Political theory and practice

336 The Christian church in Rome observed the Feast of the Nativity coinciding approximately with the winter solstice and the Roman Festival of Saturnalia.

880 The Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor in Rome. This was the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire, which was not Holy nor Roman nor an Empire per Voltaire. Sounds like something from Faux News. Even so it lasted until 1806.

1741 Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius introduced the Centigrade temperature scale calibrated with a value of 100° for the freezing point of water and 0° for the boiling point. It was reversed by Carl Linnaeus in 1745 after Celsius’s death to facilitate more practical measurement. It was called the Swedish thermometer but Celsius referred to it as Centigrade. With his death Linnaeus named it Celsius himself.

1818 ‘Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht’ (‘Silent Night’) was first performed at the Church of St Nikolaus in Oberndorff bei Salzburg in Austria. The music was by local school teacher Franz Gruber and the lyrics by local priest Jospeh Mohr.

1990 The first successful communication between an HTTP client and server over the Internet spawned the World Wide Web.

563 The Byzantine church Hagia Sophia in Constantinople was re-dedicated after being destroyed by earthquakes. We have been there and seen that remarkable building and learned something of its history.

1851 A fire at the Library of Congress destroyed about two-thirds of its 55,000 volumes, including most of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library which founded the Library. I have been there more than once and felt honoured each time to enter this temple of knowledge. There are posts about my experiences there elsewhere on this blog.

1865 In Pulaski Tennessee the Ku Klux Klan was founded as a self-help society for Confederate Army veterans, many of them maimed by the war and nearly all of whom were dispossessed. The name was derived from the Greek word kyklos, meaning “circle,” and the Scottish-Gaelic word “clan.” Its first leader was one-time General Nathan Forrest. After less than two years he objected to the violent racism of Klan members and tried to disband it. Later sitting president U.S. Grant also tried to disband it. Neither succeeded. Today its members and fellow travellers support President Tiny.

1974 Cyclone Tracy devastated Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, destroying more than 70 percent of the city’s buildings, including 80 percent of its houses. It was a colossal storm. On one of our visits to a Darwin museum we spend five minutes in a replica of a storm cellar as the sound effects blasted and wall shook. That was enough for us. The real storm went on for hours. It nearly obliterated Darwin.

1979 The Soviet Union sent three army divisions with air support into Afghanistan to install a government aligned to the USSR to head off an American attempt to do the same through Pakistan. Tribal infighting in Kabul had produced instability which made such foreign intervention tempting. So begin a decade of war that left at least 15,000 red grunts dead and an untold number of locals. It became one of the hottest points in the Cold War.

1888 At Arles Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh cut off his left ear after argument with fellow painter Paul Gauguin, sending it to a prostitute for safe keeping. We have seen some marvellous paintings by this troubled genius. There is a memorable scene in the film ‘The Night of the Generals’ when one mad man, Peter O’Toole, recognises another in Vincent.

1900 Canadian inventor Reginald Fessenden made the first wireless voice transmission while working for the Weather Bureau. His immortal words were ‘It’s snowing here.’ The reply came by telegraph: ‘Same here.’ Low key or what?

1906 At Bondi Beach the surf life-saving reel was demonstrated. Legend has it that the first person saved by that reel was the eight-year old Charlie Kingsford-Smith (for whom Sydney airport is named due to his later aviation exploits). The reels became standard equipment until 1993 when they were replaced by inflated rubber boats, yellow duckies.

1912 The prestigious ‘Nouvelle Revue Francaise’ in Paris rejected with disdain a self-contained excerpt from ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ (Remembrance of Things Past) by Marcel Proust. This was Proust’s first attempt to publish this monumental work. I have read most of it. Who can forget the death of Marcel’s grandmother, Gilbertine’s elusive kiss, the Baron de Charlus’s mordant wit, or Monsieur Norpois lighting a cigar to encapsulate European history.

1913 U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signed the Owen-Glass Act to create the Federal Reserve System to regulate banks. Its temple is pictured below. Within it the god of mammon is worshipped, propitiated, mollified, appeased, soothed, and pacified in dark and secret rituals with demand curves and Pareto optima.

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.