1431: After finally defeating the French forces of Charles VII, the English army, now occupying north-central France, begins a heresy trial of 19 year old Joan of Arc, the young peasant girl whose visions from God induced her to lead the armies of France in several notable victories over the English. Convicted, she is burned at the stake on 30th May.
1473: Birth of Nicolas Copernicus (d.1543) in Torun, Poland
1621: The newly arrived Plymouth Colony elects Myles Standish as its Commander.
1685: Birth of George Frederick Handel
1732: Birth of Virginia planter, militia colonel, delegate to the Continental Congress, General in Chief of the Continental Army, and first President of the United States of America, George Washington (d.1799). His direct military successes during the Revolutionary War were mostly in the breach, but his widely spaced victories were all crucial to the strategic victory of American arms against the British. At his death, his Revolutionary colleague and fellow Virginian “Light-Horse Harry” Lee spoke his eulogy: “First in war, First in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen…
1778: The Prussian Baron Freidrich Wilhelm von Steuben arrives at the Continental Army’s winter encampment at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. He immediately begins training the rag-tag army in the fundamentals of professional military order and discipline. He is credited with being one of the fathers of the United States Army.
1801: After 35 ballots in the House of Representatives, and only 15 days before the inauguration, Thomas Jefferson is elected 3rd President of the United States, finally defeating his running mate, Aaron Burr. The November 4th general election gave both Burr and Jefferson 73 electoral votes each, thus sending the vote to the House. An electoral technicality- the winner needed a majority of state votes (9 needed (Jefferson had 8)), kept the election in turmoil for over three months. The logjam was broken when the Federalists reasoned that a peaceful turnover of power required that the majority party be allowed to have its choice for President. The following vote gave Jefferson 10 states, Burr 4, and two states voted “blank,” thus launching Jefferson into his highly eventful presidency.
1819: Spain cedes to the United States its last territorial claim (Oregon County) on remaining Florida territory.
1836: Opening day of Mexican general Santa Anna’s siege of the Alamo.
1847: The first rescuers reach the remnants of the Donner Party, a group of pioneers who left the Midwest the previous July for the promise of California. In late October, they became stranded in the Sierra Nevada mountains by an early snow, and the ensuing four months saw them reduced to cannibalism as all of their supplies and oxen were consumed during the brutal winter. Of the original 89 who set out, only 45 made it to the Golden State. Donner Pass and Donner lake are named for the tragedy. Today’s Interstate 80 runs along the original route through the mountains.
1848: German economist and historian Karl Marx publishes The Communist Manifesto. The opening and closing lines of the book: “A specter is haunting Europe- the specter of communism.”, and “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a whole world to win. Workers of the world, unite!”
1864: Under the command of Lieutenant George Dixon, and with a volunteer crew of seven others, the Confederate submarine CSS Hunley sinks USS Housatanic in Charleston harbor. After completing the attack, the hand-crank powered sub mysteriously sank and remained unlocated until 1995. On recovery, her entire crew of 8 was found entombed on board. They were subsequently re-buried with full military honors in a Confederate cemetery in Charleston. The submarine itself is now on display in the recovery laboratory on the grounds of the former Charleston Naval Base. This was not her first sinking; twice before, she flooded and went to the bottom, the first time killing five, and the second time killing all 8 aboard, including the designer himself.
1865: General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army sacks Columbia, SC, creating havoc that consumes more than 2/3 of the city by fire. Commenting later, Sherman said, “Though I never ordered it and never wished it, I have never shed any tears over the event because I believe it hastened what we all fought for, the end of the War.”
1895: The North Carolina legislature adjourns for a day to mark the death of Frederick Douglass.
1902: Birth of photographer Ansel Adams (d.1984). His consistently spectacular work was the result of exceptional patience and a deep understanding of the interplay of light within both the scenes themselves and on the emulsion of his film. Besides his superb eye for composition, his photos technically represent the ultimate in depth, contrast and clarity. His camera of choice was almost always large format (70mm) because of its sharpness when enlarged.
1915: Gallipoli Campaign: Opening guns of what will become a futile 8 month Anglo-French campaign to capture Constantinople and secure the Bosporus and Dardanelles for transit of the Russian fleet. On this day, British warships begin shelling Ottoman coastal artillery positions on the Gallipoli peninsula.
1916: The Battle of Verdun begins with a German artillery barrage on the French fortress city. The battle ends 10 months later with the lines of contact essentially unmoved from their opening positions. What did change is the shattered and cratered landscape, littered with the corpses of 143,000 Germans and 162,440 French soldiers, many of whom remain in situ to this day in the tortured French soil. Total casualties are over 750,000 with some reasonable estimates approaching a million.
1922: The Italian airship Roma explodes over Hampton Roads, killing 34.
1942: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, ordering the forcible relocation of citizens of Japanese descent into remote internment camps. Nearly 120,000 were arrested in the ensuing dragnet. Great Britain issued a similar order for Canada on the 24th of the month.
1946: American Charge d’Affairs in Moscow George Kennan sends his famous Long Telegram to the State Department. The 800 word paper outlines the intellectual rationale for the policy of containment against an expansionist Soviet Union, and was the basis of our national security policy until the collapse of the soviet state in 1991. Ambassador Kennan died in 2005 at the age of 101.
1943: First day of the Battle of Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, the first major engagement of American units against German forces. The battle ended in a rout, with the combined Anglo-American force pushed back nearly fifty miles from their starting positions. The German commander, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, was contemptuous of the Americans but wary of their potential. In the aftermath of the defeat, General Eisenhower relieved the Corps commander and replaced him with Lieutenant General George S. Patton, who in short order proved Rommel right to be wary of American potential.
1945: American Marines raise the U.S. flag on Mount Surabachi, Iwo Jima.
1962: In the United States’ first orbital mission and Project Mercury’s third manned space flight, Marine LtCol John Glenn makes three orbits of the earth in his capsule “Friendship-7.” His Atlantic Ocean recovery ship, USS Noa (DD-841)
1963: The San Francisco Giants sign Willy Mays for a record $100,000 per year contract.
1972: President Richard Nixon departs on his historic trip to Communist China.
1976: President Gerald Ford rescinds Executive Order 9066 with Presidential Proclamation 4417, which opens the door for reparations to surviving Japanese internees.
1980: The Miracle on Ice. The US Olympic hockey team, made up of mostly college players with an average age of 22, defeats the Soviet Union team 4-3 in the silver medal round at the Lake Placid Olympics, and then went on to beat Finland for the gold medal. The team was earlier routed by the Soviets 10-2 at an exhibition game in Madison Square Garden.
1991: American and coalition forces cross the line of departure in Saudi Arabia to begin the ground phase of the First Gulf War.
Kearn says
Regarding the Internment of enemy aliens in WWII – The US also interned 11,000 German-Americans,many of them born in the US and even deported many to wartime Germany to be bombed by American planes. The US also encouraged Latin American countries to seize the assets of their Germans and deport them to the US, where they were arrested for illegal entry! They too were interned with the Japanese, in the same camps, under the same conditions. Germans were interned behind barbed wire, with guard with machine guns. Many were interned until 1948, while the Japanese were freed as soon as the war ended. http://gaic.info/ http://foitimes.com/ Every year we read the same thing about Japanese being interned, every year we “forget” that Germans were interned too.
Note: As always, thank you for adding important information to these posts. It is much appreciated.
Paul Plante says
With respect to Joan of Arc, I had an interesting talk one time about her with a man from France, and he said from his perspective, her trial not surprisingly was a political trial, because for political reasons, God could not be seen as favoring Charles VII, the so-called Mandate of Heaven as the Chinese would call it, and then he commenced into the twisted history of France at that time, which was really a history of great families always squabbling with each other over power and dominions.
Joan was actually captured by the Burgundian Faction, which was allied with the English at that time,
As Wikipedia tells us, the Burgundian faction or party was a political allegiance against France that formed during the latter half of the Hundred Years’ War.
The term “Burgundians” refers to the supporters of the Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, that formed after the Assassination of Louis I, Duke of Orléans.
John the Fearless, also known as John of Valois and John I of Burgundy, was Duke of Burgundy from 1404 to 1419 who was a member of the Burgundian branch of the Valois Dynasty.
The House of Valois, then, was a cadet branch of the Capetian dynasty, and they succeeded the House of Capet (or “Direct Capetians”) to the French throne, and were the royal house of France from 1328 to 1589.
The Valois descended from Charles, Count of Valois (1270–1325), the second surviving son of King Philip III of France (reigned 1270–1285).
Their title to the throne was based on a precedent in 1316 (later retroactively attributed to the Merovingian Salic law), which excluded females (Joan II of Navarre) as well as male descendants through the distaff line (Edward III of England), from the succession to the French throne.
So there, we see some of what underpins the death of Joan of Arc for political reasons.
Getting back to the Burgundians, their opposition to the Armagnac party, the supporters of Charles, Duke of Orléans, led to a civil war.
The Armagnac party was prominent in French politics and warfare during the Hundred Years’ War, and it was allied with the supporters of Charles, Duke of Orléans against John the Fearless after Charles’ father Louis of Orléans was killed at the orders of the Duke of Burgundy in 1407.
The party took its name from Charles’ father-in-law, Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac, who guided the young Duke during his teens and provided much of the financing and some of the seasoned Gascon troops that besieged Paris before their defeat at Saint-Cloud.
Later, John the Fearless was sent back to his lands, and Bernard of Armagnac remained in Paris and, some say, in the queen’s bed.
He was assassinated in 1419.
Sporadic warfare continued between the Armagnacs and Burgundians for a number of years, although after the Burgundians allied themselves with the English in 1419 and the Armagnacs became interlinked with the cause of Charles VII, the factional rivalry was scarcely distinguishable from the Royal dispute between the French and English monarchies.
The terms remained in use until they were outlawed by Charles VII toward the close of the Hundred Years’ War, as part of efforts to heal the factional rift.
Getting back to the Burgundians who had captured Joan of Arc at Compiegne, the Dukes of Burgundy had inherited a large number of lands scattered from what is now the border of Switzerland up to the North Sea.
The Duke of Burgundy had been granted as an appanage to Philip the Bold in the 14th century, and this was followed by other territories inherited by Philip and his heirs during the late 14th and 15th centuries, including the County of Burgundy (the Franche-Comté), Flanders, Artois and many other domains in what are now Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and northeastern France.
Prosperous textile manufacture in the Low Countries made this among the wealthiest realms in Europe.
Partisan use of the term “Burgundian” arose from a feud between John II, Duke of Burgundy and Louis of Valois, Duke of Orléans.
The latter was the brother of King Charles VI, the former was his cousin.
When madness interrupted the king’s ability to rule they vied for power in a bitter dispute.
Popular rumor attributed an adulterous affair to the Duke of Orléans and French queen Isabeau of Bavaria.
Supporters of the two dukes became known as “Burgundians” and “Orleanists”, respectively.
Other than in Burgundy’s own lands, the Duke’s supporters were particularly powerful in Paris, where the butchers’ guild, notably, closely supported him.
The partisan terms outlasted the lives of these two men.
John, Duke of Burgundy ordered the assassination of Louis of Orléans in 1407.
Burgundian partisans at the University of Paris published a treatise justifying this as tyrannicide in the belief that the Duke of Orléans had been plotting to kill the king and usurp the throne.
Leadership of his party passed nominally to his son, Charles, but in fact to the young duke’s father-in-law, Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac.
After Orléans’s capture by the English at Agincourt in 1415 and Armagnac’s murder by a Burgundian mob in Paris in 1418, leadership of the party devolved upon the young Dauphin, who retreated to Bourges.
After 1418, then, Burgundy controlled both Paris and the person of the king.
However, the whole dispute was proving deleterious to the war effort against the English, as both sides focused more on fighting one another than on preventing the English from conquering Normandy.
In 1419, the Duke and the Dauphin negotiated a truce to allow both sides to focus on fighting the English.
However, in a further parley, the Duke was murdered by the Dauphin’s supporters as revenge for the murder of Orléans twelve years before.
Burgundian party leadership passed to Philip III, Duke of Burgundy.
Duke Philip entered an alliance with England.
Due to his influence and that of the queen, Isabeau, who had by now joined the Burgundian party, the mad king was induced to sign the Treaty of Troyes with England in 1420, by which Charles VI recognized Henry V of England as his heir, disinheriting his own son the Dauphin.
When Henry V and Charles VI both died within months of each other, leaving Henry’s son Henry VI of England as heir to both England and France, Philip the Good and the Burgundians continued to support the English.
Nevertheless, dissension grew between Philip and the English regent, John, Duke of Bedford.
Although family ties between Burgundy and Bedford (who had married the Duke’s sister) prevented an outright rupture during Bedford’s lifetime, Burgundy gradually withdrew support for the English and began to seek an understanding with the Dauphin, by now Charles VII of France.
The two sides finally reconciled at the Congress of Arras in 1435, resulting in a treaty which allowed the French king to finally return to his capital.
Getting back to Joan of Arc in this confusing mess, in the fighting going on at that time, Reims opened its gates to the French army on 16 July 1429.
The coronation of the king took place the following morning.
Although Joan and the Duke of Alençon urged a prompt march on Paris, the royal court preferred to negotiate a truce with Duke Philip of Burgundy.
The duke violated the purpose of the agreement by using it as a stalling tactic to reinforce the defense of Paris.
The French army marched through towns near Paris during the interim and accepted several peaceful surrenders.
The Duke of Bedford led an English force and confronted the French army in a standoff at the battle of Montépilloy on 15 August.
The French assault at Paris ensued on 8 September.
And here comes the end of Joan of Arc.
A truce with England during the following few months left Joan with little to do, so on 23 March 1430, she dictated a threatening letter to the Hussites, a dissident group which had broken with the Catholic Church on a number of doctrinal points and had defeated several previous crusades sent against them.
Joan’s letter promised to “remove your madness and foul superstition, taking away either your heresy or your lives.”
Joan, an ardent Catholic who hated all forms of heresy together with Islam also sent a letter challenging the English to leave France and go with her to Bohemia to fight the Hussites, an offer that went unanswered.
The truce with England quickly came to an end.
Joan traveled to Compiègne the following May to help defend the city against an English and Burgundian siege.
On 23 May 1430 she was with a force that attempted to attack the Burgundian camp at Margny north of Compiègne, but was ambushed and captured.
When the troops began to withdraw toward the nearby fortifications of Compiègne after the advance of an additional force of 6,000 Burgundians, Joan stayed with the rear guard.
Burgundian troops surrounded the rear guard, and she was pulled off her horse by an archer.
She agreed to surrender to a pro-Burgundian nobleman named Lionel of Wandomme, a member of Jean de Luxembourg’s unit.
Joan was imprisoned by the Burgundians at Beaurevoir Castle.
The English negotiated with their Burgundian allies to transfer her to their custody, with Bishop Pierre Cauchon of Beauvais, an English partisan, assuming a prominent role in these negotiations and her later trial.
The final agreement called for the English to pay the sum of 10,000 livres tournois to obtain her from Jean de Luxembourg, a member of the Council of Duke Philip of Burgundy.
The English moved Joan to the city of Rouen, which served as their main headquarters in France.
And there her end would come after a bizarre trial which involved her being charged with cross-dressing.
And there for the moment will I leave the story.
Paul Plante says
With respect to Nixxon’s trip to China, in his excellent book “The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War,” the author, David Halberstam, makes the comment that no Democrat could have gone to China after Truman was accused of losing China to Mao because the Democrats were soft on Communism, without getting “red-baited.”
Nixxon was able to go to China because he had been involved in the “red-baiting” of the Democrats, and so, was himself largely immune from the accusation.
As to George Kennan, he fell out of favor with Dean Acheson, and ended up shunted off to historical obscurity.
Kennan also appears as a player in Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War” in terms of our entry into the Korean War by the Truman administration.
Paul Plante says
I for one very much appreciate the effort that goes into this thread on history in here.
I think we have essentially become a nation and a people with no history at all, no connection to anything more than a TWEET or FACEBOOK posting ago.
We have lost sight of the concept of the past leading to a future that we just might find ourselves trapped in, just as the Germans became trapped in the reality of Hitler and the Nazis in the space of roughly 20 months following 30 January 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, as a result of what was called Gleichschaltung, or the process of successively establishing a system of totalitarian control and coordination over all aspects of German society, or the Nazification of state and society.
Events transpire when we are young, and we are affected by them when we are older, and in many cases, we never realize any connection, because we are ignorant of so much that happened, just in our own lifetimes.
Take George Kennan, for example.
Who today even knows who he is, let alone anything else about him?
And yet, in our modern history as a nation, for a time he was an important player.
At p.324 of “The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War” by David Halberstam, we are informed of part of the role Kennan played in our history as follows:
The decision to go north (of the 38th parallel in the Korean War, 9 October 1950) prompted a debate that was never really a debate; the forces pushing to cross the thirty-eighth were simply too strong.
The most critical domestic change had taken place at the State Department, especially in the slow but systematic erosion of the influence of George Kennan.
By the time they faced the decision to cross the thirty-eighth parallel, he was not a major player anymore.
He had believed that the risk of either the Soviets or the Chinese coming in was far too great if we tried to unite all of Korea.
Paul Nitze, much influenced by Kennan on this single issue, agreed.
Kennan was sure that we were heading toward a major crisis, that Washington did not have control of MacArthur, and that something terrible was going to happen.
It was his personal policy nightmare: he felt the United States was overreaching militarily for something that did not matter and that would not improve our geopolitical position at all – and doing so at a fearful risk.
But he was on the outside looking in by now.
end quotes
As it was to turn out, Kennan was right, and Douglas MacArthur was an arrogant fool, but in the meantime, a history in Korea was started that lingers with complications to this day.
At p.373 of “The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War” by David Halberstam, he tells us that to Joseph Alsop, a nominally sympathetic columnist, the manner of MacArthur’s staff in the Tokyo teas (post-WWII) seemed like nothing so much as what Alsop had read of the court of Louis XIV.
The Dai Ichi Building (MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo, Japan), he wrote, “was proof of the basic rule of armies at war: the farther one gets from the front, the more laggards, toadies and fools one encounters.”
No one had more toadies and sycophants than MacArthur, and their tone with him “was almost wholly simpering and reverential, and I have always held the view that this sycophancy was what tripped him up at the end.”
end quotes
At p.390. Halberstam brings that forward to more present times, as follows:
So the men of the Dai Ichi had doctored the intelligence (about the Chinese presence in the north of Korea) in order to permit MacArthur’s forces to go where they wanted militarily, to the banks of the Yalu.
In the process they were setting the most dangerous of precedents for those who would follow them in office.
In this first instance it was the military that had playcd with the intelligence, or more accurately, one rogue wing of the military deliberately manipulating the intelligence it sent to the senior military men and civilians back in Washington.
The process was to be repeated twice more in the years to come, both subsequent times with the civilians manipulating the military, with the senior military men reacting poorly in their own defense and thereby placing the men under their command in unacceptable combat situations.
(The title of a book by one talented young officer, H.R. McMaster, studying how the senior military had been snookered by the senior civilians’ pressures during Vietnam, was “Dereliction of Duty”).
All of this reflected something George Kennan warned about, the degree to which domestic politics had now become a part of national security calculations, and it showed the extent to which the American government had begun to make the fateful decisions based on the most limited of truths and the most deeply flawed intelligence in order to do what it wanted to do for political reasons.
end quotes
And in an unbroken chain, here we are today, mired in stupid conflicts across the globe started by idiots in what is supposed to be our government, but in fact is the possession of the two squabbling political parties in this country, neither of whom have the intelligence to know it is even raining, let alone to come in out of the rain.
As Barbara Tuchman wrote, will folly always be our nemesis?
Seems so, doesn’t it?
Paul Plante says
As to Dick Nixxon going to China, that brings us all the way back in time to Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Chinese government, which was as corrupt as all get-out, which gave it favored nation status with the U.S. politicians who are for corruption as a result.
Young people in America today do not even know who Chiang Kai-Shek is, but at one time, he was a great cause of political divide in this country that had the Harry Truman Democrats labeled as being soft on Commie-nism, which was then considered a huge threat to this nation.
At p.316 of “The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War” by David Halberstam, the author brings us back to that period of our national history as follows:
By the fall of 1950, Chiang Kai-shek’s dream of returning (from Formosa) to the mainland (China proper) was already hopeless, especially since no one on either side of the aisle in Congress, not even the most rabid Chiang supporters, wanted to take responsibility for sending American boys, quite possibly millions of them, to fight min China.
Yet the dream of such a return was still very good politics, offering an endless free shot at the White House for its enemies.
Their allies in the Chinese Nationalist embassy in Washington encouraged them, although if the top officials in the embassy had news and intelligence that might spell trouble for the United States, they did not always tell their American friends.
end quotes
Halberstam then goes on to detail how the Nationalist Chinese government on Formosa knew that the Chinese Communists were already crossing the Yalu in force from Manchuria as the blind, deaf and even dumber MacArthur was splitting his command and sending both halves racing north through Korea to the Yalu, to meet their fate in a North Korean winter.
He then picks up the narrative as follows:
A (Communist) Chinese entrance into the Korean War promised a conflict they (Nationalist Chinese) badly wanted – any hope of a return to the mainland was premised by then on war with the new China.
It was their only possible hope for a ticket back,
So they were in no rush to alert their American allies about what was going to happen (Chinese entrance into the war) and thus allow them to avoid the consequences of such an encounter (several hundred thousand Chinese waiting in ambush).
end quotes
That ambush, of course, is now largely forgotten American history, as is the Korean War, and why Korea remains divided to this day.
But getting back to “Tricky Dick” and his visit to China, Halberstam continues as follows:
From the moment Chiang left the mainland (1949), few things concerned the (Nationalist) Chinese embassy (in Washington) and the China Lobby (Henry Luce et al) more than keeping the United States from recognizing Communist China.
They succeeded so well that the recognition of China became an enduring domestic issue, one the Democrats feared even to touch for more than two decades.
It would take President Richard Nixon, who as a young politician rode the idea that the Democrats were weak in dealing with the Communists to political power, and thus was himself relatively immune from red-baiting, to break the ice in February 1972 with a visit to China, one that no Democratic politician even then could have taken without quite possibly being red-baited by, among others, Richard Nixon.
end quotes
And thus, go our American politics, often to our detriment, but as a nation, we are largely kept in ignorance of this doings, and so, the beat goes on and on and on.