otzi the Iceman” by German mountaineers.
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Now that is Hilarious! Waiting!!