Political theory and practice

583 County Kerry, History: This is the feast day of Saint Brendan of Clonfert the Navigator who ostensibly made a voyage of seven years to the Land of Delight or the Garden of Eden. Did he reach the Americas? Christopher Columbus used this legend in part to justify the project to cross the Atlantic.

1763 London, Literature: Samuel Johnson met his future biographer and thereafter constant companion James Boswell, the diarist. Johnson called him Bozzy. The latter’s very name passed into common usage for constant companion as when Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes proclaim that he was ‘lost without his Boswell,’ i.e., Dr Watson.

1815 Blackheath, History: In the Blue Mountains returning from Bathurst NSW Governor Lachlan Macquarie named the settlement Blackheath after the colour and texture of native flora. The current population is 4,400. I finished ‘Matters of Justice’ (1986) there in a rented cabin one November when it snowed!

1866 Philadelphia, Popular Culture: Pharmacist Charles Hires began to sell ‘Root Beer’ made from the root of the sassafras tree without caffeine. A tea-totaler he promoted it as the temperance drink with health-giving properties. After many corporate sales and changes Cadbury Schweppes bought the residual company and still uses the name in an alcoholic drink, Hires Root Beer and Vodka!

2014 Chicago, Media: Barbara Walters retired from television at eighty-four. Her career spanned fifty years and led the way for women in the media, especially in serious journalism. She moderated presidential debates, interviewed Anwar Sadat, anchored NBC evening news, and made documentaries, often about the handicapped and disabled. Her example inspired countless other women in front of the camera to do more than point to the letters on a game show. I did see her flummoxed once when interviewing the president of a poor African country. She more or less asked him how he could take a salary in a destitute country. His reply was something like this: “Well, since you have brought up salaries, I can assure that I make much less than do you.’ With a tight smile, she was at a loss for a reply and the floor director cut to a commercial.

1831 Pittsburg, Technology: The first coal burning locomotive in the United States made a trial run in Pittsburgh. Ah, King Coal was much more efficient and effective than wood for steam power. We are still burning coal, as many still smoke cigarettes.

1861 St Petersburg, Politics: Russian Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom in all-Russia. There were many qualifications and exceptions, and no enforcement.

1878 Menlo Park (New Jersey), Technology: Thomas Alva Edison patented (# 200,521) a phonograph to record and play back sound. At the time Edison thought of the device as recording words, not music. Hence the name ‘gramo-phone’ and not muso-phone.

1906 Battle Creek (Michigan), Food: Will Kellogg and others founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company. Still to be found on supermarket shelves.

1919 Paris, Politics: W. E. B. Du Bois hosted the first Pan-African Congress. He had some informal assistance from the U.S. State Department for this inaugural conference. There were fifty-seven delegates from fifteen countries. The aim of this the first conference was to petition the Versailles Peace Conference to reform colonial rule and speed self-rule consistent with Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Good thing his typewriter ribbon fouled or there would have been more points. Woody did not know when to quit. Six later congresses followed.

1800 Philadelphia, Politics: The United States government moved from Philadelphia to the swamp at Washington D.C.

1851 Bangkok, Politics: King Mongkut was crowned King of Siam. While courting Deborah Kerr he played off the English and French colonisers against each other to maintain the independence of Siam. He also promoted the use Western cutlery. No chopsticks for him. I have spent time at Chulalongkorn University and Thammasat University in Bangkok.

1863 Paris, Art: The Salon des Refusés opened to exhibit works rejected by the offical Salon. The artists included Paul Cézanene, Camille Pissaro, Edouard Manet, and Henri Fantin-LaTour, James Whister, and others. This event heralded the beginning of modern art.

1869 New York City, Politics: Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association to unite campaigns for the female vote, to co-ordinate fund raising efforts, to increase lobbying in state and territory legislatures, and to have an office in Wahington D.C.

1928 Cloncurry, Queensland, Society: The Aerial Medical Service took wing and later morphed into the Flying Doctor Service. Reverend John Flynn had worked with two doctors who served an area of nearly two million square miles in West Australian and the Northern Territory. Sometimes it took weeks for a doctor to get to an injured or sick person. Flynn combined two new technologies, radio and aircraft. He raised money from a benefactor, H. V. McKay, and set it up. By the way, pedal radios were distributed to remote locations at a nominal charge since electricity was not available in the places that needed the service the most. It was renamed in 1942 and in 1955 after learning of it during a visit Queen Elizabeth gave it a royal warrant. That recognition lifted its profile in the philanthropic community, in the media, and among politicians.

1796 Gloucestershire, Medicine: English country doctor Edward Jenner administered the world’s first recorded vaccination. It was against smallpox. The vaccine was enthusiastically embraced by doctors far and wide and saved millions of lives. It also inspired the search for other preventative vaccines. So far no vaccine against stupid has been found.

1804 Meriwether Lewis and William Clark left St Louis for parts unknown. The Corps of Discovery, as it was called, had forty-five men. The journey there and back took nearly three years.

1855 Sydney, History: The Royal Mint on Macquarie Street commenced operations. The building still stands and boasts a restaurant these days.

1897 Flat Holm Island (England): Guglielmo Marconi sent the first message over the sea by wireless telegraph — radio. The equipment is being set up below.

1969 Ottawa, Politics: The Trudeau government removed homosexuality from the Criminal Code of Canada. Pierre Trudeau had often said that the nation does not belong in the nation’s bedrooms. The sky did not fall.

1607 Jamestown (VA), History: English colonists landed and set up camp. It succeeded where the Lost Colony of Roanoke of 1585 failed.

1792 Tasmania, Science: There occurred the first confirmed sighting of a Tasmania Tiger. Earlier in 1642 a crewman with Dutchman Abel Tasman had found a footprint which he likened to that of tiger. In 1792 French naturalist Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière with Admiral d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition to New Holland saw one and sketched it from memory. The last one died in the Hobart Zoo in 1936. Zoologist say the dingo killed off the Tigers on the mainland of Australia, but as the Bass Strait came to separate Tasmania from the continent, those tigers there survived.

1908 Washington DC, Politics: President Theodore Roosevelt delivered the opening address entitled “Conservation as a National Duty” at the outset of a three-day meeting at the Governors’ Conference on the Conservation of Natural Resources. Roosevelt designated 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reservations, four national game preserves, five national parks, and 18 national monuments because ‘nature is not inexhaustible.’ I have read a biography of this remarkable individual. We will not see his like again.

1923 Red Cloud, Literature: Willa Cather’s novel ‘One of Ours’ was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for literature much to chagrin of ambitious rivals like Ernest Hemingway. Below is the home where her imagination flowered, and to which she often returned.

1940 London, Politics: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat’ said the new Prime Minister in his first speech in the House of Commons. That was Winston Churchill sending the English language into battle, as one of his severest critics grudgingly said.

1885 Elmira, New York, Literature: Mark Twain published ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ often cited as the great American novel. Read it.

1901 Gloucester, England, Technology: Cecil Booth patented a dust removing suction cleaner. He had seen devices that blew dust off furniture to be swept up and conceived reversing the process with a filter to capture the dust. He thought this would be a more hygienic method, if it worked. His first trial was to put a handkerchief over his mouth and suck dust off wooden chairs in a restaurant! The first version was enormous and gas-fired on a wagon drawn by a team of horses. He used it to offer a cleaning service to hotels, hospitals, schools, and like institutions as pictured below. He later turned to electric models and ever smaller devices.

1927 Hollywood, Entertainment: The first list of the Awards by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was printed on the back page of Academy’s irregular newsletter. The names were later reprinted in ‘Variety’ magazine, buried on page 7. Assiduous readers would find that ‘Wings’ was the best picture that year.

1930 Flagstaff, Arizona, Science. At the Lowell Observatory astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. Percival Lowell had concluded that wobbles in the orbit of Uranus indicated the gravity of another planet out there and he calculated when and where to look. Tombaugh was versed in a new technique using photographic plates with a blink microscope and he took the first picture of Pluto. Other observers soon confirmed the sighting.

1953 Hollywood, Entertainment: ’Bwana Devil’ the first 3-D movie was released. A forgotten movie (rated 4.9 on the IMDB) but it seemed to herald a new age in cinema, which age briefly came and went. Three D recently came….and went again. Who talks about 3-D television these days? Sic transit 3-D, as Cicero said. We still have some 3-D glasses when the old becomes new again.

1551 San Marcos University in Lima Peru opened. The first in the Americas. It still exists as the National University of San Marcos.

1797 Napoleon entered Venice without a fight and dismembered the moribund remnant of the thousand year old Venetian Republic in a few days. He made Venice a part of Italy when he placed one of his brothers on Italian throne. Venetians and Italians agree that Venice is not Italian despite maps, passports, taxes, and more. Several books about Venice are discussed elsewhere on this blog. We hope to visit there this year.

1856 Melbourne, Politics: The antipodean Eight-Hour working day was introduced. Despite predictions of the Pox News of the day the sky did not fall.

1926 The airship Norge flew over the North Pole with Roald Amundsen on board, piloted by Umberto Nobile. It was the first overflight of the Pole.

1949 New Delhi, Politics: The Nehru government appointed Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit Indian ambassador to the United States. She is the first woman ambassador in Washington, and perhaps anywhere.

330 Constantinople became the capital of the Roman Empire. The Column of Constantine remains as shown below; it marks the spot where he declared it the capital. A giant statue of, who else, Connie surmounted the column. The corner of Turkey on the west side of Bosphorus is called Rumi, and that is a reference to Roman. Been there, seen that.

868 The first recorded reference to the Diamond Sutra, a holy text of Mahayana Buddhism, which is the world oldest surviving, dated, and printed book. It is held in the British Library.

1813 William Lawson, Gregory Blaxland, and William Wentworth led an expedition westward from Sydney over the Blue Mountains. The route is the first opening for European expansion into the continent of Australia. Settlements ascending the Mountains from the coast are named for these three stalwarts.

1947 Akron, Technology: The B. F. Goodrich Company announced the development of tubeless tire that increased the safety and ease of driving. The tire blowouts that figure so prominently in movies before this time became largely a thing of the past.

1997 Technology: Deep Blue defeated the unbeatable Garry Kasparov in chess three games to two with one draw.

1497 Florentine Americus Vespucci left on his first voyage to the New World. He went on to demonstrate that Brazil was a separate land mass, not the eastern edge of Asia. Once that was realised it had to be named and his seemed the obvious choice. In all he sailed for the King of Portugal to the New World four times. I once saw his statue on the Uffizi as below.

1752 Benjamin Franklin flew a kite during a lightning storm. His aim was to demonstrate that lighting and electricity were the same thing. He put lightning rods on the roof of his house and elaborate bells connected to them that rang to alert him of the approach of a lightning storm, much to the irritation of Mrs Franklin. I read Walter Isaacson’s turgid biography of Ben years ago. Franklin was quite a fellow, and — did one know? — briefly President of Pennsylvania.

1869 Promontory Summit (Utah), Technology. The Golden Spike was driven binding the transcontinental railroad, reducing the sea-to-sea journey from four months to one week. Though lives were lost in the construction, the job was completed ahead of schedule and under budget. Though I lived and worked for a year nearby in Logan and Ogden, I never visited the site. My bad.

1908 Philadelphia, Society: The first informal Mother’s Day was observed. Anna Jarvis (pictured below) advocated such a day to recognise the role of women as mothers, and she and others lobbied President Woodrow Wilson who conceded in 1914. Business interest, photographers and greeting cards, quickly took it up much to the irritation of Jarvis who in response organised boycotts and launched lawsuits against Hallmark Cards, because she had registered a trademark for Mother’s Day in 1912. Hallmark dropped the apostrophe and continued. Jarvis was arrested for disturbing the peace in her later protests.

1994 Nelson Mandela took the oath of office to serve all South Africans as president, ending three hundred years of white rule. He is the saint of our time.

1386 Lisbon, Politics: Queen Eleanor signed the Treaty of Windsor, and it is remains in force, pledging Portugal and England to mutual aid. It was evoked in World War II to protect Portuguese neutrality while allowing England to use the Azores for strategic purposes and Portugal sold wolfram to Germany. The fine line that Portugal walked during World War II figures in the biography of Salazar reviewed elsewhere on this blog.

1788 London, Politics: The British parliament voted to abolish the slave trade.

1901 Melbourne, Politics. The first sitting of the Australian Parliament convened. On the same date in 1927 it convened for the first time in Canberra. On the same date in 1988 Queen Elizabeth II opened the new Parliament House in Canberra.

1922 Paris, Science: The International Astronomical Union adopted Annie Cannon’s stellar classification system which, slightly amended, remains in use today. It is based on hydrogen absorption as indicated by temperatures and spectral type. She was nearly deaf due to scarlet fever and an ardent suffragette. She worked at the Harvard Observatory after graduating in mathematics from Wellesley College.

1960 Washingotn, D.C, Technology: The Federal Drugs Administration approved the first commercial produced birth control pill which was manufactured by Searle of Chicago. The original research for the Pill had been commissioned by Margaret Sanger and funded by Katherine McCormick (whose fortune also built the hall where I had my 8:00 am poetry class).