69 General Vespasian became Roman emperor for a decade. He was the last in the year of four emperors. His rule was one of those rare occasions when a military government led to stability and order without resorting to the sword. He founded the Flavian dynasty which ruled for another two decades. The Colosseum was one of his many building projects. Still there. Still an attraction.
1699 Tsar Big Pete changed calendar to coincide with Western Europe, making the new year on 1 January and not 1 September. The Orthodox Church rebelled because it changed saints days (and the birthdays associated with them.) Later the Bolsheviks had trouble with days and dates, too. A superb biography of Great Peter is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
1820 To encourage men to marry and produce children to increase the population and to enhance its claims to statehood Missouri introduced a bachelor tax of $1 a year. It applied to only to men.
1860 South Carolina seceded from the Union even before Abraham Lincoln was declared the winner of the election by the Electoral College. The first state to do so. It had threatened to this a number times before reaching back to the administration of Andrew Jackson. Been to Charleston to eat shrimp and grits, i.e., ‘girls raised in the South,’ we were told.
1966 Su Yu-chen, an accredited Taiwanese journalist who had covered the Tokyo Olympics and other international sporting competitions, was barred from a press conference for the Asian Games in Bangkok because she was a woman. The other 400 journalists were men, none of whom protested at her exclusion.
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