Category: Practice

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.

1865 The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified ending slavery. It had passed Congress earlier and ratification occurred when 3/4ths of the States agreed. What counted as a State in December 1865 was much vexed, as most of the Southern states were under military rule.

1894 Women in South Australia gained the right to vote in 1894 by a vote of the all-male South Australian parliament. Queen Victoria gave Royal Assent on 2 February 1895, allowing women to vote for the first time in the election of 1896.

1912 The discovery of Piltdown Man (Sussex) by amateur Charles Dawson was accepted as genuine at Geological Society of London for two generations although it was an amateurish prank. Only in 1953 was it denounced as a hoax.

1957 World’s first nuclear power plant began generating electricity for Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

1961 EMI rejected the Beatles submission for a recording contract. A change of heart came later.

1538 The Pope Paul II excommunicated Henry VIII, leading him to champion the Protestant Reformation. Paulie thus obeyed the law of unintended consequences by stimulating Henry to break with the Papacy, rather coming to heel.

1903 Two bicycle repairmen from Ohio, Wilbur and Orville Wright took to the air at Kitty Hawk beach in North Carolina in a heavier than air, self-propelled and powered, and controlled flight.

1908 Willard Libby developed radiocarbon dating in a physical chemistry laboratory. Some of the early work on this technique was done at the University of Nebraska. It uses the decay of radioactive carbon-14 (C14) to determine age in anything that was once living up to 60,000 years. It has become a tool in daily use in agriculture, archaeology, chemistry, geology, history, geophysics, and more. A dated fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls is an example.

1967 Serving Prime Minister Harold Holt of Australia disappeared while swimming in the sea off a Victorian beach, never to reappear. Fox News says Hillary did it. Conspiracy theorists have dined out on this misfortune ever since. In addition to the ubiquitous Hillary, Chinese, Russians, socialists, CIA, aliens, Moonies, leprechauns, and Queenslanders have all been blamed. Don’t mention the sharks.

1989 The Simpsons first episode appeared on television in the USA. Tune in on a channel near you.

1707 The last recorded eruption of Mount Fuji, lasting 17 days. We have seen Mt Fuji in the distance on a bullet train from Tokyo to Nagoya.

1773 Guests at the Boston Tea Party dumped 342 chests of tea into the harbour in protest of the Tea Act of 1771 introduced to prop up the East India Company by giving it a monopoly against Dutch traders who were undercutting the Company on price. The Tea Partists dressed as Mohawk Indians to shift the blame on to the innocent. Blame shifting remains a Tea Party speciality.

1899 Italian football club A.C. Milan founded as Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club by Englishmen Alfred Edwards and Herbert Kilpin. Cricket? And two English founders! Athletic Club Milan. Go figure.

1907 President Theodore Roosevelt dispatched the Great White Fleet around the world on a two year voyage. Warships visiting ports was a well established practice at the time, but Roosevelt’s fleet, painted white to signify its peaceful intent, was enormous with sixteen battleships and 50 escort ships. Every ship was fully crewed and all nearly brand new, and of the latest design: all steel and coal-burning. The voyage was in part a training mission for the navy which had until that time concentrated on operations in coastal waters and not blue water out of sight of land. It also demonstrated American power to would be predators after the assault on Venezuela earlier by European creditors. It visited Sydney as the postcard below indicates.

1946 The House of Dior was founded with financial backing from Marcel Boussac. Still going with a revenue of more than $40 billion and about 125,000 employees in 2017.

1791 D.C. The Bill of Rights was ratified by the States. The process had begun two years earlier. It includes the right to bear arms in a well-ordered militia as a substitute for a standing army. Now that there is a standing army…..it would seem to follow that there is no need for this proviso.

1891 Springfield, Massachusetts, an illegal immigrant Canadian James Naismith devised the game of basketball, a sport that could be played indoors and was neither too tame nor too rough. He set the founding thirteen rules.

1893 NYC: Foreigner Anton Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 in E-minor, Opus 95, “From the New World,” was performed in New York City in an open rehearsal at Carnegie Hall. The world premier was the next day.

1905 St Petersburg, Russia, Pushkin House was established to preserve the cultural heritage of Alexander Pushkin, who is credited with creating Russian as literary language. We have been there.

1920 Geneva: Australia became a member of the League of Nations. Been to the League of Nations building in Geneva to read archives. Frank Morehouse’s superb novels featuring Edith followed.

1751 Vienna: Hapsburg rulers founded the first military academy in the world, the Theresian Military Academy. We might see it next year.

1900 At the Physics Society in Berlin Max Planck presented a theoretical derivation of his black-body radiation law which became a corner stone of quantum theory.

1911 Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first to reach the South Pole.

1926 Mystery writer Agatha Christie reappeared eleven days after being reported missing, with no memory of where she has been. Christie’s autobiography makes no reference to her disappearance.

1962 For the first time an earth probe, Mariner 2, flew by Venus.

1577 Plymouth, England: Sir Francis Drake went to attack Spanish shipping in the Pacific. To do so he had to circumnavigate the world. Silver from Peru was the major source of money for Spain at the time.

1642 New Zealand: Dutchman Abel Tasman reached the coast of South Island in New Zealand, and named it Staten Landt (States General). It was the default name Dutch explorers used, e.g., Staten Island in New York Habor. Cartographers back home changed the name to honour his home, Zeeland.

1902 Caracas, Venezuela: British and German ships bombard Venezuelan harbour forts to collect sovereign debts. Using the Monroe Doctrine, US President Theodore Roosevelt offered to arbitrate and successfully did so.

1955 Melbourne: Australian housewife, Dame Edna Everage, debuted. The character evolved over the years. The wardrobe, the gladioli, the glasses, the rings, came later. The lane in Melbourne below bears that name.

1972 The Moon: Apollo 17 was the sixth and the last time humans landed on the Moon. Eugene Cernan was the last man of twelve men to walk on the Moon.

1694 London: the Royal Society censured Edmond Halley for suggesting that Noah’s flood might have been caused by the impact of a comet. Supernatural causes were preferred explanation.

1792 In Vienna, Franz Joseph Haydn gave the first lessons in composition to 22-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven. We hope to visit Vienna again in 2019 and pay homage to Ludi.

1874 D.C.: President U.S. Grant hosted the first state dinner at the White House and it was for visiting Hawaiian King David Kalakaua. Hawaii is our favourite place, apart from Newtown.

1953 Chuck Yeager flew two and a half times the speed of sound. He inspired Tom Wolfe.
Notice the X-plane and pilot in a pressure suit on the cover of the first edition. It is a marvellous book.

1980 NYC: Apple made its initial public offering on the stock market. It became the largest company in the US over the next generation. Ten years ago we migrated from the PC World to the Apple World and have never looked back.

1620 The Mayflower pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts. Kate has been there.

1936 Edward VIII abdicated the throne of England.

1944 The Great Toronto snowstorm of 20 inches remains the worst blizzard experienced in that winter city. The death count increased to about twenty.

1946 United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund was established, one of the many good things the United Nations does that gets little press.

2001 Race riots occurred in Cronulla in southern Sydney. A voter is pictured below.

1510 The muslim ruler of Goa surrendered on terms to the Christian Portuguese admiral Afonso de Alburquerque who ignored the terms and slaughtered the population of muslims because god told him to do so. Christianity struck again with the sword.

1799 France adopted the meter and the metric system. A meter was one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator as it was calculated at the time. Several specimens were made but one survives.

1869 Governor John Campbell of the Wyoming Territory signed the first law in the U.S. explicitly granting women the right to vote. Twenty years later it was explicitly written into the state constitution making Wyoming the Equality State. While that slogan appears on the automobile license plates the logo is a cowboy on a horse. The cowboy is certainly a man. Get it? The one pictured below was hard to find.

1927 The Grand Old Opry made its first radio broadcast from Nashville, Tennessee. It is a foundation stone of Country and Western music. I spent a week in the state archives in Nashville once upon a time.

1948 The United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Committee that brought it forward was chaired by Eleanor ‘Everywhere’ Roosevelt. The statement was written by Canadian lawyer John Humphrey. None of the diplomats at the founding of the United Nations wanted anything to do with such an airy fairy project and so they left it to Roosevelt who made it happen, overcoming indifference and hostility. It has been often cited since, justifying much of the work of the International Court of Justice in Den Haag. A biography of Eleanor Everywhere is discussed elsewhere on this blog.