1675 German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz demonstrated integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the graph of y = f(x) function. The foundation calculus as some know it today, but not me.
1880 Irish tenants and harvest workers employed in Ballinrobe by land agent Charles Boycott ostracised him, leading to the term ‘boycott.’ Boycott was refused service in shops, drapers, livery stables, saloons, and people crossed the street rather than pass him by. It was a giant cause célèbre at the time and led to army intervention to force labor. While Boycott worked for Lord Erne who owned vast acreage, it was Boycott himself who was target because he was regarded as arrogant, oppressive, and brutal. He became, briefly, a hero in England and wasshowered with honours for taking the whip to those primitive Irish.
1918 The armistice to end The Great War came into effect. Amen. The front page of the Sydney Morning Herald for this date is behind a paywall so I used the freely available one from the New York Times. During the war it was called The Great War. Afterward the Department of Defense asked U.S. President Woodrow Wilson about filing the mountain of paperwork generated for the war, he said call it ‘The World War’ because it involved action around the world. On how it all started there is no better source that Barbara Tuchman, ‘The Guns of August’ (1962). This book influenced the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1933 One of the worst windstorms of the Dust Bowl blew from South Dakota to Kansas and on to Texas. and lasted more than a week. In one year an estimated 850 million tons of top soil disappeared in the wind, some of falling as far away as New York City, Boston, Philadelphia. First came insects, then drought, and then wind. Then the cycle repeated itself until there was nothing but dust left over a five-year period. The times they were apocalyptic.
1975 Australian Governor-General John Kerr dismissed the elected government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. The history wars over this event continue. I was listening to the radio at home when the news came. The exercise of the powers of the Governor-General were destroyed in their exercise may be the judgement of history. Nicholas Hasluck’s novel ‘The Dismissal’ (2011) is a long cool worm’s eye view of this totemic event when the goal posts moved.
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