Latest Updates on the Russian, Ukrainian War & the Israel, Gaza Conflict
American Presidential, Political & Historical Facts
Until the secret ballot was introduced in the late 19th century, Americans cast their votes publicly -- initially by voice vote and later using premarked ballots that were provided by a political party or cut out from the newspaper.
The original boycotter was John Adams. After a vicious campaign, Adams left Washington at 4 a.m. on Inauguration Day, March 4, 1801, on the first stagecoach home to Massachusetts. Eight hours later, blue-coated militiamen snapped to attention and an artillery company fired a round as Thomas Jefferson emerged from his boarding house at New Jersey Avenue and C Street. The U.S. marshal for Maryland then walked Jefferson, members of Congress, foreign diplomats and local residents several hundred yards north to the Capitol for the swearing-in ceremony. John Quincy Adams made inaugural absences a family tradition. In March 1829, he departed the White House the day before Andrew Jackson's swearing-in. Like the 1800 election, the 1828 campaign was particularly nasty.
The XYZ Affair was a political and diplomatic episode in 1797 and 1798, early in the administration of John Adams, involving the United States and Republican France. Its name derives from the substitution of the letters X, Y and Z for the names of French diplomats in documents released by the Adams administration.
An American diplomatic commission was sent to France in July 1797 to negotiate issues that were threatening to break out into war. The diplomats, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, John Marshall, and Elbridge Gerry, were approached through informal channels by agents of the French Foreign Minister Talleyrand, who demanded bribes and a loan before formal negotiations could begin. Although such demands were not uncommon in mainland European diplomacy of the time, the Americans were offended by them, and eventually left France without ever engaging in formal negotiations. Gerry, seeking to avoid all-out war, remained for several months after the other two commissioners left. His exchanges with Talleyrand laid groundwork for the eventual end to diplomatic and military hostilities.
The failure of the commission led to an undeclared naval war called the Quasi-War (1798 to 1800), and caused a political firestorm in the United States when the commission's dispatches were published. Federalists who controlled the government took advantage of the national anger to build up the nation's military. They also criticized the Democratic-Republican Party for its pro-French stance, and Elbridge Gerry (a nonpartisan at the time) for what they saw as his role in the commission's failure. In 1800 the United States and France signed a peace treaty.
We the People," the first three words of the Constitution, were a bit of legerdemain on the part of draftsman Gouverneur Morris, but they have rightly resonated over the years
The election of 1800 culminated in the treason trial of Aaron Burr. Two years before the election, Federalists in Congress passed the Sedition Act, making it illegal to "write, print, utter or publish . . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States." In practice, this muzzled the Republican opposition by making it a crime to criticize the Federalist president, John Adams.
The Republican vice president, Thomas Jefferson, responded by arguing that states had the power to nullify federal laws with which they disagreed. In the election that followed, Adams came in third, and Jefferson and his vice president, Aaron Burr, tied with an equal number of electoral votes. Alexander Hamilton, who believed that Jefferson posed less of a threat to the republic than Burr, helped persuade Federalists in Congress, who had to break the tie, to elect Jefferson. Both Adams and Burr accepted the election results and supported the peaceful transfer of power.
Once in office, however, Jefferson retaliated against his political enemies. He encouraged state prosecutions of his Federalist critics and lashed out against his archrival, Chief Justice John Marshall. He also supported the impeachment of Justice Samuel Chase, a partisan Federalist who had presided over one of the sedition trials, but the Senate acquitted Chase, establishing a precedent that Congress shouldn't remove judges from office because of disagreement with their rulings.
Jefferson then indicted Burr, his former vice president, for treason. After killing Hamilton in the famous duel in 1804, Burr had fled west to improve his fortunes and raised an expedition of men to seize lands in Texas and Louisiana belonging to Spain. In 1806, Jefferson received reports that Burr was conspiring to incite the western states to secede from the Union and to conquer new territory. Jefferson alerted Congress and ordered Burr's arrest.
Burr's treason trial the following year was presided over by Chief Justice Marshall, who was dubious about the indictment. He issued a subpoena to Jefferson to deliver documents that Burr said he needed for his defense. Jefferson initially claimed executive privilege but ultimately turned over the letters. Marshall then told the jury that, according to the Constitution, a treason conviction required evidence of overt acts of war committed against the U.S. proved by two witnesses, and that no such evidence existed. The jury swiftly found Burr not guilty. Jefferson reportedly wanted to bring impeachment charges against Marshall for his conduct in the Burr trial but was dissuaded from doing so by the precedent established by the acquittal of Justice Chase.
Franklin Roosevelt won the most lopsided victory ever in terms of electoral votes, trouncing Kansas Gov. Alf Landon in 1936 by the merciless count of 523 to 8.
The Presidential election of 1864 occurred at the height of the greatest national emergency in American history and centered on issues of race, absentee voting, calls for postponement, a Supreme Court nomination and the peaceful transfer of power. Bitterly divisive, it was less a contest between the two candidates -- Gen. George McClellan and President Abraham Lincoln -- than a referendum on the behavior and leadership of the incumbent.
Lincoln fully expected to lose the election to McClellan, whom he had removed from command for failing to aggressively prosecute the war. In a private memo to his cabinet, dated Aug. 23, 1864, Lincoln wrote: "This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so cooperate with the President elect, as to save the Union." It never crossed Lincoln's mind to challenge the coming vote or to impede the process of presidential succession.
Nor did he endorse the scheme floated by some supporters to postpone the election. Eleven states had seceded from the Union, armed mobs had attacked army recruiting offices, and a Confederate raid on Washington in the summer of 1864 had come within 5 miles of the White House. Lincoln, however, refused to budge. American democracy rested on the will of the people. "We cannot have free government without elections," he said, "and if the rebellion could force us to forego or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us."Lincoln crushed McClellan, winning 55% of the popular vote and all but three states, the electoral count standing at 212 to 21. He was the first president to win reelection since Andrew Jackson's victory in 1832. The 1824 election was thrown into the House and ended with the victory of John Quincy Adams, even though Andrew Jackson had a plurality of both popular and electoral votes. That result instantly became stigmatized as "the corrupt bargain" and doomed Adams's presidency to four years of futility.
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, with startling fidelity to the cause and to each other, on the same day: July 4, 1826, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration on which they had labored together. That stirring coincidence amazed Americans, including a young reader in southern Indiana named Abraham Lincoln, who was beginning to bring into focus his own thoughts about the Declaration and its promise of human rights for all.
The election of 1876 between Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden of New York was one of the most hostile, controversial campaigns in American history. Tilden won the popular vote and led in the electoral college, but 19 votes from three Republican-controlled states (Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina) remained disputed. Oregon's count was also challenged. Allegations of widespread voter fraud forced Congress to set up a special electoral commission to determine the winner, composed of fifteen congressmen and Supreme Court justices. The commission finally announced their decision only two days before the inauguration. The vote was 8-7 along party lines to award the disputed electoral college votes to Hayes, making him the winner.
In the third year of President Richard Nixon's first term, America's economy faced seemingly uncurable unemployment and inflation. In mid-August, Nixon assembled his closest economic advisers for three days of secret meetings at Camp David. When they emerged, Nixon announced a new economic plan, including a provision that the U.S. would no longer allow foreign governments to exchange dollars for gold.
In a single stroke, Nixon killed the Bretton Woods system that had governed international finance since the end of World War II. Closing the "gold window" severed the link between the dollar and gold, inaugurating the era of floating exchange rates, activist monetary policy and central-bank interventions in the global economy.
The policy failed. Inflation resumed and would reach double digits. Ben Bernanke called it "the second most serious monetary policy mistake of the 20th century," after the Great Depression.
Yet there was a silver lining. As Virginia Postrel has argued, this failure provided irrefutable evidence for Milton Friedman's contention that inflation was not a function of external events, but a product of bad monetary policy. After 1971 that view became widely embraced by economists, including Nixon aide Paul Volcker, who eventually crushed inflation as Fed chairman by aggressively tightening the money supply.
The most famous presidential Bible reference is probably Lincoln's opening to the Gettysburg Address, with "Four score and seven years ago." It's a nod to Psalm 90:10's description of a man's lifespan as "threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years." Lincoln also folded religious references and biblical verses into his inaugural speeches. In his first, in which he argued against those who might destroy the Union, he appealed to the "better angels of our nature." In his second, he cited the Bible multiple times, including Genesis 3:19's "wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces," Matthew 18:7's "Woe unto the world because of offenses," and Psalm 19:9's "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
In 1865, the Reverend J.P. Gulliver asked Abraham Lincoln how he came to acquire his famous rhetorical skill. The President gave an unusual response:
"In the course of my law-reading I constantly came upon the word 'demonstrate.' I thought, at first, that I understood its meaning, but soon became satisfied that I did not. . . . At last I said, 'Lincoln, you can never make a lawyer if you do not understand what demonstrate means'; and I left my situation in Springfield, went home to my father's house, and stayed there till I could give any propositions in the six books of Euclid at sight."
Euclid was a mathematician in Greek North Africa in the 4th century B.C., who gathered and systematized the geometric knowledge of his day. His "Elements," in Lincoln's time and to a lesser extent our own, is the standard model of mathematical proof or "demonstration." Starting with axioms that the reader can hardly doubt, Euclid builds up a rich body of knowledge about angles, line segments, circles and figures, step by careful step.
Two days after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, in September 1862, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus throughout the United States, subjecting all Americans to the threat of military arrest and indefinite imprisonment without trial. On his own authority, Lincoln ultimately claimed the power to arrest anyone, anywhere, whom he deemed disloyal. He even suggested that silence on the war constituted a disloyalty that was "sure to help the enemy." Over the course of the war, the Lincoln administration authorized the military arrest of around 25,000 civilians.
The Founders were clearly aware of the British attempt to impeach Warren Hastings for malfeasance as former Governor-General of Bengal. The U.S. Senate held a trial of a former War Secretary in 1876 after he was impeached and resigned. But Senators acquitted William Belknap in part because some thought a trial after resignation was unconstitutional.
At the time he was shot on the grounds of Kentucky's state capitol, William Goebel was not a well-liked man—nor had he technically won the heavily contested 1899 Kentucky gubernatorial election. However, he lived just long enough to be declared governor and sworn into office, making him the only state governor in US history to have been assassinated.
For almost 40 years, there was no more widely read, and perhaps no more widely hated, journalist in America than the ferociously independent syndicated columnist Drew Pearson. In a career that spanned every presidential administration from Hoover to Nixon, Pearson prowled the corridors of government, embarrassed the powerful, savaged the venal, fought secrecy, exposed blunders, and -- not least -- entertained and offended the public.
Herbert Hoover tried to have him fired. Franklin Roosevelt called him a chronic liar. Harry Truman sent the FBI to investigate him. Dwight Eisenhower ostensibly ignored him while having his press secretary trash him. John Kennedy griped that the powers of the presidency gave him no influence over the columnist. Lyndon Johnson did his best to co-opt him. Richard Nixon put him at the top of his enemies list.
George Washington took a keen interest in hot-air balloons. In 1910 Theodore Roosevelt became the first president to fly in an airplane, and in 1957 Dwight Eisenhower became the first to fly in a helicopter.
John F. Kennedy & Lyndon B. Johnson had a terse relationship. Johnson had thought he had a good chance of winning the 1960 nomination, but Kennedy easily won on the convention floor. Johnson had angered the Kennedy team by spreading stories about Kennedy's poor health -- the Massachusetts senator suffered from Addison's disease -- and Kennedy's father's softness toward Hitler while ambassador to the U.K. Still, Kennedy put Johnson on the ticket, hoping to carry Texas. The gambit worked, but Johnson was out of place and unhappy playing a subordinate role.
Kennedy's team didn't help matters by belittling Johnson and largely ignoring his input. Johnson had a phone installed for direct conversations with the president, but it rarely rang. After Kennedy's assassination, those who crossed Johnson got their comeuppance.
For eight months in 1777, an American Loyalist -- pledging continued allegiance to the British crown in the early stages of the American Revolution -- found himself in solitary confinement in Connecticut's infamous Litchfield jail. His food came poked through a hole in the door. "Debarred," he later wrote, of "Pen, Ink, and Paper," he found that his sole human intercourse was the rare scraps of talk he could wring from his jailers. It was as if he had been "buried alive." There was neither seat, nor bed, nor toilet -- just a straw-covered floor. The prisoner would eventually lose his teeth and hair. "I should deem it a favor," he wrote to Jonathan Trumbull, Connecticut's Patriot governor, "to be immediately taken out and shot." He was not executed but, rather, exchanged for the captured rebel lead- er of Delaware, and saw out the war in New York City, a Loyalist stronghold that would stay in British hands until November 1783, two years after Yorktown.
The prisoner's ordeal at the hands of American Patriots was not uncommon, but this was not your everyday Loyalist. He was William Franklin, George III's governor of New Jersey since 1763. The "traitor" who emerged toothless and emaciated into a Connecticut winter after almost a year in his own filth was the son of none other than Benjamin Franklin, the animating spirit of the revolution. William and his father had been close. Benjamin had secured an excellent education for his son in England. William had been by his father's side for the famous 1752 kite experiment in Philadelphia and again, at the age of 25 three years later, at the start of the Ohio River Campaign during the French and Indian War. With the Revolution, the two men fell out bitterly and would never reconcile.
When Richard Nixon ran against Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas for the U.S. Senate in 1950, his House colleague John Kennedy slipped him a $1,000 campaign contribution from the family patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, who liked Nixon's anticommunist fervor. Nine years later, when the two men emerged as likely presidential nominees for their respective parties, Kennedy asked Nixon to keep the matter secret so he could avoid a political firestorm from fellow Democrats. The Californian agreed; later, when columnist Drew Pearson got wind of the story, Nixon press secretary Herb Klein denied the report. Nixon acquiesced in the public lie to honor his private commitment to the man emerging as his most threatening political rival.
The Transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau was one of the earliest Americans to link democratic values with national parks. Writing in 1858 he declared that having "renounced the king's authority" over their land, Americans should use their hard-won freedom to create national preserves for "inspiration and our own true re-creation."
The U.S. in 1918 adopted five time zones -- Alaskan, Pacific, Mountain, Central and Eastern -- in an effort to address coordination concerns on railroads, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Before time zones were established, North America had over 144 local times, sometimes leading to railroad collisions. Today, there are four time zones in the continental U.S. and five additional in Alaska, Hawaii and U.S. territories.
The Caning of Charles Sumner, or the Brooks–Sumner Affair, occurred on May 22, 1856, in the United States Senate chamber, when Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina, used a walking cane to attack Senator Charles Sumner, an abolitionist Republican from Massachusetts.
The 1960 election featured Vice President Richard Nixon vs. Sen. John F. Kennedy. It was the closest popular vote in the 20th century, with Kennedy receiving 34.2 million votes and Nixon 34.1 million, a margin of barely one-sixth of a percentage point.
Lincoln's three greatest speeches are the Lyceum Address, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. Each is associated with a memorable date: the first with the Constitution, 1787; the second with the Revolution, 1776; the numbering of "four score and seven years" from 1863 brings us back to 1776, the third, the single greatest speech, with the coming of slavery in 1619.
The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., is 100 years old this month. The beloved national monument is no less perfect for having one slight flaw: The word "future" in the Second Inaugural Address was mistakenly carved as "Euture." It is believed that the artist, Ernest C. Bairstow, accidentally picked up the "e" stencil instead of the "f." He tried to fix it by filling in the bottom line, but the smudged outline is still visible.
From her commissioning in August 1862 to her final battle in June 1864, CSS Alabama sent 52 Union merchant ships and $6 million worth of cargo to the Atlantic floor, and sank the Union gunboat Hatteras in a fight off the Texas coast. Northern newspapers raged. President Lincoln & The U.S. Navy ranked the destruction of Alabama and her sisters, CSS Florida and Georgia, as one of its top priorities.
To sink Alabama, the United States deployed three-masted "sloops of war" that, like their Confederate prey, could run on either wind or steam. The seven-gun steamer USS Kearsarge, launched in 1861, plied the Atlantic waters from Spain to the Gulf of Mexico chasing rumors and old sightings of Alabama and her crew. Alabama evaded the seaborne posse by sticking to the North Atlantic and Europe's coast -- and sailed around Africa, capturing merchantmen as far away as the South China Sea. Raphael Semmes was a Maryland-born adventurer who rose to the rank of commander in the U.S. Navy. When his adopted state of Alabama seceded in January 1861, he resigned his commission to serve the Confederacy. During the war's first full year, the Confederate government assigned him to command Alabama.
Semmes's prewar companion was John Winslow, a North Carolinian who, like Semmes, joined a navy of wooden ships and rose through the ranks. In 1846, during the war with Mexico, the two Southerners shared a cabin aboard USS Cumberland and chased fleeting glory. But Winslow, an abolitionist at heart, remained loyal to the Union. He would be tasked with hunting down his old shipmate. Winslow finally found Alabama at anchor at Cherbourg, both captains knew the long chase had come to an end. Every Union captain was aware of the battering given to the Hatteras. Semmes knew his former shipmate John Winslow was unlikely to be intimidated, but the Rebel captain believed his ship, even in its deteriorated condition, could beat the Kearsarge.
Shells fly, limbs are shattered and ships shudder under the weight of hot, flying iron. The human toll is brutal. On the Alabama, as the battle raged above, more men were being brought below. For most, there was little the surgeons could do. Shrapnel and splinters had made an unholy scarlet mess of bodies. The groans of suffering almost drowned out the noise of the explosions.
Those not killed or wounded did not weather the storm unscathed. For Kearsarge's gunners, the smoke stung their eyes until, red and watered, they could hardly see. Each roar of a gun assaulted the ears until they were temporarily deaf. It was nearly impossible to breathe as particles of gunpowder, smoke, dust, and fumes from the ship's stack choked their lungs nearly shut. Snaking lines wrenched arms and legs; deadly splinters flew with each shot the enemy landed; shrapnel was always flying about, and the noise and the pounding literally rattled their brains inside their skulls.
A little more than an hour after the first shot was fired, Alabama was reduced to a sinking wreck by Kearsarge's powerful 11-inch (280 mm) Dahlgrens, forcing Captain Semmes to strike his colors and to send one of his two surviving boats to Kearsarge to ask for assistance.
Did you know that two other men accompanied Paul Revere on his famous midnight ride? If you didn't, then you're not alone. The story of the midnight ride was stamped on the American psyche by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's popular 1861 poem "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere." And anyone who's read the poem envisions a lone hero dashing through the night, single-handedly warning his countrymen of a British attack.
But that's not the whole story. Two other men rode with Revere that night: William Dawes and Samuel Prescott. They were left out of the poem and subsequently most history books.
A diamond-studded porcelain statue was given to Benjamin Franklin by King Louis XVI in 1785. Franklin had been the U.S. ambassador to France, and the lavish gift was commensurate with his standing in Louis's court. Congress allowed Franklin to keep it, even if, as was feared, it might signal that he was beholden to the French. Such a gift from an absolute monarchy wasn't a good look for Enlightenment America, and it led directly in 1787 to the passage of the Foreign Emoluments Clause at the Constitutional Convention. Henceforth no U.S. official could receive a gift from "any King, Prince or foreign State."
Ten of the first 16 presidents had biblical names (Thomas, Andrew, James, John and Abraham). On the first ladies' side, 14 of the first 17 came from the Bible (including Martha, Abigail, Sarah, Elizabeth, Hannah, Anna, Priscilla, Julia, Rebecca and Mary).
After defeating the British, General George Washington might have gone on to govern the new American republic in the manner of Rome's Julius Caesar or England's Oliver Cromwell. Instead, Washington chose to govern as a civilian and step down at the end of two terms, ensuring the transition to a new administration without military intervention. Astonished that a man would cling to his ideals rather than to power, King George III declared if Washington stayed true to his word, "he will be the greatest man in the world."
John Milton's is best known for "Paradise Lost." Long before writing that epic poem about the fall of man, however, he was a polemicist who participated in the political controversies of his day. One of them involved the rules of matrimony, and shortly after his separation from Mary, Milton penned several tracts in favor of permitting divorce due to incompatibility. This idea shocked many Puritans, and one clergyman said that Milton's pamphlets were "deserving to be burnt."
Then came a new controversy, not over burning books but over banning them. A bill in Parliament demanded that printers receive government approval for their publications, in part to guard against the supposed heresies of Milton and his fellow authors. For Milton, this licensing scheme was an illiberal outrage -- and he said so in "Areopagitica," which is now widely regarded as the world's first important essay in defense of free speech.
The 1644 treatise takes its peculiar name from the Areopagus, a rocky mount just below the Acropolis in Athens. The ancient Greeks gathered there for debates and trials. It's also the site of Paul's sermon in Acts 17. Milton presented his essay in the form of a speech, though he never delivered it. That's probably just as well: At nearly 18,000 words, it would have taken about three hours.
"Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties," wrote Milton, in a line that has echoed across centuries. Another famous passage is engraved above the entrance to the reading room of the New York Public Library: "A good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and tresur'd up on purpose to a life beyond life." That may sound like extravagant nonsense, but Milton was deadly serious. He equated censorship with murder: "Who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the image of God."
Grover Cleveland, Herbert Hoover, James K. Polk, James Monroe -- their names were emblazoned on the hulls of round-the-world passenger ships that made stops at some of the globe's most glamorous ports. The American President Lines owned the vessels, and the business strategy was simple: What could be more thrillingly American than setting sail aboard a ship associated with a president?
Each arrival and departure made passengers feel as if they were somehow a part of history -- the headline in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin on June 3, 1950, when one of those ships pulled into port, was "Woodrow Wilson Arrives." The corporate slogan: "Travel With the Presidents." When, during the Nixon administration, the SS President Wilson steamed into San Francisco in April 1973, it was the end of the (passenger) line. The company was sold to a firm in Singapore, and then to a French corporation that turned American President Lines into a subsidiary called APL, an operator of cargo ships. Some still carry the names of presidents, but you aren't likely to encounter them on your leisure travels. Their decks now haul stacks of huge containers, not vacationers.
The U.S. Navy has plenty of aircraft carriers named for presidents, including Lincoln, Washington, Eisenhower, Truman and Ford. However for the first time in history an aircraft carrier will be named after a non President and will named after Doris "Dorie" Miller who is now recognized for his valor and bravery at Pearl Harbor.
On July 22, 1962, NASA's Mariner 1 probe to Venus exploded just 293 seconds after launching. The failure was traced to an inputting error. A single hyphen was inadvertently left off one of the codes.
The ancient Greek poet Anacreon was known for writing about the rich pleasures of daily life: love, wine, youth, beauty and revelry. His name was synonymous with bacchanalian abandon, which is why it was adopted by the Anacreontic Society, a London social club dedicated to music-making founded in 1766. "The Anacreontic Song" was the club's anthem. The lyric, written by the club's president Ralph Tomlinson, was set to music by composer John Stafford Smith by 1773 and tells an imaginary tale of the club's founding in the guise of classical mythology. Francis Scott Key penned the lyrics of the National Anthem to the melody of "The Anacreontic Song."
The Somers affair centers on the antipathy between two headstrong men, and Mr. Snow offers a compelling psychological portrait of the antagonists. The ship's captain, Cmdr. Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, was born in 1803 to a prosperous family in New York City. At age 11 he joined the Navy as a midshipman, participating in patrols for latter-day pirates in the Caribbean and off the coast of Africa. By spring 1842, when he took charge of the Somers, Cmdr. Mackenzie had earned a reputation for piety, patriotism, lack of humor and liberality with the lash.
Among his junior officers was 18-year-old Philip Spencer. Born in Canandaigua, N.Y., Philip was the son of John Canfield Spencer, the secretary of war. To his father's exasperation, Philip, though intelligent, was a lackadaisical student who preferred pirate tales over textbooks. After three years of college in which he remained a freshman, the elder Spencer enrolled him in the Navy, where the boy showed an enthusiasm for insubordination, drunkenness and brawling. On hearing that Spencer had been assigned to the Somers, Cmdr. Mackenzie tried to engineer the midshipman's transfer, but the application was denied in deference to his father.
The Somers, built as a training ship, measured only 100 feet long by 25 feet wide, with 10 cannons aboard. Spanking new, the brig was fast, something of a thoroughbred. Low and slim, with her two tall masts raked steeply aft and her bowsprit raised skyward like a poised rapier. She left New York on Sept. 12, with the mission of making sailors of her young apprentices. Of the 120 officers and crew, 90 were still in their teens.
As the Somers sailed toward Africa, Spencer grew more sullen and more outspoken in his criticism of the captain. He also gave voice to the pirate fantasies he had entertained since childhood, speculating aloud about how he and a few confederates could seize the ship, do away with the other officers and launch a cruise of pillage across the Caribbean.
After the brig left Madeira, off the coast of Morocco, the crew's morale and discipline seemed to ebb. On the evening of Nov. 25, as the Somers rode the trade winds home, Spencer confided to the purser's steward, James Wales, that he had recruited 20 men for his mutiny. Wales informed First Lt. Guert Gansevoort, who immediately reported to Cmdr. Mackenzie. From circumstantial evidence, they concluded that seaman Elisha Small and boatswain's mate Samuel Cromwell were also part of the conspiracy.
Called before the captain, Spencer claimed that he had spoken in jest, but Cmdr. Mackenzie was not persuaded. The three supposed ringleaders were shackled on deck. The original plan was to take them to the U.S. for trial, but suspecting imminent rebellion, the captain reconsidered.
Under naval regulations, the harshest punishment that any ship's captain could order was a dozen lashes for a crewman and arrest and suspension of duty for an officer. But convinced that unidentified conspirators were at large, Cmdr. Mackenzie called a council of his officers, who interrogated witnesses over two days and then recommended death for all three prisoners. With the full crew mustered, Spencer, Small and Cromwell were hanged on Dec. 1. Afterward, discipline was said to show a marked improvement.
On Dec. 14, after a cruise of three months, the Somers dropped anchor in New York. Two weeks later, the secretary of the Navy convened a court of inquiry, setting in motion nearly four months of proceedings that riveted the nation. Quoting at length from the transcripts, Mr. Snow considers the evidence and the ethics in detail. Was the midshipman's so-called plot simply the fantasy of a bored, sullen 18-year-old? Was the ship, just a few days from the friendly port of St. Thomas, in the Virgin Islands, really in imminent peril? Was the captain justified in exceeding his authority, to safeguard his vessel and crew?
On Jan. 28, 1843, on what would have been Spencer's 19th birthday, the court announced its verdict: The captain and other officers had "honorably performed their duty to the service and their country." When Cromwell's widow and Secretary of War Spencer sought to initiate a criminal indictment, Cmdr. Mackenzie requested a court-martial instead, and was again acquitted.
Relieved as captain of the Somers, Cmdr. Mackenzie led only one other ship, during the Mexican War. He died of a heart attack on Sept. 13, 1848, at age 45. The Somers had sunk two years earlier, during a storm off Veracruz, with the loss of nearly half its 80-man crew. But its ignominy lived on, Mr. Snow writes, sending "a current of shame through the Navy for more than a generation." In the end, the near-mutiny helped to propel the service into the modern age, by exposing the failings of its apprentice system and bolstering the case for a proper naval academy, which was founded at Annapolis, Md., in 1845, three years after the Somers' ill-starred voyage.
In 1782, Massachusetts-born Deborah Sampson became one of the first American women to fight for her country by enlisting as a youth named Robert Shurtleff. During the Civil War, anywhere between 400 and 750 women practiced similar deceptions.
'The College Colonel," a poem by Herman Melville, describes the return of a Civil War veteran soon after the end of hostilities at Appomattox. The colonel's regiment is "but a remnant half-tattered, and battered, and worn." The same can be said for the subject of the poem. An idealistic college student who enlisted at the start of the war, he now returns home with a maimed arm, with a missing leg and -- this is Melville's point -- with a different sort of education than the one he received in college:
But all through the Seven Days' Fight,
And deep in the Wilderness grim,
And in the field-hospital tent,
And Petersburg crater, and dim
Lean brooding in Libby, there came --
Ah heaven! what truth to him.
The poem could very well describe the unusual career of the subject of Ronald White's "On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain." Chamberlain, who played a decisive role in the Union victory at Gettysburg
Civil War memoirs often stress the tedium and intermittent terror that characterized military life, and Chamberlain's first months in service were no different. His regiment was held in reserve or quarantined with smallpox during several important early battles. Not until Gettysburg, in July 1863, did Chamberlain and his troops see sustained action. Defending a strategically important position on a small hill known as Little Round Top and ordered to hold it "at all costs," Chamberlain made a snap decision after he realized his men had used up nearly all their ammunition. As the Alabama's 15th Regiment scrambled toward the, he ordered his troops to attack with bayonets -- an especially bloody form of combat. His "citizen soldiers -- lumbermen, fishermen, farmers and shopkeepers," as Mr. White writes, charged to victory in what went down as one of the most famous episodes of the war. Chamberlain's decision led to the capture of 101 Confederate soldiers. More important, by holding the Union's left flank he contributed to the North's triumph.
During the siege of Petersburg, nearly a year later, Chamberlain was seriously wounded for the first time. A bullet passed through both hips and nicked his bladder and urethra; the wound caused extreme pain and frequent infections for the rest of his life. He was injured again the following year, this time in Gen. Grant's final advance, where Chamberlain nearly lost an arm when a bullet passed through it. Another bullet struck a mirror frame and a packet of field orders that he kept in his breast pocket, then traveled around his rib cage and exited his back.
Despite these wounds, Chamberlain was back in action within a few weeks, just in time to preside over the surrender of Confederate troops at Appomattox. As the defeated infantry paraded past the triumphant Union forces, Chamberlain, now a major general, ordered his troops to "shoulder arms" -- a sign of respect for the defeated foe. Emulating his hero Grant, he hoped to begin the process of reconciliation. Yet when he offered words of encouragement to a Confederate general, Mr. White reports, he was met with a bitter retort that suggested the difficult peace that lay ahead: "You may forgive us, but we won't be forgiven. There is a rancor in our hearts which you little dream of. We hate you, sir."
On July 7, 1860, the last slave ship to land in the U.S. moored off the coast of Alabama. Crowded in the fetid hull of the Clotilda were 103 African captives, mostly adolescents and children. Because the ship arrived so late in the antebellum era and because its victims were so young, we know many details about the prisoners, often recorded in their own words.
Some 388,000 men, women and children were kidnapped in Africa and transported to North America during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. By 1808, as the number of enslaved persons in the U.S. approached 1.2 million, Congress outlawed the importation of slaves. Even after this prohibition, an estimated 8,000 Africans, like those on the Clotilda, were brought to the U.S. illegally.
The enslavement of the Clotilda's captives began in mid-April 1860, when warriors of the neighboring Fon people surrounded the town of Tarkar, in present-day Nigeria. The attackers, armed with machetes, axes and flintlocks, needed only half an hour to burn the town, kill most of the adults and take prisoner the more than 100 survivors.
After more than six agonizing weeks, the Clotilda reached the Alabama coast and was clandestinely towed through Mobile Bay and then to Twelve Mile Island, north of the city. The ship was burned, and the 103 surviving prisoners, emaciated and disoriented but relieved at finally receiving rags to cover themselves, were taken by steamboat to a wild, swampy area about 40 miles upriver.
Although the Clotilda's arrival was an open secret around Mobile and reported in publications such as the New York Times and Harper's Weekly, the enslavers were able to avoid discovery by shuffling their captives by wagon through a maze of sloughs and canebrakes. As the survivors were sold in small groups, they grieved again at the new separation from family and lifelong friends. Scattered through several Alabama counties, they were put to work in kitchens, cotton fields, forests, lumber mills, shipyards and steamboats.
At the conclusion of the Civil War, five years later, most of the survivors were still in their teens and early 20s. Longing to return to Africa but unable to raise the money for passage, they continued laboring as sharecroppers on the same plantations where they had been enslaved, or found jobs rebuilding the railroads or working in local industries. A few managed to buy their own land. One group approached Timothy Meaher, their former captor, and purchased a secluded tract three miles north of Mobile, where they built a largely self-sufficient community they called African Town. The settlement thrived, and by 1912 its population had grown to more than 2,000.
President Grover Cleveland is best known for the trivial oddity of being both the 22nd president and the 24th. Four years after winning the White House, he lost to Benjamin Harrison. Four years after that, he won a rematch and, uniquely among presidents, moved back in.
Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition boasted everything from a nine-ton elephant to a 389-foot “Electric Tower” powered by nearby Niagara Falls, but few attractions had generated as much excitement as the two-day visit of President William McKinley in September of 1901. McKinley's current Vice President was Theodore Roosevelt as his previous Vice President under his previous term, Garrett Hobart, had died in 1899 from heart troubles. The 58-year-old President McKinley was fresh off of guiding the United States to victory in the Spanish-American War, and he had entered his second term of office as one of the most popular Chief Executives in decades. On September 5, a record crowd of 116,000 filed into the World’s Fair to watch McKinley give a speech. That same evening, the Expo put on a patriotic fireworks display that culminated with a burst of pyrotechnics that spelled out the words, “Welcome President McKinley, Chief of our Nation and Our Empire.”
Despite the sweltering late-summer heat, a long line of people waited outside the Temple of Music when the reception began at 4 p.m. As the theater’s organist played a Bach sonata, the visitors slowly filed inside, many of them eager for a chance to meet the president and shake his hand. Near the front of the line stood 28-year-old Leon Czolgosz, a shy and brooding former steel worker. An avowed anarchist, Czolgosz had arrived in Buffalo only a few days earlier and purchased a .32 caliber Iver Johnson revolver—the same type of weapon that another anarchist had used to assassinate the Italian King Umberto I the previous summer. He now waited with the gun wrapped in a white handkerchief and concealed inside his jacket pocket. “It was in my heart; there was no escape for me,” Czolgosz later said. “All those people seemed bowing to the great ruler. I made up my mind to kill that ruler.”
McKinley’s anxious staff had added police and soldiers to his usual complement of Secret Service agents, but the security detail took little notice of Czolgosz as he strode up to the president at around 4:07 p.m. When McKinley smiled and extended his hand, Czolgosz raised his pistol—still wrapped in its white handkerchief—and fired two shots at point blank range.
“There was an instant of almost complete silence, like the hush that follows a clap of thunder,” the New York Times later wrote. “The president stood stock still, a look of hesitancy, almost of bewilderment, on his face. Then he retreated a step while a pallor began to steal over his features. The multitude seemed only partially aware that something serious had happened.”
The stillness was only broken when James “Big Jim” Parker, a tall African American man who had been waiting in line, punched Czolgosz and prevented him from firing a third shot. A host of soldiers and detectives also pounced on the assassin and began beating him to a pulp. It took an order from McKinley before they finally stopped and dragged Czolgosz from the room. By then, blood was pouring from the president’s stomach and darkening his white formal vest. “My wife,” he managed to say to Cortelyou. “Be careful how you tell her—oh, be careful!”
Just a few minutes after the shooting, McKinley was carried from the Temple of Music and taken to the Pan-American Exposition’s hospital. The only qualified doctor that could be found was a gynecologist, but the president was nevertheless rushed into the operating theater for emergency surgery. One of the bullets appeared to have ricocheted off one of McKinley’s suit buttons and hit his sternum, causing only minor damage. The other had struck his abdomen and passed clean through his stomach. The surgeon managed to suture the stomach wounds and stop the bleeding, but he was unable to locate the bullet, which he assumed was lodged somewhere in the president’s back.
Even with the .32 caliber slug still inside him, McKinley seemed to be on the mend in the days after the shooting. Doctors gave enthusiastic updates on his condition as he convalesced in the Expo’s president’s home, and newspapers reported that he was awake, alert and even reading the newspaper. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt was so pleased with McKinley’s progress that he took off on a camping trip in the Adirondack Mountains. “You may say that I am absolutely sure the president will recover,” he told reporters. By September 13, however, McKinley’s condition had become increasingly desperate. Gangrene had formed on the walls of the president’s stomach and brought on a severe case of blood poisoning. In a matter of hours, he grew weak and began losing consciousness. At 2:15 a.m. on September 14, he died with his wife Ida by his side.
Eugene V. Debs, who in 1912 won 6% of the popular vote as the Socialist candidate for U.S. president, was a gentle, devout Christian, committed to nonviolence and the electoral process. He charmed even his jailers, stopping on one speaking tour to visit the sheriff who had once had him in custody for leading a railroad strike. In 1918, Debs called the backers of American participation in World War I "the same usurers, the same money changers, the same Pharisees" Jesus once denounced. For this speech he was found guilty under the Espionage Act, Woodrow Wilson's sweeping criminalization of dissent, and was sentenced to 10 years. As Convict #9653 in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Debs ran once more for president in 1920, receiving more than 900,000 votes. The next year President Harding released Debs and invited him to stop in for a visit on his way home. Debs joked that he had run for the White House five times, but this was the first time he'd actually got there. Harding commuted Debs's sentence to time served, but didn't pardon him, which meant that Debs still did not have full citizenship rights, such as the right to vote. When a reporter asked how he felt about this, he replied, "Now I am only a citizen of the world."
The largest civilian criminal trial in American history, took place in 1918. Attempting to silence both the critics of the war and the militant wing of the labor movement, the government indicted several hundred "Wobblies" -- members of the radical and flamboyant Industrial Workers of the World. More than a hundred of them were held in Chicago's Cook County Jail, where they published a handwritten newspaper, staged poetry readings and choral concerts, and gave interviews to journalists through steel cell doors. On Sundays they attended church services in a room that doubled as an execution chamber. No Wobblies were accused of acts of violence; the charges against them rested solely on words they had written or spoken. Nonetheless, President Wilson told his attorney general that they were "worthy of being suppressed." The jury deliberated less than an hour to find them guilty on all counts, and the judge passed out a total of 807 years of prison time. "The big game is over," wrote Wobbly leader William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, "and we never won a hand. The other fellow had the cut, shuffle and deal."
FDR strived to serve good food in the White House but was thwarted at every turn by his wife, Eleanor. Ernest Hemingway described a dinner there in 1937 as "the worst I've ever eaten." After Eleanor discovered her husband was having an affair, meals had become her instrument of revenge, ruthlessly waged under the auspices of Mrs. Nesbitt, her housekeeper and chief ally. Spaghetti topped with boiled carrots anyone?
Ulysses Grant, the nation's 18th president, was arrested for speeding around the capital in his buggy in 1872, while he was in office.
In 1898, 33 years after the end of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War brought a sudden, unanticipated harmony and unity to a country that had been riven by war and a punitive postwar military occupation, which failed at wholesale societal reconstruction. In the South, American flags flew again as the sons of Confederate soldiers volunteered to fight, even if it meant wearing the once-hated Yankee blue. President William McKinley presciently seized this moment to mend a generation's sectional divide.
McKinley understood the Civil War as one who had lived it, having served four years in the 23rd Ohio Infantry, enlisting as a private and discharged in 1865 as a brevet major. He knew the steps to take to bring the country fully together again. As an initial signal, he selected three Civil War veterans to command the Cuba campaign. Two, William Rufus Shafter, given overall command of the Cuban operation, and H.W. Lawton, who led the Second Infantry Division, the first soldiers to land in the war, had received the Medal of Honor fighting for the Union. The other, "Fighting Joe" Wheeler, the legendary Confederate cavalry general, led the cavalry units in Cuba, after being elected to Congress in 1880 from Alabama and working hard to bring national reconciliation.
Four days after the Spanish-American war ended, McKinley proclaimed in Atlanta: "In the spirit of fraternity we should share with you in the care of the graves of Confederate soldiers." In that call for national unity the Confederate Memorial was born. It was designed by internationally respected sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and the first Jewish graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, who asked to be buried at the memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. On one face of the memorial is the finest explanation of wartime service perhaps ever written, by a Confederate veteran who later became a Christian minister: "Not for fame or reward, not for place or for rank; not lured by ambition or goaded by necessity; but in simple obedience to duty as they understood it; these men suffered all, sacrificed all, dared all, and died."
McKinley's fellow soldiers understood that during the Civil War, four slave states remained in the Union -- Maryland, Delaware, Missouri and Kentucky -- and none of them were required to give up slavery during the entire war. And that in every major battle of the Civil War, slave owners in the Union Army fought against non-slave-owners in the Confederate Army. They understood that President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in those states or in the areas of the South that had already been conquered. The proclamation freed only slaves in the areas taken after it was issued. And in the eyes of a Confederate soldier, if Lincoln had not freed slaves in the union, why should the soldier be vilified for supposedly fighting on behalf of slavery?
Many soldiers in the North, and many more in the South, would have understood what John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), America's most esteemed black historian, pointed out: In 1860 only 5% of whites in the South owned slaves, and less than 25% of whites benefited economically from slavery. An estimated 258,000 Confederate soldiers died in the war, about a third of all those who fought for the South. Few owned slaves. So why did they fight?
The soldier who wrote the inscription on the Confederate Memorial knew. And so did President McKinley and most veterans who have fought in America's wars.
The dispute that once raged over where Pennsylvania ended and Maryland began. That colonial-era quarrel cooled only when the expanse was surveyed and mapped in the 1760s by the Englishmen Charles Mason (1728-86) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-79).
Over time, the Mason-Dixon Line, which marked the Pennsylvania-Maryland border (as well as Delaware's western edge), came to define the American house divided -- between North and South, antislavery and pro-slavery, the elusive promise of race-blind opportunity and the stubborn endurance of Jim Crow oppression.
Nearly a century after Mason and Dixon embarked on their survey, the abolitionist John Latrobe observed that the line now represented much more than a resolution of border claims. It symbolized "the fact that the states of the union were divided into . . . Northern and Southern; and that those, who lived on opposite sides of the line of separation, were antagonistic in opinion" on the one subject that threatened "the integrity of the republic": slavery.
This symbol of division imposed a dangerous checkpoint on African-Americans. South of the line, where slavery expanded, even free blacks enjoyed no rights. North of it, before emancipation, fugitives seeking freedom might find a welcoming environment via the Underground Railroad -- if they could evade the constant threat of deportation by slave catchers.
The Mason-Dixon Line came to signal danger for antislavery whites as well. En route to Washington for his 1861 inauguration, President-elect Abraham Lincoln appeared in public routinely until crossing into Maryland. He ended up traveling through Baltimore incognito to evade an assassination plot.
Even though slavery remained legal in Maryland, the state stayed in the Union -- largely because of Lincoln's efforts to prevent the legislature from voting to secede. Ironically, the state thus remained exempt from his Emancipation Proclamation, which freed enslaved people only in the states in open rebellion. When Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee invaded Maryland in September 1862, his troops recaptured and re-enslaved those who had fled northward when the war commenced.
Crossing the Mason-Dixon Line during its second invasion the following year, Lee's army wantonly kidnapped free blacks all the way to Gettysburg -- unleashing weeks of terrifying racial displacement. Maryland ended slavery on its own in 1864 but long persisted in denying equal rights to its black citizens.
Those who dwelled on either side of "Mason and Dixon's Line" in the 1760s would hardly recognize today the political and physical landscapes that the two Englishmen once separated. Mason and Dixon themselves might be astonished to learn that, in trudging through the wilderness, they were marking what would become the deepest fault line in American history.
On April 23, 1910, a year after leaving his presidential office, Theodore Roosevelt gave what would become one of his greatest rhetorical triumphs. The most famous section of his speech still resonates and inspires, even today.
It is not the critic who counts.
Teddy Roosevelt also said "Stand up to be seen. Speak up to be heard. Sit down to be appreciated."
The USS Constitution, better known as "Old Ironsides," is perhaps the most famous vessel in the history of the US Navy. One of the first frigates built for the Navy, the Constitution saw action in several wars and defeated the British frigate HMS Guerrière during the War of 1812. Later condemned as unseaworthy, the ship was saved from dismantling by public sentiment aroused by Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem "Old Ironsides."
The Battle of Savo Island that took place in August 1942, was the most devastating confrontation in US Navy History. The eerie silence inside the Japanese headquarters was broken by an urgent transmission that spurred every man into a frenzy; the Allies had initiated a full-scale invasion of the Solomon Islands and the crucial Guadalcanal Island in the South Pacific. The long-awaited escalation of the war in the Pacific Theater had begun.
The news jolted the Imperial Japanese Navy into action. They were determined not to lose territory and promptly mobilized their finest, Vice Admiral Gunichi Mikawa, and his formidable fleet. Their mission was crystal clear: to intercept and obstruct the Allied landing efforts before they could establish a secure foothold on the islands.
With their hearts aflame, Mikawa’s fleet ripped through the endless waters of the Pacific in a high-stakes race against time. Departing from Rabaul, they executed a daring sprint toward the Solomon Islands.
The warships zigzagged, maneuvering around possible Allied reconnaissance aircraft. Unseen, they arrived at their objective on August 8, 1942, setting the stage for an insidious ambush.
The Vice Admiral, a master tactician, planned to strike under the veiling darkness, leveraging his sailors’ unsurpassed prowess in nocturnal combat and exploiting the US Navy’s inexperience in it. The imminent attack was shrouded in the blackest of nights, with no warning lights to signal the approach.
The Allied northern force was suddenly intercepted, the searing brightness of Japanese searchlights blinding them and sowing chaos across their ranks as shells began to rip through their ship’s decks.
It was a scene from a nightmare: the certainty of an invisible enemy, the sharp realization of their own blindness, and the cold sound of bullets hitting the metal hull. As the reality of the onslaught finally crashed over the Allied sailors, their fight shifted into one for survival.
The Panama Canal was an engineering marvel when first built. in 1850 the United States and Great Britain negotiated the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty to rein in rivalry over a proposed canal through the Central American Republic of Nicaragua. The Anglo-American canal, however, never went beyond the planning stages. French attempts to build a canal through Panama (province of Colombia) advanced further. Led by Ferdinand de Lesseps—the builder of the Suez Canal in Egypt—the French began excavating in 1880. Malaria, yellow fever, and other tropical diseases conspired against the de Lesseps campaign and after 9 years and a loss of approximately 20,000 lives, the French attempt went bankrupt. In spite of such setbacks, American interest in a canal continued unabated. The Hay-Pauncefote Treaty of 1901 abrogated the earlier Clayton-Bulwer Treaty and licensed the United States to build and manage its own canal. Following heated debate over the location of the proposed canal, on June 19, 1902, the U.S. Senate voted in favor of building the canal through Panama. Within 6 months, Secretary of State John Hay signed a treaty with Colombian Foreign Minister Tomás Herrán to build the new canal. The financial terms were unacceptable to Colombia’s congress, and it rejected the offer.
President Theodore Roosevelt responded by dispatching U.S. warships to Panama City (on the Pacific) and Colón (on the Atlantic) in support of Panamanian independence. Colombian troops were unable to negotiate the jungles of the Darien Strait and Panama declared independence on November 3, 1903. The newly declared Republic of Panama immediately named Philippe Bunau-Varilla (a French engineer who had been involved in the earlier de Lesseps canal attempt) as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary. In his new role, Bunau-Varilla negotiated the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty of 1903, which provided the United States with a 10-mile wide strip of land for the canal, a one-time $10 million payment to Panama, and an annual annuity of $250,000. The United States also agreed to guarantee the independence of Panama. Completed in 1914, the Panama Canal symbolized U.S. technological prowess and economic power. Although U.S. control of the canal eventually became an irritant to U.S.-Panamanian relations, at the time it was heralded as a major foreign policy achievement.
- Nebraska is considered fly-over country for much of the U.S., but the tiny town of Tarnov -- with a population of 48 in 2023 -- wasn't just flown over when the U.S. Army Air Corps accidentally bombed the town on Aug. 16, 1943.
During a training mission in the early morning at an airfield in Sioux City, Iowa, a pair of B-17 bombers took off toward a bombing range near Stanton, Neb., roughly 40 miles north of Tarnov. Something went wrong. Perhaps the B-17 crews, who would soon embark to Europe to drop bombs on Hitler's Germany, got lost flying over endless cornfields and mistook Tarnov's three streetlights for their Stanton target. For whatever reason, at 4 a.m., they fixed their bomb sights on Tarnov.
According to a report in that afternoon's Columbus Daily Telegram, the planes circled Tarnov 15 times before dropping seven nonexploding practice bombs on the town. One of the 100-pound bombs crashed through the roof of the Ciecior family home and just missed a bedroom where four young children were asleep. A bomb landed in the yard of Isidore Kwapnioski, whose house remains across the street from the historic St. Michael's Church. Another bomb landed in a potato patch. Miraculously, no one was killed or hurt. But the bombing was cataclysmic to the 100 or so hardscrabble farmers who lived in Tarnov in 1943 and had sacrificed for the war effort. Nebraska is possibly the only state that was bombed by both the U.S. Army and the Japanese military during World War II. A balloon bomb launched in Japan rode the trade winds across the Pacific Ocean and halfway across North America before falling on the intersection of 50th Street and Underwood Ave. in Omaha on April 18, 1945. No one was hurt.
Joshua A. Norton Declares Himself Emperor of the US (1859). Though Norton arrived in San Francisco during the California gold rush, he took up speculating in rice, a valuable commodity at the time, rather than prospecting. Unfortunately, he ended up losing his fortune, after which he vanished for a short time. When he reappeared, he was wearing a costume resembling that of France's Napoleon III and calling himself "Emperor Norton." For the next 13 years, he paraded around the city issuing "proclamations" and even banknotes
In the 1880s, James Addison Reavis attempted the greatest land fraud in American history. In a story that crisscrosses the United States and Mexico, and crosses the ocean to Spain, he tried to convince the U.S. government that he owned 18,000 square miles of the Arizona Territory. In the process, he anointed himself the Baron of Arizona. Arizona officially joined the United States as a state on Feb. 14, 1912 during the Presidency of William Howard Taft.
Project Azorian (also called "Jennifer" by the press after its Top Secret Security Compartment) was a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) project to recover the sunken Soviet submarine K-129 from the Pacific Ocean floor in 1974 using the purpose-built ship Hughes Glomar Explorer. The 1968 sinking of K-129 occurred approximately 1,600 miles (2,600 km) northwest of Hawaii. Project Azorian was one of the most complex, expensive, and secretive intelligence operations of the Cold War at a cost of about $800 million, or $4.7 billion today.
The US designed the recovery ship and its lifting cradle using concepts developed with Global Marine (see Project Mohole) that used their precision stability equipment to keep the ship nearly stationary above the target while lowering nearly three miles (4.8 km) of pipe. They worked with scientists to develop methods for preserving paper that had been underwater for years in hopes of being able to recover and read the submarine's codebooks. The reasons that this project was undertaken included the recovery of an intact R-21 nuclear missile and cryptological documents and equipment.
The Soviet Union was unable to locate K-129, but the US knew where to look, based on data recorded by four Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC) sites and the Adak Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) array. The US identified an acoustic event on March 8 that likely originated from an explosion aboard the submarine. The US zeroed in on the location to within five nautical miles (5.8 mi; 9.3 km). The submarine USS Halibut located the boat using the Fish, a towed, 12-foot (3.7 m), two-short-ton (1.8 t) collection of cameras, strobe lights, and sonar that was built to withstand extreme depths. The recovery operation in international waters about six years later used mining for manganese nodules as its cover. The company was nominally owned by Howard Hughes, secretly backed by the CIA, who had paid for the construction of the Hughes Glomar Explorer. The ship recovered a portion of K-129, but a mechanical failure in the grapple caused two-thirds of the recovered section to break off during recovery.
A number of artifacts from Project Azorian and Glomar Explorer are on display at the CIA Museum. The museum has shared declassified images and video featuring the artifacts through its website; however the physical grounds of the museum are on the compound of the George Bush Center for Intelligence and thus physically inaccessible to the public.
During Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, from 1901 to 1909, the White House was home to six children and a menagerie of pets -- including a hyena, a lion cub and a badger that, according to the president's son, never bit faces, only legs.
Roosevelt also had a dog, Pete, which killed four squirrels, distressing the family.
Pete chased down a French ambassador and tore the man's pants, said Hager. That earned him a trip to a Virginia farm for retraining. When Pete returned, he chased down a Naval officer. That got him permanently decamped to the family estate at Sagamore Hill in New York.
A year after learning to fly, aviator Eugene Ely performed an experiment for the US Navy: he took off from a temporary platform built over the bow of the USS Birmingham, anchored off Virginia's coast, and became the first person to take off from a ship in a fixed-wing aircraft. Two months later, he performed the first shipboard landing, using the first tailhook system to land on the USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay, California.
The U.S. entered the First World War on April 6, 1917, but the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) did not begin operations in France until July. A year later—although it is now mostly forgotten—the U.S. state of Massachusetts came under attack by Germany.
The message received at the Chatham Naval Air Station the morning of July 21, 1918 was crisp: “Submarine sighted. Tug and three barges being fired on, and one is sinking three miles off Coast Guard Station 40.”
Station 40 was on Nauset Beach, 70 miles southeast of Boston.
It took Navy Ensign Eric Lingard some minutes to gather a crew to man Chatham’s flying boat. The Curtiss HS1L, a three-seat, pusher aircraft was powered by a 360-horsepower Liberty motor mounted high between widely spaced wings. A single Mark IV bomb hung from an underwing rack. But the German commander, Kapitӓn Richard Feldt, had not surfaced for a soiree, he was directing the crews firing the two 15-centimeter (5.9-in) caliber guns on U-156’s deck. With thundering regularity, orange flame belched from the guns. And with nearly equal regularity, the shells exploded, producing giant geysers of seawater or exhuming tons of sand from nearby Nauset Beach. A few shells scored direct hits—one of the barges was sinking, and holes appeared in the tall funnel of the 120-foot Perth Amboy.
As the HS1L flying boat closed on the scene, a shell from the U-boat tore into the tug’s pilothouse. The aviators initially saw a flash followed by a scene of twisted wreckage once the smoke cleared.
Although the flying boat had not year reached the recommended safe bombing altitude of 1,000 feet, Lingard shouted toward Chief Howard in the bombardier’s cockpit that he planned to bomb the U-boat.Orange flame spouted from the guns on U-156, but Lingard, undeterred, completed his circle. He straightened and aligned on the U-boat once more. At the proper moment, with one hand gripping a strut, Howard reached and manually uncaged the bomb. The four-foot-long missile splashed into the sea near the submarine but did not explode. As the pilot strove to outdistance the U-boat’s gunfire the aviators uttered strings of expletives.
Balancing athletically, Howard withdrew to the fuselage and reclaimed his station in the aircraft’s nose. Lingard boosted the motor’s throttle and gained altitude.
On the Perth Amboy below, the shell’s explosion in the pilothouse had resulted in injuries to several crewmen. The boat’s captain, James Tapley, fearing the result of a direct hit by the U-boat gunners, reluctantly issued the order to abandon ship. At the same time, a rescue crew from Coast Guard Station 40 rowed their boat frantically toward the tug, intent on aiding its crew.
It was now after 11 a.m. At Chatham Naval Air Station, five miles south of Nauset Beach, a biplane piloted by Philip Eaton touched down. Eaton, commander of the station, had received his pilot training in the Navy, but was now a Captain in the U.S. Coast Guard. He’d returned from an early-morning search for a lost dirigible. He pulled to a stop and was briefed on the U-boat attack and Lingard’s mission.
Less than 15 minutes later, Captain Eaton took off alone in a Curtiss R-9 float plane armed with a Mark IV bomb. Minutes later, Lingard, now circling at a safe altitude above the U-boat, spotted Eaton’s float plane approaching.
“It was the prettiest sight I ever hoped to see,” he’d later recall.On the U-boat’s conning tower, Kapitӓn Feldt also saw Eaton’s plane. The aeroplane was flying low and seemed to be aimed directly at U-156. Feldt’s gunners fired at the incoming floatplane but failed to hit it. Eaton swooped to about 500 feet above the water and released his bomb. As he passed over the submarine, he saw the bomb land in the water beside the U-boat. He braced for an explosion, but saw only a splash. Again, a Mark IV bomb failed to detonate.
Angered by the weapon’s failure, Eaton circled out to sea, returned, and lined up on the U-156. Again the U-boat’s gunners fired at him, and again they missed. With no ordnance, he tossed the only weapons he had left down onto the enemy below: a wrench and a toolbox. It’s not recorded whether or not they found their mark.
Kapitӓn Feldt, at this moment the luckiest U-boat commander in all of the German Imperial Navy, decided against further risk. He ordered the crew into their hatches, halted the diesels, and instructed his helmsman to dive. As the last crewman battened the hatch in the conning tower, U-156 slipped beneath the surface of the Atlantic. The only attack on the United States of America during World War One was now concluded.
Although damaged, the tugboat Perth Amboy did not sink. Its injured crewmen were rowed ashore, where they were hospitalized. All survived their wounds. Alerted to the hour-long bombardment, nearby residents swarmed the bluffs of Nauset Beach to view the craters created by the errant German gunnery. Within days, reporters arrived to interview survivors of the attack. Captain Tapley was quoted as saying, “I never saw a more glaring example of rotten marksmanship.”
In the follow-up, the Secretary of the Navy ordered the Ordnance Department to determine why the Mark IV bombs did not detonate. Ultimately, all Mark IV bombs in U.S. service were replaced with improved designs.
Indeed, the erratic gunning of the German U-boat’s crews, the failure of HS1L’s release system, and those aerial bombs that turned to duds may have something to do with this remaining a mostly forgotten incident of World War I.
As fog rolled in, off the ocean in Amagansett on June 13, 1942, a German U-boat crept slowly toward the Long Island coast line into a beach in Amagansett.
On board were four German spies with the mission to unleash a campaign of terror on the United States.
This follows the stories of the seven American pilots that actually made it into the air in their P-40 and P-36 fighters that defended Pearl Harbor.
Additionally, many people have heard of the six American Curtiss P-40 Tomahawk fighters that actually got off the ground and contested the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941. Some know about the 11 Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers winging toward Pearl Harbor from California unarmed and out of gas. A few are aware of the six obsolete Curtiss P-36 Hawk that were able to take off. However, almost no one knows the story of 18 Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bombers from the aircraft carrier Enterprise that arrived over Pearl Harbor simultaneously with the Japanese. These were the planes of Scouting Squadron Six. Scouting Six lost six planes during the attack, and Bombing Six lost one, killing eight airmen and wounding two others. Later that evening, six VF-6 Wildcats attempted to land at Ford Island, but five were accidentally shot down by friendly anti-aircraft fire, killing three pilots and wounding two others. (The VF designation was one of the oldest in use by the U.S. Navy. From 1921 to 1948 it designated "Fighting Plane Squadron" or "Fighting Squadron". It designated "Fighter Squadron" from 1948 until 2006 when the last VF squadron was redesignated to Strike Fighter (VFA) squadron).
This is the story of Loyce Deen, the TBF Avenger Torpedo Bomber gunner who was killed in action in 1944.
On 5 November 1944, Petty Officer Second Class Loyce Edward Deen was serving as an Aviation Machinist's Mate in Torpedo Squadron VT-15, USS Essex (CV-9).
On that day, PO2 Deen’s Squadron was in action against Japanese forces while participating in a raid on Manila, Philippines. PO2 Deen was serving as a Torpedo Plane gunner on a TBM Avenger when his plane was hit multiple times by anti-aircraft fire while attacking a Japanese cruiser in Manila Bay. PO2 Deen was killed in action. The Avenger's pilot, LT Robert Cosgrove, managed to return to the Essex. However, both PO2 Deen and the plane had been shot up so badly that it was decided to leave his mangled remains in it.
It is the only time in U.S. Navy history (and probably U.S. military history) that an aircraft crew member was buried at sea in his aircraft after being killed in action.
Casualty evacuation, also known as CASEVAC or by the callsign Dustoff or colloquially Dust Off, is a military term for the emergency patient evacuation of casualties from a combat zone. Casevac can be done by both ground and air. "DUSTOFF" is the callsign specific to U.S. Army Air Ambulance units. CASEVACs by air today are almost exclusively done by helicopter, a practice begun on a small scale toward the end of World War II; before that, STOL aircraft, such as the Fieseler Fi 156 or Piper J-3 were used.
The primary difference between a CASEVAC and a medical evacuation (MEDEVAC) is that a MEDEVAC uses a standardized and dedicated vehicle providing en route care, while a CASEVAC uses non-standardized and non-dedicated vehicles that may or may not provide en route care. CASEVACs are commonly referred to as "a lift/flight of opportunity". If a corpsman/medic on the ground calls for a CASEVAC, the closest available unit with space could be called to assist, regardless of its medical capabilities. This could include U.S. Marine Corps aircraft such as the MV-22 Osprey, U.S. Navy SH-60 Seahawk helicopters, or CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters. The guiding principle in a CASEVAC is to transport casualties that are in dire need for evacuation from the battlefield and do not have time to wait on a MEDEVAC. MEDEVAC aircraft and ground transport are mandated by the Geneva Convention to be unarmed and well marked. Firing on "clearly marked and identified" MEDEVAC vehicles would be considered a war crime under Article II of the Geneva Convention, in the same sense as firing on a hospital ship would be a war crime. CASEVAC transport are allowed to be armed since they are normally used for other purposes but carry no penalties for engagement by hostile forces.
"Dust Off" was the tactical call sign for medical evacuation missions first used in 1963 by Major Lloyd E. Spencer, Commander of the U.S. Army 57th Medical Detachment (Helicopter Ambulance). The name lasted the rest of the war. Typically air ambulances transport wounded soldiers categorized as "urgent" patients from point of injury to a medical facility within an hour of soldier(s) being wounded. Flying into an active landing zone to pick up wounded was a dangerous job. Peter Dorland and James Nanney wrote in Dust Off: Army Aeromedical Evacuation in Vietnam, "... slightly more a third of the aviators became casualties in their work, and the crew chiefs and medical corpsmen who accompanied them suffered similarly. The danger of their work was further borne out by the high rate of air ambulance loss to hostile fire: 3.3 times that of all other forms of helicopter missions in the Vietnam War." The following radio transmissions during a Viet Cong attack on May 18, 1969 in Xuan Loc, Vietnam, say it all: "This is Dustoff responding to your request, over." Battalion operations officer: "Dustoff be advised that we are under intense mortar and small-arms fire at this time. How long can you stay on station? over." "About 30 minutes. Do you have seriously wounded? over." "That's affirmative, over." Dustoff: "I think I see a way to get in. Prepare litter patients. Clear the decks. I'm coming in."
We had 14 killed and 40 wounded that night, requiring frequent hazardous visits by Dustoff. I was the officer on that call and was wounded later in the battle. Dustoff got me out and may have saved my leg, according to the doctor who performed the first surgery.
The Congressional Gold Medal is well deserved by the Dustoff crews. Many veterans felt the gentle touch and genuine concern of those who rescued them. I recommend immediate congressional action honoring these heroes.
Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster (Ret.)
---
In 1967 Neil P. Tessler was a second lieutenant in Vietnam leading an assault against the enemy. I was shot in front of a bunker. The bullet passed through my right thigh and destroyed a femoral artery. We couldn't stop the bleeding. My captain radioed a helicopter pilot and told him it was a hot landing zone. I heard the pilot say, "Just tell me where to set it down."
When I woke up after surgery, the surgeon who operated on me said, "You shouldn't have survived the wound" due to massive blood loss. He said the speed in which the helicopter was able to get me from the battlefield to surgery most likely saved my life. With respect to heroes, those of us who survived combat would say the real heroes are the ones who never made it back.
World Political & Historical Facts
Live view of the Russian Museum Cruiser Aurora & a view from HMS Warrior
The Romans had no interest whatsoever in listening to defeated enemies -- except once, in the 1st century, when the British chieftain Caractacus was brought in chains before the Senate.
On a whim, the Emperor Claudius told Caractacus to give one reason why his life should be spared. According to the historian Cassius Dio, the defeated Briton gave an impassioned speech about the glory of Rome, and how much greater it would be if he was spared: "If you save my life, I shall be an everlasting memorial of your clemency." Impressed, the Senate set him free.
In 1193 King Richard I of England was held captive by Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, and Richard's mother Eleanor of Aquitane had to pay a ransom to release him.
Thomas Becket, also known as Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas of London and later Thomas (21 December 1119 or 1120 – 29 December 1170), served as Lord Chancellor from 1155 to 1162, and then notably as Archbishop of Canterbury from 1162 until his death in 1170. He engaged in conflict with Henry II, King of England, over the rights and privileges of the Church and was murdered by followers of the King in Canterbury Cathedral. Soon after his death, he was canonised by Pope Alexander III. He is venerated as a saint and martyr by the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion.
In 1598, French King Henry IV issued the Edict of Nantes to restore internal peace in France, ravaged by the Wars of Religion. The edict gave the French Protestants, or Huguenots, extensive rights and control of certain cities, including La Rochelle, which became a stronghold for them.
The assassination of Henry IV of France in 1610 led to the appointment of Marie de' Medici as regent for her nine-year-old son, Louis XIII. Her removal in 1617 caused a series of revolts by powerful regional nobles, both Catholic and Protestant, while religious tensions were heightened by the outbreak of the 1618 to 1648 Thirty Years War. In 1621, Louis re-established Catholicism in the formerly Huguenot region of Béarn, resulting in an uprising led by Henri de Rohan and his brother Soubise
Henry's successor, Louis XIII, and his minister, Cardinal Richelieu, resolved to crush the Huguenots, and La Rochelle fell after a 14-month siege.
King Charles I had no hope for clemency on Jan. 30, 1649, when he faced execution after the English Civil War. But this made his speech all the more powerful, because Charles was speaking to posterity more than to his replacement, Oliver Cromwell. His final words have been a template for concession speeches ever since: After defending his record and reputation, Charles urged Cromwell to rule for the good of the country, "to endeavor to the last gasp the peace of the kingdom."
When Napoleon Bonaparte abdicated as emperor of France in 1814, he stood in the courtyard of the palace of Fontainebleau and bade an emotional goodbye to the remnants of his Old Guard. He said that he was leaving to prevent further bloodshed, and ended with the exhortation: "I go, but you, my friends, will continue to serve France."
The Battle of Austerlitz (2 December 1805/11 Frimaire An XIV FRC), also known as the Battle of the Three Emperors, was one of the most important and decisive engagements of the Napoleonic Wars. The battle occurred near the town of Austerlitz in the Austrian Empire (modern-day Slavkov u Brna in the Czech Republic). The decisive victory of Napoleon's Grande Armée at Austerlitz brought the War of the Third Coalition to a rapid end, with the Treaty of Pressburg signed by the Austrians later in the month. The battle is often cited as a tactical masterpiece, in the same league as other historic engagements like Cannae or Gaugamela.
The Peterloo Massacre took place at St Peter's Field, Manchester, Lancashire, England, on Monday 16 August 1819. Eighteen people died and 400–700 were injured when cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation.
After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, there was an acute economic slump, accompanied by chronic unemployment and harvest failure due to the Year Without a Summer, and worsened by the Corn Laws, which kept the price of bread high. At that time, only around 11 percent of adult males had the vote, very few of them in the industrial north of England, which was worst hit. Reformers identified parliamentary reform as the solution, and a mass campaign to petition parliament for manhood suffrage gained three-quarters of a million signatures in 1817 but was flatly rejected by the House of Commons. When a second slump occurred in early 1819, radical reformers sought to mobilize huge crowds to force the government to back down. The movement was particularly strong in the north-west, where the Manchester Patriotic Union organised a mass rally in August 1819, addressed by well-known radical orator Henry Hunt.
Shortly after the meeting began, local magistrates called on the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry to arrest Hunt and several others on the platform with him. The Yeomanry charged into the crowd, knocking down a woman and killing a child, and finally apprehended Hunt. Cheshire Magistrates' chairman William Hulton then summoned the 15th Hussars to disperse the crowd. They charged with sabres drawn, and contemporary accounts estimated that between nine and seventeen people were killed and 400 to 700 injured in the ensuing confusion. The event was first labelled the "Peterloo massacre" by the radical Manchester Observer newspaper in a bitterly ironic reference to the bloody Battle of Waterloo which had taken place four years earlier.
Emperor Hirohito delivered a similar message in his radio broadcast on Aug. 14, 1945, announcing Japan's surrender in World War II. The Emperor stressed that by choosing peace over annihilation he was serving the ultimate interests of the nation. He expected his subjects to do the same, to "enhance the innate glory of the Imperial State." The shock of the Emperor's words was compounded by the fact that no one outside the court and cabinet had ever heard his voice before.
The term "boycott" has its roots in 19th-century Ireland, where the nationalist politician Charles Stewart Parnell urged his followers not to deal with Charles Cunningham Boycott, a highly unpopular British land agent. A boycott is generally an act of desperation, and the original one was largely unsuccessful.
Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican leader, was so short of paper that he had to scrape inked words off old letters to draft his constitution; that it took 3,000 mature oak trees to build a major warship in the 18th century; and that the British exhibited Magna Carta in London as "The Bulwark of our Liberties" during the Seven Years' War against France and other European powers. It turns out that Napoleon wrote the constitution for the Duchy of Warsaw in about an hour.
Although the six-month Franco-Prussian War was among the shortest of all major European conflicts, the war's combination of lethal new weapons (breechloading rifles, machine guns, steel cannon) and huge armies left mountains of dead and hordes of permanently mutilated wounded: In the murderous engagement at Gravelotte in August 1870, the Prussians lost twice as many men as they had during the entire Austro-Prussian War of 1866.
The French lost the Franco-Prussian War because the best efforts of their courageous troops were frustrated by strikingly weary and incompetent commanders, all reporting to an exhausted and enervated Napoleon III. As for the Prussians, they were better organized, had a better military education and had more manpower, but is at pains to bring out their limitations and mistakes.
Napoleon III's uncle, the great Napoleon, is said to have asked, when a subordinate was proposed for promotion: "I know he's a good general, but is he lucky?"
Paris was surrounded by the end of September and a long and increasingly terrible siege began, made all the worse by an unusually severe winter. As starvation intensified, even the zoo animals were slaughtered and eaten, including the two elephants, Castor and Pollux.
Outside the capital there was plenty of horror still to come, as counterproductive resistance from partisan francs-tireurs was crushed by equally counterproductive reprisals from the German invaders. At the German occupiers' headquarters at Versailles, on Jan. 18, 1871, the German princes proclaimed Wilhelm of Prussia the first emperor of a united Germany. ("Mad" King Ludwig II of Bavaria provided evidence of his basic sanity by refusing to attend.) A week later an armistice was signed, and the war came to an end -- so far as the Germans were concerned, although a civil war erupted in Paris in March.
When Japan sought a path to modernity in the late 19th century, it was not the U.S. Constitution to which it turned but rather that of newly united Germany. That document put an emperor in charge of the armed forces -- a provision that can be found in the 1889 Japanese constitution. Another borrowing from Prussia-Germany was conscription. Male Japanese were not only given a stake in the country by means of an elected legislature; they would be expected to fight for it. In this respect, the measure was a success. In the early 1890s, Prime Minister Ito Hirobumi estimated that the extractive capacity of the state -- that is, the tax burden it imposed -- doubled in the 10 years after the constitution was promulgated. Japan was able to wage effective war on land and on sea, defeating China in 1895 and felling mighty Russia in 1904-05.
Charles II of England sought to ban coffeehouses (and the highly caffeinated political squabbles therein) for "Disturbance of the Quiet and Peace of the Realm," while Frederick II hired unemployed veterans as Kaffeeschnuffler (coffee sniffers) to follow the aroma toward unpatriotic Prussians who violated the law in their preference for coffee over beer.
It is commonly believed that the last successful invasion of England was William the Conqueror's in 1066. Not so. In November 1688, a largely Dutch army of 24,000 landed at Torbay in Devonshire, and within a few months its commander -- William, Prince of Orange -- was king of England. Some might say that this was not really an invasion: first because William had come at the invitation of opposition politicians who had urged him to depose James II and restore "the liberties of England"; and second because there was no battle, most of James's generals having crossed over to William. There were, however, battles in Scotland and Ireland. The so-called Glorious Revolution was also termed a "bloodless" one, but only in England and not throughout the British Isles. William would reign from 1689 to 1702, jointly with his wife, Mary (James's daughter), until her death in 1694 and then on his own.
William's title -- Prince of Orange -- presents a conundrum in itself, for Orange was a state within the Holy Roman Empire (eventually annexed by France) and not officially part of the Dutch Republic. Even so, the House of Orange, for various reasons, was a source of status and power in the Netherlands, especially in Holland and Zeeland, the two most important provinces. Both eventually appointed William as stadtholder -- steward or governor -- making him, in effect, the leader of the republic.
By the 17th century, the Dutch Republic was a merchant state, rich and economically more advanced than either France or England. The world's first stock exchange was established in Amsterdam, and Dutch ships dominated international commerce, making the Netherlands a rival of which both England and France were jealous.
The White Ship (French: la Blanche-Nef; Medieval Latin: Candida navis) was a vessel transporting many nobles including the heir to the English throne that sank in the Channel during a trip from France to England near the Normandy coast off Barfleur, on 25 November 1120. Only one of approximately 300 people aboard survived, a butcher from Rouen. Those who drowned included William Adelin, the only in-wedlock son and heir of Henry I of England, his half-sister Matilda of Perche, his half-brother Richard of Lincoln, the earl of Chester Richard d'Avranches, and Geoffrey Ridel. William Adelin's death led to a succession crisis and a period of civil war in England from 1135–53 known as the Anarchy.
The saga of Maximilian I, Emperor of Mexico, has all the elements of grand opera: international intrigue, ill-starred romance, abject betrayal and a well-meaning hero with the tragic flaws of hubris and self-delusion. When Napoleon's go-betweens approached Maximilian in 1861, Mexican Conservatives had just lost a three-year civil war to the Liberals, who were led by Benito Juarez and supported by the United States. The Mexican government was struggling under crushing foreign debts, and in January 1862, after President Juarez announced a two-year moratorium on payments, the country's creditors -- France, Great Britain and Spain -- landed troops at Veracruz to force reimbursement. When it became clear that France was more intent on regime change than on debt collection, the other powers hastily withdrew. President Abraham Lincoln protested France's flagrant violation of the Monroe Doctrine but, mired in his own civil war and afraid of driving Napoleon III to the Confederate cause, was powerless to act. Events turned against Maximilian in 1865, when the American Civil War ended and Washington was finally able to send military and financial aid to the republicans and to demand the removal of French troops. Frustrated with Maximilian and now faced with the real possibility of war with the United States, Napoleon III halted all additional loans and withdrew his forces, though he knew what the outcome would be. In February 1867, the French abandoned Mexico City and fled to Veracruz, where they had landed five years earlier. As the republican troops advanced on the capital, Maximilian took personal command of the imperial army and refused to abdicate, invoking family honor and responsibility to "his" people.
The climax of Maximilian's drama came in March 1867, when an overwhelming republican force surrounded the imperial army in the central Mexican city of Queretaro. Betrayed again -- by one of his officers, who accepted a bribe to guide enemy troops into his headquarters -- Maximilian was taken prisoner. At last, he offered to abdicate and depart for Europe, but too late. Over international pleas for clemency, Juarez ordered a military trial, and following the failure of two desperate escape plots, the last emperor of Mexico faced a firing squad on June 19, 1867. His final words could have been lifted from the lyrics of a tragic opera: "I forgive everybody, I pray that everyone may also forgive me, and I wish that my blood, which is now to be shed, may be for the good of the country. Long live Mexico, long live independence."
Mary Stuart of Scotland, was Queen of Scotland from 14 December 1542 until her forced abdication in 1567. Mary Stuart's child with her first husband, Lord Darnley, became James VI of Scotland, and later James I of England and Ireland. Elizabeth served him as both godparent and backup parent. To James's baptism, the English queen sent a font of pure gold and jewels, later melted down for the cash that Mary needed to defend herself from her own nobles. These were eventful times, full of implausible plot twists. James's christening, we learn, was punctuated by a fistfight started by the fancy- dress contingent when one of Mary's French courtiers wagged his satyr's tail obscenely in the direction of the English guests. Nine months before, Mary's secretary David Rizzio had been dragged out of her presence still clinging to her skirts, into a hall and knifed to death by 50 dagger thrusts. Two months after the christening, multiple barrels of gunpowder would be blown up in a basement to kill Lord Darnley where he slept several floors above -- revenge for his naming his co-conspirators in the murder of Rizzio. Mary had once claimed Elizabeth's throne as her own and was considered the legitimate sovereign of England by many English Catholics, including participants in a rebellion known as the Rising of the North. Perceiving Mary as a threat, Elizabeth had her confined in various castles and manor houses in the interior of England. After eighteen and a half years in custody, Mary was found guilty of plotting to assassinate Elizabeth in 1586 and was beheaded the following year at Fotheringhay Castle.
Richard III (2 October 1452 – 22 August 1485) was King of England and Lord of Ireland from 26 June 1483 until his death in 1485. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty.
in August 1485, Henry Tudor and his uncle, Jasper Tudor, landed in southern Wales with a contingent of French troops, and marched through Pembrokeshire, recruiting soldiers. Henry's forces defeated Richard's army near the Leicestershire town of Market Bosworth. Richard was slain On August 22, 1485, making him the last English king to die in battle. Henry Tudor then ascended the throne as Henry VII.
Richard's defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the last decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses, marked the end of the Middle Ages in England. He is the protagonist of Richard III, one of William Shakespeare's history plays. Shakespeare's brilliantly verbose but incompetent King Richard II discovers that his over-the-top invocation of avenging angels has no effect on Henry Bolingbroke, who will depose him, and the hard men around Bolingbroke who will be quite happy to kill him. At the end, he collapses in a recognition of the reality behind the costume and scenery: "For within the hollow crown/That rounds the mortal temples of a king/Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits/Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp."
It is entertaining and occasionally appalling to see Richard II and Shakespeare villains like Goneril and Iago on the stage. In the real world of political power, however, one has to work with such people and live with the consequences of their actions. One of the great gifts that Shakespeare offers us is an understanding of how they think, how they fool us while also fooling themselves, and how we become consumed by the play in which we find ourselves fascinated spectators.
There's no fool like an old fool, because the nature of comedy keeps changing. Slapstick and bodily functions aside, one era's side-splitter often leaves the next era stone-faced. The functions of humor also change. The courts of Europe had professional fools and amateur politicians, mostly clerical or aristocratic.
The Renaissance fool we remember is the fictional "poor Yorick," whose "infinite jest," Hamlet recalls, enlivened the long Scandinavian nights at Elsinore. Shakespeare's contemporaries, however, remembered a real fool. Will Somer was, to borrow from vaudeville, Henry VIII's "banana man," a fooling foil to the royal straight man.
The Tudor period in England (1485-1603), was an era of intrigue, sectarianism, war, and paranoia. Somer was a permanent fixture in the bloody game around the throne. Henry spent more time with Somer than he did with his chief advisers, Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, or with his wives. Somer appears in four of Henry's royal portraits. In one, he loiters in an archway in black, frowning like Hamlet. In another, a lovestruck Henry plays the harp in the manner of King David. Somer contorts his face. Is he helplessly moved or trying to lighten the mood?
We know little about Somer before 1535, when his name first appeared in the court records. He may have been born in Shropshire. He possibly entered royal service via the household of a man named Richard Farmor, who later became a Catholic dissident. Somer gave his public what it wanted, lots of afflatus and physical violence, but his specialty was wordplay. He fell asleep a lot, sometimes among the king's spaniels, and was remembered as a "poor man's friend." He may have been throttled by the king for joking about Anne Boleyn.
Admiral Edward Vernon, was the hero of a largely forgotten colonial war waged between Britain and Spain from 1739 to 1742. This war was referred to as the War of Jenkins Ear. Its name, coined by British historian Thomas Carlyle in 1858, refers to Robert Jenkins, a captain of a British merchant ship Rebecca, whose ear was cut off by sailors of the Spanish coast guard when they boarded his ship to search for contraband. Seven years later, in support of mongering for war, Jenkins was paraded before the British Parliament, without his ear. In an opening move, the hawkish Vernon was sent to raid Porto Bello, in what is now Panama. The news that Vernon had fulfilled his bold boast to capture his objective with "six ships only" prompted wild celebrations in Britain and her North American colonies, making him a figurehead for opponents of the pacifistic "prime minister" Sir Robert Walpole."Vernonmania" gave rise to commemorative medals and pottery, and coincided with the first performance of what would become Great Britain's unofficial national anthem, "Rule, Britannia. After a landing on Cuba (via Guantanamo Bay) was aborted, Britain's ambitious Caribbean designs fizzled out, and with them visions of an expanded American empire. The human cost of the bungled venture was appalling. Of about 28,000 British combatants, almost half perished, with the American Regiment's fatalities approaching 75%. In another remarkable offshoot, a British naval squadron under Commodore George Anson was dispatched around Cape Horn to harass Spain's Pacific possessions. Reduced by storms and scurvy to just one ship, HMS Centurion, the dogged Anson succeeded in capturing the silver-filled galleon sent annually from Mexico to Manila, before returning to England via the Cape of Good Hope. By the time Anson completed his epic circumnavigation in 1744, the Anglo-Spanish conflict had bled into the wider War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48), which embroiled many other belligerents and was fought from Italy to India.
Louis XIV cleverly made France the fashion capital of Europe when he used clothes to enhance the prestige of the monarchy and the court. To support French artisans, he demanded that his courtiers update their wardrobes twice a year, using new textiles manufactured in Lyon. Thus, the fashion season was born.
When Julius Caesar was under siege in Alexandria in 47 B.C., Ptolemy XIII contaminated the local water supply in an effort to force the Romans to withdraw. But the Romans managed to dig two deep wells for fresh water within the territory they held.
The last emperors of the Classic Maya civilization on the Yucatan Peninsula, 250-950 A.D., couldn't overcome a crippling drought that started around 750 and continued intermittently until 1025. As the water dried up, Mayan society entered a death spiral of wars, famine and internal conflicts. Their cities in the southern lowlands were eventually reclaimed by the jungle.
Hong Xiuquan, a Chinese Christian mystic who believed he was a brother to Jesus, led a revolt against the ruling Qing dynasty. Hong founded the Tai Ping Heavenly Kingdom, and led an army to overthrow the Qing. The civil war, which lasted from 1850 to 1864, was possibly the most lethal conflict ever.
Hong’s rebellion started in southern China, with many of its recruits coming from Guangxi and Guangzhou provinces. As the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom marched north, enjoying victory after victory over Qing forces, a capital was set up in Nanjing.
The advance of the Taiping Army was halted by the Ever Victorious Army, an Imperial army led by European officers, including American Frederick Townsend Ward and British Army officer Charles “Chinese” Gordon, who would later be killed at the Siege of Khartoun. The Taiping Army proved unable to capture Beijing and Shanghai, and was eventually rolled back by Imperial forces.
Although military casualties were likely under 400,000, total casualties including civilians were reportedly anywhere from 20,000,000 to 100,000,000. Most civilian casualties were caused by civil disorder and resulting starvation and disease. Towards the end of the war Imperial government troops conducted reprisals in the birthplace of the rebellion, with up to one million killed in Guangzhou.
Fleeing the Manchurian conquest of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), Ming loyalists under Zheng Cheng-gong, or Koxinga, drive out the Dutch from Taiwan and establish authority over the island. Qing dynasty (1644-1912) forces take control of Taiwan's western and northern coastal areas.
On Dec. 13, 1740, the Prussian king Frederick II slipped out of a masquerade ball and mounted his horse at the head of 27,000 well-drilled troops. Three days later, he crossed the frontier into neighboring Silesia, northernmost province of the Habsburg monarchy, then at peace with Prussia.
Frederick had chosen his moment wisely. In late October, the emperor Charles VI had died without a male heir, leaving the chaotic jumble of territories that made up the Habsburg patrimony to his 23-year-old daughter, Maria Theresa. The realm that she inherited was in a pitiable state: its army demoralized following a recent defeat by the Turks; its treasury depleted by Charles's long campaign of bribery to secure the sanction of Europe's other monarchs for his daughter's inheritance.
The Habsburg dynasty's first and only female ruler, Maria Theresa ascended the throne under a cloud of doubts about her competence and legitimacy.
But Frederick had underestimated the young queen. Maria Theresa rallied her subjects, outwitted her foes and fought Frederick to a standstill. In the years that followed, she overhauled Austria's antiquated systems of finance and administration, modernized its army and revolutionized its foreign policy. When Frederick attacked again in 1756, the tables were turned against him. Altogether, Maria Theresa would fight "the monster" (as she called Frederick) for more than a third of her 40-year reign. Along the way, she bore 16 children, 10 of whom reached adulthood and four of whom would go on to become European monarchs.
"A King is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly do behold." So remarked James I, the first Stuart king of a united England and Scotland.
In 1471, when the Portuguese crown established Europe's first overseas outpost in the tropics at Elmina, in present-day Ghana. Its purpose was to acquire as much gold as possible for transport back to Lisbon. This first foothold resulted, he writes, in "civilizational transformations" of Europe, Africa and the New World. It was gold from Elmina that made possible the financing of the fleets that would propel Portugal into the Age of Discovery, most saliently in the voyages of Bartolomeu Dias, who rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and Vasco da Gama, who in 1498 landed in Calicut, in southern India.
Winston Churchill prepared himself for the struggle against Hitler by studying his ancestor John Churchill's military and diplomatic path to victory over Louis XIV. John Churchill's role in defeating the Monmouth Rebellion in 1685 helped secure James on the throne, but he was a key player in the military conspiracy that led to James being deposed during the Glorious Revolution. Rewarded by William III with the title Earl of Marlborough, persistent charges of Jacobitism led to his fall from office and temporary imprisonment in the Tower of London. William recognised his abilities by appointing him as his deputy in Southern Netherlands (modern-day Belgium) before the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701, but not until the accession of Queen Anne in 1702 did he secure his fame and fortune.
Marriage to Sarah Jennings and her relationship with Anne ensured Marlborough's rise, first to the captain-generalcy of British forces, then to a dukedom. As de facto leader of Allied forces in the Low Countries, his victories at Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), Oudenarde (1708), and Malplaquet (1709) ensured his place in history as one of Europe's great generals.
His wife's stormy relationship with the Queen, and her subsequent dismissal from court, was central to his own fall. Incurring Anne's disfavour, and caught between Tory and Whig factions, Marlborough was forced from office and went into self-imposed exile. He returned to favour with the accession of George I to the British throne in 1714, but a stroke in 1716 ended his active career.
Marlborough's leadership of the Allied armies fighting Louis XIV from 1701 to 1710 consolidated Britain's emergence as a front-rank power, while his ability to maintain unity in the fractious coalition demonstrated his diplomatic skills. He is often remembered by military historians as much for his organisational and logistic skills as his tactical abilities. However, he was also instrumental in moving away from the siege warfare that dominated the Nine Years' War, arguing one battle was worth ten sieges.
The first wife of the first king of Jerusalem, Baldwin I, dies during the First Crusade, before she even arrives in the East; his second wife is dumped into a convent because her father fails to furnish the promised dowry; the third wife provides no heirs and is sent back to Europe sans her wealth. The next king, Baldwin II, has to be ransomed by his wife, Morphia, from a Saracen prison before he can be crowned Jerusalem's monarch in 1118. In 1123, he's captured again, and Morphia devises a daring raid to free him. It fails. He spends more years in prison, and she ransoms him again
Eleanor of Aquitaine, the queen of France, is made to go with King Louis VII on the Second Crusade (1147) for fear that she might be unfaithful to him if left behind. She is rumored to have had an affair with an uncle and is ultimately abducted back to Europe by the king, who abandons the crusade. The couple divorces in Paris in 1152. She marries Henry II of England, who, taking no chances, keeps her under house arrest for 16 years.
A tragic figure in English history, Lady Jane Grey was a pretty, intelligent young girl whose life was cut short due to the political machinations of those closest to her.
The great-granddaughter of Henry VII through his younger daughter Mary, Jane was a first cousin once removed of Edward VI.
When she was just 15, she was wed to the son of a duke. Her father-in-law then persuaded the dying King Edward VI, still a boy himself, to name Lady Jane his successor. She reigned for just nine days before stepping down. She was convicted of high treason and executed.
Although her life was initially spared. Wyatt's rebellion of January and February 1554 against Queen Mary I's plans for a Spanish match led to the execution of Jane, at the age of 16 or 17, and also of her husband.
Right before being executed, Jane spoke the last words of Jesus as recounted by Luke: "Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit!"
Following the deposition of King James II in 1689 and the accession of William III, some Scottish clans fought—and failed—to restore James to the throne. In 1691, William offered to pardon all Highland clans that took an oath of allegiance to him before January 1, 1692. The MacDonald clan of Glencoe missed the deadline by six days, and for this they paid with their lives. The unsuspecting MacDonalds were massacred in their homes by soldiers that had arrived prior seeking shelter.
In the thirteenth century, the Mongols achieved a string of virtually unbroken victories, gaining the largest contiguous land empire in history. In the 1240’s, they devastated Hungary, destroying the army of King Béla IV at the famous Battle of Mohi. This experience profoundly impacted the Hungarians, and caused them to fundamentally alter many aspects of their society, for they feared that the Mongols would one day return. As it turned out, they did. In 1285, a vast Mongol army again drove into the lands of the Hungarians. How would Hungary fair this time?
Marco Antonio Bragadin, also Marcantonio Bragadin (21 April 1523 – 17 August 1571), was a Venetian lawyer and military officer of the Republic of Venice.
Bragadin joined the Fanti da Mar Corps or marines of the Republic of Venice. In 1569, he was appointed Captain-General of Famagusta in Cyprus and led the Venetian resistance to the Ottoman–Venetian War (1570–1573). He was executed by flaying in August 1571 in contravention of negotiated safe passage after the Ottoman Empire took Famagusta, the fall of which signaled the end of Western presence in the Mediterranean island for the next three centuries.
This episode, inspired one of Titian's greatest late painting "The Flaying of Marsyas."
In the first part of the 16th century, Martin Luther's Reformation was not only a German Reformation but also a Central European one, for it struck deep roots in Transylvania, among the nobility and mining communities in northern Hungary (now Slovakia), and in Poland. The Ottoman invasion of Central Europe led to mass migrations, as people fled from the path of the largely Turkish soldiery. By the late 16th century, there was a long and contested border between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, a hot frontier, where raiding was commonplace. Almost 200 forts were built on the Hapsburg side. For the next four centuries, this border, with some variations, would help delineate Central Europe from the Balkans.
The first half of the 17th century in Central Europe was even bloodier, with the Thirty Years' War (1618-48) claiming as many as seven million lives. Fighting spread across the Holy Roman Empire, mainly in Bohemia and the German-speaking lands, and ended with the Peace of Westphalia. The war was actually a series of contests that only later came to be known by a collective name.
Many historians and political scientists credit the Peace of Westphalia for launching the era of the self-interested sovereign state and ushering in the modern world. In fact, it would be another two centuries before, in 1848, various uprisings in France, Germany, Italy and the Hapsburg Empire unleashed nationalism as a mass phenomenon. This was a fatal juncture. The revolts ultimately failed, but had they succeeded, with their promises of liberal and democratic-trending reforms, the world wars of the 20th century may not have happened. Instead, autocracies re-emerged, even as people psychologically separated themselves into national groups to celebrate. This inevitably led to chauvinism and the "politics of exclusion."
In the wake of 1848, Germany's chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, rebuilt Central Europe as a system of autocracies in which the states and empires needed Germany more than they needed each other. Following Bismarck's death in 1898, the system gradually fell apart. World War I was the final death knell; the sprawling Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires were destroyed, and Central Europe was left to fester as a nationalist cauldron of intolerant monoethnic nations. Empire, however it may be disparaged today, had provided for a cosmopolitanism and a protection of minorities that would thenceforth be lost. Without it, the Nazi Gotterdammerung of World War II was made possible, the apotheosis of the nationalistic and ethnic furies that had been building since 1848.
The only surviving child of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, Mary inherited the vast Burgundian domains in France and the Low Countries upon her father's death in 1477 and became known as Mary of Burgundy. Louis XI of France immediately annexed some of these and, hoping to gain possession of the rest, proposed that she wed his son Charles. She instead married Maximilian of Austria, establishing the Hapsburgs in the Low Countries and initiating the long rivalry between France and Austria.
On the bitterly cold afternoon of Jan. 30, 1649, Charles I, anointed king of England, Scotland and Ireland, stepped through a window of the Banqueting House in Whitehall, London, and onto a wooden scaffold. There, with a single blow, he was beheaded before a horrified crowd.
Emerging to meet his death, the king had passed under a ceiling upon which, in happier days, he had commissioned a magnificent painting by Peter Paul Rubens celebrating his own Stuart dynasty's divine right to rule. Charles's stubborn adherence to that creed had ignited civil war with a defiant Parliament in 1642, and ultimately brought him to the executioner's block, wearing an extra shirt against the chill lest spectators should mistake any shivering for fear.
Not content with killing the king, the future lord protector of the new republican commonwealth, Oliver Cromwell, determined to eradicate the symbols of royalty, melting down priceless crowns and other regalia dating back six centuries to the institution's Anglo-Saxon origins.
But the monarchy was too deeply entrenched to be obliterated so swiftly. In 1660 the interregnum ended with the enthusiastic restoration of Charles's exiled namesake son. Remembered as a "Merry Monarch" fond of horseracing, spaniels and mistresses, Charles II promptly commissioned a new set of "crown jewels," which have been used for every subsequent coronation, most recently that of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.
During 12 tumultuous centuries the function of Britain's monarchy has been transformed, with the role of the sovereign eventually curbed to reigning, rather than actually ruling. A crucial tipping point was the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, when concern at the arrogance and pro-Catholic policies of James II (another son of Charles I) prompted a group of leading politicians to invite the king's son-in-law, the Protestant Dutchman William of Orange, to depose him and reign jointly with James's daughter Mary.
But William's crown came with strings attached: through the Bill of Rights (1689), royal power was severely restricted by Parliament. In Ms. Borman's trenchant verdict, the resulting brand of "Constitutional monarchy" was a "euphemism for emasculation." A king like Henry VIII (reigned 1509-47), who had ruthlessly wielded a highly personal authority that his people never forgot, would have been enraged to see the monarchy so debased. Yet it was such concessions that enabled Britain's royal family to survive when others succumbed to war or revolution.
Sibling rivalry and political intrigue are a dangerous combination. In the case of George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, mixing the two brought about his early demise. As a young man, Clarence joined in a rebellion against his brother, King Edward IV. He soon had a change of heart and reconciled with Edward, but a few years later, he became involved in another plot against him. Clarence was then sent to the Tower of London, where he was secretly executed in 1478. Clarence was the third son of Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York, and Cecily Neville, and the brother of kings Edward IV and Richard III. He played an important role in the dynastic struggle known as the Wars of the Roses. He is also remembered as the character in William Shakespeare's play Richard III who was drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine.
Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke observed in 1871 that no plan survives contact with the enemy.
The origins of green spaces can be traced to ancient Egypt's temple gardens. Hyde Park, which King Charles I opened to Londoners in 1637, led the way for public parks. In the 3rd century B.C., King Devanampiya Tissa of Sri Lanka created the Mihintale nature reserve as a wildlife sanctuary, prefiguring by more than 2,000 years the likely first modern nature reserve, which the English naturalist Charles Waterton built on his estate in Yorkshire in the 1820s.
The Romanov family was the last imperial dynasty to rule Russia. They first came to power in 1613, and over the next three centuries, 18 Romanovs took the Russian throne, including Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Alexander I and Nicholas II.
The Patriotic War of 1812 not only secured for Czar Alexander I his own throne and created a heroic template for Russian cultural genius. It incepted a Continentwide reaction against the subversive tides of liberalism and secularism. The Holy Alliance that Alexander formed in 1815 with Prussia and Austria was the ancien regime's monarchist bulwark against those currents that had flowed from the French Revolution, and it survived for about 40 years.
Defeat in the Crimean war in 1856 led to the dismemberment of Russian possessions in Eastern Europe and the loss of its Black Sea fleet. That conflict also precipitated the premature death of Czar Nicholas I, whose successor, Alexander II, introduced far-reaching reforms of Russia's autocratic system.
In 1905 defeat in the Russo-Japanese war led to the First Russian Revolution. Czar Nicholas II was compelled to introduce reforms to temper the despotic rule that had been reimposed after Alexander II's assassination, but Nicholas's temporizing and authoritarianism were his undoing.
It took defeat in World War I to crush not only the czar but any hope of a genuinely democratic Russian revolution. Russia replaced one dictatorial regime with another with the massacre of Nicholas II and his family in a basement in Yekaterinburg and the ascent of Vladimir Lenin in Moscow.
William Manchester states that Winston Churchill at age 13 memorized the following passage from Thomas Babington Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome" (1842), that
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?"
As a noun, "ally" originally referred to a relative or kinsman. In Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," Romeo calls his friend Mercutio "the Prince's near ally" since he was a cousin of the prince of Verona. Over time, that familial sense was extended to other kinds of bonds, such as those between people or states united in a common political purpose. Allies could be formally linked in a treaty, establishing a confederation sharing in military defenses. The poet Francis Quarles advised in a 1640 book of maxims, "If thou desire to make war with a Prince, with whom thou hast formerly ratified a league, assail some ally of his rather than himself."
The epochal Battle of Jena was fought on Oct. 14, 1806. A massive French army under Napoleon cut off Prussian and Saxon troops from access to the Elbe River and from possible Russian reinforcements. The French demolished the Germans and within six weeks had conquered all of Prussia. The subsequent Treaty of Tilsit made allies of France and Russia, pitilessly reduced Prussia and Austria, and planted French client states throughout central Europe. The 1,000-year-old Holy Roman Empire, dominated for centuries by the Austrian Habsburgs, came to its end. Everywhere Bonaparte was acknowledged as the "new Charlemagne."
On March 15, 44 B.C., Julius Caesar lay dead from 23 knife wounds inflicted by his assassins. The next day, the question on every Roman citizen's mind was: Who will rule Rome now? Getting to the answer took more than 13 years -- until Caesar's chosen heir, Octavian, crushed his rival Mark Antony in a ferocious naval battle at Actium, a Roman outpost along the Greek coast. Marcus Brutus and his fellow conspirators thought that, by assassinating Caesar the dictator, they had restored the Roman Republic. Instead they found themselves outmaneuvered by the two men who saw themselves as the inheritors of Julius Caesar's political legacy: Gaius Octavius was Caesar's great-nephew and Marcus Antonius his former lieutenant. Two years after Caesar's death, the pair joined forces and crushed Brutus and his army at the Battle of Philippi, clearing the way for each to contend with the other for the final spoils, the Roman Empire itself.
In 32 B.C., the senate in Rome declared war on Cleopatra and stripped Antony of his consulship and military command.
Preparing for Octavian's assault, Antony faced two choices. He could adopt an aggressive approach and use his superior navy to launch an invasion of Italy. Or he could wait on the other side of the Adriatic, in the Gulf of Corinth, to lure Octavian and his second-in-command, Marcus Agrippa, into attack. He chose the second plan -- a blunder. His opponents, especially Agrippa, understood naval warfare far better than he. Octavian's ships swept in and trapped Antony's fleet in the narrow entrance to the Gulf of Ambracia at Actium. After months of stalemate, Antony decided to risk everything with a battle at sea.
The Battle of Actium -- involving more than 600 ships and 40,000 men -- "a cacophony of shouts, trumpets, and battle cries set to the pounding rhythm of oars; the whoosh of catapults and the crash of ships; and, everywhere, the screams of the dying." After hours of fighting with no result, "the attackers approached Antony's ships from many directions at once. They shot blazing missiles, hurled spears with torches attached to them, and used catapults to shoot pots filled with charcoal." The all-wood triremes lit up like kindling as their crews were immolated or drowned. Still, Antony's ships fought long enough to allow both Antony and Cleopatra to sail to Egypt to fight another day.
It took a year before Octavian felt strong enough to launch an invasion of Egypt. Facing death at Octavian's hand, and believing rumors that Cleopatra had taken her own life, Antony committed suicide. The rumors were false. Cleopatra managed to meet the triumphant Octavian long enough to beg for her children's lives before choosing death herself. We still don't know exactly how she died. If it was from a poisonous snake bite, it was more likely that of a cobra than the asp of legend.
Octavian spared Cleopatra's children -- except for Caesarion, He had to die to secure Octavian's position as "the August Caesar," or Caesar Augustus, as the senate eventually dubbed him. For all his ambition, Augustus understood that Rome had for too long ruled itself and its possessions by a sleight-of-hand, pretending that it was still a republic of farmers perched on the banks of the Tiber and led by a cluster of noble families. Decades of civil war were the result -- all because Romans wouldn't face the reality that they weren't a city-state anymore but an empire.
Julius Caesar was the first to see this reality clearly. He had grasped that Rome needed a broader base of leadership and support, even as its noble families fiercely opposed him in the name of liberty. His namesake and heir did better. A new governing elite drawn from across Italy came into being, graced with impressive titles and powers, though Augustus kept the key powers for himself.
After annexing Egypt, he made sure that its governorship was a reward for loyal service, not a new power base. The victory at Actium, allowed Augustus to build an empire that lasted for nearly 500 years. The price was the destruction of the man who dared to oppose him, along with the woman for whom he had risked everything.
The eastern Roman empire was founded by Constantine the Great on May 11, A.D. 330. The empire fell on May 29, 1453, when the army of the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II breached the walls of Constantinople. Pagan then Christian, Roman then Greek, the eastern empire endured for 1,123 years, bridging the centuries between the ancient and modern ages. The life of Constantine XI Palaiologos (1405-1453), the emperor last seen taking arms against a sea of Turks at Constantinople, overlapped with those of Christopher Columbus (b. 1451) and Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452).
The city of Byzantion, astride the frontier between Greece and Asia Minor and equidistant from the Danube and Euphrates, was the traditional fault line whenever the empire divided in civil war. The east, needed a Rome of its own to repel the Persians. Constantine, having won his own civil war in 324, needed the support of the elites in the eastern provinces. He rebalanced strategically by making Byzantion a clamp that fastened the two halves of the empire together, then secured himself politically by rebuilding Byzantion as Constantinople, the old-new image of Rome.
The empire made Romans, but it also made Christians. Before Constantine's conversion to Christianity, there were roughly two million Christians in the eastern empire (about one-tenth of the population). Once the empire switched from persecuting Christians to placing restrictions on pagans, the number of Christians rose sharply.
Empress Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), who is often credited for the birth of modern China. A former concubine, Cixi plotted two successful coups and ruled for almost half a century, albeit from behind a screen and in the name of more than one male relative. A forceful and ruthless military leader, Cixi was at the helm through civil strife, wars with Japan and France and, in 1900, invasions by eight foreign powers, including the U.S. She was a reformer, a leader who modernized the education and legal systems, championed women's rights and, as she lay dying, set up a constitutional monarchy.
There were two women behind France's victory over England in the Hundred Year's War. One was Joan of Arc (ca. 1412-1431), whose astounding military victories according to some should be credited to another woman: Yolande of Aragon (1384-1442), queen of Sicily and mother- in-law to the French dauphin, the future Charles VII. Yolande has long been overlooked by historians and scholars, but, if it is accepted . that without Joan of Arc there would be no France, it is also true that without Yolande of Aragon there would have been no Joan.
There were four women who laid the groundwork for female rule in England: the famed Eleanor of Aquitaine, and the less-familiar Empress Matilda, Isabella of France and Margaret of Anjou. All were bold wartime leaders: Eleanor (ca. 1122-1204) engineered her sons' revolt against their father, King Henry II; Matilda (1102-1167) battled with her cousin, Stephen of Blois, to establish her right to rule England; Isabella (1292-1358) led an army to depose her husband, King Edward II; and Margaret (1430-1482) was a principal in the Wars of the Roses. The reigns of these female rulers were met with unease, if not outright denunciation, which coalesced in the image of the she-wolf, a feral creature driven by instinct rather than reason.
Quipu -- meaning "knot" -- served the Incan civilizations of the Andes well for centuries. In a slightly different form, it also flourished in China, Tibet and Japan. Though quipu is still used in remote Peruvian villages and valued as a cultural heritage, it is mostly regarded as a historical curiosity. For some physicists, however, it is becoming a creative inspiration.
The basic letters of quipu are knots made in strings. Typically, many strings are hung from a common cord. Several different kinds of knots are used, and their order and spacing is meaningful. Different colors of string get used, too, to set a context. Thus, on a blue string, two knots might represent "warrior" and "lamb," while those knots on a red string represent "1,000" and "10" -- a trick similar to how differentiated cells apply epigenetic variation to the four-letter codes of DNA.
Peter the Great defeated Sweden in 1709 at the Battle of Poltava. The Swedish empire shrank, and Russian supremacy began.
King George III -- who reigned for six decades, in sickness and in health -- from the man who lost America and went mad, to someone altogether more interesting, sensitive and admirable. He was tender and intelligent, the first Hanoverian monarch king to be raised in Britain -- the first Hanover, moreover, to be brought up with an ideal of kingship: an ideal prompted by his father, who wanted his son to govern, "like the common father of the people." Far from the tyrant perceived by the Americans, George knew that his constitutional role was to support Parliament's decisions. It is ironic, that Whig historians attacked George for trying to subvert the British constitution when in fact it was his unshakable respect for it that helped him lose America.
On an October day in 1719, more than 100 women filed out of Paris's Salpetriere prison. Chained to one another and wearing only their shifts, they climbed onto carts that took them out of the city. They knew they had been banished from Paris, but they could not imagine the place they were being sent. Half a world away lay their new home, the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, where France had recently begun to establish a colony.
In June 1719, 16-year-old Marie Baron was arrested for stealing a ribbon. She had arrived in Paris around a decade earlier with her family, seeking food and work. Her village usually grew enough wheat to sell to France's urban population, but a series of disastrously bad harvests and extremely cold winters had brought famine to the country. In 1709, a parish priest noted, "this year there was no wheat at all." Hundreds of thousands of French people died that year and many more did so in the following years. Among the deaths were Marie's parents and siblings. Parisian anger at the rural poor who crowded into their city was high, and many of these unfortunates ended up in prison on charges of theft or prostitution. Marie's first arrest came when she was only 7, swooped up by a French officer on horseback. By the time Marie Baron was arrested for the third time -- the ribbon theft -- the French judicial system had devised a new way to deal with girls and women like her. Banishment from the city was a traditional punishment, but hungry people had a habit of sneaking back in. This new plan would mean lifetime exile.
Many of the women sent away from Paris established businesses, married farmers and soldiers and fur traders, and acquired property. Some lived into their 40s and 50s and beyond -- much longer lives than they could have had on the streets of Paris. Marie Baron married a farmer, survived being captured and seeing her husband and eldest son killed in the French-Natchez War of 1729-30, and ultimately told her story to Louisiana's first historian (and married him).
Napoleon Bonaparte, after nearly being captured by Russian forces in his retreat from Moscow in 1812, carried a pill of poison with him, which he swallowed when he was exiled to the island of Elba two years later. Napoleon survived, however, since the poison had lost its efficacy.
William I of Orange was born to the house of Nassau and became prince of Orange in 1544. Though he initially served the Spanish king as a diplomat, Spanish encroachments on the independence of the Netherlands and the introduction of the Spanish Inquisition led him to turn against Spain. He subsequently led the Dutch revolt that instigated the Eighty Years' War and resulted in the formal independence of the United Provinces of the Netherlands in 1648.
Japan's warlords seized power in 1192, establishing the Shogunate, essentially a military dictatorship, and reducing the emperor to a mere figurehead until the Meiji Restoration in 1868.
The Sumerian word for leader was "Lugal," meaning "Big Man." Initially, a Lugal was a temporary leader of a city-state during wartime. But by the 24th century B.C., Lugal had become synonymous with governor. The title wasn't enough for Sargon the Great, c. 2334 -- 2279 B.C., who called himself "Sharrukin," or "True King," in celebration of his subjugation of all Sumer's city-states. Sargon's empire lasted for three more generations.
The Athenians elected their generals, who could also be political leaders, as was the case for Pericles. Sparta was the opposite: The top Spartan generals inherited their positions. The Greek philosopher Aristotle described the Spartan monarchy -- shared by two kings from two royal families -- as a "kind of unlimited and perpetual generalship," subject to some civic oversight by a 30-member council of elders.
Pope Julius II (1503-13) led his troops into battle against rival Italian rulers and the French
With the loss of the papal states in central Italy in 1870 came the decoupling of religious authority from the European state system under which the Holy See had made alliances and fought wars with other territorial powers.
In his seminal 1832 text on military strategy, "On War," the Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz proclaimed: "The defensive form of warfare is intrinsically stronger than the offensive." By the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Prussians distilled this to requiring triple the attackers. Prussia decisively triumphed.
Napoleon's foreign secretary Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord once said that "A diplomat who says 'yes' means 'maybe,' a diplomat who says 'maybe' means 'no,' and a diplomat who says 'no' is no diplomat."
A lack of knowledge about the laws of supply and demand also doomed early Chinese experiments in paper money during the Southern Song, Mongol and Ming Dynasties. Too many notes wound up in circulation, leading to rampant inflation. Thinking that paper was the culprit, the Chongzhen Emperor hoped to restore stability by switching to silver coins. But these introduced other vulnerabilities. In the 1630s, the decline of Spanish silver from the New World (alongside a spate of crop failures) resulted in a money shortage -- and a new round of inflation. The Ming Dynasty collapsed not long after, in 1644.
John of Gaunt is among the best-known figures from medieval England. One reason is the speech that Shakespeare gives him in "Richard II," a hymn to England itself: "This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle, / This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, / This other Eden, demi-paradise." Who, in history, was the man we know mostly from his eloquence on stage?
Shakespeare calls Gaunt "time-honoured Lancaster," a reference to the duchy that he acquired as the result of the first of his three marriages. The liaison made him, as Duke of Lancaster, the richest nobleman in 14th-century England. He was also royal-born, the third (surviving) son of Edward III and the brother of Edward, the heir apparent, who died too young to assume the throne. Edward was called the Black Prince -- no one is quite sure why, perhaps it was an allusion to the color of his armor. England's 14th century was turbulent, to say the least. Two kings -- Gaunt's grandfather Edward II and his nephew Richard II -- were deposed and then murdered in prison. England was intermittently at war with France. The bubonic plague -- the Black Death -- killed at least a third of the English population. A violent peasants' revolt erupted.
Other aspects of the period were less disturbing. Most notably, English gradually replaced French as the language of the governing class, leading to the first flowering of English literature: Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" and Langland's "Piers Plowman." Chaucer, a government official, would become, late in life, John of Gaunt's brother-in-law.
The Battle of Evesham was fought on the morning of the 4th August 1265, between the forces of a number of rebel barons led by Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester and the army of King Henry III, under his son Prince Edward (the future King Edward I).
De Montfort’s rebel forces of around 6,000 men were trapped in Evesham by a Royal army of at least twice this number. Despite being heavily outnumbered, de Montfort charged his cavalry into the enemy ranks in an attempt to split the royal forces.
The battle lasted for some hours before finally turning into a bloody massacre. Both de Montfort and his son Henry were killed, along with around 4,000 of his soldiers.
The first emperor was Sargon of Akkad (2334-2279 BCE), a Near Eastern priest-king who found his city-state too small and conquered modern Iraq and Syria. The western Roman Empire lasted five centuries and became the template for the modern European empires. Its eastern, Byzantine heir endured for another millennium, until Constantinople fell in 1453. Diocletian (284-305 CE) upgraded the emperor from first citizen to divine autocrat, the Romans got through 53 emperors in 311 years: not much different to the election cycles of the American republic, with their "never-ending" factional struggles. The Sassanids of Persia, founded in 224 CE, had 30 emperors in three centuries, and the British have had only a dozen monarchs since 1707. No wonder that the "Meditations" of Marcus Aurelius, the most personal testimony left by a Roman emperor, advises Stoic endurance.
Russia's Romanovs lasted three centuries, the Habsburgs nearly a millennium in various forms, but the Chinese are the long-distance champions: their first imperial dynasty, the Qin, was founded in 221 BCE. The unification of China under the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) led to "great economic advances and a superb flowering of Chinese literary and artistic high culture." The second Tang emperor, Taizong, was "beyond question one of history's greatest emperors," combining military and administrative skills with a "flair for the dramatic, flamboyant gesture." Like Marcus Aurelius, he bequeathed advice to his heirs.
The Tang emperors were Confucians, ruling through the aristocracy. Their replacements, the Song dynasty, absorbed elements of Buddhism and Daoism, and ruled through a bureaucratic elite which excelled in gathering taxes from the provinces. Their civil-service examinations and the "neo-Confucian ideology" welded the Chinese elite to the imperial order. Mr. Lieven compares the examination system to "the role of the public schools and Oxbridge" in Victoria's empire.
The Tang emperors were Confucians, ruling through the aristocracy. Their replacements, the Song dynasty, absorbed elements of Buddhism and Daoism, and ruled through a bureaucratic elite which excelled in gathering taxes from the provinces. Their civil-service examinations and the "neo-Confucian ideology" welded the Chinese elite to the imperial order. Mr. Lieven compares the examination system to "the role of the public schools and Oxbridge" in Victoria's empire.
In 1184, King Henry VI of Germany convened a royal gathering at Petersburg Citadel in Erfurt, Thuringia. Unfortunately, the ancient hall was built over the citadel's latrines. The meeting was in full swing when the wooden flooring suddenly collapsed, hurling many of the assembled nobles to their deaths in the cesspit below. It was the Erfurt Latrine Disaster
England's first Stuart monarch was James I -- who was already reigning as James VI of Scotland .
James had inherited the English and Irish thrones upon the death of the childless Elizabeth I in 1603, and felt he needed to reinforce his position. His father, Henry Stuart, had been murdered in 1567, when James was still an infant; his mother, Elizabeth's cousin, Mary Stuart "Queen of Scots," was executed for treason 20 years later. James's insecurities were swiftly vindicated when he narrowly escaped being blown sky high by the pro-Catholic "Gunpowder Plot" of 1605.
The Restoration of the exiled Charles II in 1660 ushered in a quarter-century of relative political stability, but the accession of his openly Catholic and overly authoritarian younger brother James in 1685 provoked a reaction that heralded the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, when the Protestant Dutch ruler William of Orange was invited to oust him, and reign jointly with his wife, James's eldest daughter, Mary. Now "constitutional" monarchs reliant upon parliament's cooperation, they ruled as William III and Mary II.
In 1651, after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester during a third and final spasm of civil war, Charles II miraculously escaped the ensuing Cromwellian manhunt by hiding amid the spreading branches of an oak tree at Boscobel in Shropshire, on the Welsh border.
When Charles II agreed to wed Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza in 1661, her dowry included the city of Tangier. For 22 years a beleaguered garrison defended Stuart England's North African outpost against the local "Moors" before it was abandoned.
In 1685, at the Battle of Sedgemoor in Somerset, hardened Tangier veterans were instrumental in crushing the rebellion of Charles's illegitimate son, James Duke of Monmouth, against his uncle James II.
In 1819, outside Manchester, England, a wave of meetings demanding parliamentary reform ended with the Peterloo Massacre, when magistrates ordered cavalry to disperse an unauthorized gathering. The ensuing panic left many dead and hundreds injured.
A plan was hatched in early 1820, to murder the members of the British cabinet, including its head, the prime minister. Not since Guy Fawkes's Gunpowder Plot in 1605 -- intended to blow up Parliament and assassinate James I for the sake of Catholic emancipation -- had there been such a sensational threat of violence against the government. The trap was set when a newspaper item advertised the meeting at Grosvenor Square and its date. The conspirators gathered at their headquarters in a rented stable on Cato Street to prepare for the assault while the ministers themselves dined at Lord Liverpool's home, Fife House, roughly a mile from Grosvenor Square. Some of the men who had been involved in the plot decided to stay away, and constables and soldiers interrupted those who came. A scuffle ensued, and a constable was killed. Most of the conspirators escaped, only to be caught soon after. Who was behind the Cato Street Conspiracy? The major participants were radical artisans embittered by hardship. William Davidson had been born in Jamaica to a slave before taking up cabinetmaking in England. The butcher James Ings likened his plight at trial to bullock driven to slaughter. John Brunt and Richard Tidd were shoemakers whose trade attracted literate men drawn to radical politics. The decline of guilds and the rise of competition among skilled tradesmen had brought downward social mobility to many such workers, especially as demand collapsed when the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815.
The leader of the conspiracy was Arthur Thistlewood, who fits no easy stereotype. Described by a government spay as "quite the gentleman in manners and appearance," he had squandered a modest fortune on drink and gambling, leaving his family to struggle in poverty. Resentment made him dismiss all the genteel classes as "mean and contemptible." News of the plot shocked respectable London. The Cato Street conspirators faced public trial in April 1820 after an examination by the privy council. While the core five went to the gallows, other sentences were commuted to transportation to Australia, and one man was released. The drama closed with Thistlewood and his fellow lead conspirators publicly hanged and then beheaded as traitors. The French painter Theodore Gericault captured their end in "Scene of a Hanging in London," which, leaving out the crowds of spectators, focused on the scaffold for emotional impact.
Despite the sympathy aroused, the conspirators' trials and executions, dealt a death blow to revolutionary enthusiasm. Attention soon turned elsewhere as George IV's estranged wife sparked a scandal over her demand to be recognized as queen. Protesting crowds -- with no thought of heads on pikes -- gathered again in the streets.
56-year-old Thomas Dimsdale, in his dark suit and curled wig, drawn from the comfort of his farmhouse in Hertfordshire, England, traveled a grueling 1,700 miles overland in a carriage to St. Petersburg. Dimsdale had been summoned by Catherine the Great to inoculate not only the empress herself but also her 13-year-old heir, the Grand Duke Paul. Catherine sought protection from smallpox, that scourge of the world that, through the ingenuity of science and social persuasion, became the first -- and still the only -- disease to have been eradicated by the interventions of mankind.
Five reigning monarchs were dethroned by smallpox in the eighteenth century, including Peter the Great's grandson, the child Emperor Peter II. In Vienna, Empress Maria Theresa lost her son, two daughters and two daughters-in-law. Survival rates in Russia were particularly low.
When the unvaccinated Louis XV died of smallpox in 1774, Catherine the Great of Russia is so pleased with herself that she tells her friend and agent in Paris, Baron von Grimm: "It is shameful for a King of France living in the eighteenth century to die of smallpox."
Moscow began its colonial expansion after freeing itself in 1480 from the Mongol Golden Horde. Muscovy served as the Mongols' principal tax collector and agent in Russian lands in previous centuries. Once it gained independence, it adopted many of the methods of war and elements of statecraft that once allowed the Mongols, an impoverished nomadic people, to conquer much of the known (and exponentially wealthier and more technologically advanced) world. Turning cities that refused to submit into rubble, the Mongols' trademark tactic.
The Tatar cities and mosques on the Volga were dismantled in the 16th century, their bricks and tombstones used to build Russian churches and fortresses. Yerofey Khabarov, the explorer after whom the Siberian city of Khabarovsk is named, had his men butcher thousands of the native Daur people as he sailed down the Amur River in the 17th century. Russia's 19th century conquests in the Caucasus and Central Asia were accompanied by wide-scale killings and displacement. One of Russia's most famous paintings, by Vasily Vereshchagin, who served with Russian forces in Central Asia in the 1860s, depicts a mountain of sun-bleached skulls and is dedicated "to all the great conquerors -- past, present and future."
Catherine the Great. The most successful of a line of 18th-century rulers, expanded the empire of Peter the Great and made Russia the greatest land power in Europe, Catherine conquered the Crimea and western Ukraine. She won naval battles in the Black Sea and ruthlessly suppressed rebellions at home. Having installed a former lover as king of Poland, she gleefully took the lion's share of that unhappy country while partitioning it three times.
The 15th-century Ming expeditions undertaken by the Muslim admiral Zheng He to ports in Asia, Africa and the Middle East established links with the sultanates of Melaka, Brunei, Pasai and others located around the Spice Islands. It was in this Sinocentric world, that the Iberian powers built their first global commodities portfolios in the 1500s. Until the 19th century, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English traders maintained an unusually peaceful circumspection. Finished textiles flowed from Safavid Persia and South Asia to Japan; silver bullion from Japan to China; and tea, ceramics and silk from China to Europe.
Zheng He's fleet comprised nearly 300 vessels, with its leading boats estimated to have been as long as several hundred feet, considerably larger than Portuguese carracks and Venetian galleys. The Chinese did not bully their neighbors, however, inviting cultural as well as commercial connections, employing polyglot Muslims for mediation with Central Asia and spreading Confucian ethical philosophy to Korea and Japan.
China never entered into a period of isolation during the Ming Dynasty [1368-1644], and the transfer of objects and innovations across the old silk and spice routes in many ways accelerated in the lead-up to the Age of Exploration . . . the Ming period did not represent the transitional period between a global Yuan state [1271-1368] to a closed Qing state [1644-1912], but rather the crystallization of China's first modern global era.
Artemisia I of Caria was one of the Persian king Xerxes's most successful naval commanders. Hearing about her exploits against the Greeks during the Battle of Salamis in 480 B.C., he is alleged to have exclaimed: "My men have become women, and my women men."
The Romans crushed Queen Boudica's revolt in what is now eastern England in 61 B.C., but not before she had destroyed the 9th Roman Legion and massacred 70,000 others.
The birth of the modern passport may be credited in part to King Louis XIV of France, who decreed in 1669 that all individuals, whether leaving or entering his country, were required to register their personal details with the appropriate officials and carry a copy of their travel license. Ironically, the passport requirement helped to foil King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette's attempt to escape from Paris in 1791.
The mutiny on the Royal Navy vessel HMS Bounty occurred in the South Pacific Ocean on 28 April 1789. Disaffected crewmen, led by acting-Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, seized control of the ship from their captain, Lieutenant William Bligh, and set him and eighteen loyalists adrift in the ship's open launch. The mutineers variously settled on Tahiti or on Pitcairn Island. Bligh navigated more than 3,500 nautical miles (6,500 km; 4,000 mi) in the launch to reach safety and began the process of bringing the mutineers to justice.
Bounty had left England in 1787 on a mission to collect and transport breadfruit plants from Tahiti to the West Indies. A five-month layover in Tahiti, during which many of the men lived ashore and formed relationships with native Polynesians, led those men to be less amenable to military discipline. Relations between Bligh and his crew deteriorated after he allegedly began handing out increasingly harsh punishments, criticism, and abuse, Christian being a particular target. After three weeks back at sea, Christian and others forced Bligh from the ship. Twenty-five men remained on board afterwards, including loyalists held against their will and others for whom there was no room in the launch.
After Bligh reached England in April 1790, the Admiralty despatched HMS Pandora to apprehend the mutineers. Fourteen were captured in Tahiti and imprisoned on board Pandora, which then searched without success for Christian's party that had hidden on Pitcairn Island. After turning back towards England, Pandora ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef, with the loss of 31 crew and four prisoners from Bounty. The ten surviving detainees reached England in June 1792 and were court-martialled; four were acquitted, three were pardoned, and three were hanged.
Christian's group remained undiscovered on Pitcairn until 1808, by which time only one mutineer, John Adams, remained alive. Almost all of his fellow mutineers, including Christian, had been killed, either by one another or by their Polynesian companions. No action was taken against Adams; descendants of the mutineers and their accompanying Tahitians live on Pitcairn into the 21st century.
When ordinary Parisians learned about the scandalous ideas of Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau from the newsmongers under the Tree of Cracow, they acquired the attitudes of the coming age. Through the press, they tracked the journey from Vienna of the future Louis XVI's Austrian wife, Marie Antoinette. In June 1770, the streets of Paris were decked, and debtors released from prison, for a nine-day celebration, with free wine, bread and sausages for all, and then a fireworks display. One of the first rockets misfired and detonated the rest. The disappointed crowd stampeded, and rioters attacked coaches. The Gardes Francaises charged into the crowd. The police estimated that 367 people were killed. By the time the news reached the Gazette de Leyde, the international newspaper published at Leiden in the Netherlands, exaggerated reports had the toll at more than 3,000 killed or seriously wounded.
Each time a scandal raised the temperature, it settled at a new high. By 1789, the Parisians were familiar with violence and verbal hyperbole. They were sensitive to the rising price of bread and the falling status of the monarchy; in the "flour war" of 1775, they rioted because they believed they were being starved by a "famine plot." They were obsessed with Marie Antoinette's foreign advisers and private expenditure and were convinced that the ministers who tried to fix the deficit were out to fill their own pockets. After Jacques Necker, the director of royal finances, exposed the "king's secret" (the budget for 1781) the state finances became a subject of public debate.
One of the most shocking events in European History was when the French King Louis XVI was executed using the guillotine. For centuries the monarchy had ruled over France, but as the country suffered economically and the people suffered, the French Revolution began. The Bastille was stormed and the King eventually was arrested and imprisoned. Louis XVI was placed on trial and then was sentenced to death after being declared of being a traitor and his execution was hastily arranged. At the Place de la Revolution on the 21st January 1793, Louis was brought from his prison in front of a huge crowd.
He was met by his executioner who prepared him for his death. His arms were bound, and he was led up the steps to the guillotine that stood on the scaffold. Shortly after he was beheaded in front of the jeering crowd, and the executioner raised his head up above the crowd and cried out, 'Viva Le Revolution!' Following the execution of the King, the killing continued in France as his Queen Marie Antoinette was later executed. Also 'The Terror' occurred in which opponents of the Revolution were also executed using the guillotine.
The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas had divided the world into two zones of influence, with Portugal claiming everything east of a line drawn in the Atlantic Ocean and Spain everything to the West.
If you ask most people to name the first person to circumnavigate the globe, they will likely answer Ferdinand Magellan, the Portuguese mariner who sailed on behalf of Spain in 1519. But Magellan never even attempted the feat, and he didn't live to see it accomplished by members of his crew.
When Magellan's fleet had reached the Philippines, The strangers were well received on the island of Cebu, but imposing himself in a conflict between rival chiefs, Magellan made an ill-advised attack on neighboring Mactan, where he and several of his men were slain in battle on April 27, 1521.
Magellan named the Pacific Ocean for its initially gentle seas.
How did the Atlantic Ocean get its name? The first documented usage of the term “Atlantic” was in the sixth century BC by a Greek poet, Atlantikôi pelágei or the “Sea of Atlas.” In Greek mythology, Atlas is the Titan tasked with holding up the heavens for all eternity.
From the 13th century till the end of World War I, a Habsburg ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire with Vienna as its capital city. For a couple of centuries, another branch of the family ruled the Spanish empire with Madrid as its capital city. No other royal dynasty has a record that can match that of the Habsburgs. The historic achievement of the Habsburgs was to hold the line against the Ottoman Turks. Across the border in Hungary, mosques and minarets still survive from the Ottoman occupation of that country. The Ottomans called Vienna "the Golden Apple" and in 1683 an army of 150,000 laid siege to the city. It was touch-and-go. John Sobieski III, king of Poland, saved the day by commanding the largest cavalry charge in history. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 was a jamboree that put an end to the Napoleonic wars, made what looked like a lasting peace in Europe, and propped up the thesis that the Habsburgs were master diplomats. In reality, the 18-year-old Franz Josef came to the throne after the revolution of 1848 and gave the Chancellors Felix Schwarzenberg and Klemens von Metternich the freedom to build the sort of conventionally repressed society that so infuriated the likes of Wickham Steed. By then, aristocrats and churchmen and intellectuals all over the Empire were certain that every people should have a nation-state of its own. The nationalism of Hungarian, Czech, Serb and other minorities within the Empire had to be reconciled with the nationalism of the German-speaking majority. In the process of becoming a nation-state for all Germans, the kingdom of Prussia went to war with Austria and its empire. Heavy defeat in the battle of Koniggraetz in 1866 left the Habsburg Empire at the mercy of events. A single gunshot fatally killed an Austrian Archduke in 1914. That was enough to bring down the Empire.
George Canning was prime minister of the United Kingdom for just shy of four months in the summer of 1827.
Mr. Canning went to the University of Oxford and served as foreign secretary. A member of the Tory Party, his greatest success is deemed to have been during the Napoleonic Wars in 1807, when he outmaneuvered Napoleon, enabling the British to seize the Danish navy. But he blamed the war minister, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, for setbacks in Spain and in the Netherlands, calling for his resignation and accepting his challenge to a duel in 1809. Mr. Canning missed his opponent and was shot in the leg.
Mr. Canning was popular with the British middle class and was a champion of Catholic emancipation, under which restrictions on Catholics in Britain, imposed after the Reformation, were repealed. His views provoked the resignations of dozens of ministers who were opposed to such freedoms.
The opposition Whig Party supported him in parliamentary votes. But the pressure got to him, historians record, and his health deteriorated. He died on Aug. 8, 1827.
He was succeeded by Frederick John Robinson, Viscount Goderich, who served as Mr. Canning's war minister. He left office the following year after being dismissed.
Just over a century passed between 1485, when Henry Tudor became Henry VII, and 1603, when his granddaughter Elizabeth I died childless, ceding England's throne to the Stuart dynasty in the form of her Scottish cousin James. Yet the Tudor century remade English politics, religion and art, from the Reformation to Wolf Hall.
The only time when there was no King or Queen in Britain was when the country was a republic between 1649 and 1660. (In 1649 King Charles I was executed and Britain became a Republic for eleven years. The monarchy was restored in 1660.)
In 1403 honey helped to save the life of 16 year-old Prince Henry, the future King Henry V of England. During the battle of Shrewsbury, an arrowhead became embedded in his cheekbone. The extraction process was long and painful, resulting in a gaping hole. Knowing the dangers of an open wound, the royal surgeon John Bradmore treated the cavity with a honey mixture that kept it safe from dirt and bacteria.
Bailouts of Yore
A.D. 33
After property speculation fed by low interest rates led to a crash, the emperor Tiberius authorized a banking commission to bail out wealthy real-estate speculators.
1825
British banks began to fail after falling interest rates goaded them into buying immense quantities of speculative assets, including debt issued by Poyais, a fictitious Central American nation invented by a con artist. The Bank of England lent money "by every possible means and in modes we had never adopted before," a bank director testified.
1882
The Paris stock market crashed, and its membership of brokers ran out of capital. With government approval, the French central bank made an emergency loan of 80 million francs, preventing the Paris bourse from going bust.
1890
The giant British bank Baring Brothers & Co. collapsed after gorging on Argentine bonds right before the South American country defaulted on its debt. To stem a panic, the Bank of England swiftly lent Barings 7.5 million pounds and coaxed private banks into pledging an additional 17 million pounds to cushion potential losses.
"Et Tu, Brute?" It turns out Julius Caesar didn't say those titular words to the conspirator who stabbed him, because emperors, as a sign of status, spoke Greek. As readers of William Shakespeare know, a dying Caesar turned to one of the assassins and condemned him with his last breath. It was Caesar's friend, Marcus Junius Brutus. “Et tu, Brute?” – “You too, Brutus?” is what Shakespeare has Caesar say in the Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Except, Caesar never said these words.
The suppression of the Society of Jesus began in the Summer of 1773 when Pope Clement XIV - bowing to pressure from the royal courts of Portugal, France, and Spain - issued a Papal “brief” ordering Jesuits throughout the world to renounce their vows and go into exile.
Catherine the Great of Russia had harbored the Jesuit order, during the order's suppression by Rome in the late 18th century.
Pope Pius VII, a Benedictine, restored the Society on August 7, 1814.
The first siege of Ceuta lasted 26 years and is still the longest siege in history. The Moroccans eventually took the city in 1720, but it was recaptured when Spain brought in thousands of reinforcements. When Ismail bin Sharif died in 1727, the Moroccans simply gave it up.
On November 18th, 1939, the Dutch liner Simon Bolivar (Capt. H. Voorspuiy), was on a voyage from Holland to Paramaribo, when she struck a mine, off Harwich. The liner carried 400 passengers and crew.The explosion was very violent and many people on the deck were killed, Capt. Voorspuiy was mortally wounded and died. The Simon Bolivar´s masts were blown down and she began to settle by the stern. The ship´s radio was damaged by the explosion and the S.O.S. could not be sent out. Nevertheless, other vessels were quickly on the spot. About 15 minutes after the first explosion, there was a second explosion that badly damaged some of the remaining lifeboats. According to the ship´s officers, the vessel had struck two mines, one on each side of the ship. S/S Simon Bolivar finally sank with the loss of 84 lives.
When Israel declared independence from British colonial rule in May 1948, it immediately went to war with the neighboring Arab states. One of the first weapons Israel acquired was a fighter plane designed by a country that had sought the extinction of the Jewish people.
Did you know that the B-17 joined the Israeli Air Force? In July 1948 the Israeli Air Force operated three B-17 Flying Fortresses which the fledgling Israeli Air Force had acquired in the United States. The squadron flew the Flying Fortress, a type credited with propelling the IAF into the realm of modern aerial warfare, during both the 1948 Arab–Israeli War and 1956 Suez Crisis.
On January 7, 1949, the last day of the first Arab-Israeli War. A flight of four British Spitfires takes off from their base in Egypt to monitor the situation along the border between Egypt and Israel. They are attracted by black smoke along the road so they decide to investigate and take some photos. This decision would have serious consequences as a flight of two Israeli Spitfires flown by non-Jewish volunteers would mistake the British planes for Egyptian ones.
Military Paranormal Mysteries that have never been solved. Did Winston Churchill meet Abraham Lincoln? What about Britain's ghost planes?
To view Mysteries of WWI click the video.
How the World Navies decided to use ramming to further their goals.
The shortest war in history is the foot-light
Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1869. It managed to be started, prosecuted, and wrapped up, all within the
hour! From beginning to end it lasted only 38 minutes. Yes, you heard me. Not 38 years, not 38
weeks, not even 38 hours. In fact, this 38-minute war happens to be the shortest in all recorded
human history.
The brief Anglo-Zanzibar War represents a fascinating outlier in warfare, not just because it was
unbelievably short, but also because of the unusual events that occurred within it. For those 38
minutes, family intrigue and betrayal met the no-nonsense might of Victorian Britain. The result:
an unexpected, point-blank costal artillery barrage of pretty insane proportions. This is the story
of the Anglo-Zanzibar War.The Anglo-Zanzibar War is the shortest war in history. Lasting only 38 minutes, the conflict broke out when Khalid bin Bargash seized power after the death of his uncle, Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini. The British, who favored a different candidate, delivered an ultimatum ordering Bargash to abdicate. When Bargash refused and assembled an army, the Royal Navy sent five warships to the harbor in front of the palace and opened fire.
The Third Battle of Ypres during World War I - also known as Passchendaele - has shaped perceptions of the First World War on the Western Front. Fought between July and November 1917, both sides suffered heavy casualties and endured appalling conditions. The name Passchendaele has become synonymous with mud, blood and futility.
In 1917, General Sir Douglas Haig planned a major offensive to break out of the Ypres salient, which the Allies had occupied since 1914.
Haig's vision was for a war-winning breakthrough. He planned to capture the high ground around Ypres, as well as a key rail junction to the east, and then advance on the German-occupied ports of the Belgian coast - critical to the U-Boat campaign.
The battle failed to achieve Haig's objectives. It lasted over 100 days. In that time, the Allies advanced about 5 miles for the loss of over 250,000 soldiers killed, wounded or missing.
Sture was a Swedish statesman and regent of Sweden. When he refused to recognize Christian II of Denmark as king of Sweden, Christian sent a force to aid Sture's rival, Archbishop Gustaf Trolle, whom Sture had deposed and who was besieged in his castle. Sture defeated the Danish army and imprisoned Trolle. Warfare continued, and Sture was killed in battle, but not before he paved the way for Swedish independence, which was attained under Gustavus I.
During the Second World War, a PoW camp in southeast Australia nearby the township Cowra housed mainly Japanese and Italian prisoners. During the night of August 5th 1944, a bugle sounded in the dead-quiet night.
As the camp’s guards would soon find out, this sound was the signal for hundreds of Japanese prisoners to storm the outer-fences and six guard towers, brandishing nothing but makeshift weaponry.
That night, the largest and single-most bloody POW prison break of the entire Second World War commenced. All of it happening nearby that middle-sized quiet township of Cowra, Australia.
The Delft Thunderclap happened on Oct. 12, 1654 in the Netherlands. On that morning, a stray spark detonated 90,000 pounds of gunpowder stored in a basement vault, sending forth sound waves that could be heard 70 miles away. The repeated explosions killed at least a hundred people, injured thousands, uprooted trees, collapsed buildings and left a dark crater where the ammunition had been kept.
Delft's most famous artist, Johannes Vermeer, lived a few streets away from the explosion, but survived unscathed. Meanwhile his colleague, the celebrated painter Carel Fabritius, resided several blocks closer and was buried beneath the fallen roof beams of his home studio. He died within hours. He was 32.
Fabritius left behind only 13 paintings that can be attributed to him, each a cherished gem.
"The Goldfinch" (1654), Fabritius's most famous painting, seems to portray nothing more than a charming bird with downy brown feathers highlighted by a stark yellow streak. It's easy to miss the slim gold chain that wraps around his leg and ties him to the feedbox on which he's perched. Once you do, however, it seems impossible to add still more poignance to the painting. But the work turns out to carry an astonishing legacy of the same thunderclap that took the artist's life.
A CT scan of the painting, conducted in 2003 by the Danish conservator Jorgen Wadum, shows traces of a blast, the minuscule indentations of hurtling matter, broken shards, hard pellets blown scattershot through the air, across the room, pocking its surface in an instant. The further revelation of these scans is that the explosion registered in a surface that did not split or shatter because it was not dry. "The Goldfinch" was still wet, still drying, a work in progress like its maker, a living thing in the studio when Fabritius was dying.
In the days and weeks after the Delft Thunderclap, many artists hurried to the scene to sketch the ruins left in its wake. Only "The Goldfinch" captured the actual moment. It stopped time in perhaps the most profound way possible, yet the painting continues to exist in our time, and in this way has kept the artist alive.
75 years ago British-ruled India was split into two states: India and Pakistan. An estimated one million people were killed during a violent process known as partition. Here’s a short explainer on how it happened.
The Niños Héroes (in English: Boy Heroes), also known as the Heroic Cadets or Boy Soldiers, were six Mexican teenage military cadets. These cadets died defending Mexico at Mexico City's Chapultepec Castle (then serving as the Mexican Army's military academy) from invading U.S. forces in the 13 September 1847 Battle of Chapultepec, during the Mexican–American War. One of the cadets, Juan Escutia, wrapped himself with the Mexican flag and jumped from the roof of the castle to keep it from falling into enemy hands. The Niños Héroes are commemorated by a national holiday on September 13.
The Niños Héroes were:
Juan de la Barrera (age 19)
Juan Escutia (age 15–19)
Francisco Márquez (age 13)
Agustín Melgar (age 15–19)
Fernando Montes de Oca (age 15–19)
Vicente Suárez (age 14)
The Battle of Lissa (or Battle of Vis) (Croatian: Bitka kod Visa) took place on 20 July 1866 in the Adriatic Sea near the Dalmatian island of Vis (Italian: Lissa) and was a significant victory for an Austrian Empire force over a numerically superior Italian force. It was the first major sea battle between ironclads and one of the last to involve deliberate ramming. The Italian navy fired roughly 1450 shots during the engagement but failed to sink any Austrian ship and lost two ironclads.
One of the main reasons for this poor performance was internal rivalry between the Italian fleet commanders: for example, Italian Vice Admiral Albini, with his ships, did not engage the enemy during the battle. The engagement was made up of several small battles: the main battle was between seven Austrian and twelve Italian ironclads and showed the ability of Austrian Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff to divide his more numerous opponents and then destroy the isolated ironclads.
The Dardanelles was an attack launched by the Allies in WWI, prior to the Gallipoli Landings, A couple of wrong moves sank the entire operation.
The biggest naval confrontation of World War I, the Battle of Jutland in 1916, also has the distinction of being the first battle during which a plane was launched from an aircraft carrier. The pilot of a British seaplane flew toward the German warships off the coast of Denmark, and his observer radioed the enemy's coordinates back to the British fleet. When the plane's engine failed on the return leg, the pilot, Frederick Rutland, landed on the water, repaired the engine and safely returned to his ship. To top it off, he later jumped into the sea to rescue a wounded sailor. He was decorated for his bravery, had two audiences with King George V, and became a national hero, "Rutland of Jutland."
By the end of the next war, Rutland was disgraced as Rutland spent years spying for Japan in the lead up to the surprise strike on America in 1941.
Rutland was a school dropout born into poverty in 1886 in Weymouth, England, but his brains and ambition propelled him up the military ranks. A few years after his celebrated World War I service, he retired from the navy and accepted a job in Japan, then a British ally, advising its navy on aircraft-carrier design.
In 1932 a Japanese naval officer offered to pay Rutland to gather intelligence on U.S. naval preparations on the American West Coast. Rutland agreed, relocating his family to Beverly Hills.
Charming and affable, Rutland proved well-suited to socializing with American officers over drinks. A British war hero could ask probing questions about military preparations and capabilities without setting off alarms. Rutland, given the code name Agent Shinkawa, passed to Japanese intelligence details of America's aviation technology; he scouted naval bases, including Pearl Harbor's. He regularly demanded more money from his Japanese handlers, the better to fund his lavish lifestyle, which allowed for hobnobbing with stars such as Boris Karloff and Charlie Chaplin while making the circuit of the Hollywood party scene.
The British counterintelligence agency MI5 was aware of Rutland's espionage but withheld the information from its American counterparts to avoid an embarrassing scandal. When the FBI was closing in on Rutland in the years before the war, Ellis Zacharias of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence told the agency to halt its investigation: He believed he'd turned Rutland into an asset reporting to him, but Rutland seems to have continued to give information to Japan. Rutland, committed suicide in 1949 after being expelled from the U.S. and imprisoned in England
In March 1918, Vladimir Lenin's Soviet government signed a separate peace with the Central Powers, taking Russia out of World War I. The punitive Treaty of Brest-Litovsk forced Moscow to cede a vast swath of territory stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The Allied governments regarded Russia's withdrawal as a betrayal. To prevent munitions supplied to czarist Russia from falling into the hands of the Germans, Allied forces were sent to the city of Murmansk on the Barents Sea, adjacent to the extreme northern borders of Finland and Norway, and, 6,000 miles east, to Vladivostok on the Pacific. These expeditions, which lingered after the Armistice of November 1918, ended up offering half-hearted support to the White armies in their quest to overthrow the Bolsheviks after the war.
There were several theaters of operation, including the Black and Caspian seas. Nearly 180,000 troops were involved from more than a dozen countries. Especially vivid is her depiction of hostilities at the port of Archangel, nearly 500 miles northeast of today's St. Petersburg, where 4,500 Americans, in the fall of 1918, went ashore under British command and remained after the war ended. The climate of frustration and uncertainty is recorded in a diary kept by Pvt. Clarence Scheu of Detroit, part of a contingent of raw recruits from Michigan and Wisconsin. On Feb. 12, 1919, in the midst of the desolate Arctic winter, Scheu told his diary: "No relief, no reinforcements, no definite advice as to why and wherefore . . . British command -- bah." The northern intervention claimed nearly 500 British and American lives, nearly a quarter of the total Allied lives lost in Russia.
President Woodrow Wilson, the most reluctant interventionist leader, was persuaded to send American soldiers to Siberia when he learned of a crisis involving a Czechoslovak legion, some 50,000 strong, that had been cut off from the anti-German struggle after the Brest-Litovsk Treaty was signed and the Eastern Front shut down. The legion was now attempting to exit Russia by way of Siberia.
The fate of these embattled Czechoslovaks, strung out along 5,000 miles of the Trans-Siberian Railway, appealed to Wilson's notion of America coming to the defense of one of the small, self-determining nations. Seven thousand American troops landed at Vladivostok in August and September 1918, joined by a comparable number of Japanese forces. American soldiers in Siberia saw little combat but departed only in April 1920. As for the Czechoslovaks, they eventually evacuated Russia through the port of Vladivostok.
Western statesmen assumed that the Reds were destined for defeat in the Russian Civil War. Yet the Whites' armies in the field -- Adm. Alexander Kolchak's advancing from Siberia, Gen. Anton Denikin's from Ukraine and Gen. Nikolai Yudenich's from the northwest -- vied with one another for political supremacy and were unable to coordinate their campaigns. The White tide peaked in the fall of 1919. Militarily the Allied intervention was inconsequential, but it enabled the Bolshevik government to rally Russian patriotic support behind the Red flag and for decades afterward served the Kremlin as a propaganda club against the West.
Disintegrating morale infected the interventionists' ranks. There were acts of insubordination that escalated into soldiers' strikes and included a French naval mutiny in the Black Sea port of Sevastopol. Political radicalism played a part, but the chief causes were war weariness and home sickness among the beleaguered forces.
The Bolsheviks managed to reconquer Ukraine for the U.S.S.R.
The Lidice massacre was the complete destruction of the village of Lidice in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which is now a part of the Czech Republic, in June 1942 on orders from Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and acting Reichsprotektor Kurt Daluege, successor to Reinhard Heydrich. It has gained historical attention as one of the most documented instances of German war crimes during the Second World War, particularly given the deliberate killing of children.
Rudolf Diesel invented the diesel engine. Prior to Diesel's innovations, ships had to "raise steam" before they could be put to sea, a process that could take hours. With a diesel engine, a ship could get under way in minutes. Diesel engines also eliminated the need for dozens of men shoveling coal into boilers; freed of all those men and all that coal, ships could take on more cargo.
Rudolf Diesel was celebrated for his invention and stood alongside Thomas Edison and Henry Ford as a pioneer of industry. He did business with Adolphus Busch -- whose factories needed engines to pump water and cool beer -- as well the Nobels and Rothschilds and their oil-producing companies. But Diesel made an enemy of John D. Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil was already losing market share to electricity companies thanks to Edison's lightbulb. Rockefeller, viewed Diesel's revolutionary technology -- an engine that didn't require gasoline or any product derived from crude oil -- to be an existential threat.
Diesel disappeared at sea in 1913.
Leon Gambetta was a lawyer who gained recognition as an opponent of the Second Empire of Napoleon III and, in 1869, joined the parliamentary opposition. When Napoleon's empire fell to the Germans, Gambetta organized a government of national defense to drive them out. With Paris under a grueling German siege, he made a spectacular escape to Tours in a balloon, where he continued fighting the Germans as minister of the interior and of war.
In 1952 Gamal Abdel Nasser led a coup by Free Officers (as they called themselves) that dethroned Egypt's king, the very dissolute Farouk I, whose morals many Egyptians found repugnant. But citizens who'd hoped for democratic reforms to accompany the cleansing of royal rot were soon disappointed. Nasser banned all political parties except his own, snuffed out the Egyptian press, and orchestrated assassinations across the Arab world.
Nasser also mentored the monsters in Iraq, Syria and Libya. A young Saddam Hussein lived in Cairo for three years, on Nasser's dime, before returning to Iraq as a despot. Syria's Hafez al-Assad was also sheltered in Cairo and was on sabbatical in the Egyptian capital, in fact, at the same time as Saddam. In 1956, an international crisis over control of the Suez Canal put Britain and France into direct conflict with President Nasser of Egypt, a proud Arab nationalist determined to stand up to foreign powers meddling in Egyptian affairs.
President Eisenhower had rescued Nasser from ignominy in 1956, when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. Britain and France, with Israel as a partner, responded to the canal's seizure with an invasion of Egypt that would have spelled the end of Nasser's rule had Ike not ordered a cease-fire.
In 1969, a year before his death, Nasser helped Muammar Gaddafi seize power in Libya.
In July 1969, a short war broke out between two Central American nations, El Salvador and Honduras. It is often known as 'The Soccer War' or 'The Football War', suggesting that matches played between those countries were the main cause of the conflict. This is quite inaccurate and superficial and this video will explain why.
For aviation enthusiasts, the most interesting fact about the war is that this was the last time that piston-engine fighters fought each other and shot each other down.
