1509 London, Politics: Henry VIII took the throne. Reduced to a player in a bedroom farce in the popular culture by people who cannot understand anything else, Henry was a consummate strategist and he had to be.
1529 Zaragoza (ES), Politics: Spain and Portugal agreed to the Treaty of Saragossa to divide the world between them. The Pope had brokered the arrangement to keep the peace among Christian nations against the Ottoman threat. When the dividing line was drawn around a globe it bisected the continent of Australia and centuries later that line became the border to Western Australia. See Leslie Marchant, ‘The Papal Line of Demarcation’ (Perth, 2008).
1876 St Petersburg, Music: Pytor Tchaikovsky completed the ballet ‘Swan Lake.’ It never gets old. We saw it most recently in St Petersburg.
1970 Madison (WI), Ecology: The first celebration of Earth Day. An estimated 20 million Americans took part in events related to it. Many events involved picking up trash and environmental education. The leading champion was Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, who was instrumental in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in the same year. It takes imagination to think of a senator today doing something this farsighted and constructive.
1983 ‘Stern’ magazine and Murdoch’s ‘Times of London’ announced the Hitler Diaries. Robert Harris’s deadpan telling of this blunder of the century is discussed elsewhere on this blog. The managers managed, all right, especially in shifting the blame away from themselves.
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