1816 London, Literature: The son of a stable hand, John Keats, published his first poem in ‘The Examiner.’ I met Keats at 8:00 am on Saturdays in McCormick Hall.
1862 Puebla (Mexico), History: Mexicans defeated a French army when Louis Napoleon III used the pretext of loan defaults to expand the French Empire into Mexico while the USA was embroiled in its Civil War. The conflict continued for some years (1861-1867). The date has since become the Mexican National Day. We have been to Mexico twice.
1877 Fort Walsh, Saskatchewan, History: Sitting Bull with thousands of Lakota passed into Canada to escape from the US Army out to avenge Custer’s stupidity. A few redcoats of the North-West Mounted Police at the border extended the Queen’s protection to the immigrants much to the annoyance of the pursing bluecoated avengers.
1925 Dayton (Tennessee), Science: The Scopes Trial began. In part the trial had been staged as publicity stunt by locals but when H. L. Mencken appointed himself ringmaster, it spun out of control, leading to a clash of titans, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. Bryan is invariably a caricature in this story but his motivation was to oppose Social Darwinism. One fundamental of his fundamentalism was that God made us all in that respect we are all equal, a subtlety lost in the popular stereotype. A biography of the Great Commoner is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
1961 Cape Canaveral, Technology: Alan Shepard became the first American launched into space riding a Mercury-Redstone rocket. When ground control dithered for five hours hesitating to ignite the rocket, an impatient Shepard finally said, ‘Light this candle!’ Off he went. Tom Wolfe’s account of the Mercury program is the best thing that wordsmith ever wrote.
Skip to content