Political theory and practice

877 The tradition of the Twelve Days of Christmas started when King Alfred the Great decreed that no servant had to work during the twelve days of celebration which followed Midwinter which merged with the twelve days of Christmas instigated by Christians to replace the pagan festival of Saturnalia.

1808 Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67—the “Fifth Symphony” premiered half way through a long program with an unrehearsed orchestra in a vast, freezing hall. It was ignored by critics at the time but is now regarded as one of the greatest work of one of the greatest composer. The four-note opening motif is familiar to many people who have never heard of Ludi. Its opening four-note motif was the signal for D-Day on 6 June 1944.

1849 Fyodor Dostoyevsky was to be executed for antigovernment activities. In fact, he was led out to face a firing squad, where he was then told he had been reprieved. He was sent into exile for a decade. At the time of his arrest he had written two juvenile novels now seldom read. The great works followed his return to Russia in 1859. We saw much about this tortured soul on our Russian tour.

1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason by a military court-martial and sentenced to life in prison for passing military secrets to the Germans. He was convicted on flimsy evidence in a highly irregular trial. Being Jewish he was a scapegoat for the far reaching corruption and incompetence in the French Army. The meat-eaters of the day, i.e., journalists, had him convicted long before the sham of a trial. Somethings never change.

1956 A baby gorilla named Colo was born at the Columbus (Ohio) Zoo becoming the first-ever gorilla born in captivity. After a long and comfortable life with many progeny she died in January 2017.

1817 Governor Lachlan Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office in distant England the use of the name ‘Australia’ instead of New Holland for the continent. Much of Australia still bears the imprint of Lachlan Macquarie, a humanitarian and visionary. In Latin ‘australis’ means southern, and from the second century there were legends of an “unknown southern land” (terra australis incognita).

1844 The Rochdale Pioneers began business at a cooperative in England, starting the Cooperative movement. The principals included: Open membership, democratic control (one person, one vote), distribution of surplus in proportion to trade, payment of limited interest on capital, political and religious neutrality, cash trading (no credit extended), and promotion of education.

1898 French scientists Pierre and Marie Curie discovered radium. It made them famous and it killed them. She was the first woman in Europe to earn a PhD. They coined the term ‘radioactivity.’

1913 First crossword puzzle (with 32 clues) was printed in New York World. It was created by Arthur Wynne, a Liverpool journalist. We have done a few of these.

1933 Fox Films signed Shirley Temple at five-years of age to a studio contract. By that time she had been in films for two years. She retired from Tinsel Town at twenty-two and had a career in business and then another in diplomacy.

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.