History Notes this week of Dec 1

267 AD: Traditional date of the martyrdom of Saint Barbara. Although her actual provenance was suspect enough to be removed in 1969 from roster of official Saints, she remains the Patron Saint of artillerymen, miners, explosive workers, and others whose jobs carry with it the risk of sudden and violent death. 

771: Death of Carloman I (b.751), younger brother of Charlemagne, who held half of the Frankish kingdom on the death of their father. Carloman died Charlemagne forcefully annexed the region to become the sole king of the Franks.

799: King of the Franks, Charlemagne, grandson of the great Charles Martel holds an audience in the north-central German city of Paderborn with the embattled Pope Leo III, who fled Rome under persecution by the nobility of that city. Leo requested the protection of the powerful French king, and Charlemagne reciprocated with a vow of fealty to the papacy, which included a promise to forcibly re-install Leo in Rome. The meeting began a chain of events that culminated in Leo’s re-installation as Pope, and him, in turn, proclaiming Charlemagne as the Protector of the Roman Empire. He thus became the first Holy Roman Emperor, a title that remained essentially intact through multiple dynasties over the course of 1,120 years, finally ending with the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which stripped the Austrian Royal family of any lingering claim to the throne.

1466: Birth of Genovese Admiral Andrea Doria (d.1560), remembered not only for his exploits at sea against the Ottomans and Barbary pirates, but as the leading politician of the independent Genovese Republic.

1492: Continuing his initial exploration of what he still thought were the Spice Islands of Southeast Asia, Christopher Columbus lands on the largest of the Windward Islands, which he names Hispaniola. In the subsequent colonial dash, the island was eventually split between Spain (Dominica (now Dominican Republic)) and France (Haiti). Over the course of the next ten years from this day, the Admiral of the Ocean Seas made three more voyages of discovery throughout the Caribbean basin and along the coast of Central America. His reputation was tarnished by administrative abuses committed in his name by the Spanish colonial authorities in Santo Domingo, of whom he was Governor of the Indies. That said, Columbus remains in my mind one of the greatest seamen of all time: a man whose vision, leadership, audacity and religious faith pointed the way to a fundamental re-ordering of how Europeans viewed the world. 

1667: Birth of Irish novelist and eventual clergyman, Jonathan Swift (d.1745). Best-known works characters remain staples of contemporary political criticism. You remember the title, of course: “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships!”

1763: Dedication of the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, the oldest such assembly in the United States.

1775: Lieutenant John Paul Jones hoists the Grand Union Flag aboard USS Alfred, a Philadelphia-built merchantman, converted to a 10-gun warship under the command of John Barry. Jones, recently commissioned as First Lieutenant aboard Alfred, had the honor of ordering the new national flag raised on the new national warship.

1775: The 25 year old bookseller, and recently commissioned Colonel in the Continental Army, Henry Knox arrives at Fort Ticonderoga to begin transporting its captured artillery to support General George Washington’s forces arrayed around Boston. Knox’s keen intellect and organizational skills accomplished this strategically crucial mission through the dead of a New England winter, arriving within a short ride of Washington’s camp on January 25^th. The Knox Expedition is also widely known as “The Noble Train of Artillery.” Wikipedia quotes historian Victor Brooks, who called the operation, “one of the most stupendous feats of logistics” in the entire Revolutionary War. 

1776:College of William and Mary, the first college fraternity is chartered: Phi Beta Kappa.

1783: With the Revolutionary War successfully concluded, General George Washington bids farewell to his military staff at New York City’s Fraunces Tavern.

1803: France and Spain execute a secret clause of the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso, transferring title of the Louisiana territory from Spain back to France.

1804: Fresh from his consolidation of dictatorial power as First Consul of the Directory, and fresher still from his recent gutting of a major Jacobin-inspired coup d’etat plot, Napoleon Bonaparte crowns himself Emperor of the French, the first since the demise of the Charlemagne’s dynasty a thousand years earlier. Napoleon assumed the title and crown as a specific means to re-establish a hereditary monarchy. After crowing himself, the new Emperor then crowned as Empress, his wife Josephine. 

1823: During his annual State of the Union address to Congress, President James Monroe outlines a new doctrine that asserts a fundamental change in the relationship between the United States and the nations of Europe. It boils down to two parts:
     1) European colonization of the Western Hemisphere is over, and the United States will actively resist any further European military intrusion on this side of the Atlantic, and;
     2) The United States will remain studiously neutral across the full range of real and potential European conflicts. The Monroe Doctrine was essentially the bedrock foreign policy of the U.S. through the Great War and well into the 1930s.

1824: The 1824 presidential election is sent to the House of Representatives for decision under the terms of the 12^th Amendment. Four men ran for the office: General Andrew Jackson of Tennessee; former Senator John Quincy Adams, son of President John Adams and long-serving envoy of the United States; former Senator William H. Crawford of Georgia; and Kentucky Representative Henry Clay, “The Great Compromiser” and Speaker of the House of Representatives. None of the men achieved a majority of Electoral votes, although Jackson received a plurality, with Adams a close second. You would be correct if you thought that between today and the time of the House vote, a great deal of politicking went on; when the vote finally came on February 9^th, Adams won on the first ballot.

1829: British Governor-General of India, Lord William Benetick issues an edict that all who abet suttee will be guilty of Culpable Homicide. British administrators in India were disgusted and vexed by the seemingly intractable practice of new widows being burned alive on their husband’s funeral pyre. Nearly thirty years later, General Charles Napier, serving as Commander-in-Chief India, was quoted with a thought that should remain front and center when arguments move towards multi-culturalism and political correctness: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

1831: Former President John Quincy Adams takes his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, as the delegate from Massachusetts, serving seventeen years in 8 consecutive terms. 

1859: Abolitionist John Brown is hanged by the neck until dead for his role in fomenting the bloody raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

1864: Confederate General John Bell Hood orders his troops into a Burnside-like frontal assault against entrenched Union positions on the high ground just outside the town of Franklin. Both sides begin the fighting with 27,000 troops. The Battle of Franklin becomes an unmitigated disaster for Hood, with over 6,200 casualties, 1750 of whom are killed. Union losses number 189 dead of their 2,300 total casualties. As night fell, the Union forces made an orderly withdrawal into the next layer of Nashville’s defensive works, completely foiling Hood’s strategy of breaking the Union lines.

1866: Death of Colonel Sir George Everest (b.1790), Surveyor-General of India 1830-43. British surveyor and geographer who served as Surveyor General of India from 1830 to 1843. After receiving a military education in Marlow, Everest joined the East India Company and arrived in India at the age of 16. The mountain is named after him.

1872: 600 nautical miles west of Portugal, the British merchantman Dei Gratia discovered the brigantine Mary Celeste abandoned, drifting under shortened sail, with no sign of a struggle on board or any damage beyond slightly torn and weathered sails. The ship’s longboat was also missing, and three barrels of its cargo of denatured alcohol were broken open. The ship’s log remained aboard, although the ship’s papers were gone.
A prize crew sailed her to Gibraltar, where an Admiralty court tried to make sense of the mystery of her abandonment and the proper disposition of the vessel after her discovery. The ship continued in service for the next 13 years under 17 different owners, and ended up wrecked on a reef near Port-au-Prince, most likely as part of an insurance fraud scheme. 

1874: Birth of Great Britain’s Winston S. Churchill (d.1965). Statesman, military officer, and writer who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955. Apart from 1922 to 1924, he was a member of Parliament from 1900 to 1964 and represented a total of five constituencies. 

1885: The U.S. Patent Offices recognizes Dr Pepper as a commercial drink.

1917: The new communist government of Russia signs an armistice with the Central Powers. The cease-fire leads immediately to negotiations for a separate peace, ratified in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March, 1918. The cessation of hostilities allowed the Bolsheviks to concentrate their energies on their own increasingly bloody civil war, and gave the Germans in particular a boost of forces back into the Western Front.

1918: President Woodrow Wilson departs by ship to participate in the Versailles Conference, becoming the first President to travel to Europe while in office.

1934: A British steam locomotive nicknamed The Flying Scotsman becomes the first steam locomotive to officially be clocked at a speed over 100 mph. 

1945: A U.S. Navy formation of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers, known by their callsign as Flight 19, vanishes without a trace on a routine navigation training mission flown from Naval Air Station Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Later in the day, one of the PBM-5 patrol aircraft sent up to search for the missing crews explodes in mid-air, killing all 13 on board, adding to the 14 lost from the TBM flight. The mystery of the TBM’s disappearance has never been conclusively solved, although transcribed radio transmissions from the doomed flight suggest that soon after becoming lost, the flight lead mistakenly identified an island in the Bahamas chain as one in the Florida Keys, and made a decision to fly the formation northeasterly in order to find the Florida mainland. A northeasterly course from the Bahamas will take you into the central Atlantic and the Bermuda Triangle. Several attempts in recent years to find the lost flight have, in fact, recovered scores of crashed TBMs and other aircraft on Florida’s continental shelf, but none of them match the serial numbers of the five TBMs.

1955: Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on the bus, and is subsequently arrested. Her run-in with white authorities was not the first of its kind, but it was carefully designed* to force a confrontation and to present the problem of segregation to a national stage. It succeeded, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the months that followed.

1959: The Antarctic Treaty is signed by the 12 nations participating in the International Geophysical Year (IGY), opening it for ratification by member states and others who will abide by its provisions. Antarctica remains the only land mass on the planet that is considered non-sovereign, and thus is part and parcel of the Global Commons– the regions of earth and space that, by belonging to no-one, are free to be used and exploited by everyone. The other Commons are the high seas (including the airspace over the high seas), exo-atmospheric space, and increasingly, the realm of cyber-space.

1961: Two years into his Cuban Revolution, strongman Fidel Castro officially states that Cuba under his rule would be built into a communist state. 

1964: 800 protesters from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement are arrested on Sproul Plaza and the Administration Building at UC Berkeley, where they occupied the building and staged a “sit-in” to protest the UC Chancellors’ decision to limit protests on campus. 

1970: Republican President Richard M. Nixon creates the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

1990: “Chunnel” drilling machines from France and England meet 120 feet under the seabed of the English Channel.