This Day in Alternate History

February 29, 1932 – Alfalfa Bill Murray Begins his Road to the White House

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Future President of the United States William Henry Davis “Alfalfa Bill” Murray appeared on the cover of Time Newsmagazine with a quote from comedian Will Rogers who noted, "I guess he ain't got much chance." Murray’s chances were indeed slim as he did not win a single primary, but he still appeared at the Democratic National Convention, where he came in eighth on the first ballot with 23 votes. He was set to jokingly endorse Will Rogers as a write-in and head home when William Randolph Hearst broke news of a long-running affair by frontrunner New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt with his wife’s secretary. It was well known that FDR was a playboy before contracting polio in 1921, but the news exploded with the sensation that he was still carrying on with his wife’s secretary after some fifteen years. Additional articles added another affair with his personal secretary Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, and the news-hungry Depression public went crazy. Roosevelt bowed out of the race, leaving over six hundred votes suddenly up for grabs. It was understood by the party machine that their pick, former New York Governor Al Smith, would collect the votes, but his old rivalry with FDR turned off supporters, including Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. In a midnight call between Kennedy and Hearst, who supported Speaker of the U.S. House John Nance Garner despite him never asking to be president, they determined to select the biggest Blackhorse candidate since 1844’s James K. Polk. Murray seemed someone they could influence, and he was already famous for his relief activities in Dustbowl-stricken Oklahoma. Much to his own surprise and frustration of Al Smith, Murray found himself picked as the Democratic candidate on the fourth ballot.

Murray was born in 1869 in Toadsuck (later renamed “Collinsville), Texas. He worked as a laborer while attending public school and tried a number of careers before passing the Texas bar exam in 1895. Murray soon started a law practice in Indian Territory, where he earned his nickname from speaking tours in which he often mentioned his alfalfa field. In 1905, he served as the Chickasaw Nation representative to the constitutional convention of the proposed state of Sequoyah and a year later in the convention that created the singular state of Oklahoma. Using connections through his wife’s uncle, former Territorial Governor Douglas Johnston, and first state governor Charles N. Haskell, Murray managed a moderately successful political career with stints as Speaker of the Oklahoma House of Representatives and U.S. Representative. He retired from politics in 1918 after losing his bid for governor and aided local ranchers in founding a colony in Bolivia during the 1920s.

In 1930, Murray reappeared in Oklahoma and again ran for governor. He won handily, with a margin of some 100,000 votes. When he came to office, the state was crippled with the Dust Bowl as well as a $5 million budget deficit as the government made attempts to provide work and welfare as the Great Depression began. Murray proved a creative and effective leader. He collected money voluntarily for food programs for the poor, donating even his own salary. To save on government expenses, he ordered the capital lawn to be used to raise sheep, limiting the need for landscaping. When any need arose, he called up the Oklahoma National Guard and declared martial law, such as enforcement of his executive order to limit oil production in 1931 to keep prices strong and support state exports. In July of 1931, he instigated the Toll Bridge War in which he forced open a bridge on the Red River closed on its Texas end by an injunction due to a disagreement with a toll company. Perhaps most beneficial was his June call for a national convention on relief to be held in Memphis, TN, which shot him into the press. Riding his wave of fame, he announced his intentions to run in 1932.

The race against Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover was a firm victory for the Democrats. Votes poured in from the South and West, where the ravages of the Great Depression had been the deepest and President Hoover’s plans for relief agencies had not yet reached. The Northeast was firmly for Hoover, even New York where stalwart Roosevelt fans rejected Murray’s “yokel” (and notoriously racist) policies. Inaugurated on March 4, 1933 (the last late inauguration before the Twentieth Amendment came to be), Murray’s first one hundred days proved to be among the busiest in American history, responding to an earthquake in California only a week later and the Akron airship disaster in New Jersey the next month. When “Machine Gun” Kelly kidnapped Oklahoma oilman Charles Urschel, Murray gave the FBI unprecedented powers and reinforcement through US Army, including spotter planes. Beer became legalized, cannabis was outlawed, and the dollar was taken off the gold standard to enable more free-flow of cash. Roosevelt, still holding political clout, criticized Murray’s use of armed forces and suggested instating agencies, but Murray showed himself as a man of action, appearing himself at many of the trouble-spots.

Most famous, however, was Murray’s reaction to the “Business Plot” of 1933. Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler testified in 1934 to the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (founded to investigate propaganda contrary to the Constitution, particularly Nazism) that a group of businessmen responding to “socialist” possibilities after the removal of the gold standard had contacted him about the possibility of a coup d’état. While many contemporaries ignored the accusations or, at most, chuckled (General Douglas MacArthur called it “the best laugh story of the year”), Murray’s increasing paranoia after the death of his friend Haskell latched onto the idea of conspiracy. He tasked J. Edgar Hoover with finding conspirators and pressured the McCormack–Dickstein Committee to call in every name under suspicion, including banker Thomas Lamont and Admiral William Sims. Many accused Murray of fear-mongering and distracting from his only somewhat successful relief programs. Murray and his supporters, however, reacted violently to potential fascists, even though Murray himself had applauded the busy activities of Mussolini and Hitler. In the Battle of Wall Street, FBI agents supported by US soldiers seized several New York banks and firms, clearing out papers to be reviewed by the Justice Department.

In 1936, the Democratic convention in Philadelphia became a circus of accusations. Kennedy had long removed himself from Murray and hoped to reinvent the Democrats despite him. Murray eventually broke away with his own Plowman’s Party after his quote that “civilization begins and ends with a plow.” The move split would-be Democratic votes and handed the election to centrist Republican Alf Landon, whom Murray once proclaimed was a Nazi spy. Landon, however, proved himself much less rightist than Murray and achieved the bulk of the Black vote. He won a second term in 1940 as he prepared America for another world war as Nazism was generally feared thanks to Murray’s stand. After the war, the Republican dynasty continued under Thomas Dewey and General Dwight Eisenhower.

Murray, meanwhile, returned to Oklahoma where he wrote extensively and lost further attempts at election. His son, Johnston, would become the governor of Oklahoma in 1951, but did not seek higher office.

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In reality, Murray’s presidential run was unsuccessful. Roosevelt (whose alleged affairs would not be spoken of until the ‘60s) would go on to be elected four times as president, serving through the Great Depression and much of World War II. His policies of moderated socialism and extensive spending in the New Deal established modern American government.

February 28, 1844 – President Tyler Killed in Accident

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In an accidental explosion that caused many superstitious Americans to believe the office of President had become cursed, John Tyler was killed less than three years after the death of William Henry Harrison due to illness. During a party aboard the USS Princeton (the first screw stream ship in the Navy), some 400 guests were treated to displays of modern technology, including the 12-inch cannon known as the Peacemaker. It had been fired twice successfully over co-designer John Ericsson’s warning that the gun was not ready. The third firing, a tribute as they passed Washington’s home at Mount Vernon, caused the cannon to explode. Tyler, who was eager to impress young Julia Gardiner of his virility despite being a 54-year-old widower, had hopped up the ladder onto the deck, just in time to catch shrapnel to his head. Julia’s father, New York businessman David Gardiner, and Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur were also among the casualties in the worst peacetime explosion to that point.

Mourning for the disaster included curiosity at another unprecedented occurrence: the ascension of a President pro tempore of the Senate to the office of President of the United States. After the death of Harrison, Tyler had been the first Vice-President to assume the office, though many such as John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay thought that he was meant to fulfill a role rather than be a wholly new president. Despite being nicknamed “His Accidency,” Tyler went about resigning from the Whig political party and launching his own economic policy. He vetoed bills for a National Bank repeatedly, causing his cabinet to resign in disgust. While Tyler had a few supporters, such as Daniel Webster, he fought with the Whigs so much that they initiated the first impeachment hearings against him, though it would ultimately be voted down. Tyler’s greatest separation from the Whigs, however, was the potential annexation of the Republic of Texas. The matter had been raised before in 1837 with a Texas proposal that was declined by President Martin van Buren. Tyler had Secretary of State Upshur begin work on a treaty, but it remained incomplete at the time of their deaths. What Tyler had planned to be the great issue of the election of 1844 was a political afterthought.

As President pro tempore of the Senate, North Carolina Whig Willie Person Mangum became the eleventh president of the United States. Mangum was something of a reversal of Tyler, having left the Democratic Party in 1834 after declaring himself a Whig. He left politics and reinvented his career, working as part of a failed Whig plot to nominate four men for president to block out Martin van Buren in 1836 before returning triumphantly to the Senate in 1840. When New Jersey Senator Samuel L. Southard resigned from the Senate in 1842 due to his failing health, Mangum came onto the track that would accidentally make him president. Where Tyler had broken with the Whigs, Mangum worked alongside party leader Henry Clay to institute as much of his American System as possible with the Whig majority in the Senate, though the Democrats controlled the House and resisted several proposed tariffs. A new National Bank was established to capitalize on the rebounding economy after the Panic of 1837, and numerous transportation improvement projects began. These projects would be the main issue of the election of 1844 when Henry Clay narrowly defeated Martin van Buren with the promise of extending the National Road to Oregon and clarifying American control there rather than joint-rule with Britain.

The issue of annexation arose again after the California Republic won its independence from Mexico in 1846 under men such as Mexican general Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and John C. Frémont. The republic proposed annexation by the United States, but Henry Clay politely declined. Such an annexation might have sparked war with Mexico, who was already upset over American soldiers unofficially participating in the rebellion, seemingly a mirror to Texas. The move is believed to have cost Clay and the Whigs the election of 1848 that gave the White House to Democrat Lewis Cass despite the efforts of the Free Soil Party under Martin van Buren to limit slavery in the territories.

Settlers poured westward on improved roads (including many government-funded rail projects), giving rebirth to the question of slavery in federal territories. Popular sovereignty became the strategy for Kansas and Nebraska Territories, which turned into guerilla warfare as men committed to both sides fought to protect interests. Alongside this issue came the discovery of gold in the newly founded California Republic, which spawned a renewed call for Manifest Destiny. With the approval of Britain, the United States annexed California, prompting Mexico to declare war. The Republic of Texas came as an ally, winning many victories and expanding its territory in the resulting treaty in 1854, which also brought the Republic of Sonora to the US. Some suggested annexing Texas as well, but no formal proposal was made as abolitionists saw it as an extension of slavery and the general attitude of Texas (which had been independent for over a generation) felt best to stay independent.

In 1860, the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln caused the South to declare its independence, inviting Texas to join in a confederation, which it considered before declining and remaining neutral. The war was finished by 1864, and the question of slavery was answered in the United States, though it remained legal in Texas until the 1880s. Texas and the US continued diplomatic relations despite being on opposing sides of the French intervention in Mexico. Suggestions for annexation arose again in the 1890s with a new wave of expansionism, but conservative Texans valued independence while local businesses hoped to hold onto the growing oil industry there. Over the next century, Texans would continue to be friendly with Americans, even joining the Allies in the Second World War, though its production-based economy was especially crippled by the Great Depression. Today it stands as a close trade-partner with the United States, but still fiercely independent.

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In reality, Tyler was only halfway up the ladder. After Usher’s death, he instructed John C. Calhoun as the new Secretary of State to complete the treaty for the annexation of Texas. It failed in Congress, but caught national attention alongside the issue of slavery, which catapulted it to a key point in the platform of James K. Polk in his election in 1844. Tyler went on to marry Julia Gardner, and they had seven children, in addition to eight he had with his first wife.

February 27, 1860 – Lincoln Outlines his Ideas on Slavery

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In perhaps the greatest turning point of the career of the sixteenth president of the United States, Lincoln gave a speech that transcended his figure from a joking yokel to a serious national force. Lincoln had been invited east to speak at a series of lectures held by Plymouth Church, where word had spread about his able debates with Illinois Senator Stephen M. Douglas. Much of the debates had been over the issue of slavery, particularly its expansion into the new territories gained from the Mexican-American War. Popular sovereignty had created Bleeding Kansas, where Free-Staters and Bloody Ruffians had killed dozens of people in the fight over whether the territory would become a free or slave state. It was obvious that this strategy could not continue, and the actions of vigilante John Brown had shown that abolitionists meant to end slavery completely, some by any means necessary.

When Lincoln accepted the invitation, he began to pore over legal and political precedence to determine what exactly the spirit of America thought of slavery. He worked for months, causing William Herndon, his law partner, to note, "No former effort in the line of speech-making had cost Lincoln so much time and thought as this one.” After diligently outlining the careers and beliefs of each of the thirty-nine Founding Fathers of America, he traced twenty-one of them to speaking for limitation on slavery, particularly the matter of controlling its spread to new territories, first the Northwest Territory in the Ohio Valley, then the Louisiana Purchase. Rather than stop at this, however, he decided to show the future of what could be done by beginning the end of slavery in all states.

Lincoln gave an enormous 7,000 word speech (one of the longest of his career), tackling nearly all of the angles on the issue of slavery. He commented on the flip-flopping of politicians such as his old rival Stephen Douglas and Chief Justice Roger Taney. He also rebuked those who suspected Republicans of being willing to resort to violence to end slavery and showed that they “have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper's Ferry enterprise” and that “John Brown was no Republican.” Instead, the Republicans would do their work through the polls, legally and without force. To those who refused to acknowledge Federal authority and called for secession, he said, “But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!", a point that would be upheld by the Constitutional Unionists later in the election that November.

Later in the speech (which ended with a rallying cry to the Republican Party about their “sense of duty” and “right makes might”), he answered the question of what to do with freed slaves in a society where “a physical difference between the white and the black races which will forever forbid the two races living together on social or political equality” (a quote from his own 1858 speech in Charleston, IL) that rather segregation was the answer and that the Republicans ought to support efforts to “…colonize persons of African descent, with their consent, upon this continent or elsewhere, with the previously obtained consent of the government existing there.” Perhaps most critically, he explained that ending slavery could also be a boon for the nation as freedmen could purchase freedom with government bonds, which would be repaid in full over a few years’ taxes for the new citizen.

The speech was greeted by much applause, and one audience member described Lincoln with, "his face lighted up as with an inward fire; the whole man was transfigured. I forgot his clothes, his personal appearance, and his individual peculiarities…" Cooper Union proved to New Yorkers and Easterners overall that Lincoln would make a great campaign. At the 1860 Republican National Convention, Lincoln took the lead as other candidates had fallen back: William Seward the radical had bungled his attempts to moderate, Whigs distrusted Salmon Chase over tariffs, and Edward Bates was opposed by immigrants. Lincoln handily won the ticket, and, in November, won the election as the Democratic party was in pieces.

Many Southerners called to secede, but their voices were drowned out by many slaveholders who stood to make a great deal of money “liberating” their slaves with the government paying market rates to cover “loss of property” in voluntary compensated emancipation. While the Emancipation Act of 1862 was to be followed only at will, a wave of slaves hurried to gain their freedom. The question of what to do with so many freedmen (few embraced the idea of going back to Africa, despite the pamphlets of the American Colonization Society) was solved with the Homestead Act of 1862, populating much of the territories with free land proved up by former slaves. Lincoln’s two terms further expanded federalism by promoting large works projects such as the Intercontinental Railway (completed in 1865), followed by an abandoned effort at digging a Panama Canal suggested by Representative Benjamin Butler.

War with Spain broke out in 1870 after the execution of Captain Joseph Fry and 52 others as pirates, leading to American capture of much of Spain’s Caribbean holdings by 1872. It was an expansionistic dream long held by many Southerners, proud to see the Stars and Stripes above new capitals.

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In reality, Lincoln limited his speech to thoughts on the expansion of slavery to the territories. Lincoln’s ideas of colonization for former slaves would later be outlined in the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, though not largely carried through.

February 25, 1843 – Paulet Seizes Hawai’i over American Protest

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Since its discovery for the West by Captain James Cook in 1778, Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands, served as an important harbor in the Pacific Ocean. The island chain was united soon after the coming of the Europeans by King Kamehameha the Great in 1795 after deposing his cousin and militarily dominating the other chieftains. Meanwhile, Europeans used the island as a port in the vast Pacific, refilling their stores aboard merchant ships and whaling vessels. Along with the Europeans came diseases that devastated the population, which had never experienced flu, small pox, and measles before. Missionaries soon arrived on the islands, aiding the sick and spreading the Word, converting even King Kamehameha III in 1833 after a youth of raucous rebellion.

Kamehameha III would prove to be the final native king of the islands. In 1843, Captain Lord George Paulet arrived aboard the HMS Carysfort to settle land claim disagreements between British citizen Richard Charlton and the Hawaiians. Paulet won an audience with Kamehameha by way of American translator Gerrit P. Judd, who had come to Hawaii as a missionary-physician and eventually served as a chief minister in Kamehameha’s government. Paulet had been warned by Charlton that Judd was acting as a dictator and refused the audience, listing specifically the demands of British citizens and writing to the USS Boston also in harbor that he was “prepared to make an immediate attack upon this town, at 4 o'clock P.M. to-morrow, (Saturday) in the event of the demands now forwarded by me to the King of these Islands not being complied with by that time.” Rather than fight, however, he received word that the Hawaiians would negotiate, and Paulet began three days of meetings that culminated in Kamehameha ceding the islands to British control.

Kamehameha announced, “"Where are you, chiefs, people, and commons from my ancestors, and people from foreign lands? Hear ye! I make known to you that I am in perplexity by reason of difficulties into which I have been brought without cause, therefore I have given away the life of our land. Hear ye! but my rule over you, my people, and your privileges will continue, for I have hope that the life of the land will be restored when my conduct is justified.”

Worries arose about the rights of Americans and others living on the islands, however, not mentioned in Kamehameha’s announcement. A march that night turned into a riot as drunken protestors turned weapons on Paulet’s men. Paulet responded with a bombardment from the Carysfort that scattered the rabble and left two natives and one American worker, all affiliated with the growing sugar plantations on the east side of Oahu, dead in the streets. Before dawn the next morning, Paulet set out to find the source of the protest, arresting Judd as well as anyone who disobeyed British rule and keeping them carefully watched for revolutionary behavior. Rumor circulated that Charlton had instigated the fight to blame it on the Americans, but there was little proof one way or another, and Paulet meant primarily to keep Hawaii peacefully within the British Empire. He destroyed any Hawaiian flag his men were able to find and ended the land-claim issues by clearing out 156 people on Charlton’s property.

Paulet dispatched Alexander Simpson to London to affirm the annexation and kept Americans from sailing with him, holding traders in the capital while his clerks reviewed business practices. While Paulet could prevent shipping from leaving Hawaii, a few traveled secretly, spreading the rumors of the British takeover. In July, the USS Constellation came into port, followed by the USS United States, carrying American Commodore Thomas ap Catesby Jones, who had mistakenly captured Monterrey from Mexico the year before. Just after, Paulet’s superior, Rear-Admiral Richard Darton Thomas, arrived in Honolulu to observe what had become a standoff between the British and Americans.

The standoff would be resolved in London, where Foreign Secretary Lord Aberdeen had answered the boundary dispute between Maine and New Brunswick with the Webster-Ashburton Treaty only the year before. Among his many other issues was the Oregon Dispute of overlapping territory claims beyond the Rocky Mountains. Discussions finally turned to dividing the islands, as they did with Oregon. The British would control the smaller islands, while Americans gained the Big Island of Hawaii, where Kamehameha III moved his court and became elected to the new territorial government as a representative. The French called for a reinstatement of independence, but further diplomacy ensured rights to Catholic missionaries and merchants there.

After the shuffling of Americans off Oahu to resettle in Hilo, the islands continued to be a bustling center for Pacific trade. Tension rose between the growers there, but international diplomacy headed off war potential war in the 1890s. After the Japanese raid on Midway in 1941 in which British patrols detected the fleet and gave adequate warning to the US, Hawaii became an important staging ground for the Allies with more Americans than ever stationed in hastily built bases while the British guard was minimized to aid the war effort in Europe. After the war, Britain began the process of decolonization, and, for the first time in over a century, Kamehameha’s descendants were allowed to return to Oahu, though Hilo continues to be the bustling center of the modern tourism-oriented islands.

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In reality, there were no riots, and Judd worked in diplomatic secrecy to sneak merchant James F. B. Marshall aboard the same ship carrying British agent Alexander Simpson. Marshall spread word to the American press and traveled to London to plead the Hawaiians’ case. Rear-Admiral Thomas arrived to apologize to Kamehameha III and officially return his kingdom.

February 23, 1820 – Cato Street Conspiracy Purges Spies

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After Napoleon was finally dispatched to St. Helena, Britain settled its foreign affairs to find the home state in midst of crisis. The Industrial Revolution had drastically changed the demographics of the nation and thousands had been forced out of old jobs replaced by new technology, such as the weavers displaced by the automatic loom. Luddites had attempted to fight the change with violence, leading to suppression by the British government in 1811. While that had cooled some tempers, rising tension continued as more and more manual jobs were given to machines. Thousands of soldiers returning from the Napoleonic Wars worsened the unemployment.

A revolutionary social club called the Spencean Philanthropists had formed in honor of orator Thomas Spence and liberal ideals. While some members were primarily dedicated to propaganda and publishing, others were men of action, such as leader Arthur Thistlewood. In 1816, he and several others instigated a series of riots in Spa Fields, Islington, aimed at gathering enough force to storm the Tower of London and seize the Bank of England. While marches of some twenty thousand did take place, the small group that actually attempted to approach the Tower was dispersed by soldiers. Ringleader Dr. James Watson, Thistlewood, and others were arrested, but released after exposure of a government spy who had helped suggest the riots.

Mass public gatherings continued, and the British government under Prime Minister Lord Liverpool decided to take action. On August 16, 1819, the cavalry charged a group of over 60,000 protestors at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester who were marching for representation reform as only males owning land valued at forty shillings were allowed to vote. More than a dozen were killed and hundreds injured, spurring shock across Britain as newspapers covered what came to be known as the “Peterloo Massacre.” In response, the government increased its suppression in the next months with the Six Acts, which banned unlawful training, gave magistrates the right to seizing arms and require permission for rallies, and reduced free press.

Thistlewood and his cohorts were infuriated by Parliament. Following the death of George III on January 29, 1820, Thistlewood’s second-in-command George Edwards suggested that they act: kill the Prime Minister and his cabinet and seize the government in the lull between kings. They determined their plan on February 22 and roused up twenty-seven men ready to act. Jamaican William Davidson, who had once served the Earl of Harrowby, Lord President of the Council and host of the dinner they planned to attack, stopped by for details and discovered Harrowby was not at home. When he mentioned this to Thistlewood, the latter recalled the agent provocateur at the Spa Fields riots and that Edwards had been eager about the sudden idea of an attack.

Thistlewood and his comrades began a midnight purge of their organization, discovering both Edwards and George Ruthven to be spies for the British Home Office. Ruthven confessed his plan to meet with a dozen Bow Street Runners (the newly formed police force) and apprehend the Spenceans at the loft they had rented on Cato Street. Holding the spies prisoner, Thistlewood announced that plans should go forward immediately as soon as the cabinet members could be found. While there was no dinner at Harrowby’s home, the other cabinet members were found at their own homes and massacred in coordinated attacks infamous for their use of grenades. Harrowby himself was hunted by a team who left London in pursuit that afternoon. True to his boasts, coffee shopkeeper John Ings decapitated two men and placed their heads to Westminster Bridge, where he was apprehended by shocked Coldstream Guards.

Thistlewood and the conspirators who had not been killed barricaded Mansion House and declared themselves a Committee of Public Safety to oversee the transition to a new representative government. Their fliers depicted revolution akin to that seen in France thirty years before. Within days, Britain was “set alight” by revolutionaries marching while loyalists defended the remaining government.

The idea of a revolution mirroring that of France, however, proved overall unappetizing. While most were ready for reform, few wanted the horrors of the guillotine, the Terror, and, perhaps ultimately, a British Napoleon. The loyalist soldiers of Britain rallied behind the Duke of Wellington, who had seen the fires of London from his home of Apsley House on the outskirts. Taking up arms, he marched on Mansion House, capturing and later executing the conspirators following military trial. Much of England fell under martial law, and instigators of violence were rooted out. Wellington was granted unprecedented powers as a new Prime Minister, and, though he was able to provide for Catholic Emancipation, he continued Britain as a rigidly censored place. Revolutionary ideals were mistrusted, as was seen for decades after in the arrest and exile of communist Karl Marx in 1850.

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In reality, Thistlewood did not suspect Edwards, who turned over the conspiracy to the Home Office. The men were arrested in a brawl, and conspirators Robert Adams and John Monument testified against the others under the promise of dropped charges. Five men, including Arthur Thistlewood, William Davidson, and John Ings, were hanged at Newcastle prison, though original sentences added drawing and quartering, which were commuted. Five others were sent to penal colonies, a show of reform which was gradually coming to Post-Napoleonic Europe.

February 22, 1957 – Ngo Dinh Diem Assassinated

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While touring an economic fair in Buon Ma Thuot, President of the Republic of Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem was shot pointblank by communist agent Ha Minh Tri. The president was killed immediately, causing an anti-communist uproar in South Vietnam and creating a wave of instability in the young state.

Following colonial expansion through military conquest in the 1850-80s, the Kingdom of Vietnam that was controlled by the Nguyen Dynasty became French Indochina along with further regions in Southeast Asia. The French built up plantations and sought to convert the populace to Catholicism. The Vietnamese, however, reacted with increasing demands for civil liberty and nationalism that would be largely dismissed. When France was defeated in Europe by Nazi Germany in 1940, the colonies were turned over to the Japanese in 1941, and the Viet Minh communist/nationalist movement led the rebellion under its leader Ho Chi Minh. After the liberation of France, the French Far East Expeditionary Corps arrived to combat Japan but instead went about suppressing the Vietnamese and reinstalling French Indochina. Supported by the Soviet Union and communist China, the Viet Minh fought on until 1954 when victorious at the Dien Bien Phu. Ho Chi Minh sought peace in the resulting Geneva Accords, and Vietnam was separated with a communist north and capitalist south along the 17th Parallel. It was to be a temporary separation to pacify both territories and lead to a nationwide election by 1956.

In South Vietnam, however, Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem overthrew Emperor Bao Dai in a 1955 referendum. Even at the time, the election was suspect when he won 98.2% of the vote. From the numbers of votes (which were counted by agents of his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu), Diem received more than 100% support in several regions; for example, out of 450,000 registered voters in Saigon, Diem managed 605,025 votes. Diem proclaimed a Republic of Vietnam with himself as head and created a legislature that was simply to give popular support to his actions. Bao Dai warned world powers such as France and the United States not to trust Diem, but they saw this as the opportunity to block the spread of Communism in Asia after China had fallen. With international approval, Diem canceled the 1956 national elections, claiming that had been an agreement made before the existence of the new Republic.

Initially, Diem’s term seemed beneficial. Citing his Catholic upbringing for his policies, he closed opium dens, brothels, and the organized crime of Binh Xuyen. However, his Catholicism proved extreme, and Diem soon turned state forces against the Buddhist Hoa Hao organization. The sweeping executions of potential enemies caused Diem to lose public favor, but he maintained power through public relations, diplomacy with the United States (who shared his fervent anti-Communism), and Nhu’s use of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam Special Forces. In the midst of the oppression, Diem’s rule was cut short as another photo op allowed Ha Minh Tri to walk up and shoot the president.

Nhu quickly seized power, but, despite his often public self-applause for his intelligence, he was not popular. His ARVN was exposed as a personal army already clashing with locals as well as Cambodians, and hubris led to further exposure of corruption, such as his wife’s extortion schemes. Since Nhu had never been elected, protests called for new elections, and international opinion agreed. Pressure forced Nhu to begin elections in 1958, already planning to move troops, censor papers, and ensure his victory. Nhu did not possess the Teflon class of his brother, however, and even his own ARVN turned against him, leading to his exile in Australia. With open elections in 1959, physician and prominent government critic Phan Quang Dan became president and quickly began to reconstruct the nation along genuine democratic grounds.

Dan’s government proved nationalist as well as anti-communist. Ho Chi Minh, now seventy years old, had conducted mass support of insurgency through the late 1950s, primarily through assassinating local leaders and installing supporters of communism. With a policy of “armed propaganda”, he instructed, “If an assassination is necessary, use a knife, not a rifle or grenade. It is too easy to kill innocent bystanders with guns and bombs, and accidental killing of the innocent bystanders will alienate peasants from the revolution. Once an assassination has taken place, make sure peasants know why the killing occurred." While Diem and Nhu had combated this with violent witch hunts, Dan proved more able to win popular support and show communists as the antagonists. He was friendly with US support, but did not take in luxuries and military aid as the previous presidents had.

Ho Chi Minh stepped down from party leadership as Le Duan rose to power. In 1960, North Vietnam organized the National Liberation Front to unify communists in the South, but by 1963, it had lost much of its support despite Le Duan’s warmongering. Ho worked behind the scenes to motivate the North Vietnamese government into coming into peace with the South, which was readily accepted by Dan. The two Vietnams lived side-by-side, eventually warming to one another as the horrors of the Khmer Rouge were seen across the border in Cambodia. Following the restructuring of communism in 1986, new bids for peaceful reunification grew, and Vietnam was again whole in 1997.

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In reality, Ha Minh Tri missed Diem entirely, hitting only the Secretary of Agrarian Reform in the arm before his weapon jammed and he was subdued. Diem and his family would face another assassination attempt by air force officers bombing the palace, but he would remain in power until a coup in 1963 led by General Duong Van Minh. Minh was himself overthrown the next year, and continued turnovers in government along with the spread of the Vietnam War resulted in the fall of Saigon in 1975.

February 20, 1798 – Pius VI Escapes the French

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The Catholic Church in France had become one of the casualties of the French Revolution as Hébert and his followers sought to replace it with the Cult of Reason. In 1789, the Church lost its political power to tax and then all property, which was auctioned to the public. The next year, a constitution was written for the French clergy, and Pope Pius VI spent eight months pondering it before ultimately denouncing it. French priests became split, those signing it being dubbed “jurors” while “non-juring” priests refused. Non-juring priests and those who protected them were susceptible to forced emigration to French Guiana, fines, imprisonment, conscription, and execution. The power of the Church quickly decreased as symbols and public worship were outlawed, even to the point of replacing the calendar of saints’ days with the new Republican one. While most of the oppression ended with Robespierre’s execution, only a limited return of the Church came after the legalization of worship in 1795.

Meanwhile, the center of the Church became threatened as French troops stormed Italy under the young and ambitious Napoleon Bonaparte, creating republics in his wake. Papal forces were defeated, and Pius VI agreed to a peace that would last only a few months before riots that killed a member of the French embassy led General Louis-Alexandre Berthier to march on Rome itself. On February 10, 1798, the French demanded an end to the Papal States and the Pope’s political power, and Pius VI refused. As they made to move Pius VI to Siena under guard, the Pope managed to escape through the use of double agents. He fled to southern Italy where King Ferdinand IV still held the Kingdom of Naples. There, Pius published his papal bull denouncing French military actions and calling all Catholics to rise against France to find justice for a decade of murders of priests and nuns, along with some 30,000 priests forcibly deported. The French pursued him and conquered Naples, though they were overthrown by a peasant rebellion. Ferdinand IV returned to the throne, but Pius had escaped to Vienna, and the political damage against France was done.

The bull caused an uproar in Spain, which was currently a French ally under treaties negotiated by then-Prime Minister Manuel de Godoy. He had fallen out of favor in 1797 with the queen and much of the country and was shifted to the military as Captain-General. When the bull was announced, Godoy’s notions of war with Britain came to an end, and Spain canceled its treaties with France. Instead, they began funding popular uprisings in south central and western France, where the Church was still fairly popular. The Directory in Paris hurried to put down the protests, using French soldiers against citizens, which only spread unrest as many feared a return to the Terror.

The country became a vacuum ready for change. The Directory was unpopular, and the greatest hero of the war, Napoleon, was in Egypt, bottled up by the British Royal Navy. Upon the return of former clergyman Emmanual Joseph Sieyès from an unsuccessful bid at pulling Prussia into the war on France’s side, he was made Director in May of 1799. He called up popular general Barthélemy Catherine Joubert, who had been managing Italy as commander-in-chief before resigning in January due disputes with local civic leaders. The two led a coup d'état that overthrew the Directory and prompted a new triumvirate headed by Sieyès. Napoleon arrived unannounced from Egypt in October, months too late to participate in the new government, and was dispatched back to the Middle East, where he would be captured and humiliatingly repatriated to France aboard English ships. Gradually, war began to slow, and peace was signed in 1802 with the Treaty of Amiens. The political sweeps Sieyès performed satisfied the Church, and France welcomed the new Pope Pius VII on a tour.

Although diplomacy in Europe remained tense, particularly with English suspicion of France after their expedition to Haiti returned it as a colony (but held onto Enlightenment ideals refusing a return to slavery), no one seemed willing to start another war in Europe. France and Britain soon had another colonial war over Malta, resulting in a wider war that involved the United States of America as both France and the Americans tried to expand their colonial holdings while the British continued to occupy forts outside of treaties. Ultimately the war would affirm British naval superiority, but it would not be enough to create William Pitt’s dream of a Europe diplomatically led by Britain.

After a generation, the French Republic was considered firmly instituted in Europe and fueled the ideals of republicanism and, as the nineteenth century continued, nationalism. Under internal pressure, the Holy Roman Empire collapsed, fracturing into nation-states while old kingdoms such as Italy became unified. Spain managed to hold onto its overseas empire for decades until the Third Spanish-American War (the first two losing Florida and then Tejas) culminated with the recognition of a number of republics that had struggled to confirm independence. France, meanwhile, led its own confederation of republican colonies in Africa and around the world.

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In reality, Pius VI was escorted under French guard to Siena. He died under French arrest August 29, 1799, and his body was held until buried in a grandiose display by Napoleon in hopes of reconfirming the Church to his national rule. Pope Pius VII eventually excommunicated Napoleon in 1809, but it did little to diminish his popularity as emperor.

February 19, 1777 – Benedict Arnold Promoted

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After much political infighting and discussion, the Continental Congress announced promoting five men to the rank of major general. The move was largely bureaucratic, but attempts influence came from every direction with much of the decision being a balance of generals from the various states of the new republic. Thirty-six-year-old Benedict Arnold was nearly passed over for the promotion largely due to his poor relations with other officers, but a final decision to promote him over Scotsman Arthur St. Clair came as both he and Thomas Mifflin were of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Mifflin was necessary as the Quartermaster General. Arnold was not popular, but his connections with Washington gave him some credence, and St. Clair proved more useful as a commander beside Washington.

Arnold’s record would prove impressive. Orphaned by the age of twenty but highly successful in business, Arnold quickly joined the Sons of Liberty in resistance against the Sugar and Stamp Acts. He was away on business in the West Indies at the time of the Boston Massacre, of which he wrote, “good God, are the Americans all asleep and tamely giving up their liberties?” When the Revolutionary War began, Arnold became a member of the Connecticut militia and suggested the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in New York, which was so strategically significant it was known as the “Gibraltar of the North” but had an insufficient British garrison. Gaining the rank of colonel, he joined with Ethan Allen in the successful capture of Ticonderoga. During the failed invasion of Quebec (also believed to have been Arnold’s suggestion), Arnold’s wilderness route gave extra support and earned him the rank of brigadier general at the cost of wounds. He commanded Montreal until forced to retreat by British advancing forces, but ordered the construction of the defensive fleet for Lake Champlain that slowed the British advance to Ticonderoga by months and was noted by James Wilkinson to be the last to leave.

While supervising the defense of Rhode Island and remarrying (his first wife had died while he was conquering Ticonderoga), Arnold received his promotion and was dispatched to command the defense of Ticonderoga while St. Clair was kept at Washington’s side with great praise for his strategy at Princeton. General Phillip Schuyler, then in command of the North, requested 10,000 men for the defense of Ticonderoga, but Washington expected British advance to come from the south following the Fall of New York. Arnold was to command only 2,000 men against the approaching forces of General John Burgoyne. Realizing that he had far too few troops to defend the large fort, Arnold ordered an immediate reconstruction of the fort, breaking up much of it and moving it to the higher, more defensible Sugar Loaf height (later known as Mount Defiance). John Trumball had shown the year before it was too high to be shot by cannon from the fort, and Arnold countered opinions that it was impossible for cannon to be set there as he himself had climbed it while injured.

The new works were established shortly before Burgoyne’s 7,800 troops arrived on June 30, 1777. Many of Arnold’s advisers suggested a withdrawal and regrouping with American troops to the south, but Arnold determined to stand firm and call for reinforcements. Burgoyne took the small fort at Crown Point and the remains of Ticonderoga with ease, but then found himself under fire from the American forces atop Mount Defiance. Burgoyne laid siege and was unable to move south, giving General Gates the time needed to collect thousands of local militia and march northward to raise the siege. Burgoyne counterattacked despite recommendations to retreat, and the resulting victory for Americans would be the turning point of the war. While Gates received much of the credit, Arnold won great new political connections through the commander and went with him to the southern theater following the loss of Charleston, where Arnold would manage the retreat at the Battle of Camden in 1780 to keep it from becoming a disastrous rout. Under Nathanael Greene, Arnold would be instrumental in the victories of the South, where his Tory leanings were appreciated.

When the war came to conclusion in 1783, Arnold continued in politics. He joined with the Federalists and determined to keep Georgia and the Carolinas, where he was very popular, from falling under the sway of Jeffersonian Virginia. Campaigning extensively over the value of unity, he took the place of John Adams as the Federalists’ bid for president, giving Adams his desired position of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in return. Arnold’s presidential term would be a disaster as he used his position of Commander-in-Chief to extremes during the military build-up in the Quasi-War with France while many hoped for a recall of Washington to arms.

Arnold was soon seen as a potential dictator, and he was expunged from office in 1800, dying of dropsy after complications from gout the next year. Federalism came under great suspicion despite Alexander Hamilton’s attempts to distance his party from Arnold. Under Jefferson, the Twelfth Amendment would see a great restriction of executive power, clarifying many rights to the states.

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In reality, Benedict Arnold was passed over for promotion. He made enemies with men such as Moses Hazen, the commander of the 2nd Canadian Regiment, nicknamed “Congress’ Own”, and John Brown of Pittsfield, a member of the Massachusetts Committee of Correspondence, who had been in charge of failed diversionary tactics that led to American defeat at the Battle of Quebec. Arnold would ultimately turn traitor to the American cause with his offer to surrender West Point, then later serve the British in commanding a number of raids. After the war, Arnold attempted to set himself up in business in Saint John, Canada, but found himself unpopular anywhere he went.

February 18, 1637 –Dutch Convoy Defeats Spain off Lizard Point

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The Dutch War of Independence had dragged on for some seventy years after the lowland provinces began their attempt to break away from Spain. There were numerous reasons for the rebellion, including cultural and religious differences exacerbated by the birth of Protestantism, political ideals, and, perhaps most importantly, the growth of the Dutch economy. While Spain had made tremendous wealth by conquering the lands of the Aztecs, Inca, and others, Dutch merchants prospered greatly from the increasing maritime trade. This income fueled Dutch desires for independence as well as giving it the ability to hire, train, and outfit some of the greatest soldiers Europe had seen.

In 1637, the Dutch economy was soaring. Spanish embargoes had limited Dutch trade for some time, but victories at sea lifting river blockades in 1629 came alongside the timely end of the Polish-Swedish War, which opened the Baltic to safe trading once again. When the Franco-Spanish War erupted in 1635, Spanish Flanders lost its southern trade and instead had to pay hefty tariffs for a route through the north. Along the same time, demand for supplies for the Thirty Years’ War in Germany gave an enormous market, easily fed by the victories of the Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company, which gave the Dutch extensive colonies, including vast sugar plantations in newly conquered regions of Brazil. This massive influx of money led to speculation, including the projects of draining land in Holland and famous spikes in luxury goods such as tulips.

The economy of the small nation depended upon trade at sea, which was readily targeted by the Spanish navy. Miguel de Horna, new commander of the Dunkirk squadron as his predecessor was captured and died of illness, was fresh from the capture of a merchant ship when his fleet came upon a convoy of 28 Dutch and 16 English merchant ships escorted by six Dutch men-of-war off Lizard Point, Great Britain’s most southerly tip. Horna’s fleet of six galleons and two frigates descended upon the Dutch, whose warships lined up to fight closely while artillery from the armed merchantmen gave support. Three of Horna’s ships, including his own flagship, assaulted the Dutch flagship, which was crippled early in the battle. Whether through accident or desperation not to be captured, the Dutch flagship was set aflame. Explosions riddled the Spanish ships when the fire reached the magazine, injuring Horna and turning the tide of battle. The remaining Dutch were able to disengage and make safely for port while the Spanish were forced to limp home for repairs.

The Battle off Lizard Point was said to wreck Horna’s nerves. He continued to harass Dutch shipping, though rarely again fighting closely enough to capture prize ships. Two years exactly after his fateful defeat off Lizard Point in 1639, Horna was due to leave Dunkirk and join Admiral Antonio de Oquendo's fleet, but he was pinned by the Dutch blockade under Admiral Maarten Tromp. Horna sailed close to the shore, using batteries from shore as cover. Tromp pursued and came into the shallow waters where the vice-flagship had lost its steerage and run aground. Though he was able to capture the ship, it limited the Dutch maneuvers, and the rest of the Spanish fleet escaped with fair damage.

That October, the fleet under Oquendo was set to escort a series of neutral English transports bringing fresh troops to relieve Dunkirk. Tromp arrived with over one hundred ships to block them, and the Battle of the Downs began. Tromp dispatched several squadrons on tasks of preventing escapes to the north or south and interference by the English populace (gathered to watch the battle) and attacked directly with his three remaining squadrons, using principally fire ships against the large, ungainly Spanish warships. Horna and his seven ships were placed as the vanguard due to their familiarity with the Channel, and Oquendo had already experienced a battle with Tromp that September. Horna’s slow hand recommended defensive tactics, and Oquendo had learned a lesson from his humiliation from bravado at the battle on September 16. The battle raged tightly with the Spanish troops meant for Dunkirk used to keep away the grapples of fire ships until a fog fell. Unable to use their artillery, the Dutch were drawn in close, and the Spanish swarmed them. With Tromp imprisoned, the Dutch fleet was in disarray, and the Spanish managed to escape the blockade.

While the war was largely over with Spain increasingly caught up in battles inside Germany and an uprising in Portugal, the Dutch were unable to confirm themselves as masters of the sea. The Republic affirmed its independence in 1648 with the Peace of Munster, and the economy gradually switched to peacetime. However, without maritime laurels to rest on, the Dutch found themselves needing to maintain their navy as protection from privateers. Although losing out in North America to the English, the Dutch would become the principle force in the Pacific, maintaining Formosa despite Chinese attack and expanding their East Indies colonies to include New Holland and New Zeeland.

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In reality, Horna would be one of Spain’s most effective commanders. After seizing seventeen ships off Lizard Point, he would ravage Dutch shipping in the English Channel. Although his initial attempt to break the Dutch blockade in the Action of 18 February 1639 would fail, he injured the Dutch forces enough to force a retreat. Horna fought valiantly against tremendous odds at the Battle of the Downs and led his squadron to escape a blockade once again, though the rest of the Spanish fleet would be wiped out, establishing Dutch dominion over the sea for some sixty years but never again afterward. Horna was knighted further battles with the Dutch and French, but died in 1641 while on another convoy raid.

February 17, 1801 – Burr Confirmed Third President of the United States

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In a shocking turn, Aaron Burr was elected as the third President of the United States instead of Democratic-Republican Party leader and former vice-president Thomas Jefferson. The election was expected to be a monumental one as the Federalists, who had reigned in American politics since the days of Washington, had become exhausted in public opinion during the term of second president John Adams. When Washington had resigned rather than seeking a third term in 1796, the two parties had fought a bitter campaign with Adams narrowly winning. They favored centralization of power and improved terms with Britain, but taxation in the Quasi-War with France as well as the unpopularity of the Alien and Sedition Acts drove voter-support toward the Republicans. Further, the Federalists became divided between Adams’ legal mindedness and the belief of Alexander Hamilton’s “High Federalists” that a heavy hand was needed for a strong America.

Jefferson and his second-in-command, James Madison, knew a victory could be had, but they needed to win support in the Federalist North, especially the powerful state of New York where Hamilton dominated. There, they asked for political aid from Aaron Burr. Burr had an illustrious career: a grandson of famous evangelist Jonathan Edwards, service to the Continental Army during the Quebec Campaign and winter at Valley Forge with later command as Lieutenant Colonel (where he systemized his famed “shaming” punishment), and political experience as a member of the New York State Assembly, New York State Attorney General, and United States Senator. When Jefferson asked him to aid in the election of 1800, Burr leaped onto a number of campaign strategies, including boosting the Tammany Society from a social club into a political machine and founding the Bank of Manhattan in 1799.

During the election itself, both sides worked to ensure winning the maximum number of votes in whatever manner possible. Popular election was replaced with electors chosen by the state legislature in Georgia, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Virginia removed its practice of election by district to voting as a whole, ironically removing some of the Jeffersonian ideal of de-centralization to assure it would be seen on the national level. Further plans took place among the electors themselves. At the time of election, each elector put forth two votes, and the one with highest vote became president while the runner-up became vice-president. The Federalists put into effect a plan where one elector would vote for John Jay, thus establishing a firm choice for Adams as president with Pinckney as vice-president. The Democratic-Republicans intended to make a similar action, but the plan never materialized.

When Burr caught wind of the idea, however, he determined to use it. Anthony Lispenard, a New York faithless elector had determined to vote for Burr twice, and Burr suggested he simply cast his second vote for someone else, thus giving Burr a head start if he and Jefferson did, in fact, otherwise tie. The gamble paid off as Lispenard voted for Madison in secret ballot, giving Burr the election with 73 votes and Jefferson again serving as vice-president with 72. Jefferson was furious, and the matter arose of the improper form of the Georgia ballot results with demand for a recount. The decision was finally put to rest when the Supreme Court received the proper documentation from the Georgia electors, and Chief Justice John Marshall (himself in office for only 17 days) proclaimed Aaron Burr rightful president.

Burr’s term in office started by clearing the Federalist acts, clarifying election issues with the Twelfth Amendment, and the landmark Marbury v. Madison, in which the Marshall court established the principle of Judicial Review. Also in 1803, Burr presided over the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France, doubling the size of the United States and opening huge areas to settlement beyond Ohio. Burr, however, felt that war with Spain was eminent, and he was glad to have established the US Military Academy at West Point, NY. Under the authorities granted by Congress to fight the Barbary War, Burr greatly expanded his Navy and especially Marines and refused the first offer of treaty on payment of $60,000 to protect American shipping. He also worked to ensure his re-election, winning over much of Jefferson and Madison’s camp while diminishing the waning power of Hamilton with use of his own Sedition Act. Burr was reelected with a begrudged Madison as his new vice-president.

In early 1808, war began with Spain, guaranteeing Burr an unprecedented third term as commander-in-chief during a crisis. Although there were tensions with Britain or France to defend American neutrality in the Napoleonic Wars, Burr had picked a fight with Spain after ordering American troops into Florida in pursuit of Seminoles who had attacked Florida. The Spanish homeland was in disarray as Napoleon worked to conquer his former ally, and American victory came easily. Burr expanded westward in 1810 as Baton Rogue requested US protection. Britain, meanwhile, was in a difficult position of to defend its ally at home or abroad, and finally peace was brought about in 1812 as part of Burr’s campaigning for a fourth election with the Treaty of Veracruz, which defended American ships abroad as well as seizing the Spanish territories of Florida as well as Tejas. While land-hungry settlers applauded, the expansion would cause violent turmoil over the question of the expansion of slavery only twenty years later.

Many believed that Burr’s continued naval build-up despite the treaty would become a push to conquer British colonies in the Caribbean, and calls of conspiracy arose. Burr’s plans were upset by the election of fellow New Yorker DeWitt Clinton under a reformed moderate Federalist party. Politics forced Burr into retirement, and he lived out his days as one of the most famous and infamous early American presidents.

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In reality, Jefferson won the Election of 1800. Lispenard voted for Burr twice, which was illegal and translated into a vote for Burr and one for Jefferson. Jefferson and Burr tied, and campaigning by Hamilton gave Jefferson the presidency. Hamilton would upset Burr again as the latter ran for governor of New York, and Burr killed Hamilton in a duel in 1804. Afterward, Burr fled to unsettled territory with arms in expectation of war with Spain and was eventually brought to trial for treason, left for Europe, and finally returned to law practice in New York, where he died in 1836.

February 16, 1804 – American Raid on Tripoli Fails

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In the early days of the new United States, the nation struggled to establish itself with global credibility. Many assumed that Britain would eventually reabsorb its colonies, while France had even anticipated conquering the colonies after they were weakened by separation from Britain. One of the keys to achieving recognition internationally was establishing a navy to protect American interests abroad, but for the first few decades, the Unites States struggled. After the creation of the Continental Navy in 1775, Benedict Arnold’s fleet of hastily built ships was wiped out in the Battle of Valcour Island but was strategically successful with slowing down the British support to the Army on land. Except for the legendary stand by John Paul Jones, the early US depended upon privateers and, most significantly, the navy of the French. While allies for a time, the US refused to pay debts to Republican France on money borrowed from the Crown, and France began to prey on American merchants at sea in the Quasi-War. The US had newly restarted its Navy after defunding it from 1785-94, first building six frigates to battle the Barbary Pirates, who had ended the Portuguese blockade holding them within the Mediterranean after Portugal was weakened with the French Revolutionary Wars.

The Quasi-War had given the American Navy a handful of notable victories and ended with the Convention of 1800 with French recognition of the Americans’ rights at sea, but piracy from the Barbary Coast continued. While America again scaled down its navy to six ships in 1800 as the Federalists left office, the Pasha of Tripoli demanded $225,000 tribute from the incoming President Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson refused, and the Pasha declared war by cutting down the flag of the US Consulate. Congress did not officially return the declaration, but they did grant Jefferson powers to give defensive commands to Americans at sea. An attempt was made to blockade Tripoli, but it was largely unsuccessful aside from the morale-boosting victory of the USS Enterprise over the Tripoli. Commodore Edward Preble established short blockades and launched attacks against the Berbers with varying success until the USS Philadelphia ran aground in Tripoli’s harbor and was captured intact in October of 1803.

Tripolitans took the Americans prisoner and turned Philadelphia into another shore battery to keep Americans at sea. After nightfall on February 16, 1804, a team of US Marines under Lieutenant Stephen Decatur sneaked into harbor with a captured Tripolitan ship, attempting to float close enough to the Philadelphia to storm her. Unfortunately, their position was deemed suspicious, and the Tripolitans opened fire at point blank range, decimating the Americans and killing Lt. Decatur. Humbled, the Americans returned to heir blockade. Washington fell into a political quagmire with some suggesting America pay a tribute while others called for a simple withdrawal, and Jefferson’s plans of reinforcement under Commodore Samuel Barron were put on hold. On his own, Preble grew more daring in his attacks, even launching a fire ship into the Tripolitan fleet, but most actions proved unsuccessful. It was not until the overland attack on Derne by mercenaries and 100 Marines under William Eaton, formal consul to Tunis, through the desert that the Americans gained an upper hand.

Preble saw his opportunity to press for victory, and he reinvested his sailors into further Marines to press the overland attack. Eaton had with him Hamet Karamanli, the Pasha’s ousted brother who had claim to Tripoli’s throne, and Preble encouraged him to march quickly for the capital. Coordinating with naval attacks learned from British assaults, the Americans swept into the city and took it on June 10, 1805. Many felt that Yussif Karamanli had attempted to make peace and the hungry-for-victory Americans had quashed him, but Jefferson and Congress were satisfied that the problem of pirates had been resolved in what became known as the Barbary War.

Naval problems continued with Britain as the Royal Navy pressed captured Americans into service and even seized the USS Chesapeake in 1807 after Captain James Barron refused an illegal search. This, along with US expansionism, led to the War of 1812 with Britain, which saw another wave of American struggles at sea. One of the most disastrous was the American attempt to run the blockade at New London, Connecticut, in 1813, which led to the capture of three ships, including the Macedonian, which the US had captured from the British only the year before. By the end of the war, Americans had had enough of naval battle and decided to focus on a transport fleet for a wider number of Marines.

These Marines would be instrumental in the cleanup of pirates in the Caribbean in the 1820s. Many of the estimated 3000 ships captured there were taken by privateers, and so the Marines dealt with them in a similar manner as Tripoli: attacking primarily on land while supported at sea and using large numbers of local mercenaries. The strategy was successful, and brought American imperial influence southward, making a number of newly liberated states from Spain into virtual American colonies. The Mexican War saw another use of the transport fleet as 12,000 soldiers invaded Veracruz and captured Mexico City, with the resulting treaty giving the US its Southwest quarter.

While having strong diplomatic measures close to home, the US did not participate in much foreign activity, such as the 1862 Opening of Japan by British forces newly victorious from the Second Opium War in China.

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In reality, Decatur’s raid was successful and declared the "most daring act of the age" by British Admiral Horatio Nelson. Jefferson reinforced the American blockade with an additional four ships and dispatched Samuel Barron, who held high enough rank to determine peace with Tripoli. Barron limited Eaton’s attack and quickly made a treaty with Yussif Karamanli after the victory at Derne, winning back American prisoners but at a cost of $60,000 ransom. In a few years, Barbary pirates would strike again, this time under the flag of Algiers, and the US would fight the Second Barbary War in 1815. Decatur would serve as a valiant and successful officer until his death in 1820 in a duel with James Barron after Barron sought satisfaction over Decatur’s disparaging remarks upon Barron’s return to the Navy after court-martial.

February 10, 1846 – Sikhs Defeat British East India Company

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The Sikh Empire had one of its greatest military triumphs and began its second imperial age with the defeat another great imperial force, Britain. Although Sikhs as a culture had begun some three centuries before in the Punjab region of India, it would not be until the fall of the Mughal in the mid-1700s that the Khalsa (Sikh army) was organized to support a confederacy of newly freed Sikh misls. Ranjit Singh rose to power from leader of one misl into uniting the Sikhs into an empire in 1801. He modernized the Khalsa, even including Western artillery and mercenaries, and expanded his control by conquest of Afghan territory as well as the kingdoms of Jammu and Kashmir.

At about the same time, the British Empire through the East India Company worked to extend its control in the region. Afraid of Russian interference, the British fought the initially successful but later disastrous Anglo-Afghan War, which had been supported by Ranjit Singh. After the death of Ranjit in 1839, however, the Sikh Empire began to wane as centralized control dissipated. Many applauded the return to the ideal confederacy, but unrest was common. The Khalsa tripled in size to maintain order, even though they themselves were responsible for much of it, such as killing viziers who proved to be thieves or cowardly or holding a riot to find anyone who spoke Persian and executing them on grounds they might be corrupt administrators in charge of financing. The court, known as the Durbar, faced its own turmoil with intrigues and assassinations that caused the throne to change hands quickly between sons and regents until finally settling on eight-year-old Duleep Singh with his mother, Maharani Jind Kaur, in control of real power. Seeing the chaos just over the border in what British visitors described as a "dangerous military democracy", combined with the sudden and ultimately rebuffed Sikh invasion of Tibet in the Sino-Sikh War (1841-42), the East India Company built up military forces near the Punjab for protection of their holdings.

The British massing caused tension to build further with the Durbar disagreeing with both the Khalsa and the representatives from the East India Company working to keep trade free of the hang-ups of corruption. In December 1845, a British force made up largely from units of the legendary Bengal Army under Sir Hugh Gough began maneuvers to join units already stationed along the border at Ferozepur, and the Khalsa responded with their own armies led by the rajas Tej Singh and Lal Singh. The two generals meandered: Tej refused to attack an exposed British division at Ferozepur that became instrumental in the close British victory at the Battle of Ferozeshah, where he appeared late and withdrew upon misinterpreting the retreat of the British cavalry as a flanking maneuver. Lal, meanwhile, failed to reorganize his troops after a few British soldiers broke Sikh defenses. After the battle, both armies retired with the British exhausted and the Sikhs in disarray. In Lahore, the Sikh capital, Jind Kaur blamed the cowardice of officers rather than her commanders, even dismissively throwing garments in their faces.

Upon this insult, Khalsa tempers rose and became embodied the Sham Singh Attariwala, a hero who had served in the Sikh army since enlisting in 1817, whose daughter had married Nau Nihal Singh (the second in line for the throne after the death of Ranjit and died from wounds after a building fell), and who served on the council that observed the regency for Duleep Singh. He ordered corrupt prime minister Gulab Singh exiled and Jind Kaur placed under house arrest, naming himself regent for Duleep. Sham also began a purge of the lackluster command of the Sikh army, finding both Tej and Lal Singh, upper-caste Hindu Dogras rather than Sikh, not only futile but treacherous, having sold battle plans to the British. Both were executed, and Sham himself took command of the army, reinforced with troops from the western part of the empire. The British, themselves reinforced, attacked the pontoon bridge at Sobraon, trading artillery fire before Gough was told his cannons were low on ammunition and he replied, "Thank God! Then I'll be at them with the bayonet." The resulting attack, however, would prove a repeated failure to break through Sikh lines. When the British began to withdraw, the Sikhs counter-attacked and routed them.

The expedition would prove a disaster for the British, but it cemented the Khalsa in control of what would become known as Sikhistan to the West. Sham Singh Attariwala himself ruled until Duleep Singh came of age and ruled until his death in 1893. He westernized his country as per his tutelage under Sham and maintained it as the richest part of India, many historians believing due to the secular nature of the diverse country. Duleep traveled to Europe a number of times and was on good terms with Queen Victoria, creating a peaceful coexistence of the Sikhs alongside British India. India would not see independence from Britain until 1947, when it was divided into predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. The resulting Partition of India would be largely calm in the north as Khalsa watched over the borders, and the population of Sikhistan surged as refugees were taken in after escaping brutal clashes in the south.

Today Sikhistan is an economic leader in the region as well as its territory of the Punjab considered “the breadbasket of India.” While there have been some border altercations, the military strength of the Khalsa has maintained order in what otherwise could be an area of violent tension.

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In reality, the Khalsa did not rise up. Sham Singh Attariwala appeared at the Battle of Sobraon, encouraging the army never to retreat again. Lal Singh supposedly sold information to the British, while Tej Singh fled the battlefield early, reportedly destroying the pontoon bridge behind him. The Sikhs fought to the last man, but ultimately the Sikh Empire was defeated. Although promised even marginal independence for over 150 years, the Sikhs have yet to find it.

February 9, 1861 – Alexander Stephens Elected CSA President

2012-01-19T13:21:00.000-08:00

In a surprising turn, longtime Congressional Representative Alexander Stephens was chosen as President for the provisional government of the Confederate States of America to hold office until formal elections could be held. The constitutional convention meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, had been expected to choose Jefferson Davis, who had twice served as senator from Mississippi as well as being the Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce. However, it became clear that Davis would rather serve his country as a general, and so Stephens was chosen, as he was also a moderate, instead of fiery secessionists Howell Cobb and Robert Toombs. While Toombs had called for war almost immediately (his farewell speech to the US Senate had included, "as one man would meet you upon the border with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other"), Stephens was slow to raise arms. Earlier in the convention that elected him, he campaigned against secession and detailed the American political system with the Republicans holding a minority in Congress and, even if any laws were to be passed around them, the Supreme Court would continue the status quo, as it had in its 7-2 decision in the Dred Scott case four years before.

Georgia native Stephens had always seemed to best understand the mechanics behind the obvious. Despite growing up poor, benefactors had paid for his education, and he passed the Georgia bar at age 24 after graduating at the top of his class. He was routinely ill, even from childhood, but he was a masterful lawyer who, in his 34 years of practice, never had a client charged with a capital crime meet the death penalty. As he became wealthy and established himself with land and slaves, he returned the generosity he had been given by opening his own home to the homeless and paying for more than one hundred students' educations. Even though he was constantly thin from illness, he earned the nickname "The Strongest Man in the South" from his intelligence and craftiness. Stephens went on to Washington as a Representative as a Whig, Unionist, and finally Democrat. His self-described "greatest glory of my life" would be the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in the House by use of rare point of order, thus bringing popular sovereignty to the territory despite the Missouri Compromise limiting slavery to the South.

After the election of 1860 gave Lincoln the White House, Stephens was sent as a delegate to the convention judging the question of secession. Stephens opposed it, arguing that the South bide its time, but was eventually convinced on the grounds of the North not abiding by the Fugitive Slave Law. As one of his first acts in the presidency, Stephens gave his impromptu "Cornerstone Speech" in Savannah describing the new constitution the convention had written, clarifying its differences from that of the United States. While Lincoln referred to the famous line "all men are created equal" in the Declaration of Independence, Stephens replied, "Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas” and called slavery a “natural and moral condition." Stephens also outlined economic independence rather than the Federalism of the North, stating, “If Charleston harbor needs improvement, let the commerce of Charleston bear the burden. If the mouth of the Savannah river has to be cleared out, let the sea-going navigation which is benefited by it, bear the burden.”

Finally, Stephens also noted the significance of Fort Sumter, which would prove the first issue of his presidency. Lincoln, only a month into his own presidency, ordered a relief expedition after skillfully dodging any agreements with the South that would have served as a political recognition of the CSA instead of considering it a rogue government. He notified South Carolina’s Governor Pickens of a delivery of “provisions only”, and Pickens turned to General P.G.T. Beauregard, who relayed the information to Stephens. While his cabinet (interestingly, though, not Secretary of State Robert Toombs) called for an attack to clear out the fort, Stephens ordered the CSA to stand down, and Lincoln achieved his goal of feeding Sumter. Stephens was declared “yellow” by many, but the political tide turned back to favor the South a month later when the heavy-handed actions of Union General Lyon in the West attacked parading Missouri State Militia called up by secessionist Governor Claiborne "Fox" Jackson.

While not enough to swing Virginia’s support to the South, Yankees were increasingly perceived as brutes, tarnishing Lincoln’s image, who sent additional troops to Missouri and Kansas, resulting in secession by Arkansas. Guerilla fighting continued, but it was never enough to make a full move against the South without seeming the aggressor. The quasi-war dragged on for years until Lincoln lost his bid at reelection in 1864, and President Horace Greeley was elected by Copperheads to end the war.

Stephens retired the presidency after his single term (as per the CSA constitution) in 1867 as a hero who had “waited out the Union” and became governor of Georgia, confirming the supremacy of the states. The Confederacy continued on its states’ rights, later seeing the secession of the Republic of Texas in 1874 (who later had a number of military disputes with both the US and CS as the West became settled). Attempts were made to add Caribbean and Middle American states to the Confederacy, but each turned into either military blunders or economic burdens. By the 1890s, the South was seen as economically and culturally stunted compared to the great wealth and strength of the industrialized North. A movement began around the turn of the century to rejoin the Union, but many on both sides would refuse. President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1907 Goodwill Tour proved for naught after it brought international attention to the deplorable poverty of newly freed Africans and entrenched the crippling conservatism of the nation.

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In reality, though Davis wanted to serve as a general, he willingly took the office of president when he was unanimously chosen to do so. CSA Vice-President Stephens disagreed with Davis on many of his policies and constantly pressed for attempts at peace, which was impossible once the war had begun.

February 8, 1807 – Napoleon Defeated at Eylau

2012-01-13T15:40:00.000-08:00

At the height of the War of the Fourth Coalition against Napoleon, France came under defeat by Russia because of a simple failed charge. Napoleon had already defeated three such coalitions, finishing off Austria in 1805 at Austerlitz and forcing them to become his ally. Prussia stood to take Austria’s place among the allies against him, and Napoleon swiftly overran the Prussians, taking their capital Berlin in October of 1806. From there he marched eastward against the Russians, the final European power on the Continent to stand against him. He pursued their fleeing army until they stood to fight outside the East Prussian town of Preußisch Eylau.

The battle began in the afternoon of February 7 with unproductive French assaults on the heights and spilled over into the town itself as both sides attempted to take it, arguably for the simple reason that the soldiers were trying to find warm shelter from the snowstorm. The fighting died off at 10 PM when the Russians began a retreat and waiting for the French to attack again the next morning. The French obliged with Napoleon giving an attack from the center and his general Augereau, gravely ill at the time, advancing from the left just as a blizzard began. Artillery was blinded; the French firing on Augereau’s men and the Russians waiting until they fired point-blank as the French came out of the snow. Augereau fell back, and Napoleon was caught too far advanced as Russians pursued the retreating French. He had used the town church’s tower as a command post, and that is where the Russians caught him, taking him prisoner before the Imperial Guard could arrive.

The French army frantically assaulted the Russian lines to get Napoleon back, but the Russians had spirited him away from the battle while chaos reigned among the French. The battle crumbled into defeat, although the counterattack by the remaining Prussians under L’Estocq was repelled by the French cavalry under Marshal Ney, saving the French from a route. Ney united the French and organized them to wait for the terms from Russian General Bennigsen. Bennigsen, who held the enviable position as the first to have suffered Napoleon a reversal at the Battle of Pultusk the previous December, determined to hold Napoleon under strict guard and await the arrival of Tsar Alexander, commenting to his secretary that he had no idea what to do having caught the man known as "the oppressor of Europe and the disturber of the world's peace.”

Alexander soon arrived in Tilsit, where Napoleon was imprisoned in luxury. The younger Tsar had come to the throne at approximately the same time as Napoleon, and the two found that they shared similar ideals about autocracy as well as upholding the freedoms of the people. Alexander held great respect for Napoleon, though he had determined him to be “the most famous tyrant the world has produced" after the execution of the duc d'Enghien, which had prompted Alexander to join Britain on what he believed to be a mission from God. After Austerlitz, Napoleon had attempted to reopen diplomatic relations with Alexander, but the Tsar had waited until he suddenly had the upper hand. The two conferred terms of surrender, and, during the discussion, Napoleon astonished Alexander with visions of a world reined over by a French-Russian alliance. The talks concluded with Alexander exclaiming, “What is Europe? Where is it, if it is not you and we?”

The British demanded Napoleon be handed to them or at the very least dethroned, but Alexander understood that, with the tyrant of Europe in his possession, he was the new authority. A treaty was produced in July that protected Austria from being broken up and assured military assistance in the colonial dreams of an “Empires of the East and West” in which Napoleon controlled the Danubian states west, Russia held sway over Finland, and the two worked together to drive out the Ottomans and eventually conquer India. Alexander further drew up terms to end the Fourth Coalition, leaving Britain alone in its refusal to make peace with Napoleon.

Defeated in the east, Napoleon begrudgingly returned to Paris to find Spain in flames as its people rose up against his attempts to conquer the Peninsula. The British embarked a vicious guerilla war, and it was more than enough to occupy Napoleon’s time defeating it finally in 1813. War-weary Britain was at last forced to make peace with France and focus on the second war with its lost colonies in America. Afterward, Napoleon made good on his word to the idealistic Alexander (whom he called a “shifty Byzantine”), joining in the Russo-Turkish War with a Grande Armée of 450,000 soldiers. He rode through the Balkans, liberating the Serbs, Bulgars, and Greeks who had been awaiting arrival of Russian troops that had moved only as far as Bucharest. Although the campaign succeeded in besieging Constantinople, malaria and other diseases devastated the French troops, and Napoleon eventually retreated.

Europe came under peace for a time until a wave of revolution struck in the 1820s following Napoleon’s death in 1821. Spain and Portugal again rebelled, as did Rome, the Piedmontese, German students, and the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily. Revolutionary sentiments struck Ireland with the attempts of Catholic Emancipation, but Britain held fast while the French Empire under the ten-year-old Napoleon II shattered. Russia, who had been the diplomatic giant of Europe for over a decade, also came into trouble with the Decemberists seizing power after the unclear succession upon the death of Alexander and a revolt of the Polish in the 1830s. Europe remained without a clear superpower until the gradual rise of Britain with its industrial empire eventually controlling nearly a fifth of the surface of the Earth.

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In reality, the Imperial Guard arrived in time to drive away the Russian forces, which were held off by Napoleon’s staff. Thanks to one of the largest cavalry charges in history, the Battle of Eylau was a French victory, but without any great gain. Napoleon became master of Europe after the thorough defeat of the Russian army at Friedland, but his Continental System of economics meant to starve out the English drove away his allies and led to his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812.

January 20, 1265 – De Montfort's Parliament Ends English Monarchy

2012-01-12T12:17:00.000-08:00

The end of the English kings came at the hand Simon de Montfort (son of a French crusader who became Earl of Leicester through his mother's bloodline), who himself married Henry III's sister Eleanor in secret. This was yet another point of strife in the kingdom as the barons of England protested the marriage, as Eleanor had been widowed of the Earl of Pembroke, and they demanded that their opinion on such an important marriage should have been asked even though Henry had given his permission. De Montfort and Henry themselves had a falling out when de Montfort used the king's name as security on a loan, and, after Henry discovered this, he told de Montfort, "You seduced my sister, and when I discovered this, I gave her to you, against my will, to avoid scandal." The feud caused Montfort and his wife to flee England in 1239, going on crusade and being offered the regency of France before returning in 1253 to make peace with Henry.

The peace would be a shallow one, however, as de Montfort began to lead the argument against Henry's demand for a subsidy of royalty from the barons. While de Montfort continued to support Henry on foreign affairs such as undoing pledges to the Pope, he determined that Henry's domestic policies were causing disapproval among all English, especially barons. In 1258, a parliament was called at Oxford, where de Montfort worked with the barons to ease the troubles between them and the king. There, he became more enfranchised with his fellow barons, but he did not approve wholeheartedly of the oligarchy created by the Provisions of Oxford, which gave the barons tremendous power in a Council of Fifteen to control domestic affairs. Henry was forced to take an oath on the Provisions, but, in 1261, he was granted a Papal Bull that nullified his vow. Civil war erupted three years later as the barons rallied under de Montfort to force the king to loosen his grip on the country, and the Battle of Lewes in 1264 gave a staunch victory to de Montfort when he captured both Henry and his son, Edward Longshanks.

With the king under guard and many of the barons his direct allies, de Montfort became the de facto ruler of England. He established a triumvirate with the Earl of Gloucester and the Bishop of Chichester, whom he controlled, and a new Parliament, which became unique in its inclusion of burgesses from economic boroughs as well as the knights of counties and in that de Montfort demanded all members be chosen by election, with the vote available to any man who owned land with the value of an annual rent of 40 shillings. The extension of power to the lower classes upset many of the barons, but de Montfort had hope in his state-building by unifying the peoples of England on a wide scale. Further barons distrusted de Montfort's alliance with Llywelyn, Prince of Wales, who took advantage of the English war to affirm the independence of Wales, weakening the Marcher Barons' holds there.

De Montfort felt his control of the nation slipping, so he decided to use power fully before it could vanish from him. Upon the opening of the Parliament, de Montfort pushed through a bill stripping Henry III of his title of king based on treason for canceling his oath from Oxford. A second bill established that England should have only a prince for its foreign affairs, which meant Edward Longshanks would never become more than a figurehead. Many of the barons balked, and several began to conspire against de Montfort, but he assured his legacy by promptly dispatching Edward from the kingdom to go on crusade and imprisoning Henry until his death. Edward, who had agreed with the Provisions of Oxford initially, determined he would be content until at least he was not surrounded by de Montfort's trusted (and armed) guards while in a foreign land.

Without a royal for his enemies to rally behind, de Montfort secured his power, primarily by his new enfranchisement of the growing middle class of England. When Longshanks arrived back from crusade in 1272 after the death of his father, he attempted to overthrow de Montfort's new permanent Parliament with barons who wished to gain back their power, but the grassroots support had grown firm and further aid flowed in from Llywelyn of Wales and Longshanks' brother-in-law, Alexander III, King of Scotland, who had also struggled against the power of an English king under Henry. Longshanks was again captured, and de Montfort stripped his title by act of Parliament as he had done with Henry, making Longshanks' quieter brother Edmund the new Prince of England. Edward Longshanks would live out his life under house arrest.

England settled into a sense of quiet prosperity and growing trade, sharing Britain with Wales and the Kingdom of Scotland, which underwent its own crisis after a string of deaths in 1286 and resulted in the leadership of the Guardians of Scotland. In 1306, Robert the Bruce became King of Scotland, and Scottish rule would eventually spread over the whole of the British Isles after the Black Death swept through the trade towns of England in the fourteenth century.

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In reality, de Montfort did not attempt to destroy the kingship of England, merely spread the power among a new base. His plan weakened his ties with the barons, and, after Edward's escape in May of 1265, nearly all of de Montfort's support disappeared. Edward defeated and slew de Montfort at the Battle of Evesham and went on to become one of England's most powerful kings, confirming domination of Wales and invading Scotland in 1296.

February 2, 1812 – Founding of Fort Ross Begins Russian Gold Rush

2012-01-11T19:45:00.000-08:00

As the sea otter fur trade blossomed in the Northern Pacific, settlers from Russia began to colonize the Alaskan coast. They worked alongside native Aleutians to perfect hunting techniques for otters, and American ships provided the transport of processed furs out and new settlers in. Joint Russian-American hunting expeditions took them as far south as the coasts of Spanish California, where otters were plentiful beyond the reach of colonies. Alexander Andreyevich Baranov, Chief Administrator of the Russian-American Company, which had been chartered as Russia’s first joint-stock company in 1799, determined to establish a settlement in California to exploit the natural resources there as well as limiting the northward expansion of the Spanish.

After a trade mission to San Francisco in 1806 and a successful hunting expedition in 1808 during which Russians buried plaques denoting Russian possession of the land, a second try at a permanent agricultural settlement was successfully made in 1812 by Commerce Counselor Ivan Kuskov with what became known as “Fort Ross” (a slurred nickname of “Fortress Russia”). The settlement flourished, though the otters in the area were practically eliminated by American and English hunting expeditions in the next decade. Settlers built windmills and a shipyard and introduced luxuries such as glass windows and stoves to Northern California.

Its great importance, however, came as it was a stop on the exploration route of Lieutenant Otto von Kotzebue. The German-born Kotzebue had been given charge of a ship of twenty-seven men outfitted by Count Nikolay Rumyantsev to seek out a passage through the Arctic Circle and chart undiscovered islands in Oceania along with the naturalists Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz and Adelbert von Chamisso and the artist Louis Choris. While a Northwest Passage proved impossible, he stopped in 1824 at Fort Ross after visiting the Spanish missions at Santa Clara and San Francisco. His journals described the region as “of a very romantic though wild character; and the luxuriant growth of the grass proved that the soil was rich.” He also noted, “the inhabitants of Ross live in the greatest concord with the Indians, who repair, in considerable numbers, to the fortress, and work as day-labourers, for wages” and that the natives “willingly give their daughters in marriage to Russians and Aleutians; and from these unions ties of relationship have arisen which strengthen the good understanding between them.”

Kotzebue returned to San Francisco, where “The Californian winter being now fairly set in, we had much rain and frequent storms. On the 9th of October the south-west wind blew with the violence of the West-Indian tornado, rooted up the strongest trees, tore off the roofs of the houses, and occasioned great devastation in the cultivated lands.” Their ship suffered severe damage as its cables broke and wind drove it onto the rocky shore. With such major repairs needed, Kotzebue determined to winter in the safe harbor of San Francisco Bay, giving extra time for Dr. Eschscholtz to obtain botanical samples from far upstream in the lands not inundated by the notable fogs that plagued Russian gardens in the area. Upon his return from one of the expeditions, Eschscholtz revealed to Kotzebue a handkerchief full of gold pebbles gathered from a creekbed. Kotzebue returned the samples of gold to Russia and determined that the storm that had delayed them struck simultaneously in St. Petersburg, as if a herald of the joining of northern California to Russia. Tsar Alexander I and his ministers dispatched expeditions and colonies to the area, igniting a Russian gold rush and securing the claim to the area by supporting America in its war against Mexico in 1846-8 (during which they seized San Francisco). As the Russian gold turned national attentions to the Pacific, they expanded with colonies in the Sandwich Islands and throughout the northern ocean.

While for the most part the Russian settlers worked well with Americans, Russia proved too cordial to natives for the Americans’ taste. After battles in the Oregon territory such as Rogue River, Grave Creek, and Big Meadows, the Russian colony of New Albion welcomed refugees and helped organize a resettlement program that bolstered the defense of the region, ending many Americans’ hopes of annexation as had been seen in Texas. Several warhawks called for an expedition to drive out the Russians, but by the time railroads would have allowed supply chains, Albion was as entrenched of a state as Alaska.

Following the lackluster support given from the tsar during the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian colonies in the Pacific began calling for independence. Although several attempts at insurrection were put down in the early 1900s, the Russian Civil War would give the colonies a wave of successful revolutions in 1917. Fearing Japanese expansion, the defensive Coalition of Pacific Russian Republics renewed its close ties with the Americans and British. Political ties deepened as they came into NATO during the Cold War, though Albion, Alaska, and Gavay (Hawai’i) were often viewed with suspicion due to their historical ties with what became the Soviet Union.

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In reality, the ships of the Kotzebue expedition were not heavily damaged in the storm of 1824. The discovery of vast goldfields in northern California did not come until 1848 during the construction of a mill by John Sutter, who had purchased the Fort Ross claims from its last administrator, Alexander Rotchev, in 1841.

February 1, 1861 – Texas Delivers Ordinance of Grievances

2012-01-11T17:03:00.000-08:00

After a half-shouted speech by Governor Sam Houston on January 21, the Texas state legislature begrudgingly determined that they would not be able to rally enough support to pass an act of secession over his veto. In his speech, Houston called the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln “unfortunate” but not grounds enough for the "rash action" of seceding from the Union that Texas had come into only fifteen years before. Responding to increasing tension, Houston prophesied,

"Let me tell you what is coming. After the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure and hundreds of thousands of lives, you may win Southern independence if God be not against you, but I doubt it. I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of states rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery, impulsive people as you are, for they live in colder climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche; and what I fear is, they will overwhelm the South."

The special convention which had been expected by organizers to vote overwhelmingly for secession was hamstrung by the governor’s continued Unionist pressure, but the legislature vowed to review the decision of the delegates. Houston practically hounded the convention, drumming up support for the Union and noting that the United States of America had attempted to make peace with King George before its Declaration of Independence. Many Texans supported secession for a number of reasons, but others, especially the newly settled German population, respected the Union and wished to hold to it. Finally, with only a slight majority firmly wishing to secede, the convention voted to give Washington a chance to address the grievances of Texas, mainly the failures of protection from Indian attacks, raids across the borders for the theft of property including slaves, and an assurance of white superiority. Most of all, the ordinance called for support of states’ rights, which was outlined in the Tenth Amendment and final point in the Bill of Rights, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Texas would remain neutral in the matter of secession for a time. New-to-office President Lincoln offered to send 50,000 Union troops to aid Governor Houston in quelling any rebel insurrection, but the elder politician declined and counseled Lincoln to be slow to call for punishment against his fiery Southern brothers.

A Texas state referendum on February 23 confirmed the list of grievances, which gave great credence to the Peace Conference of 1861 being held in Washington. Derisively dubbed the “Old Gentlemen’s Convention” because so many of its participants were former statesmen, including former president John Tyler, the conference met to discuss the necessities to avoid a War Between the States. Many of the points to come out of the conference were similar to the Crittenden Compromise, which had failed in Congress the month before, but the sentiment for peaceful compromise was enough to spur the later convention in Virginia to call for neutrality rather than secession after Lincoln’s meeting with Virginian delegates assured them that the firing upon Fort Sumter in South Carolina would be a black mark for the Confederacy, not Union. Virginia led many border states and joined with Texas in a sense of neutrality as the Federal government worked to resolve a compromise. Meanwhile, the Cotton South descended into the long and grinding Civil War from Tennessee to Florida and Louisiana. Paramilitary forces conducted bloody guerilla combat in neutral states such as Missouri, North Carolina, Arkansas, and, especially, Texas, where Houston worked feverishly until his death in 1863 to calm the massacres of German immigrants and slave rebellions. On a positive end, the “galvanized Yanks” (Confederate POWs who volunteered to serve in forts in the West) solved the issues of Indian raids with a seeming surplus of willing soldiers.

Lincoln narrowly lost the election of 1864 to Democrat George McClellan, who began the process of Reconstruction for the Cotton South after the surrender of P.G.T. Beauregard. While the slaves of rebellious states had been freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (believed to have been what cost him the election in the border states), slavery would continue in the United States until advances by the Industrial Revolution, growing labor movements, and international pressure caused it to disappear by the late 1880s, with Texas to be the last state in the Union to declare it illegal in 1891.

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In reality, Houston was largely neutral, claiming that if Texas were to secede, it should at most revert to its independent status as a republic. The Texas legislature pledged to uphold whatever decision came of the convention, which voted 166 to 7 for secession. Houston refused to acknowledge Texas’ shift to the Confederacy and was drummed out of office. After being hounded by crowds calling for reasons behind his lack of support for the Confederacy, Houston made his prophetic speech on April 19, just days after the Battle of Fort Sumter, Lincoln’s call for 75.000 volunteers to retake federal property by force, and Virginia’s resulting secession. The war would end with the cost of over 600,000 lives and an 1879-estimated $6,190,000,000.

January 19, 1966 – Desai Elected Prime Minister of India

2012-01-08T13:50:00.001-08:00

Only twenty years into its independence from Britain, the nation of India faced a major turning point in the question of who would succeed Prime Minister Shastri after his fatal heart attack while attending peace accords in Tashkent that ended the Second Kashmir War. India was firmly in control of the popular National Congress party, but internal squabbles interrupted a smooth transition of power. Indira Gandhi, daughter of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (and of no relation to the famed Mahatma Gandhi), ran against Morarji Desai, who disagreed with Nehru's legacy on points of international diplomacy, internal security, and economic influence.

Ultimately, the decision came down to K. Kamaraj. Famous for his exploits in the Indian Independence Movement and arrested on a number of occasions, Kamaraj had worked with the Congress party since the age of 16 and became the unquestioned President of the National Congress Party. Most of his time in politics had been spent establishing schools and increasing education rates from 7% under the Raj to 37% by the end of his career, but his long service also gave him the position as the Congress party's “kingmaker.” Upon the death of Nehru, Kamaraj had practically declared Shastri for succession. Shastri's term had lasted less than two years and was primarily dominated with the 1965 war with Pakistan. When Shastri died (his widow argued that he had been poisoned), the issue of succession arose again.

In what many considered a surprising move, Kamaraj chose Desai. Some argued that he had been attempting to heal divisions in the party with Desai's more conservative wing, others imagined Karmaraj and Mrs. Gandhi had gone through a falling out, and still others determined that Desai was the elder and Indira was being saved for the inevitable next succession. Gandhi protested in several speeches along with many of her supporters, but the election carried Desai despite her warnings that he would weaken the country's work “to create what my father used to call a climate of peace."

When Desai took office, he worked to encourage free market expansion, frustrating the pseudo-socialist leanings of Indira Gandhi's followers. Desai held true to the ideals of Mahatma Gandhi with strict rules of swadeshi, or self-reliance, and laws declared that international companies would have to include a 40% stake by Indian owners to have permits for the country. This led to famous rivalries between Desai and corporations such as Coca-Cola, who left India after Desai suggested they could stay provided they revealed their secret formula. Desai himself was noted to drink his own urine daily for medicinal purposes and was believed not to trust the artificial drink. He also launched a Five-Year Plan that hoped to modernize rural areas of India, but was arguably responsible for increasing unemployment and inflation as India's people moved off of farms, which were largely self-sufficient though poor.

Internationally, Desai normalized relations with China after US President Nixon's visit in 1972. Matters with Pakistan became more difficult upon the declaration of independence of East Pakistan by Ziaur Rahman and West Pakistan's resulting declaration of war and genocide of the Hindu population, which sent more than ten million refugees over the border into India. The move threatened to topple India's economy, and appeals to international action went unanswered. Indian troops participated in establishing Bangladeshi independence, and Desai worked to cool violent tensions with Pakistan after the war. As South Asia became settled again, many called for advancements in the Indian nuclear program for future deterrence, but Desai refused, saying that the only need for nuclear power would be for the creation of electricity, which was handled already by economic encouragement programs for coal-burning and hydroelectric plants. China had already achieved nuclear weapons, and rumors suggested Pakistan was contemplating a similar project, but Desai held firm to Gandhian pacifism. Desai's opponents took his stance as the backwardness of an old man, which culminated in his forced retirement in 1979 after his economic policies were believed to be failures. Indira Gandhi won the following election in a landslide with hopes of expanding Indian diplomatic strength and social reforms for the working class that had built up around foreign industry.

Gandhi's steps forward in India's new nuclear program raised eyebrows worldwide, especially after Pakistan hurried to keep pace. She also nationalized banks, returning much of India's economic strength home, though it caused worldwide financial difficulties that exacerbated issues of the Energy Crisis and recession. As perhaps the most stable world economic power, India looked to have a bright future, but Gandhi's premiership came to a tragic end when she was assassinated in 1984 after her approval of Operation Blue Star, which used tanks to dislodge Sikh separatists from Amritsar's Golden Temple. Her son Rajiv Gandhi, who expanded India's telecommunications systems and would himself be assassinated by the Tamil Tigers, separatist fighters for the Tamil peoples of Sri Lanka. The 1990s proved turbulent for India, which was fraught with corruption in seemingly every area of government. After the reforms of Minister of Finance and later Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the mixed groundwork of free market and socialism as well as Indian national strength while balancing minority rights and international intervention has seemed to settle toward ongoing Indian prosperity as the world's eighteenth largest economy, as cited by the World Bank in 2011.

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In reality, Indira Gandhi was elected with Kamaraj's support. Desai split from the Congress Party to form the Janata Party in 1968, and Indira solidified her command with Indian victory in the 1971 war with Pakistan. She advanced India's nuclear program to successful tests in 1974, launched agricultural reforms establishing surplus food for the Indian people, and declared a state of emergency from 1975 to '77 during which she ruled by decree. When she and the Congress Party lost the election of 1977, she found herself out of power and arrested for electoral corruption and abuse of power. Desai became prime minister for a few years, but the failures of economic reform took him out of office in 1979. Despite unpopularity during the Emergency, Gandhi returned to power in 1980. Her harsh treatment of Sikhs during Operation Blue Star led to her assassination by two of her bodyguards in 1984. India has experienced tremendous growth, and was listed as the ninth largest economy in 2011.

January 17, 1961 – Eisenhower Confirms Restrictions of a Military-Industrial Complex

2011-12-06T20:48:00.001-08:00

During his "Farewell Address," President and former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, as well as first Supreme Commander of NATO, Dwight D. Eisenhower confirmed that his administration had done its part in limiting what he called the "military-industrial complex."

In the 1950s, the United States was in the midst of an ongoing arms-race with the Soviet Union that had continued to maintain unprecedented levels of troop mobilization despite the end of the Second World War. Fear of the spread of Communism fueled government contracts for new and better technology, giving birth to supersonic jet engines and even an artificial satellite in orbit of the Earth. However, during his administration, Eisenhower became concerned over the amount of public funds and interest tied into simply maintaining readiness for a war against Communists who, in Russia, were under collective leadership since the death of Stalin in 1953 and, in China, suffered under accidental famine from ill-planned agricultural Five-Year Plans. The Korean War had shown that conventional warfare mixed with modern politics to create a stalemate, and Eisenhower decided to keep the stalemate overt with America's readied nuclear arsenal capable of Mutually-Assured Destruction.

Citing examples from the 1956 work by sociologist C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, Eisenhower's new policy turned to limiting the abilities of lobbyists in "The Higher Circles" who had direct influence and adding new levels of visibility to policy-creation as well as methods of direct review and polling upon budgetary issues. Numerous figures said that the policy was watering-down the leadership of America in tough times as Khruschev seized power in the USSR, but those such as Senator Robert Taft loudly questioned the ethics of those he considered fearmongers and warhawks. The FBI gained a new office investigating potential illicit lobbying, and numerous contracts between the government and large businesses were allowed to run out. The military gradually began to downscale, and research was limited to grants to universities only with direct proof of public benefit. Proposals, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which would largely guide civilian space efforts, were kept to what was pertinent given the defense of the United States.

In Eisenhower's last speech, he commented on having cleaned house in Washington and limited the possibility of special interests to dominate Congress under the table. Many believed that if anyone but the highest-ranking general in American history to become president since Washington had tried to decrease military-industrial spending, it would have blown up in his face. Ike's successor, John F. Kennedy, continued the regulation of Washington spending, preferring to use politics rather than numbers to maintain diplomacy. The standoff in the Cuban Missile Crisis proved that MAD was enough to limit Soviet threats to the United States. Some called for a Space Race after the Russians had put Sputnik into orbit as part of the festivities of the International Geophysical Year, but Kennedy noted that American missions to space would be the realm of private enterprise, much like the settling of the West.

As the twentieth century continued, the Domino Theory proved true with Soviet and Chinese power extending through Central and Southeast Asia, respectively. However, within a generation, the USSR had overextend itself with uprisings in Iran and Afghanistan as well as in old Eastern European trouble spots of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Local resistance drained the authority of Moscow, which would collapse in the late 1980s, while China transformed itself with experimental limited capitalism and made acquaintance with the United States during the Nixon era.

By the end of the twentieth century, the world had changed drastically to what many considered a Pax Americana. There were certainly threats, primarily through terrorism, but international policing agencies as well as FBI were tasked with finding and capturing the nation's enemies. Meanwhile, everyday Americans continued improved lives as private funding took up where public funding had left off. As of the year 2000, radio systems are able to incorporate “mobile” phones as long as they were tied to a power source, such as a car. Personal computers have come into many homes, and many technologists predict a network of integration (or “Internet”) in the coming decades, though the investment required would be staggering. Meanwhile, rocket-launching companies have established a number of satellites in orbit to study weather and relay communications, while others hope for a manned mission to the Moon, although it would need to prove to be economically viable.

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In reality, Eisenhower only warned America to be on "guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." His "Farewell Address" made note of the changing America in the heightened time of the Cold War, but America continued its investment in industry, devising new defense technology that would trickle down into public use with items like cell phones, GPS systems, and the Internet.

January 15, 1919 – Spartacist Uprising Overthrows Weimar Republic

2011-12-03T16:52:00.001-08:00

After a humiliating outcry condemning the use of paramilitary soldiers, President Friedrich Ebert was forced to step down and the united workers of Germany created a new, socialist government. It was another phase in what would be a tumultuous decade for what had been the proud and powerful German Empire.

Following the defeat of Russia in 1917, the Kaiser and his generals had great hope for the winter campaigns. The people of Germany had suffered through the Turnip Winter of 1916-17, eating vegetables usually fit only for livestock. It seemed the chance to turn the war around as hundreds of thousands of troops came home from the eastern front and were re-trained with new “storm-trooper” tactics that were designed to break the trench-warfare stalemate before the American soldiers arrived. Unfortunately, the strategy failed in 1918, and Americans began pouring onto the battlefield at a rate of ten thousand a day. Amid the depressed morale of the people and soldiers, orders went out to launch the fleet for a final fight with the Royal Navy, and the sailors refused. The October mutiny spread into outright revolution, and the Kaiser abdicated along with the rest of Germany royalty, which handed control of the state over to the Social Democratic Party.

Meanwhile, the Independent Social Democratic Party (USDP) broke away from the SDP with stronger demands for worker’s rights and an overall socialist state. It was joined by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) led by the “Spartacist” Karl Liebknecht, newly released from prison, and Rosa Luxemburg, whose ideals would form many of the economic policies of the party. The last chancellor of the Empire, Friedrich Ebert, held his power through popularity with the SDP and was elected president in the carefully timed elections in late 1918. For a time, the USDP worked in an uneasy alliance with the SDP, both wary of the Freikorps, a name dating back to voluntary guerilla soldiers against Napoleon and now meaning paramilitary groups made primarily of retiring soldiers who held very right-wing ideals.

When Ebert fired the Chief of Police for Berlin for not using force against strikers during the Christmas troubles, KPD and USDP began a new revolution, forming a “Revolution Committee” on January 5, 1919, that called for a general strike to show support. More than 500,000 workers in Berlin flooded the streets, and the city shut down. After the initial success, however, the Committee began to falter. No one was able to agree on whether to negotiate with Ebert or began an armed revolt to topple him. Liebknecht and other KPD members worked to gain the support of the Volksmarine who had initially begun revolution the October before as well as the army regiments. Most of the soldiers, however, had either given up their posts or sworn loyalties to the present government.

Seeing the failure to bring real soldiers onto their side and the meager arms taken up by the workers that would have been soundly defeated if Ebert’s government cracked down, a new plan was determined. Just as the KPD and USDP were about to break their Committee on January 8, a flyer was discovered telling that Ebert had made a call for the Freikorps to “take revenge” on the leftists that had lost the war for them. Outrage was shared among the leaders, and Luxemburg suggested the outrage could be spread to the rest of the country. Using expert propaganda as had been perfected over the course of the Great War, the workers were persuaded to put away their weapons and Ebert was portrayed as a backstabber who called up brutes while promising to meet for deliberations (an image of the French turning away the 1916 German offer of armistice just before the bloody Battle of Verdun). When the Freikorps attacked on January 12, the workers refused to fight back and were easily defeated. However, as propaganda of the atrocities by the paramilitary flooded the country, outrage turned public support to the socialists. Freikorps members were pelted with clods of earth in the streets, symbolizing their loss of ground during the fighting, and Ebert was blamed for the deaths of over 100 workers as the strike continued.

Under public pressure, Ebert and his government left Berlin and new elections were held. The united USDP and KPD won overwhelmingly, and their representatives attended the Treaty of Versailles that summer. The resulting treaty would be viewed with great suspicion by the Americans, whose Senate soundly rejected it, and the Germans took it as a solid display that the communists had sold out their country. The Allied blockade had stood for months after the armistice, and more Germans than ever had died of malnutrition, which was also blamed on the communists. While France rested on its laurels, Americans fearful of the expansion of communism called for occupation of Germany to settle the matter there as only a Red Scare could overcome the sense of non-interventionism.

When the Socialist government collapsed in March of 1920 in yet another wave of revolution under Kapp and Lüttwitz, a coalition army marched into Germany aiding the institutions established by and the return of a limited monarchy under Wilhelm III (who famously declared the War “the most stupid, senseless and unnecessary war of modern times” as Crown Prince). The international soldiers were begrudgingly hosted as they kept the peace and supported the flow of aid, particularly money under the Dawes Plan of 1921, which not only stymied potential hyperinflation with capital investment but also tied together the two nations’ economies and political theories. After the Great Crash, the monarchy and its vibrant Chancellor Adolph Hitler were blamed for mismanagement, and Germany fell into a civil war that would later return the Republic.

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In reality, there was no plan to oust Ebert peacefully. The workers attempted to fight the Freikorps only briefly before surrender. In 1920, Ebert would use the workers’ general strike to thwart the Kapp Putsch, and the Weimar Republic would continue through foreign aid until the Great Depression brought on hopes of genuine prosperity through fascism.

January 14, 1858 – Napoleon III Assassinated in Bombing

2011-12-01T07:37:00.000-08:00

In an organized attack by Italian independence radicals led by Felice Orsini, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew of the famous Napoleon I and reigning emperor of France since 1852, was killed in a firestorm of bombs. The emperor and his consort, Eugénie de Montijo, were on their way to the opera when Orsini and his fellow assassins hurled bombs that exploded on impact, following a design created by Orsini the year before. The first two bombs struck at the front of their carriage, the second wounding animals and breaking the protective glass, while the third and final landed inside the carriage itself. A policeman was the first to reach the wreckage and cried out, "l'Empereur est mort!"

It was a tragic end to what had seemed an epic life. Louis-Napoléon was born in 1808 as the third son of Napoleon's brother Louis, puppet-ruler of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Holland. After the fall of the French Empire, Louis-Napoléon grew up in Switzerland comfortably while his cousin Napoleon II was held under royal trappings under the Austrian court. Following the deaths of Napoleon II and the earlier generation, Louis-Napoléon became the head of the Bonapartist movement and dedicated his life to reestablishing the glory days under Napoleon I. In 1836, he attempted to begin a coup at Strasbourg much like the Hundred Days, but, rather than join him, the garrison arrested him and sent him back into exile. Another failed coup came in 1840, and Louis-Napoléon was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment in the fortress at Ham.

There, Louis-Napoléon began formulating his ideals of the liberal emperor. He wrote L'extinction du paupérisme, defining Bonapartism as autocracy for the good of the masses and outlining economic policies bordering on socialism. Following six years of imprisonment, he escaped after trading clothes with a mason and came to England, where he remained until the Revolutions of 1848 toppled King Louis-Philippe and established a new republic. Louis-Napoléon returned to Paris after the June Days uprising proved the reforming efforts of the Republic were ineffective, and he won the new presidential election with more than 75% of the total vote. He was wildly popular, "all things to all men" with progressive economic policies for the poor, being dubbed "least bad" by the Monarchists, and holding the historic Napoleon name. His term proved beneficial, but problems began as Louis-Napoléon requested an amendment to the 1848 Constitution so that he might run again after his term ended in 1852. The National Assembly refused and instead amended voting laws with a three-year residency requirement, which would cut out many traveling workers of the lower class who would have voted for him. Calling for maintenance of universal male suffrage, Louis-Napoléon secured the support of the army and at last had his successful coup in 1851.

Now ruler of the Second French Empire, Napoleon III worked to create anew what his uncle once held. A new constitution kept universal male suffrage and the Parliament, but all real power lay with Louis-Napoléon. He exiled political rivals to Devil's Island and other penal colonies and married the Spanish Eugénie de Montijo (after being turned down by higher nobles from the houses of Sweden and Britain) to produce his heir, Louis Napoléon the Prince Impérial, born in 1856. Louis-Napoléon also worked to overcome the colonial restrictions placed on France by aiding European powers in the Crimean War (using Russia as an excuse for the return of French influence) and the Anglo-Persian War. More notably, he also gave influence in the militaristic attempts at Italian unification, such as his providing troops to restore Pope Pius IX and defeat the short-lived Roman Republic of Garibaldi and Mazzini in 1849.

This action had caused an uproar in France (which had been calmed by Louis-Napoléon's popularity), but it had also instilled in the minds of Orsini and others that Louis-Napoléon was a stumbling block to an Italian nation, leading to his assassination. The assassins were caught and executed with Orsini notably going to the guillotine quietly and with a sense of satisfaction. Meanwhile, France became a political vacuum as Napoleon IV was only two years old. Bids for an advisor turned into factionalism, and power gradually fell back to the Parliament, making the young emperor a figurehead. Anti-Italian sentiment led to the French assistance of the Austrians (a large reversal from the old Napoleonic enemy) in the Second Italian War of Independence in 1859, which formed the alliance that narrowly defeated the Prussians in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, giving Emperor Franz Josef political clout to build his Southern German Confederation opposing Prussia and its northern German allies.

Prussia would eventually have its victory in the Great War (spawned from another assassination in 1914 of Austria's archduke) when it joined with Russia and Britain against France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire, leading to the dissolution of the latter two and the formation of South Germany and, finally, an independent unified Italy. With its humiliating defeat, France gave up its empire as the aging Napoleon V abdicated. The new republic lasted only briefly before the fascist Third French Empire arose in the 1930s. The resulting imperialism with its Japanese allies would be opposed by a congress of nations, including the century-old Republic of Mexico and the liberated Vietnamese who suffered under years of Japanese colonialism before becoming a republic under American encouragement.

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In reality, the third bomb landed underneath the carriage, injuring the police officer but leaving the imperial couple unscathed. Napoleon III survived to put into action many of his foreign policies including military intervention in Mexico, the conquest of Indochina, and aiding Sardinia in victory over Austria and the unification of Italy. In 1870, he would go to war against Prussia after being pressured by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, and the resulting loss would give way to the German Empire while the French collapsed. Napoleon III died from complications in surgery in 1873 while in exile in England.

January 13, 1950 – Soviet Union Remains Active in the United Nations

2011-11-13T17:19:00.000-08:00

Upon the 6 to 3 defeat of his proposal to oust the Nationalist Chinese representatives in the United Nations in favor of the People's Republic, Soviet ambassador Jacob Malik walked out of the voting chamber and announced his boycott of the Security Council. He blamed the United States for "lawlessness" and noted that anyone could see the illegality of refusing to recognize the PRC. Until the Nationalist Chinese were removed, Malik vowed that the Soviet Union would not be bound by UN declarations.

Although Malik was willing to make the gamble, higher-ups in Moscow were not, and he was replaced as the Soviets determined to keep their power of veto that had been part of the original agreements to joining the UN in 1945. The early days of the UN were rife with difficulties as the Soviets initially balked at the inclusion of India and the Philippines, the former colonies who were believed to be just extra votes for the dominant UK and US. Further issues arose when the USSR wanted each of its republics within to gain recognition, but the US countered saying each of its 48 states would then, too. A compromise was met with recognition of Belorussia and Ukraine, and the United States was proposed two additional seats but declined rather than choose among its states.

With the balance of the Cold War thusly struck for the early days, the defining moment of the renewed troubles was the refusal to recognize the People's Republic of China after the Nationalist Republic moved its capital to Taipei. Malik hoped for a shut down of the UN by walking out and relying on the power of the Eastern European Bloc. However, the West had worked to create another political union, The North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It had begun with the Treaty of Brussels on March 17, 1948, as a mutual defense agreement and continued to expand from the original states of Luxembourg, Belgium, Netherlands, France, and UK. As the Cold War heated up with the tense days of the Berlin Blockade, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Canada, and the United States were included by 1949. Seeing the potential for such an overwhelming position by the West, the Soviets decided to keep their veto with the UN to stymie the spread of renewed imperialism.

The resolute stance soon proved useful as the invasion of South Korea by North Korea arose in debate that June. Korea, which had been occupied by the Empire of Japan for years before its defeat in 1945, was split into occupation zones. The Soviets, who had invaded Manchuria and were much closer to the agreed upon 38th Parallel, held the north while the Americans stationed soldiers in the capital and south. North Korea came under the influence of communism and supported the People's Liberation Army during the Chinese Civil War. After the war ended with the Nationalists retreating to Taiwan and the formation of the People's Republic in 1949, some 70,000 Koreans who had volunteered for service returned to North Korea. North Korean leader Kim Il-sung gained Mao Zedong's blessing in May of 1950, and an invasion took place soon after in retaliation to provocative raids under "bandit traitor Syngman Rhee." They vowed to capture and execute the South Korean leader, who was evacuated, but not before he ordered the Bodo League Massacre in which hundreds of thousands of suspected communists were slaughtered by military and police.

Meanwhile, the invasion came to notice by the United States. Truman and his Secretary of State Dean Acheson agreed that appeasement could not be repeated and the expansion of Communism was a threat to the Free World. They knew that unilateral action would cause a massive upheaval, however, and so the matter was introduced into the United Nations on June 25 with a proposed demand that North Korea remove its forces, which would have been United Nations Security Council Resolution 82, had the Soviet Union not vetoed it. Arguing on the grounds of national sovereignty, the Soviets continued to veto potential resolutions, blocking the US's chance at stopping the flow of Communism. As the months passed and the ambassadors' hands were tied, Kim Il-sung's forces overwhelmed the peninsula, and it was all the US could do to organize a massive evacuation to the heavily militarized American bases in Japan.

Although many were frustrated, the primary mood of the West was one of conservatism. When the People's Republic of China occupied Tibet that November, again the United Nations sat with hands tied although the matter was widely debated. The nation most considered to have grave concern for the matter, India, held that the Chinese would be peaceful and refused to support military action. Truman's doctrine of "containment" seemed to largely fall apart on the impossibility of military action, though it had succeeded with its $400 million donation to support the government of Greece in its civil war. A new form of Dollar Diplomacy, famous from the Taft presidency, came into power during Eisenhower’s terms, fed by the vast economic expansion of the 1950s.

Instead of becoming militarily involved, the United States would invest heavily in surrounding nations, such as the famous New Society programs expanding support for Thailand and Cambodia after the fall of Vietnam under the Johnson administration. Meanwhile, covert CIA operations would aid enemies of communist influence, which would bring about the downfall of the cash-strapped Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan. Despite its overall success, the policies were widely condemned by the often pro-USSR debates in the United Nations as "New Imperialism" and many countries such as Korea continued under what Truman called "totalitarian regimes", evident at night when the bright lights of Japan are compared with the darkness on the whole of the Korean peninsula.

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In reality, the Soviet boycott lasted until August, absent from UN SC Resolution 82, 83, 84, and 85, which established the Korean War with peace-keeping forces from around the world, though largely American with General Douglas MacArthur as commander. Years of brutal fighting would return the demilitarized zone to the 38th Parallel, but further wars such as that in Vietnam would expand the fighting of the Cold War.

January 12, 1904 – Automobile Enthusiast Henry Ford Dies in Crash

2011-11-10T21:08:00.001-08:00

Atop the frozen Lake St. Clair near Detroit, Michigan, USA, automobile engineer Henry Ford died when his experimental Ford 999 broke through a spot of unseasonably thin ice. The car flipped at speeds estimated beyond ninety miles per hour, and Ford was instantly killed.

Ford had already built an illustrious career in engineering and was gathering investors for his newly incorporated Ford Motor Company. He had begun on his own farm and sawmill and, in 1891, accepted a job at the Edison Illuminating Company. In 1893, the same year as the birth of his son, Edsel, Ford was made chief engineer, which gave him the resources to experiment with gasoline engines and culminated in the invention of his Ford Quadricyle in 1896. With Edison's encouragement, Ford continued to develop his machine and in 1899 left to found his own company. The initial Detroit Automobile Company did not meet Ford's standards, and he later began again with Alexander Malcolmson, taking in a partnership with the Dodge brothers, whose company produced parts.

As part of his self-publicity, Ford drove his latest automobile design, the "999", which he had perfected from the old model created alongside bicyclist Tom Cooper. It had won races in the past, and Ford meant for it to be a display of his capabilities at setting a new land speed record far and above that made by William Vanderbilt in his internal combustion Mors at seventy-six miles per hour over one kilometer. Although the new record was estimated, it was partially considered out of respect of the late Henry Ford, though L'Automobile Club de France did not recognize it at all as the run had taken place on a frozen lake.

Despite Ford's disaster and numerous other birth pangs, the automobile industry blossomed across the world. Ford's company would shift ownership to the Dodge brothers, who eventually sold the automobile component and put in manufacturing with other Detroit automobile companies such as Olds and Buick before starting their own car line. Other countries such as France, Germany, and Britain manufactured their own automobiles, though America would take up a lead in numbers overall. The growing middle class in America was able to support more of the luxury of an automobile while much of the world transitioned from the horse and buggy to trains. The car remained a badge of wealth, costing between $2000 and $3000, a large amount as the average annual salary in 1910 was $750. Even more expensive luxury cars such as those from Cadillac would cost as much as $5000 by 1920.

Through the Twenties, manufacturing improved and many Americans purchased their cars on credit only to lose them as the Great Depression began. Much of the United States continued using horses, bicycles, and the cheaper motorcycle, but the manufacturing burst of the 1940s set the groundwork that after World War II just about anyone could afford an automobile. Just as prefabricated houses became widely available, so did the many varieties of American cars. Internationally, the American car would continue its lead into the rebuilding of Europe, though every nation seemed to have its own variety.

By the '50s when the industrial sector managed to cross over into mass production of cheap cars, however, the wartime perfection of the rail system and air travel did not leave much interest in long-range driving. President Eisenhower was able to secure some funding for his Interstate Highway System, but the roads would be rarely used by the public who preferred the ease of passenger travel. Cars, meanwhile, were typically saved for leisure on day-trips or commuting for those who lived outside of cities' widespread mass transit systems. Counter-culture beatniks and later hippies popularized the “road trip”, but it would be another generation before it could be considered a family activity.

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In reality, Henry Ford's test run was impeccable, and the car went onto a racing tour that spread his name across the country. Ford would be instrumental in the making of the modern world with his Model-T, introduced October 1, 1908, as “a car for the great multitude.” At only $825 initially and as cheap as $360 in 1916, by 1927 over fifteen million Model-Ts had been produced. Ford also helped introduce the moving assembly belt, which revolutionized manufacturing. While severely anti-union, Ford believed in high wages and benefits for employees, hiring and keeping the best workers to maximize efficiency.

July 27, 1794 - Robespierre's Defense Published

2011-11-10T21:07:00.000-08:00

At the height of the Reign of Terror, the French Revolution held its climax as forces loyal to the ideals of Maximelien Robespierre overwhelmed the Convention army arranged by men such as Billaud, Barras, and Barère. The loyalist soldiers had been rallied by the overnight and secret publication of Robespierre's speech defending himself from charges of tyranny. Instead, he warned France of a conspiracy to seize power in the Republic, which caused his enemies to leap to action and call for Robespierre's execution, bringing all cards to bear.

It was a harried time in the chaos that seemed to dominate Paris since the storming of the Bastille in 1789. Through the next five years, the National Assembly would attempt to create constitutions, women would march on Paris, property of the Church was publicly seized, the king fled, was captured, and eventually executed, and nearly every king in Europe declared war on the new Republic. Meanwhile, even the forces of revolution began to splinter, forming political clubs such as the Feuillants and the Girondins. Many of them encouraged the wars, hoping for war to be declared against Austria, but lawyer and political leader Robespierre said in 1792, "such a war could only favour the forces of counter-revolution, since it would play into the hands of those who opposed the sovereignty of the people. The risks of Caesarism were clear, for in wartime the powers of the generals would grow at the expense of ordinary soldiers, and the power of the king and court at the expense of the Assembly."

The war began anyway after the death of Leopold II of Austria, but France took major victories in Belgium and the Rhineland, cementing the position of the Republic on the continent. The fledgeling government turned inward to its problems of food shortages, insurrections, and outright treason. The Tribunal was established in 1793, leading to a Committee of Public Safety, and Robespierre was one of the nine elected. Here began a "Reign of Terror" during which Robespierre wrote, "...the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible." The report of enemies of the state became a major part of clearing up the factionalism and counter-revolutionaries of the time, and it grew further with the Law of 22 Prairial on June 10, 1794. By it, the Tribunal could condemn an enemy of the state through direct order and without witnesses. Through the next eight weeks, nearly 1300 people would be guillotined.

Robespierre's system of purification nearly ricocheted back at him when he was called before the Convention, accused of treason. That July, Robespierre had recalled several envoys who had been accused of extravagance with their positions to Paris to account for their actions. One of them, Joseph Fouché, evaded arrest and sneaked from house to house of Convention members, explaining that Robespierre would come for them too. With the groundwork set for a coup d'état, the Convention called in Robespierre on suspicion of tyranny, and he delivered a two-hour speech giving already his knowledge of the conspiracy. The guilty members (though unnamed) hurried to act. The next day, Robespierre's ally Saint-Just (whom Robespierre had been before sent to the front to garner support from the army) was shouted down during his defense. Robespierre also attempted to speak, but the chaos and outright mockery closed him off. At the conclusion, the Convention ordered the arrest of Robespierre and many of his allies.

Commune soldiers under General Coffinhal marched in to defend Robespierre, aiming for the Convention itself, who ordered up soldiers of their own. The soldiers of the Commune began to falter, and it was then that copies of Robespierre's speech was delivered to them, printed in secret after the debate in the Convention had attempted to censor them. Instead, the soldiers realized that they must continue to fight for the good of the revolution against conspiracy and were joined by many free Parisians from the mob. The Battle of Paris raged for only a few hours initially, but when the conspirator's army broke in the early morning, the rioting spread to follow them. Barras, who led the Convention soldiers, was killed in the fighting, Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne was captured and executed, and Bertrand Barère (who had already come under suspicion of treason) managed to escape, eventually ending up in England before disappearing into the Caribbean as an adventurer.

After the Battle of Paris, Robespierre succeeded in his plans to end counter-revolutionary movements. By winter, the Law of 22 Prairial came to an end and the Terror expired. Instead, Robespierre continued his place maintaining the Committee of Public Safety and keeping the political elements of pure to his ideal of republic. Meanwhile, the wars with Europe (and even the Quasi-War with the United States until the matter of privateering was settled) continued until the Treaty of Lunéville with Austria in 1801 and the Treaty of Amiens with Britain in 1802. The war was finished by General Moreau as the great Corsican general Napoleon Bonaparte was dispatched to the West Indies as "punishment" for his lateness in returning from Egypt in 1799 due to poor communication, but also to get a potential tyrant away from the young republic as well as to organize the former slaves who had been freed under the Rights of Man.

Robespierre himself would retire from political office in 1815, but he would continue to lead the Jacobin political party and encourage the spread of Republicanism to other countries. After the success of the Society of United Irishmen liberating the Republic of Ireland and later the Republic of Australia, Robespierre was instrumental creating a Republican Bloc of nations such as Batavia and Saint-Domingue that spurred conservatism in the royal houses of Europe. In 1821, Robespierre left to observe General Simón Bolívar in his carving out of republics from the old Spanish Empire in the Americas, which rejected Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being. Elsewhere, primarily in Europe and then in French republican dependencies, the deist Le culte de l'Être suprême remains the state religion with its festival on June 8 as the largest holiday of the year. Robespierre himself led the festivities in Paris until his death in 1836.

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In reality, Robespierre's speech was never published, though repeated and applauded at the Jacobin Club. According to Napoleon Bonaparte, "Robespierre was overthrown because he wanted to become a moderator and stop the Revolution. Cambaceres told me that the day before his death, he delivered a wonderful speech that was never printed. Billaud and other terrorists, seeing that he was weakening and he would invariably have their heads, conspired against him and stirred up the so-called decent people to overthrow the 'tyrant,' but in reality to take his place and extend the reign of terror."

*Special thanks to Nicolas Gregoire for idea and background

December 20, 1989 – Canal Sabotage as Panama Invasion Commences

2011-10-12T08:41:00.000-07:00

As part of the growing War on Drugs that had been declared by President Richard Nixon in 1971 and redoubled by President George Bush, Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega was indicted on drug-trafficking charges and endangering American nationals in addition to his more obvious crime of suppressing democracy. Sparked by the shooting death of a US Marine at a roadblock on December 16, nine thousand US troops entered Panama in Operation Just Cause, joining the some 12,000 others that were already there as part of the defense of the jointly owned Panama Canal (set to revert to Panamanian control in the year 2000 under the Torrijos–Carter Treaties). Noriega’s pet army of the Panamanian Defense Forces was easily defeated with minimal resistance, except for a devious counterattack with an unassuming small freighter that rested in the Canal near the Gatun Locks.

Rigged with explosives on a timer, the freighter exploded while unoccupied, killing several sailors on nearby boats and one canal worker. While the damage to the Canal was not catastrophic, it would take months to repair back to full capacity, frustrating international shipping and making a noticeable dent on the world economy with the Dow Jones dropping briefly below 1,000 points. News of the strike shocked military commanders and President Bush, who had been largely in control of the situation. Although only twenty-three US soldiers and three American civilians were killed (opposed to 150 PDF and some 500 Panamanian civilians), the invasion would have a black smear in the public view.

While the fighting ended shortly after it had begun, Noriega found asylum in the Vatican anuncio and did not surrender until arrested by US Drug Enforcement agents on January 3. During this time, the US scrambled to polish its image. Polls sponsored by CBS and articles by the New York Times showed that Panamanians were pleased that the dictator had been overthrown and the properly elected Guillermo Endara sworn into office; even those who had suffered property damage or the loss of loved ones supported the US invasion by as much as 80 percent. Other news sources were not as friendly, giving accounts such as those from Paul Eisner of Newsday describing blacklists and “sapo” informers upon neighbors as well as the Miami Herald’s report of "Neighbors saw six U.S. truck loads bringing dozens of bodies to a mass grave” and a mother’s "voice rose over the crowd's silence: 'Damn the Americans.'"

International disapproval arose, made all the louder by the economic fallout of the damaged Canal. The Organization of American States and the European Parliament made formal protests, calling the move a violation of international law. As public criticism grew, more stories began to come out about Noriega’s past. Most recognized him as a money-launderer and drug-trafficker, but the story of his origins by CIA support became widespread. Noriega had been picked by the CIA as a potential block to fears of Central American communism in 1970, but was dropped from the payroll in 1977 after he had become mixed in drugs. Two years later, the Sandinista National Liberation Front came to power in Nicaragua, and Noriega was tapped again to keep communism from spreading and became dictator in 1983. Throughout the Reagan Administration, which came into its own problems with illegal activity in the Iran-Contra Affair, Noriega enjoyed American support as he rigged elections and was condemned by US Senate committee reviews of drug traffic. Upon word that Noriega may have been connected with Cuba and the Sandanistas, he was cut off by the US government. After his arrest in 1989, he would be sentenced in 1992 to federal prison for forty years.

President Bush raced to salvage his administration, citing his own experience with the CIA and admitting that certain intelligence activities were necessary to stop the spread of communism. With the Berlin Wall falling in August and the Soviet departure from Afghanistan earlier in February, he noted that American fears of international instability had been satiated and now was the time to “clean up the mess.” With new policies on cutting international aid from dictators and new CIA transparency, a wave of revolution watched over by UN and largely American forces came in several countries such as Nigeria with free elections. Most famous would be the removal of Saddam Hussein at the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 after his invasion of Kuwait. The actions would give Bush a narrow election victory for a second term after successfully winning support in Maine and Colorado from Ross Perot’s dropping out of his campaign in July of 1992. The fall of the Soviet Union that December would be a further feather in Bush’s hat.

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In reality, there was no strike against the Panama Canal. Although sometimes condemned, Operation Just Cause would remove one of many dictators established by CIA and US support as part of Cold War strategies.

December 4, 1952 – Weather Settles to Spawn the Great Smog Panic in London

2011-10-09T18:23:00.001-07:00

In a somewhat rare weather phenomenon, an anticyclone formed over London during the bitter cold of the late 1952 winter. Something like an inverted hurricane, the anticyclone is a clockwise (counter-clockwise in the southern hemisphere) rotation of winds around a high pressure region above a cold pocket. Inside, air becomes even colder and typically drier with clear skies, though it can also produce heavy fog as surface relative humidity increases. The lack of internal wind compounds gasses that would typically escape, which became the key to creating a nightmarish weather condition that plagued London for five days.

As the anticyclone settled over London, most citizens thought little more of the colder weather than an annoyance. They heaped more coal onto their furnaces and turned on lights, which meant more electricity from the coal-power plants around London. As the fires continued, the windless low pressure system did not let the smoke escape, and pollutants like carbon soot, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide began to thicken the growing fog. By December 5, visibility was reduced to a few yards.

Even though it was a thick, smoky fog, Londoners did not raise concern quickly. The old days of “pea soupers” (fogs as metaphorically as thick as pea soup, sometimes even green-tinted fog from industrial pollutants in the nineteenth century) were not far in the past, and London had always been known for its fog. Children were released from school as “parents were advised not to risk letting their children get lost on the way to school,” according to Prime Minister Ken Livingstone, who experienced the Great Smog as a boy. Above-ground traffic came to a standstill, ending all public transport outside of the Underground. Even ambulance services were halted, forcing the ill to get to hospital on their own.

Somewhere amid the haze, a rumor started that the smog was poisonous. It was in fact poisonous, due to its composition of pollutants, but most had fair air quality within their homes and wore handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses when they went out. Young children and people with respiratory problems were the few to face real danger. However, as people saw more and more deaths (estimates calculate that 4,000 more people died than usual), panic began to strike. People attempted to flee their homes, overloading the Underground until it too broke down and was unfixable in the dense fog.

As December 6 and 7 rolled on, the fog became denser. In some places, visibility decreased to less than a foot, making walkers outside unable to see their feet or even their hands with arms outstretched. Smoky fog seeped into buildings where it could, and the panic turned to all-out chaos. Rioters smashed into shops initially looting survival gear and then, after it became obvious police were unable to respond, anything of value. Fires broke out, adding to the smog and sense of Armageddon. As reporters and what newspapers were able to continue to print spread word of the madness, riots spread further.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill called in aid from the armed forces who were able to communicate by radio but unable to react to one another outside of a few yards. They attempted to canvas the city, but resources were stretched too thin to alleviate much of the rioting and damage. Primarily, the soldiers assisted in evacuating the city, a sight not seen since the days of the Blitz, escorting civilians onto special slow-moving trains bound for the North and Southwest.

Finally on December 9, the anticyclone dissipated, and the fog lifted from the scarred remains. An estimated 8,000 more people died due to respiratory complications, and commerce in the city was limited for weeks during cleanup. The government launched into numerous studies on the problems of low-grade coal fires and began legislation promoting paraffin heaters and then electric. Further actions led to the Clean Air Act of 1956, much improving restrictions on pollutants. Meanwhile, other studies questioned the impact of media on spreading the panic. The Conservative government put into effect new regulations managing the emotional coverage of news in times of emergency, reestablishing review boards similar to those during the counterespionage days of WWII.

Although rarely taken into play, numerous fines were handed out for reports on the battles between Mods and Rockers during Whitsun weekend in 1964, giving ironic government support to the youth subcultures as media portrayed them as folk devils.

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In reality, there was not much concern over the Great Smog. It was not until after the fog cleared that doctors and coroners began to notice the increased death numbers. Environmentalism came to the forefront of the political discussion, and numerous Clean Air Acts have since been passed.

December 3, 1839 - Abraham Lincoln Fails his Admission to the US Circuit Court

2011-10-06T18:08:00.000-07:00

In another critical moment of failure of famed States Rights advocate Abraham Lincoln, his application to practice law at the federal level was dismissed, possibly due to finagling from Democratic opponents. The grounds for refusal were based in his fiery rhetoric and several challenges of his character, giving examples from his history of scatological humor and rough story telling. Lincoln could not deny these remarks and attempted a defense on First Amendment Free Speech, but he would soon give up as he fell into one of his "melancholies" (believed to be what modern psychologists would call clinical depression).

Lincoln's life had been fraught with hardships. Born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky in 1809, young Lincoln was the son of Thomas Lincoln, who had become a wealthy and respectable man in the real estate business until he was wiped out in 1816 due to court cases over a faulty title. They moved to Indiana, a state where slavery was banned, and tragedy struck again as milk sickness (tremetol poisoning) took Lincoln's mother. Frontier life was hard, and the Lincolns moved westward again to Illinois to a new homestead. Lincoln left home and worked on a river barge before returning and starting a store that would ultimately fail. After losing a political campaign in 1832 and serving as a captain in the Black Hawk War, Lincoln finally found his path as an orator and lawyer.

He was famously self-educated, stating, "I studied with nobody." Instead, Lincoln read Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, the Revised Statutes of Indiana, the Declaration of Independence, and the United States Constitution while working as a secretary and surveyor in New Salem, Illinois. In 1834, along with his legal firm, he successfully began his career with the Illinois General Assembly as a Whig, following his hero Henry Clay, whose American System ideals he had begun to follow passionately. As a Whig, he would be firmly for investment in infrastructure to improve the nation, voting for projects such as the Illinois and Michigan Canal to connect Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River, roads, and railroads. With the Panic of 1837, however, the projects became bankrupt and Illinois was “littered with unfinished roads and partially dug canals" while its bonds tumbled in value. Lincoln suggested making up the money by Illinois purchasing federal land and selling it for a profit to private citizens, which the federal government refused. These disappointments by federalism would later impact his philosophy of state self-dependence.

Just as his career seemed to be on the proper path, Lincoln's subtly failing strength as a Whig became a stumbling block blamed for costing him the ability to argue cases in the US Circuit Court. His world collapsed as he settled into depression, even skipping offers by John Todd Stuart, a war buddy and benefactor who had inspired Lincoln to take up law, to meet his cousin Mary Todd. Eventually the two would meet and even marry, though they once broke their engagement due to second thoughts. During this time, Lincoln determined his ideas on independence and voluntary mass-agreements, like marriage, and he focused on local items for his legal practice and political career supporting federalism as less important.

In 1847, Lincoln advanced to the federal level as a representative in the US House. He argued bitterly against the Mexican-American War (disgusted with calls for the glories of war, which he called an “attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood”) and reaffirmed his “free soil” stance on slavery saying, "the Congress of the United States has the power, under the constitution, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; but that power ought not to be exercised unless at the request of the people of said District” while still denouncing the evils of slave-holding. He was rewarded with his support during the election of Zachary Taylor with an offering to be governor of the new Oregon Territory, but Lincoln declined, wanting to stay close to his home of Illinois.

Lincoln spent the next decade working to support his home state, running unsuccessfully in the 1858 Senate campaign but becoming famous after his publication of speeches in the Douglas-Lincoln Debates, including “I believe this government can endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will be divided.” He was proven wrong with the secession of the South after the narrow 1860 election of William H. Seward. During the Civil War, Lincoln argued for the rights of Southerners but agreed that a violation of the agreement of Union had taken place. He begrudgingly supported military action and rose significantly to the Illinois Senate, where his aid bills laid groundwork for military planning in decades to come.

After the war and the assassination of Seward, Lincoln became a powerful voice on Reconstruction and the necessity to return the South to normalcy, including the return of many rights. Gathering support from other wings of the Republicans and even former supporters of Douglas as well as revealing much of the corruption of victory-profiteers, Lincoln challenged and would eventually overthrow the Radical Republicans even though he had agreed with them on many anti-slavery issues before. Eventually, Lincoln’s fair-mindedness and disgust of corruption would get him elected President of the United States in 1868. Due to his deteriorating health and the increasing mental illness of his wife, Lincoln would retire from politics at the end of his term, though he had already set a new precedent for the United States with regional interest and a successful plurality of political parties. Many scholars would say this disjointedness did much to limit federal power that could have alleviated social woes in the next century’s Great Depression.

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In reality, Lincoln successfully passed on to argue in the US Circuit Court and continued his belief in an American system, championing many Whig and later Republican ideals. His victories through political thought and the Civil War laid much of America’s groundwork of federalism.

November 30, 1876 - Forward Pass Declared Illegal in American Football

2011-10-04T19:45:00.001-07:00

During an early game of American Football, a pivotal moment took place when Yale athletic legend Walter Camp tossed the ball forward while in mid-tackle to his teammate Oliver Thompson, who then went on to score a touchdown. The opposing team, Princeton, protested as only backward passes to teammates. As it was an action performed in a tackle, the beguiled referee determined to settle the decision with a flipped coin. In the end, Princeton was supported, and the touchdown was nullified, along with the notion of a “forward pass” in American-style football.

Americans had been playing various non-codified games for decades already by the time modern football began to take form. Early in the nineteenth century, boys and men alike often played forms of “mob football” that date back to English games of time immemorial. Rules varied from town to town, with the “Boston Game” taking the lead as a hybrid of the diverging “kicking” and “carrying” games that would later evolve into Association Football (soccer) and rugby, respectively. The Oneida Football Club of boys on the Boston Common established rules in 1862 for the first organized take on what would become the modern game. It was an uphill battle, however, as football was routinely being banned from universities as too dangerous or unbecoming of gentlemen, and it would be years until these organized fellows went to college themselves with a proven formula for gameplay.

The bans on football ended, and colleges began to play one another in a loose intercollegiate league including Rutgers, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia. These big four schools met in 1873 to determine a standardized set of rules that would resemble soccer more than rugby. Meanwhile, Harvard, McGill, and Tufts continued the fascination with the Boston Game, more rugby than soccer and incorporating the “try”, which would evolve into the “touchdown” of carrying the ball into the end zone. In 1875, Harvard and Yale met for the first “The Game”, which became an annual event, and a new league was born as they decided to make the hybrid football the new standard for competition. On November 23, 1876, a new conference determined official rules for college football, among them making note of, but not clarifying, the forward pass.

In the Yale-Princeton game the next week, the forward pass would officially be laid to rest. Camp was disappointed with the choice, but he worked to determine a better, faster game where speed became as important as brawn. He created the line of scrimmage and a system of downs to move the game in increments, creating an ordered form of strategy and cleverness where there had once been only mobs. Camp also determined game length, field size, and scoring methods, creating the skeleton of what would be American football today.

Key to the game was the idea of movement, which would prove its most influential piece as the twentieth century dawned. Players typically followed mass formations, moving violently as one unit and often crushing opponents during a charge. In 1905 alone, nineteen young men were killed, and cries arose for safety on the field, even to the point President Theodore Roosevelt threatened to end football nationwide. An attempt to limit scrimmages was made, but the resulting punting game did not work well. With the forward pass having been declared illegal, the solution came to be ending mass formations, making each individual a significant piece to the eleven-member team.

Under Coach “Pop” Warner, one of the most influential football players of all time, Native American Jim Thorpe, would revolutionize the game with his expert moves. Pop did not want the fragile track star to play in football on fears he would be injured, but Thorpe convinced him to try a play against the defensive line and "ran around past and through them not once, but twice." Later that year, Thorpe would single-handedly score all of the points for Carlisle Indian Industrial School in an upset victory over the famed Harvard team, 18-15. Coaches across the nation hurried to emulate the apparent need for speed, finally matching Camp’s dream of a fast game working from a series of plays.

Since that time, American football has grown to enormous popularity and a multi-billion dollar industry. While America’s pastime of baseball became notoriously corrupt and slow, football has grown to be its rival, making key advances in its skillfulness and complex, eager maneuvers in high scoring games. Another rival, basketball, has taken its own season with some players in college crossing over due to the similarities in passing and running, but still with the unique feature of a pausing scrimmage and of course the famed tackles of blinding gymnastic agility.

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In reality, the coin toss gave America its first forward pass. While still technically illegal, the pass would happen again in 1895 in a successful attempt by the Tar Heels to break a zero-zero tie between North Carolina and Georgia. After further experimentation, the forward pass was approved in the 1906 revisions and has become a mainstay of American football to this day.

September 26, 1960 - Nixon-Kennedy Debate Faces Technical Difficulties

2011-09-26T20:51:00.000-07:00

What would have been the first-ever televised debate among presidential candidates came under technical difficulties that cut out the visual transmission, leaving only the audio and a test pattern, leading many Americans to turn off their TVs.

Television was fast becoming the dominant medium for mass communication. By 1960, the inclusion of televisions in American households had increased some tenfold to 88%. There had been presidential debates broadcast by radio for some time, but this would be the first live coverage of presidential candidates in what would prove to be one of the closest races of the twentieth century. It was estimated that some 70 million people had tuned in for the debate, though they would be disappointed and would have to wait another week to see their candidates.

The Republicans had dominated the White House since former general Dwight Eisenhower had taken over for Truman in '53. Eisenhower's two-time vice-president Richard Nixon was now up to bat, having practically clawed his way up to the top of politics from a childhood of poverty. An economic recession had come into play, weakening the Republican grip and turning the attention to the Democratic Party's new poster boy, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was son of Joseph Kennedy, Ambassador to Britain before World War II and millionaire spirits-importer. Kennedy was Catholic, which proved to make many Protestants wary of a potential Vatican-dominated Washington but also bolstered the polls with many Catholics who had not participated in politics much before. Both men were young and had served in the Navy, but Kennedy had the advantage of being obviously more physically attractive.

Nixon, however, proved to carry the more powerful voice. At the time of what would have been the first televised debate, Nixon had just recovered from a hospital stay due to illness while campaigning and was pale, skinny, and still looked very exhausted. Attendees took great notice at the difference between the healthy, tanned playboy of Kennedy and the frail Nixon, but when the camera transmission failed, Nixon won handily. He would continue his luck when the second debate successfully went on the air (by this time he would be plumper from his famous "milkshake diet", well rested, and use professional stage makeup) as well as the third, though Kennedy would make up ground and cause the fourth to be pronounced a draw.

The election itself would be fraught with supposed corruption. Mob influence may have pushed Cook County in Chicago to be taken by Kennedy, which nearly tilted the whole of Illinois into his favor. Further questions were raised in Texas, the home of Kennedy's would-be vice-president, Senator Lyndon Johnson. Nixon reportedly refused to point fingers, which many believed would only lead to scandal on even his own end if investigations began about election fraud, such as the conspiracy that his aides had sabotaged the televised debate that September. Key Democratic votes were taken away from Kennedy by electors calling for conservative Democrat Senator Harry Byrd, and it would be enough for Nixon to take the White House the next year.

Nixon's term would be one of international turmoil. He would grant the order for air support at the Cuban exiles' victory at the Bay of Pigs, which would begin the Cuban War that lasted for almost two years before Castro's regime fell. Tensions with the Soviet Union would be constantly high, but the fighter in Nixon refused to ever back down. He poured resources into the American space program, paving the way for a Moon landing by the end of the decade. The Berlin Wall went up, strengthening the Iron Curtain, but Nixon would be instrumental in opening relations with the People's Republic of China, tilting the balance of world power into a wider mix than simply NATO against the Warsaw Pact.

While people debated his “soft on communism” approach, Nixon would continue to be popular and ever more so after his sudden assassination in Dallas while campaigning in November of 1963 with hopes of securing Texas for his next election. His vice-president Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr, would fill out his term and continue Nixon's international diplomacy with East Asia after his own election in 1964. Nixon is routinely ranked among the most loved of American presidents.

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In reality, the debate was televised, and Kennedy took the lead in the polls for the first time in the election season. He would win that November in the closest election since 1916. Nixon would refuse to debate again on television during his presidential campaigns in 1968 and '72, both of which he would win.

November 29, 1944 – Operation Elster Makes American Landfall

2011-09-15T21:02:00.000-07:00

On a stormy day, German submarine U-1230 came up from an eight-day rest on the ocean floor off the coast of Maine and delivered its package of two spies to Hancock Point in Frenchman Bay. A freak wave caught the landing craft, however, tossing one of the spies, William Colepaugh, into the cold sea, where he drowned. The surviving spy, Erich Gimpel, determined to go on with Operation Elster (English, “Magpie”) in gathering intelligence on rocketry laboratories, sabotaging the Manhattan Project, and, perhaps most significantly, setting up the radio beacons that would enable the Germans to launch their V-1 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.

Gimpel would later say during his interrogation after being caught by coordinated FBI agents and Army MPs outside of Los Alamos, NM, that losing Colepaugh was the best thing to happen to his mission. Colepaugh was an American defector who had been expelled from the US Naval Reserve for, as the official report stated, the good of the service. He was a discontented and seemed unable to apply himself enough to complete tasks, yet when he defected to the German consulate in Portugal after leaving a Merchant Marine ship, Colepaugh was chosen for an espionage mission to the United States. He was paired with Gimpel, a radio-operator at mines in Peru before the war, and the two were trained to be spies at The Hague, still controlled by German forces. They were given orders, transported across the Atlantic via U-boat, and told that a pack of submarines bearing V-1 flying bombs would come behind them.

After managing to get to Boston by foot and hitchhiking, Gimpel took the train to New York City, where he acquired rooms and began construction of his radio transmitter. He was stunted in his chances for espionage without American Colepaugh, so instead he focused on establishing communications with Berlin. By Christmas, he was able to radio messages to Germany, and Hitler became ecstatic at the thought of a vicious strike to America, perhaps one enough to bloody her nose into retreat from Europe. The Fuhrer pressed resources into the Vulkan Docks in Stettin to assemble launch-canisters developed after the experiments with on-board launches in 1943 had been unsuccessful. Many in the German High Command thought the focus was waste and only annoy the American tiger as the end of the war was coming within view, but Hitler personally ensured that the project would go forward.

The United States Government had become aware of the threat the September before, when captured German spy Oscar Mantel had given up information during an FBI interrogation that the Nazis were planning a long-ranged missile attack. In the Department of War, which was largely under the weight of the Army, the recommendation to FDR was that no real threat existed. The Navy disagreed and, on its own, wrote up plans for an “Operation Bumblebee” that would become Operation Teardrop in which a sub-hunting fleet would track down and destroy submarines bearing rockets. Vice Admiral Jonas H. Ingram, commander of the Atlantic Fleet, prepared task forces within the bounds of allowed resource allocation.

Germany went forward with its attack plans. As 1945 began, Albert Speer, German Minister of Armaments and War Production, gave a broadcast stating that flying bombs "would fall on New York by February 1." The propaganda was largely dismissed, and February 1 passed without incident. German spy Gimpel finally established his radio beacons later that month and began his journey west toward Tennessee and New Mexico. In late March, a seven U-boat fleet set out with its hastily prepared launch canisters, and the US took notice of increased radio traffic as April began. Ingram’s ships began a patrol, but it would be too late as the V-1 attacks struck in the early morning of April 3.

Many of the launches would malfunction and at least one rocket would fall far off-target into New Jersey, but several flying-bombs struck home, spreading incendiaries over Manhattan and one landing in the National Mall between the US Capitol and the White House, damaging the Smithsonian Museums. American sentiment flew into angry panic, especially upon news of FDR’s death by stroke only days later. Ingram’s Operation Teardrop was pressed forward, managing to sink five submarines at the cost of one destroyer, the USS Frederick C. Davis. Hitler’s attempt at scaring the Americans into peace only exacerbated a public opinion of revenge akin to after Pearl Harbor, and newly promoted four-star general Patton was directed by now President Harry Truman to take Berlin rather than turning south to liberate Bohemia.

In a combined Soviet-American assault, Berlin fell, and Hitler would be found dead in his bunker from suicide. The war continued in the Pacific and in the minds of many Germans, such as Gimpel in New Mexico where he would be apprehended in late July, supposedly having witnessed the Trinity tests. After the war finally closed, Truman launched his doctrine of American invulnerability, never to allow another such attack on home soil to happen again. Typical post-war conservatism was scarce, and instead massive resources (including captured German scientists) were allocated to defense projects that would be able to take out any missile attack with strategies such as homing counter-measure rockets, supersonic jets, tracking satellites, and focused microwave-rays that could destroy incoming enemy (most likely Soviet) weapons with no fear of a “cold war” becoming hot with a surprise attack.

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In reality, Colepaugh survived the landing in Maine. Upon their arrival in New York, Colepaugh turned to womanizing and drink, then changed his mind about defecting and turned himself in to the FBI. His information aided in the capture of Gimpel, ending any hope of success of sabotage in Operation Elster. Rocket attacks proved infeasible; the Germans were never adapt their submarines to launch V-1 flying bombs, and scare tactics of a U-boat pack off the Atlantic seaboard were swiftly defeated by Operation Teardrop.

December 19, 216 BC – Hannibal Captures Rome

2011-09-13T22:28:00.000-07:00

The Second Puno-Roman War had raged for two years, and Rome became desperate after a string of catastrophic defeats at the hand of Hannibal, son of Hamilcar Barca. Hamilcar had served as the great Carthaginian commander in the First Punic War and went into exile in Iberia after angrily killing Hanno II, leader of the peace-mongers of Carthage, who had demobilized the Carthaginian navy and allowed the Romans to rebuild their own fleet. Hamilcar had passed on his distrust and hatred of the Romans to Hannibal, who set off across Gaul in a surprise attack across the Alps that caught the Romans with their sandals untied. The Gauls of northern Italy rose up around him, and Hannibal began a years-long campaign around the Italian peninsula that would end with the defeat of Rome.

Most of the Romans were sent to Iberia or Sicily to fight an imperial war, and the consul Publius Cornelius Scipio scrounged what 42,000 men he could to meet Hannibal in battle at Trebia. Hannibal's cavalry and expert flanking defeated the Romans, sweeping them from northern Italy. They vowed to drive Hannibal from Italy and formed up an army of more than 50,000, which Hannibal ambushed them on the cliff-ringed shores of Lake Trasimene in one of the most famous flanking battles in history. By 216 BC, many of the Roman “allies” erupted in revolt, and Hannibal captured the key supply depot at Cannae, where he and his army rested on the eastern end of Italy.

The Romans were determined to have another, final battle with the largest army anyone had attempted on the peninsula. Working under both consuls, they formed up a force of nearly 90,000 men, which included quaestors, tribunes, and even senators from the 300. The enormous army attacked Hannibal, who feinted a retreat, catching the much larger army in an enveloping maneuver that allowed the Carthaginians to surrounded and again slaughter Romans by the tens of thousands. After the battle, some 50,000 Romans lay dead, including much of the governors of Rome itself. According to legend, every single Roman was related directly to someone killed in battle. Hannibal's army, meanwhile, had only lost some 8,000.

At the victory, Hannibal's Nubian commander of cavalry, Mahrabal, approached him, saying that he would ride ahead of the main army and begin the attack on Rome. Hannibal, however, was slow to agree. His was a field army, and they did not have the siege weapons necessary to take Rome. Moreover, the Romans still had many allies as well as a seemingly unbreakable resolve, and moving on the city would potentially cut off his supply lines. Finally, Hannibal's men had fought long and hard, and he sought to reward them with three days of looting the corpses from the field. Mahrabal responded, “Truly the Gods have not bestowed all things upon the same person. Thou knowest indeed, Hannibal, how to conquer, but thou knowest not how to make use of your victory.”

Hannibal,suffering a migraine from his strained vision after having lost an eye before the Battle of Lake Trasimene, responded that Mahrabal could do as he saw fit, and the Nubian took an army of volunteers to begin the siege of Rome with Hannibal's forces to follow after their days of rest. He sent a case of some 200 rings cut from the fingers of dead Roman nobles to the Carthaginian senate, asking for reinforcements and equipment necessary to finish the war. After much debate, Carthage agreed, and they gained new allies as Grecian Sicily revolted against Rome and Macedon joined Hannibal's cause.

Even with an upgraded army that summer, the siege of Rome was not easy. Rather than a uniform siege line, Hannibal stretched his resources and emulated Mahrabal's tactics of constant patrols on horseback with skirmishers defeating any supply trains attempting to sneak into Rome. The Romans attempted several times to piece together a larger force to drive away the Carthaginian raiders, but Hannibal's superior tactics defeated them over and over. Finally, as winter approached, the Romans gave in. They had done everything they could to resist even moderate peace talks, mobilizing the entire male population including slaves, outlawing the word “peace”, and banning public crying while limited mourning periods to 30 days. Hannibal is noted by historians such as the Roman Livy as saying that want broke the Romans' back, but never military defeat.

The war ended very favorably to the Carthaginians, who raised up opposing cities such as Tarentum and Pisa to cow Roman influence on the peninsula. Carthage's empire would spread as the centuries progressed, south into Africa and eastward through the Mediterranean and Black Seas, using their famous navy to establish colonies and dominance in places such as Greece, Egypt, and Palestine. As a merchant people, their influence was largely cultural with an increase of child-sacrifice seen in archeology, and their empire did not go much beyond the navigable shores. After hundreds of years of dominance, the Carthaginians would eventually fall to invading Vandals, whose King Genseric would establish his capital and center of his state religion of Arian Christianity there in 439.

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In reality, Hamilcar never killed Hanno II. In the Second Punic War, Hanno would sway the Carthaginians away from sending reinforcements, and Hannibal would never take Rome itself. He marched on Rome in 211 BC, but the attack was temporary and largely propagandist. For the next thirteen years after Cannae, Hannibal would fight a losing war in Italy before being recalled to defend Carthage from a Roman invasion force under Scipio Africanus, who would defeat him at the Battle of Zama.

278 BC - Pyrrhus Obliviates the Romans

2011-09-12T07:59:00.001-07:00

The short-lived days of the Roman Empire came to an end as Greek conqueror Pyrrhus of Epirus determined to finish off the growing city. What had once been a pack of exiles and bandits who could only gain wives by stealing them during a false olympics became Rome, a masterful city-state that had taken in numerous forced allies after years of expansionistic war in Italy.

Originally of the Molossians, Pyrrhus's father had been dethroned, and he grew up in exile, learning the importance of military strength and political prowess. His father-in-law, Ptolemy of Egypt, restored him as king of Epirus in 297 BC, and Pyrrhus determined to expand his power. He attempted to conquer Macedon, but was defeated. In 281 BC, a new chance arose to build a league of allies when Tarentum on the southern end of Italy determined to revolt against the growing influence of Rome. The Oracle at Delphi told him “Aio te, AEacide, Romanos vincere posse”, meaning, "I say, Pyrrhus, that you the Romans can conquer." Armed with 3,000 cavalry, 2,000 archers, 500 slingers, 20,000 infantry and 20 war elephants (much of his forces on lone from Egypt), Pyrrhus set off for his Italian campaign.

In 280 BC, he met the Romans in the Battle of Heraclea, defeating their larger army but taking tremendous losses not easily replaced as he was away from Epirus and his allies were wary of utterly declaring war on Rome. The Romans considered a treaty, but eventually declined and rebuilt a fresh army. The next year, he Pyrrhus again defeated the Romans at Asculum, and again his losses were so large that he commented, "One more such victory, and we shall be undone."

In 278 BC, Pyrrhus came upon two new opportunities. The Greek cities in Sicily approached him to drive out Carthage as he was driving the Romans out of southern Italy, and the Macedonians invited him to take the throne there as their king Ceraunus had been killed by barbarians. Both were glorious, but Pyrrhus determined his most important goal should be utter defeat of his present enemy, lest they counterattack and he lose his position as his father had. Taking up what was left in his coffers and forces, Pyrrhus stormed Rome with a grand army and left the city with no stone on top of another.

With Rome destroyed, Pyrrhus's influence in Italy was secure. He next took up the position as King of Sicily, driving out the Carthaginians and pacifying the Greeks in Sicily to be loyal under his command. Pyrrhus then returned to Macedon, and he was able to build up a system of diplomacy that make the Pyrrhic Empire the great power of the middle Mediterranean. He was invited by Cleonymus of Sparta to overthrow the city there, and Pyrrhus began his last campaign in 272 BC. He would be caught in the street fighting after successfully sneaking his army into the city and killed by a roofing tile thrown by an old woman. It seemed an unfitting end who Hannibal, the great statesman of the Carthaginians and conqueror of Gaul, called the greatest military commander in the world. His strategy of utterly destroying and absorbing his enemies gave birth to the phrase "Pyrrhic victory" in which a conquest is total.

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In reality, Pyrrhus left the Romans to rebuild, and they would harass Italy to the point he abandoned Sicily to fight back, but was ultimately defeated after a string of "Pyrrhic victories" in which he won battles only at terrible cost. The unclear message of the Oracle stated that the Romans would conquer him, and they would in later campaigns into Illycrium. Appian noted that Hannibal called Pyrrhus the second greatest commander after Alexander.

* Idea offered by Steve Payne

November 28, 1943 – Roosevelts Arrive at Tehran Conference

2011-09-10T07:21:00.000-07:00

As the Second World War raged, the leaders of the “Big Four” Allied nations sought to meet, even though they would risk life and limb to do so. The Japanese Empire separated America from China, while Nazi Germany divided the USSR from America and Britain. They found a neutral point in Tehran, Persia, where Russian Premier Stalin could come from the north, Chinese Chairman Chang Kai-shek could approach from the east, and American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill could arrive from the west after a meeting shortly before in Cairo. They would discuss strategy for defeating the Axis powers as well as outlining post-war plans.

After a good deal of argument that the meetings would be strictly business between the immediate leaders and that women would not be allowed, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt convinced her husband that she and their daughter Anna would be necessary as future leaders in their own rights (and supposedly asking whether he had anything to hide, which would become more obvious after FDR’s stroke in 1945 where mistress Lucy Rutherfurd was by his side). Roosevelt’s arguments proved hollow as they arrived in Cairo and were surprised to be met by Mrs. Churchill. When they continued on to Tehran, they would be joined by Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Soong May-ling. Joseph Stalin also attended the meeting, though his wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva had died in 1932 from apparent suicide (that was rumored to be actual murder at Stalin’s hand) after the two had a public argument. Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt formed a “Big Three” of the conference, edging out the war with the Japanese on the important matter of finishing off Germany with a European campaign.

While the men conferred, Eleanor gathered Mrs. Churchill and Chiang to tea on a number of occasions, which quickly turned into their own summit. Eleanor had long been a supporter of the Red Cross, while Mrs. Clementine Churchill was currently the Chairman of the Red Cross Aid to Russia Fund as well as a number of home front charitable efforts and Madame Kai-shek had worked to build and fund orphanages and schools for Nationalist "warphans," whose parents had been killed in the dark times of the past decade in China. They agreed on a number of matters that would eventually become important parts of shared efforts worldwide in 1945 when Mrs. Roosevelt became a representative and charter member of the United Nations Organization.

At one point in the conference, Mrs. Churchill noted Mr. Churchill’s worries about how eager FDR seemed to please the stony Stalin. Eleanor related the importance of the Soviet declaration of war against Japan once the Europe question was over, but Soong May-ling voiced concern they all shared that Stalin was working to ensure a powerful Soviet Bloc of buffer territory in Eastern Europe and would most likely soon be funding the communists in China to overthrow the republican government that would serve as the Japanese were driven out. The ladies’ concerns grew, and Eleanor and Clementine voiced their opinions to their husbands. FDR began to rethink his position, and Churchill redoubled his conviction that the world would not be safe from “the scourge and terror of war” as long as oppression in the Soviet Union remained.

Even with the distrust of Stalin growing uniformly, Churchill and FDR put into effect Operation Overlord headed by General Eisenhower that would begin a new front in France. Stalin, in return, promised to declare war on Japan, though the action would not follow until Germany was fully defeated. Meanwhile, the western Allies grew closer to Chiang Kai-shek, whose anti-communist sentiment spread. By the time of the conference in Yalta in February of 1945, feelings had shifted away from giving the Soviets direct control over much of anything outside of their prewar borders. The Morgenthau Plan to de-industrialize Germany was written off to keep down potential resistance, which infuriated Stalin, who began to demand why he bothered to fight a war if the rest of the Allies were simply going to let Germany rest to fight again. Unsatisfactory plans were agreed upon, though it was understood that, after the war, they would quickly be shelved.

After the taking of Berlin, threats of use of the A-bomb caused Stalin to retreat across Europe and acknowledge the International Zones. In China, support from America bolstered the Nationalist armies, which snuffed out the communist forces in China in 1947 after taking their capital at Yan'an. Stalin found himself surrounded with few allies, and he turned inward to develop his own atomic weapons. The “Cold War” standoff would continue for nearly a decade until 1956 brought attempted incursions into Hungary, threats over the Suez Canal, and the internal disputes over leadership after the death of Stalin. The weakness urged NATO to push for the dissolution of the Soviet government, resulting in a swift war that brought on a new Russian constitutional convention. UN aid bolstered the Russian people and eased tensions to ensure the new government would not fall to another predatory dictator.

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In reality, FDR objected to the Roosevelt ladies attending the conference in Tehran. He held that no women would be allowed to attend, even though Mrs. Churchill and Madame Chiang Kai-shek both attended, which left Eleanor and Anna most displeased.

November 26, 1864 – "Alice's Adventures Under Ground" Manuscript Burned

2011-09-07T17:53:00.001-07:00

In one of the more dramatic moments of logician Charles Dodgson's fairly private life, he attempted to deliver a handwritten manuscript to his young neighbor Alice Liddell as an early Christmas present. He was caught in a sudden rain shower and approached the Liddell family's home drenched but received graciously. As he was changing into dry clothes offered by Henry Liddell, an argument began. The source of the argument is unknown, though the two had disagreed on a number of occasions on college politics, and Dodgson left the Liddells' in his own clothes. Mr. Liddell proceeded to throw Dodgson's manuscript into the fire and comment, "Children need lessons from moral men."

Dodgson had met the Liddell family when Henry came as dean to Christ Church, Oxford, where Dodgson studied and would serve as a lecturer in mathematics. He suffered a stammer, which is believed to have been what kept him from entering the priesthood. Dodgson and the Liddell family became close, with Dodgson befriending the Liddells' boy Henry and their daughters Lorina, Edith, and Alice. As a family friend, Dodgson would become close to the children in the family, whom he would tell stories, have picnics, and use as models in his photography hobby. The friendship came to Dodgson's advantage in 1862 when he attempted an appeal to halt his taking of priestly orders, interrupting a lifelong plan of his mother's that he would enter the priesthood. As dean, Liddell noted that he should take the appeal to the college ruling body, which might only grant the appeal on grounds of expelling Dodgson. Instead, however, Liddell made the decision himself, allowing Dodgson to end his path to priesthood and remain at Christ Church as a mathematician.

On July 4, 1862, while boating with Mr. Liddell and the girls, Dodgson would tell a series of stories about a girl named "Alice" (in honor of, but not based upon, ten-year-old Alice Liddell) who fell down a rabbit hole and experienced many strange adventures. The Liddells encouraged Dodgson to write out his story, and he obliged, working on it for two years before delivering the manuscript to Alice. In the meantime, Dodgson and Liddells had a falling out. His diary through this time had numerous pages torn out, but it is known that, on June 27, 1863, Mrs. Liddell approached Dodgson on a topic that had been the source of much gossip. Notes suggest it was a questionable relationship, either with the governess or “Ina”, referring to either the oldest girl Lorina or her mother, also Lorina. Whatever the subject, the problem was enough to spur a falling out between Dodgson and the family, which lasted perhaps a year. The problem seemed to have faded enough for Dodgson to present his manuscript to Alice for the upcoming Christmas.

However, a renewed argument with the head of the house (and dean of his college) would cause Dodgson to storm out of the Liddells’ forever. While sometimes threatening to quit his position, Dodgson remained at Christ Church, lecturing and writing in the fields of mathematics and logic. He wrote stories, but none were published more widely than a few relations and acquaintances. Dodgson was encouraged to publish his Alice tales by friend and fantasy novelist George MacDonald, who had read a partial manuscript to his children, but Dodgson was through with it. Instead, he focused on his logic puzzles and completed several important theses on argument up to his death in 1898.

Meanwhile, Victorian children’s literature would remain “moral”, as Mr. Liddell had mentioned. Some scandalous material was produced, but censors were quick to keep publishers respectable. The moral constraints even continued across the Atlantic as L. Frank Baum rewrote his American fairytales to include necessary words of wisdom for children not appreciating home, such as his hero Dylan Gale. J. M. Barrie would be refused on his first draft of Peter and Wendy from his play Peter Pan, the editor saying that children needed deeper moral lessons and explanations that the ambivalence of the ethics of Wonderland would only lead to loneliness and destruction. Even into the 1960s, animated cartoons for children would carry lessons such as the moral responsibility of standing up to predators in Tom and Jerry, although cartoonist Walt Disney defied any sort of logic in his early “Silly Symphonies” of the 1930s, art simply for the sake of enjoyment.

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In reality, the manuscript was embraced, and in 1865 Charles Dodgson (as “Lewis Carroll”) published Alice in Wonderland to wide enjoyment, though it was critically snubbed. The silliness of his stories would inspire writers such as L. Frank Baum (whose Dorothy came as a recognition of Dodgson’s female protagonist), J. M. Barrie, and many more with the notion that stories can be simply fun.

November 21, 1910 - Revolt of the Lash Spurs Race War in Brazil

2011-09-01T17:37:00.000-07:00

Brazil, though a large, advancing nation in the early twentieth century and a leader among Latin American countries as part of the ABC Powers (Argentina, Brazil, & Chile), still stood as a culture suffering from racial division. While many French colonies had ended slavery with the Revolution in 1789, England had abolished it by act of Parliament in 1833, and the United States fought its civil war in 1861 partially over the matter, Brazil did not begin gradually ending slavery until 1871 with the passage of the Rio Branco Law (or "The Law of Free Birth") providing freedom for children newborn to slaves, the Saraiva-Cotegipe Law in 1885 freeing slaves over 60 years old, and finally total abolition in 1888 with the Lei Áurea shortly before the emperor was overthrown. While Brazil avoided much of the US's infamous institutionalization of race superiority with Jim Crow, there was still a significant social division of race among the wealthy whites and the blacks, paros (mixed race), and caboclos (mixed Euro-Indians), fed by intellectual “science” of the time.

While minorities were kept at a lower caste in general culture, the most obvious racism was felt in the military. In particular, the Brazilian navy was notorious for white commanders with minority crews held at their whim. Living conditions were poor aboard ship, but the navy was making leaps beyond other navies in comparable nations. In the early days of the Republic, the government focused on the army to quell internal problems, leaving only a handful of naval soldiers and less than 2,000 marines. As tiny as it was, the navy proved instrumental in the Revoltas da Armada of 1891 when President Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca attempted to dissolve Congress and continued to battle against President Marshal Floriano Peixoto who held onto office despite legal need of elections in the next few years. After the turn of the century, calls began for building up the navy and establishing Brazil as a significant power at sea. Other nations such as Britain, Germany, and the United States rushed into the naval arms race, and Brazil was quick to catch up with many new ships and two dreadnoughts, the Minas Gerais and São Paulo, both commissioned in 1910.

Economic downturn struck Brazil just after the completion of their dreadnoughts, causing the third proposed, Rio de Janeiro, to be shelved. The troubled times also turned into harder conditions aboard ship as well as on land with food and supplies cut back to save on expenses. General morale fell, which caused discipline to be sharpened, including the use of racial slurs and corporal punishment, specifically the lash. This aggravated two years of organization and protest against flogging, which involved "leather whips tipped with metal balls", and pushed the sailors into planned mutiny. The men aboard the Minas Gerais chose João Cândido Felisberto (“The Black Admiral”) as leader and watched furiously as a sailor was sentenced to 250 lashes, continuing even after he slipped into unconsciousness.

In the late hours of November 21, the men began their mutiny, killing officers and capturing British engineers as hostages. The revolt spread to the São Paulo as well as the Deodoro and the Bahia. Their demands began simply, but as Cândido saw that the Army was moving to protect the capital Rio de Janeiro and outnumber the coastal defenders who were sympathetic, he decided that the only way to survive was to make wider demands. The issue that tied the bulk of the oppressed together was the problem of race. Most of the sailors (as well as army and manual laborers) were black, many of them former slaves or their sons, forced into place by lack of other options. Cândido and his advisers (including several of the British) wrote up a new list of demands for rights despite race as well as taxes on the rich to support charities for the poor.

The “Letter to Brazil” (Letra a Brasil) was sent by written message, word of mouth, and even wireless, spreading through the country and spawning an upheaval in major cities and areas where minority populations outnumbered the whites. The army quickly came onto the side of the navy, which made the white elites unable to put down the revolt as they had many in the past. Britain began to step in, but when their hostages were cheerfully released home, Brazil was left to itself. Much of the government and the elites fled the country. The remainder invited Cândido ashore, and a new government was built following his manifesto.

Public education became mandatory as a subpoint on the Letter, and the new Brazilian Democratic Republic survived its depression to thrive as it contributed to the rebuilding of Europe after its neutrality in World War I. The Great Depression struck harder, and Getúlio Vargas swept elections with his nationalist rhetoric. He was invited by Adolph Hitler to join the new Axis, but Vargas decided to continue Brazilian elections and relations with the United States, leading to Brazil's participation in World War II. While economic issues arose after the war and rumors circulated about militaristic or even communist uprising in the 1960s, Brazil would ultimately continue to be a social model to the rest of the world.

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In reality, the demands of the rebelling sailors were limited to more focused items such as the end of lashing, increased standards on ship, and amnesty for the mutiny, which they saw as a necessary action. The government quickly gave into Cândido's demands on fear of naval bombardment of the city, but they reneged on amnesty with a decree expelling government workers who were "undermining discipline.” Two thousand men were discharged afterward, and hundreds were killed or imprisoned, maintaining the power of the elite. However, the lash was never used again in the Brazilian Navy.

November 20, 1759 – Battle of Quiberon Bay Ravages Royal Navy

2011-08-30T16:57:00.000-07:00

The Anglo-French portion of the Six Years' War had dragged on through mixed results. Early on, the French had the upper hand with a string of victories in North America, but the leadership of Secretary of State William Pitt, Senior, resulted in a masterful use of British resources to turn the tide of the war. Then came the Annus Pestis (Cursed Year) of 1759. The French settlers and their Indian allies ignited a guerilla war in the Ohio Country that frustrated British hopes of taking Quebec. In India, Madras fell to French forces, though the battle would prove Pyrrhic for the victors. On the European Continent, French troops formed a siege of Minden, taking large swaths of German land west of the Weser River. At sea, the British gained great hope after the attack on Le Havre with a two-day bombardment that destroyed many of the barges the French were assembling for an amphibious invasion of Britain and again a small victory came at the Battle of Lagos, where British ships destroyed two ships-of-the-line from the French fleet and scattered the rest. However, the Battle of Quiberon Bay would give France another chance to challenge Britain for control of the high seas.

The battle began after a storm had driven most of the British blockade keeping the remaining troop transports at bay in France. French Marshal de Conflans hurried to merge his fleet with other squadrons collected from the West Indies and remainders from battles in the Mediterranean. He was spotted by British squadron commander Robert Buff and decided to give pursuit, but Buff split his smaller fleet into two groups heading north and south. In what was is seen as the most fortuitous move of the war, Conflans decided to keep his fleet together while in pursuit of the southerly British ships, resulting in organization that would be key to victory in the hard-won battle. The bulk of the English fleet appeared under Edward Hawke from the west, and the two converged in a titanic battle. A shift in the wind nearly disorganized Conflans, but the French managed to keep their composure and defeat the English inside the bay. Hawke died in the battle and only a handful of ships-of-the-line managed to escape, enabling the French to capture some ten more and wreck others.

It would be the final straw of the Annus Pestis. The French hurried to rebuild their fleet and launch their invasion of Britain as soon as weather permitted. Meanwhile, England became frantic.
Though William Pitt campaigned for a strong militia defense, drawing in the French force and then cutting off their supplies with a renewed navy to capture the army while it starved, the rest of Parliament would be swayed by the fearful public opinion. That Christmas, the English sued for peace, and the Treaty of Paris in 1760 took England out of the war. France made great colonial demands, retaking the lost Guadeloupe in the West Indies, expanding French territory in North America, and carving out rights to a French South India from the Carnatic and Mysore regions to the Indian Ocean France continued on in Europe, pressing troops into Hanover and forcing Prussia into a stalemate with Russia and Sweden. In the east, the war would end in 1761 with Prussia's growth being checked amid the other Baltic Powers.

The next twenty-five years would be a renewed Golden Age for France, raking in great wealth from its new colonies. Britain, meanwhile, came upon problematic times as it struggled to recover, establishing a taxation system that sent its American colonies into rebellion, which was much aided by the French. The resulting United States of America would soon have the first of many border wars with the French in Ohio, Louisiana, and along the St. Lawrence River, gradually pushing the French and their Indian allies west and northward.

The American experiment in self-rule spawned a wave of Enlightenment revolutions through Europe, and France would be among the first to lose its autocracy with the revival of the Estates-General and the establishment of the National Assembly to placate and aid those suffering from poor harvests. The renewed France would again injure Britain by aiding the Irish Rebellion of 1798, which would make famous Colonel Arthur Wesley as a great hero of Ireland as he managed to forge a self-rule for Ireland while maintaining some connection with England.

With a weakened Britain, other European powers took up their chances to increase their colonial strengths with Portugal in southern Africa, the Dutch in the South Pacific with New Holland, and the French in South Asia, West Africa, the Great Lakes, and in numerous islands wherever their navy could reach.

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In reality, the Battle of Quiberon Bay was be the last great British victory in 1759, which came to be known as the Annus Mirabilis (Year of Miracles). They had driven the French nearly out of Canada, captured Guadeloupe, held Madras in India, and aided their German allies in victories on the Continent. Perhaps most significant were the victories at sea, particularly Quiberon Bay, where Britain would establish itself as unquestioned master of the seas for the next 150 years.

November 17, 1603 – Sir Walter Raleigh Acquitted

2011-08-28T21:35:00.000-07:00

Upon the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, many Catholics saw the time of transition when Scottish James I took the English throne as the chance to overthrow the Protestant government. England had officially separated from Rome in 1534 under Henry VIII, who repeatedly fought to keep his position as head of the Church of England. The wars continued, primarily with Spain, through the reign of his daughter Elizabeth, though she would take a fairly neutral stance on Catholicism compared to Henry. The Virgin Queen had no issue, and the crown passed to her relative James VI of Scotland, who was not uniformly welcomed to the throne.

In the midst of the uneasiness, many Catholics thought that a single push would overthrow the Protestant rule of the country, and conspiracies were born. Most famous would be the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 with its close-call to the destruction of Parliament, but there would also be Bye Plot (in which Catholic priests hoped to kidnap James I to force the repeal of anti-Catholic laws) and the Main Plot both in 1603. Funded by Spain and led by men such as Henry Brooke, his brother Sir George (who would be executed after trial in the Bye Plot), and military man Thomas Grey, the plot involved raising up an army to storm London and place James’s cousin Arabella on the throne. Henry Brooke, the Lord Cobham, was in contact with the court of Spain and would collect money for the plot by travelling circuitously from London to Brussels to Spain and then back to London via Jersey, where Sir Walter Raleigh was governor. As the conspiracy came to trial, Raleigh would be dragged into it.

Raleigh was familiar with scandal. He had secretly married one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth Throckmorton, without permission in 1591, and the couple was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Shortly thereafter, however, Raleigh was released as he was one of the leading Englishmen with knowledge of the New World and worked to divide the spoils of the captured Spanish Madre de Dios. His fortunes would bounce back, just as they had after his failed experiment with Roanoke Colony. In 1593, he was made a burgess and later elected to Parliament (sitting for three counties in 1603). The next year, he came upon the story of “El Dorado”, a golden city at the headwaters of the Caroní River, a tributary of the Orinoco, and traveled to explore the northern coast of South America. Upon his return, Raleigh wrote The Discovery of Guiana and made exciting, if exaggerated, claims about his voyage. He returned to favor with exploits in battles with Spain and was named Governor of Jersey, from which he would be recalled in 1603 under suspicion of conspiracy and treason.

Cobham had given a sworn confession involving Raleigh, attempting to name names as his brother George Brooke had done turning Cobham in during the Bye trials. Raleigh denounced the evidence as “hearsay”, which was outright inadmissible in common law, though it could be heard in this civil law case of treason. General Attorney Edward Coke, who was new to his position and gaining great fame as he prosecuted numerous treasonous conspirators, refused to allow Cobham to testify in person as Cobham was described by contemporaries to say “one thing at one time, and another thing in another, and could be relied upon in nothing." Coke used personal attacks such as "notorious traitor", "vile viper" and "damnable atheist" in lieu of actual evidence, and finally Raleigh was able to point out that Coke was acting simply out of desperation in his duty to prosecute by order of the king. James I recognized this, and the charges were dismissed.

Raleigh returned to his positions and completing his improvements of the Jersey defenses before pressing on with his aspirations of discovering El Dorado. He gathered investors and equipment for not just an expedition, but a colony at the delta of the Orinoco to supply further expeditions up river. Raleigh’s bravado worked to his advantage in keeping the Spanish farther west and establishing an effective new Jamestown. The colony would later be governed by his son Wat after Raleigh disappeared into the jungle on one of his many expeditions and never returned. Orinoco proved a key military position between coastal Spanish Venezuela and the Dutch colonies forming to the east, many of which would be conquered in the later Anglo-Dutch wars.

Orinoco proved a fairly profitable, if non-noteworthy, plantation colony for the British Empire in the next several centuries. By the early 1900s, its vast oil fields became a valuable commodity, and since then Orinoco has been one of the richest corners of the Commonwealth, looked upon with envy by other former colonies and routinely doing well in sporting matches from its state-of-the-art national stadium, El Dorado.

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In reality, Raleigh was found guilty of treason, though King James would suspend his execution and hold him in the Tower of London until 1616, when he would be released to lead an expedition in search of El Dorado. During the exploration of Venezuela, an attack on a Spanish outpost would go wrong, his son Wat being shot and the attack being labeled an illegal act of war. To appease the Spanish, Raleigh’s sentence of beheading was reinstated in 1618. It was said that “justice of England has never been so degraded and injured as by the condemnation of the honourable Sir Walter Raleigh."

November 16, 636 – Sassanid Victory at al-Qādisiyyah halts Muslim Advance

2011-08-27T17:44:00.001-07:00

Beginning in the 600s, the Middle East was a theater of war for three of history’s greatest empires. Two of them, the Byzantine and the Sassanid Empires, had battled for centuries and were descendants of empires that had stood even longer ago, Rome and Parthia, respectively. A new empire began to form, however, during the life of the Prophet Muhammad. As more and more converts joined his faith, the power of Islam grew out of the western part of Arabia and expanded quickly. When the Byzantines and Sassanids noticed this, they set aside their own differences and began an alliance for mutual protection.

Byzantium had begun its significance when the Roman emperor Constantine moved his capital there to promote stability in 330. Doing so strengthened the wealthy eastern frontier, but it also ultimately broke the Roman Empire apart with the West falling to the German hordes in 476. The Byzantines still stood, but toward the beginning of 600, the Sassanid Empire stormed Syria, Egypt, and Anatolia in vengeance of the Byzantine general assassinating and usurping the emperor Maurice, who had married a Sassanid princess. The next emperor, Heraclius, defeated the Sassanids at Nineveh in 627 and received back the captured territory and loot, including the True Cross.

The Sassanid Empire faced its own turmoil. Khosrau II was assassinated by his son Kavadh II in 629, who died in a matter of months, leading to a string of usurpations. Seven-year-old Ardashir III reigned before being killed by General Farrokhan, who died in battle and was succeeded by Purandokht, daughter of Khosrau II. She would rule for a short time, repairing much of the damage done by the past years’ intrigue before being replaced by her sister Azarmidokht, who would in turn be replaced by the nobleman Hormizd VI. Finally, Purandokht’s son and Khosrau’s grandson Yazdgerd III came of age and stabilized the Sassanid throne, supported by his general Rostam Farrokhzād.

Meanwhile, Muslim power continued to grow. Upon the death of the Prophet in 632, a council met and determined that Abu Bakr would be caliph. He set upon a series of wars uniting the Arabs of Arabia and then moving northward to add those in Syria and Palestine. With a new force the Middle East to counteract the tentative balance between Byzantium and Persia, wars quickly began with the caliphate invasion of Iraq, and the Muslim power was affirmed with the defeat of an army Sassanids, Byzantines, and Christian Arabs in 633. Sassanids finally stopped the Muslim advance in 634, and Sassanids and Byzantines made a formal alliance in 635. Knowing of the alliance, the Muslim forces decided to deal with their enemies one at a time, wiping out the Byzantine army at Yarmouk near the Sea of Galilee in August of 636 at the cost of abandoning Iraq to a massive Sassanid force of some 200,000 in camp. The Muslims camped at Qādisiyyah with 30,000 and waited as peace talks dragged on.

That November, the talks gave way to actual battle. The two sides had attempted to bend the other’s will with the Muslims sending an emissary to convert Yazdgerd III while the Persians sent a Muslim ambassador home as a servant carrying a basket of dirt on his head (though the Muslim response was, “Congratulations! The enemy has voluntarily surrendered its territory to us”). Caliph Umar ordered the talks to end, which caused Sassanid General Rostam to prepare for battle despite his reservations. Although the Sassanid army was much larger, the vast majority of the force was conscripted spear infantry that Procopius of Caesarea described as "a crowd of pitiable peasants who come into battle for no other purpose than to dig through walls and to despoil the slain and in general to serve the [real] soldiers.”

In the night, Rostam decided to use the infantry, what might have been his weakness, as a diversion. He dammed up the canal and moved over his entire army to face the Muslim force the next morning. Following secret orders, the infantry led the attack as a whole after the opening onslaught of the arrows, but were swiftly beaten back by the better trained Muslims. They feigned retreat, and the Muslims pursued. When they reached the canal, however, the infantry turned about and were ordered to hold position while the archers pounded the Muslims, who then began their own retreat. In the chaos (the battle would be known to Islam as Yaum-ul-Armah, "The Day of Disorder"), Rostam released his war elephants, backed by his heavy cavalry, which swept the Muslim cavalry from the field. The organized retreat turned to a rout with the unnerving elephants stomping, and the Muslim army was destroyed.

Yazdgerd III would manage to seal the victory with a treaty that would end his alliance with the now extremely weakened Byzantine Empire. The Zagros Mountains were strongly defended against further Muslim invasion, though the rich lands of Mesopotamia would routinely change hands between them, like Anatolia, which would be stripped from the Byzantines, who became a relic city-state with a naval empire. The Muslim caliphates, meanwhile, would turn westward, conquering across North Africa and into Europe, where Christians would begin counterattacks such as the Crusades with Persian allies.

While the political boundaries settled for the time, the wildly different religions of the Arab and Persian peoples would keep up a constant sense of distrust. Although conquered by the Mongols and later European colonialists, Persia would remain the center of Zoroastrianism, one of the world’s largest religions.

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In reality, the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah lasted four days. Fighting was bloody but inconclusive until the fourth day, when Rostam’s war elephants were driven from the battle for good. Rostam was killed in the battle, and his army disintegrated without a leader, giving a great victory to the Muslims, who would soon conquer Persia and add it to the Rashidun Caliphate. After centuries of religious persecution, only a handful of Zoroastrians remain, and Iran is the seat of Shia Islam.

November 15, 1957 – Khrushchev Offers to Share Technology

2011-08-27T08:19:00.000-07:00

In a move that many who knew him considered shockingly uncharacteristic (and believed to have been caused by advisers warning against words antagonizing opponents as had caused massive uprising in Hungary), Russian First Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev said during an interview with an American reporter that he would be willing to share missile technology with the United States, who clearly did not have the same ICBM capabilities as the Soviets. "If she had, she would have launched her own Sputnik," Khrushchev noted, recalling the Russian success of being the first people to put an artificial satellite into orbit some six weeks before on October 4. Later in the interview, given as part of the commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution, he discussed East-West relations and noted that neither side wanted war, but that the Soviets would win if one began.

The interview came just days after the Soviets had hurriedly launched Sputnik 2, which brought the first living creature into orbit, a dog named Laika. She proved that living creatures could survive weightlessness and opened the door for human scientific exploration of space. It also came after the humbling Gaither Report was leaked to the press. Assembled by the Security Resources Panel of the President's Science Advisory Committee, the report showed that the United States was far behind the Soviets on missile technology. After a decade of not working toward that end, the US had as its only defense the system of bomb shelters that were hardly effective if a large-scale war erupted.

The American populace continued to reel from the shocking news of Soviet superiority. Only a decade ago, the USA had been unquestionably the most powerful nation in the world with the A-bomb born out of the Manhattan Project. At the end of the war in 1945, Operation Paperclip sent OSS agents throughout Germany picking up Nazi scientists such as Werner von Braun and capturing what technology they could. Many of these scientists came to work for the Americans (some even illegally imprisoned at places such as P.O. Box 1142), and an inter-continental ballistic missile project was begun in 1946 by Consolidated-Vultee with its MX-774. The program was shut down a couple of years later as conservative feelings overtook post-war America, and it would not be until after the shocking launch of Sputnik that the Americans would reawaken.

Embarrassed and shocked by the Russians, Project Vanguard was quickly put into place by the Eisenhower administration to lift the Explorer Program, picking up proposals from the US Navy and Army that had been shelved due to lack of interest and funding. With the disastrous launch attempt of the Vanguard TV3 on December 6, 1957, where the three-stage rocket rose four feet before losing thrust, collapsing, and exploding, American public turned back to Khrushchev's offer. Many took it as if he were an older brother offering help with homework, while others thought he was twisting the diplomatic knife with a pandering, impossible offer. The world was in the midst of the International Geophysical Year sharing science on geomagnetism, oceanography, etc, and leaders internationally began to criticize the Americans for not taking up Khrushchev's offer to take up an American satellite on a Russian rocket. Much of the hooplah was settled with the launch of Explorer 1 on January 31, 1958, and then rocketry settled to a calmer scientific route with military espionage riding closely, secretly behind.

International relations improved somewhat between the USA and USSR, later resulting in the Nuclear Limitation Treaty in 1962 avoiding a massive stockpile of weapons beyond the point of Mutually Assured Destruction. Despite Khrushchev's constant assurances that communism would bury capitalism and colonialism, the Soviet Union would eventually fall in 1992, but not until after the success of the Buran shuttle system, launched in 1988 on the anniversary of Khrushchev's speech that began a time of peaceful coexistence in orbital space above the simmering Cold War. With an international space station being pieced together by Russian rockets with American engineered segments, long term space habitation is gradually being explored. Scientists hope to eventually put a man on the moon, where probes and flyby satellites have already taken a great deal of data, but cost and lack of public incentive have kept humans home.

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In reality, Khruschev challenged America with, "Let's have a peaceful rocket contest just like a rifle-shooting match, and they'll see for themselves." The words would help begin the Space Race in which the Americans would work to catch up with and surpass the Soviets, culminating with the American Moon landing on July 20, 1969. Due to cost and recent catastrophic N1 rocket failures, Khrushchev determined that the Soviets would not make further plans to attempt a manned moon landing, and even the Russian shuttle program, which emulated the Americans from a decade before, would never launch more than an unmanned test mission.

November 13, 1861 – Lincoln Dismisses McClellan after Insult

2011-08-25T19:13:00.001-07:00

After not even two weeks of being General-in-Chief of the Union Armies, General George B. McClellan was dismissed from his position after repeated faux pas. President Abraham Lincoln, Secretary of State William H. Seward, and presidential secretary John Hay came by McClellan's house for a strategy meeting. The general was out, so the men waited. An hour later, McClellan returned but did not acknowledge them, and, after another half hour, his servant finally told the president that McClellan had gone on to bed. Lincoln was initially very calm, as he would typically be despite the trials of his presidency, and at first determined "better at this time not to be making points of etiquette and personal dignity." When word slipped that McClellan had privately referred to Lincoln as a "baboon" and "gorilla" and Seward as an "incompetent little puppy," Lincoln's uncustomary temper rose, and he fired his general-in-chief, demoting McClellan simply to commander of the Army of the Potomac.

Lincoln, however, put himself into dire straits. His military was hardly ready, but the populace was unsure whether a war to keep the Union united would be worth it, and he needed victories to keep the people in ready. General Winfield Scott, who had served with the US Army since before the War of 1812, had retired October 31 due to "health reasons" of being seventy-five years old. Other commanders might have been available, but Lincoln needed someone he was certain would be brash and wield the available army to the fullness of its effect. He recalled meeting Colonel William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the most effective commanders at the Battle of Bull Run that June. Lincoln had been so impressed that he promoted Sherman to brigadier general of volunteers.

Sherman, however, was unnerved by the war. The defeat by Confederates had caused him to question the abilities of Union soldiers as well as his own competency as a commander, despite his bravery even after taking grazing bullet wounds to his shoulder and knee. He had been assigned to Robert Anderson in the Department of the Cumberland and that October had replaced Anderson due to ill health. Sherman had been promised by Lincoln not to be given such authority so suddenly, and it began to wear on him. He was increasingly paranoid of Confederate resources and sent constant requests for more supplies from Washington. After a review by Secretary of War Simon Cameron, the press turned against him, noting his pessimism and what would be later described by psychology as a "nervous breakdown." He was relieved of command and sent to St. Louis, where he would receive his summons to Washington by Lincoln as a new general-in-chief to concoct the strategy for defeating the South.

Sherman arrived in Washington and immediately pleaded with Lincoln (directly as well as through his brother, Senator John Sherman) that he was unfit for command. Lincoln recalled his reservations about McClellan's ability to be both general-in-chief while still operating as an army commander, to which McClellan assured him, "I can do it." The president was tired of generals who questioned his decisions as commander-in-chief, and Lincoln wrote Sherman a direct order to take command. Sherman committed suicide December 23, 1861, under the pressure.

It would be a severe strike against Lincoln's administration and public opinion about the war. Further, Lincoln was once again stuck without a commander. Frémont had proven overly aggressive in Missouri that November, turning Lincoln to the third most senior general in the Army, Henry Halleck, who had just replaced Frémont in Missouri. Halleck soon arrived in Washington and proved an able administrator, though Lincoln would be frustrated over his lack of action in the next years, referring to Halleck as "little more than a first rate clerk." The Union struggled to make any progress in the East, but the Western theater with its eager General Ulysses S. Grant returned numerous victories. Winfield Scott's "Anaconda Plan" eventually began to choke out the South, who suffered Pyrrhic losses in its invasion of Pennsylvania under Lee, and Grant was made the new general-in-chief in 1864 with Halleck being "kicked upstairs" to Chief of Staff.

Grant put forward Lincoln's plan of total war to break down Southern infrastructure and keep potential reinforcements pinned. The taking of Atlanta by General George Henry Thomas on October 2, 1864, came just in time to guarantee Lincoln's second election, and Thomas would lead the careful and slow demolition of Southern communication, transport, and industry. However, shortly after the end of the war with Lee's surrender in June of 1865, the superficial damage would be easily repaired. Lincoln's assassination came as a harsh blow to the South, but Thomas's gentlemanly use of Army resources to enable Southern rebuilding did much to aid feelings in Reconstruction after the notions of him being a "traitor" to his native Virginia faded.

Andrew Johnson battled through the rest of Lincoln's term, and in 1868 Grant would win the presidency. While dealing mainly with the issues of the South, he would also be notably genial toward Native Americans. His use of treaties restricting buffalo hunts came too late to preserve the food supply entirely, but he would continue his overall attitude toward Natives as "harmless" and "peaceful" until "put upon by the whites" and prevent as many armed altercations as he could.

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In reality, Lincoln allowed McClellan to continue as general-in-chief until the failure of the Peninsular Campaign. Sherman would be given leave not long after the Cincinnati Commercial referred to him as "insane" on December 11, 1861. He soon return recuperated, taking up service under Grant, whom he would aid in victories such as that at Chattanooga. When Grant became general-in-chief, he gave Sherman command to take Atlanta and approved the later March to the Sea, which saw scorched earth tactics of utterly laying waste to the South from Atlanta to Savannah. After the war, Sherman would be put in charge of the Military Division of the Missouri, where he would write to Grant that "hostile savages like Sitting Bull and his band of outlaw Sioux ... must feel the superior power of the Government" and "we must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children."

November 9, 1916 – JRR Tolkien Hallucinates in the Trenches

2011-08-23T20:18:00.000-07:00

In the midst of trench fever, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, signals officer with the Lancashire Fusiliers, began hallucinations that would forever change him. He was meant to have been invalided the day before, but he chose to stay behind to let another, sicker soldier take his place. Still in the miserable conditions of the trenches, Tolkien relapsed the next day into a high fever, crippling muscle soreness in his legs, and stabbing pain in his eyes. Others went to fetch a medic while he remained propped in the dark of a supply tent, near an unused machine gun. He had listened to the thunderous blasts of machine gun fire often in training in Staffordshire and later in combat during the Somme offensive.

This time, however, the noise was only in his mind, which translated the mechanical pattering into a language. He thought he could just about translate the words, a series of taps as if a living telegraph key, reassuring him that the gun would fight on just as a fellow soldier would. When medics arrived to take him away from the front, he told them, “The gun. It shall fight on.”

Tolkien returned to England and to his wife, Edith, whom he had married three years before after five years of waiting due to his guardian's refusal they see one another before Tolkien was 21. He would spend the rest of the war alternately in hospitals or on light guard duty since he was too ill with recurrent fever to participate other than stints in camps on the home front, but honor kept him in the service until the end of the war. While recovering, Tolkien would begin writing fanciful stories, mixing the worlds of myth he had always studied with his new ideas of animated machines. He devoured science romances of Jules Verne and the like, but the use of machines as tools carried too little personification. Instead, Tolkien created machines that were as human as men, with personalities and special skills, just as the dwarves or elf creatures in Northern European myth. One of his first stories, "Fall of Gondolin" told of a city made of machines, each working its duty to create a glorious world, and its betrayal and destruction by the armies of an industrial behemoth monster called Morgoth ("Black Foe of the World" in Klindirin, a clicking language he invented for his machines).

Tolkien was not the only fiction-writer fascinated with intelligent machines. Just after the turn of the century, Frank L. Baum wrote about Tik-tok, a living clockwork being. The idea was taken further in 1921 by the Czech playwright Karel Capek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), first coining the term “robot” for a humanlike automaton built to do work. Films would soon have their own robots with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1927 giving a robot indistinguishable from the human Maria. In all of these, the machines were written to emulate humans, but Tolkien’s stories went further, creating a world complete with history, language, and culture with different races of machines, not metal emulations of humanity. His studies of myth, particularly Beowulf, turned him to a sense of social tribalism and competition over resources. In 1936, Tolkien published The Robbit about a portly, quiet machine chosen by a magical Tinkerer to join a quest to liberate a coal mine from Smaug, an ancient predatory machine. This and the following Bearing trilogy would inspire the next generation of science fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke.

While he would continue to write during his free time, Tolkien's professional life kept him busy. He worked for the Oxford English Dictionary, became the youngest professor at the University of Leeds, and finally settled at Oxford first at Pembroke College and then Merton, becoming chair of English Language and Literature. Tolkien often ate with fellow writers in a club nicknamed “The Inklings”, including C.S. Lewis, the unquestioned Father of Modern Fantasy with his Wardrobe tales. In World War II, Tolkien served his country again as a code-breaker (though was notoriously vocal about his anti-war sentiments) and worked alongside men such as Alan Turing, who would be inspired by Tolkien’s ideas on machine communication. While Tolkien never officially worked on computer development projects, he and Turing kept close correspondence, even through Turing’s indecency debacle in the early ‘50s. Shortly before Tolkien’s death in 1973, Turing’s Beren system came online, creating the first vocal command interface and allowing man and machine to talk just as Tolkien dreamed. Mankind would far surpass Arthur C. Clarke’s description of a “HAL 9000” by its fictional birth date in 1997 for his 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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In reality, Tolkien was invalided to England on November 8, 1916. He wrote extensively in the style of ancient myth, giving new life to the High Fantasy genre that supplied depth and poetry to literature that was often considered nothing but pulp adventure.

November 8, 1942 – Operation Sledgehammer Begins

2011-08-21T15:36:00.001-07:00

In the beginning of the darkest hours of the Second World War, the ill-fated 1942 invasion of the European mainland began on a sunny, mild day. The week prior to the landing had been one of changeable weather, and Allied Command had been nervous about weather upsetting the Channel waters. On the 5th, an inch of rain fell in London, which made ground commanders nervous about the ability to move tanks and trucks while pilots hoped air fields and visibility would be clear. On the 7th, as if Mother Nature were welcoming the invasion, temperatures climbed into the 50s (12+ C) and dried the soaking land. In the early hours of the 8th, Supreme Commander Allied (Expeditionary) Force Dwight Eisenhower gave the go-ahead for the invasion.

The operation had very nearly not happened. As late as the Second Claridge Conference in July of 1942, Prime Minister Churchill was firmly against the idea of an assault on the heavily defended northern shore of France. He recommended instead that the Allies attack through North Africa, striking at the “weak underbelly of Europe” to take on Hitler’s weaker allies in Vichy France and Italy rather than the Third Reich itself. His main argument against a massive assault was that Britain simply did not have the resources necessary in supplies, transports, and aircraft.

Against him was US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor had thrust America into the war, but many felt that resources should be spent seeking revenge on Japan in the Pacific theater rather than Roosevelt’s call to destroy Hitler, the instigator of the war. With Americans fully invested in Europe, FDR would further hush naysayers who said we were fighting the wrong enemy. In March of 1942, FDR wrote Churchill that he was “becoming more and more interested in the establishment of a new front this summer on the European continent, certainly for air and raids... And even though losses will doubtless be great, such losses will be compensated by at least equal German losses and by compelling the Germans to divert large forces of all kinds from the Russian front.”

The Russians were thusly extremely interested in a second front in Europe. If Hitler were caught in a pincer movement, or even distracted by air raids such as FDR suggested, the bloody Eastern Front would take great relief. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov visited the UK and insisted on aid as soon as possible. He was rebuffed in London, but his visit to Washington proved much more supportive. Eventually, however, diplomatic squabbling settled on the side of the US and Soviets, and Churchill begrudgingly readied his country for another great fight after surviving the Battle of Britain in 1940 and terrible Blitz in ‘41. He was at least able to postpone the invasion until the late autumn, using the disastrous Dieppe Raid on August 19 as an example of the vicious resistance the Allies would face.

Allied Command determined that the only possible method of success would be air superiority. For months, air resources were readied on fields in England and even as far away as Scotland while convoys such as SL 125 worked to divert German attention toward the false notion of an African attack. The attack began with bombers with diving torpedoes attempting to clear a path in the mines for landing craft while naval bombardment provided cover and pounded the soon-to-be-captured port of Cherbourg. The landing would be difficult and the resulting fight even worse with urban warfare racking up numerous Allied losses. Thanks to “brute American will”, however, the beachhead would be established.

Any plans for a push that winter, however, were cut short when Erwin Rommel was brought back from North Africa, where he had begun a drive to take Egypt, but was cut short by British General Montgomery’s counterattack. Rommel took up the Panzer divisions that had waited in Europe for just this moment and attacked the Allied port, narrowly kept at bay with massive casualties by American General George Patton. Through the bitterly cold winter of ’42-’43, the Allies and Axis would throw more and more resources into the fray, creating a warzone not seen in France since the bloodbaths of World War I.

The next spring, Operation Roundup pumped more divisions and the Allies finally made a few miles of progress into France. News of never-ending battles beleaguered the war-weary nations with Americans growing firmer on the idea that they had yet again stumbled into Europe’s mess. In Britain, which was continually under German air assault in hopes of breaking up Allied supply lines, Churchill was blamed as speeches recalled his responsibility for Gallipoli. A vote of no confidence was carried, and Churchill fell from office despite his historical innocence. Likewise, FDR would be narrowly defeated in 1944 despite the European theater coming to a close. Hitler himself became increasingly frantic, causing many of his ministers and commanders to distance themselves. Mussolini as well as Admiral Francois Darlan of Vichy attempted to work with the Allies, and both would find themselves murdered by the end of the war.

Modern commentators often mention that the real winners of the Anglo-American and German Second Battle of France were the Soviets. Much relieved from German pressure and even victorious at the Battle of Stalingrad with the capture of the German 6th Army, Stalin surged in a counterattack across Eastern Europe and brought the ultimate defeat to Germany by taking Berlin in late 1944. Capturing numerous German scientists and technologies, it would be only a matter of a few years before Moscow began producing its own supersonic V-2 rockets.

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In reality, Operation Sledgehammer was shelved as infeasible. Initially planned for early fall of 1942, the plan would have brought only nine potential Allied divisions against some thirty German, realistically ending with the Allies being driven back into the sea. Instead, Churchill’s ideal of Operation Torch sent Allied troops through North Africa and then into France and Italy and finally Germany.

November 7, 1730 – Crown Prince in Prussia Dies during Imprisonment

2011-08-20T18:08:00.001-07:00

In a punishment that was fitting of the iron-willed Prussian king but proved to be too much, Crown Prince Frederick died from what was officially declared “fever.” Historians as well as contemporary scholars disagreed what “fever” meant, whether a brain hemorrhage from stress or legitimate illness. Another theory stands that the prince might well have killed himself. Some even suggest a conspiracy to assassinate a would-be foppish king before he could ruin his throne.

The matter at hand was something of a youthful dreamer’s ideal of escape from an authoritarian father. Frederick was born January 24, 1712, and was eagerly welcomed as a surviving heir second in line to his grandfather, Frederick I, the first King in Prussia. One of many states within the aged Holy Roman Empire and a fiefdom of the Kingdom of Poland, Prussia sat at the southern shore along the Baltic Sea with several scattered territories separated from one another by Poland and various other German dukedoms and principalities. Although devastated in the Thirty Years War with invasions by the Swedes and riotous counterattacking armies marching up from the south, Prussia had gained greater strength over the latter seventeenth century. They were liberated from Poland as a buffer for Sweden in 1657, and further gains were made as native coal became an increasingly valuable resource as well as the issuance of the Edict of Potsdam in 1685 that welcomed Protestants, especially encouraging Huguenots expelled from France, to transplant to Prussia, bringing valuable wealth and skills with them. In terms of joining the War of Spanish Succession against France, the Duke of Prussia was allowed by treaty to upgrade himself to king, and the new title “King in Prussia” was born despite Prussia not being a true kingdom as it was still an electorate under the Holy Roman Emperor.

Thus, in 1701, Frederick I would crown himself king. Bubonic plague would ravage the country a few years later, but the capital at Berlin would be spared and from then on would stand as a centralized point of authority. Frederick William I came to the throne shortly after his son Frederick’s birth and, only months later, his father Frederick’s death. He continued efforts to improve Prussia and was soon nicknamed the “Soldier King.” Establishing effective bureaucracy and creating a modern, professional, standing army, Frederick would prove an able leader and oversee the defeat of Sweden as a world power through the Great Northern War. He added territory to the small kingdom and forcibly included aristocracy into the army, giving seriousness to warfare that was often considered a “gentleman’s sport.” Frederick William was notably spartan, thrifty and calculating, and not participating much in art, except in military display, where he sent proclamations throughout Europe seeking the tallest men for a unit known as the “Potsdam Giants.”

Prince Frederick, however, thrived in the arts. His father gave him no aristocratic tutors, demanding his children would be taught as “simple folk” with pragmatism and religion. Frederick sought the company of his sister Wilhelmina and comfort of his gentle mother rather than facing the austere temper of his father. Frederick William (himself terrified of not being among the Elect) attempted to block Frederick from Calvinism. Frederick firmly held onto the tenet of the Elect while being otherwise irreligious, causing many to think he was spiting his father.

The greatest spite, however, was Frederick’s plan to escape his father’s weight and flee to Britain in 1730, where he would be welcome in his uncle George I’s court to pursue philosophy and music as he pleased. He and his friend Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte planned to slip away along with a contingent of other junior officers. Word leaked of the escape, and Katte and Frederick were captured. His father determined to deal with them as would fit a soldier. Katte was found guilty of desertion by trial and given life imprisonment, but Frederick William announced that both would be executed under treason law. Katte was beheaded on November 6, and Frederick was forced to watch until he ultimately fainted and began to suffer hallucinations. The next morning, he was discovered dead in his cell.

His father became distraught. Frederick William had wanted to toughen his son and planned to pardon him in a few days. The last ten years of the king’s reign would be spent quietly reviewing the military and ensuring that Prussia would be able to defend itself during the reign of the new heir, Frederick’s younger brother Augustus. Augustus became king in 1740, and he worked to keep Prussia free from the potentially disastrous entanglements of the War of Austrian Succession. His son Frederick William II succeeded him in 1758, and the king proved soft: unwilling to put forth great efforts and rather delight himself with simple pleasures, such as good food. After a half-hearted alliance against the French Republic during Frederick William II’s term, Frederick William III attempted to clean up Prussia’s wasteful decadence, but it came as too little too late when the armies of Napoleon swept across Europe.

After Napoleon, Europe attempted to rebuild, and Austria managed to cut off Russia’s attempt at land-grabbing by surrendering claims to Pomerania, land for which Frederick William III’s ancestors had fought bitterly. The German Confederation fell under the sway of Vienna, and Austria would be the dominant power of Central Europe over the next century. Troubled times would come in 1848 with waves of revolution, but Emperor Franz Joseph I was adept in granting improved autonomy to the German kingdoms of Bavaria, Hanover, and Prussia. After the Great War at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Austro-Hungarian Empire would be broken up, and the three German states would gain independence with Hanover competing with Prussia for political influence in Mecklenburg, but failing. It wouldn’t be until 1945 when the Bavarian Fuhrer Adolf Hitler would manage to fulfill his dream of a united German-speaking people from the Rhine to the Danube and Baltic.

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In reality, Frederick survived two days of hallucinations and was pardoned on November 18 by his father. He was a changed man by the experience and never spoke of Katte again. Frederick married Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Bevern but did not love her, and the two had no children. Instead, Frederick threw himself into work improving his kingdom (he would upgrade his title to “King of Prussia” just before his death) and making Prussia into one of the most powerful military forces in Europe in the mid-1700s, defeating opponents such as Austria and Poland.

October 31, 1517 – Martin Luther Nails Ninety-Five Theses to Wittenburg Town Hall

2011-08-19T16:50:00.001-07:00

After a study of social structure, lawyer and university professor Martin Luther sent his famous letter to Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, as well as publishing a copy on the door of the town hall with ninety-five questions critiquing the current political and economic system in the Holy Roman Empire called "Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Rule." The points would become the most famous document of the time, being republished along with many other of Luther’s works calling for social reform based upon early humanist ideals. With a sudden concrete philosophical base, peasants who had been kept under feudal thumb for centuries would successfully rise up to establish representation as Europe’s dominant political system.

Martin Luther was born November 10, 1483, in Eisleben in the midst of the Holy Roman Empire. His father, Hans Ludher, was of comfortable wealth in the working middle class, serving in the copper industry as owner of mines and smelters as well as a citizen representative in the town council. As eldest son, Martin was expected by his hardworking parents to become a lawyer and make a great name for himself in Germany. Martin was well educated as a youngster and sent to the University of Erfurt (which he later described as “a beerhouse and whorehouse”) where he would gain a master’s degree in 1505 and enroll in law school. He found the law to be vague and his schooling to be nothing more than rote learning. Tutors inspired him to critique even so-called “great thinkers”, but Luther found difficulty accepting cold reason when a loving God was key to the meaning of man.

On July 2, 1505, Luther rode through a thunderstorm on his way home from university and became terrified when lightning began to strike. He called out, "Help! Saint Anna, I will become a monk!” Luther survived the storm and told his father about his vow. Hans became livid and attempted to persuade his son not to waste his years of education by leaving law and going into a monastery. Luther was unconvinced until his father reminded him of the Fifth Commandment, “Honor your father and mother.” Luther would have ample time to become a monk upon retirement after fulfilling his father’s request of serving in the law. The moment would convince Luther of the effectiveness of reason in earthly matters, such as his own life, while unquestionable truths, such as carrying out his vow, were still in the realm of God and Heaven.

For the next decade, Luther threw himself into his work, completing his juris doctorate and establishing a successful practice in nearby Wittenberg. Still in his thirties, Luther began to teach at the university and worked to perfect the tangled mess that was the legal code at the dawn of sixteenth century Germany. After much struggle, he determined that the law being a “top-down” system was ineffectual when a much better “bottom-up” system would establish code of conduct as well as rights for all men. Although accused of anarchy and purporting regicide, Luther never encouraged and even decried violence against ruling royalty. In many of his writings, he supported the idea of rulers being placed in position by God, yet he said that if their position was abused, they should be removed legally, just as the servant with one talent had been unfaithful in Jesus’ Parable of the Talents.

Upon publication of his thoughts in 1517, Luther would become an international name. Frederick the Wise would become a benefactor of Luther, whereas many lords called for his immediate execution for treason. It is said that Frederick, though holding his claim and estates, understood the changing of the times. The Bundschuh Movement had caused uprisings along the Rhine valley among the peasants calling for better treatment (the “bundschuh” being a tied peasant’s shoe, which they used for their symbol). Each of these uprisings had been violently put down with mass executions of anyone resembling an instigator with even crusades launched against the followers of Huss, but more and more would crop up as years passed. Frederick encouraged his fellow nobles to read Luther’s writings and attempt to work with the peasants instead of stemming an ever-increasing tide.

In 1521, Luther was taken to be questioned by Charles V, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire and King of the Romans, Italians, and Spanish, as well as Duke of Burgundy and Lord of the Netherlands; he was the most powerful man in Europe outside of the Pope. At the conclusion of the diet, Charles declared Luther an outlaw and banned his books, but Luther was secretly taken to safety by Frederick to Wartburg Castle and eventually returned quietly to Wittenberg. Meanwhile, the “Knights’ Revolt” would erupt with lesser nobility attempting to seize addition freedoms and rights, but would quickly be put down.

Three years later, peasants following Luther’s ideals sent a petition to Charles called the Twelve Articles of the Black Forest addressing grievances, such as the demands of the Countess of Lupfen for serfs to collect snail shells for her thread spools during harvest-time. More radical leaders such as Zwilling and the Anabaptist movement were largely passed over since Luther had inspired a sense of separation of church and state in many of his arguments. The petition was ignored by Charles, and the peasants revolted with initial nonviolence, simply refusing to carry out the orders of those who had abused their post and electing new officials. Luther applauded the moderate revolution and noted the failures of the “poor barons” of the Knights’ Revolt.

Finding increasing cohesion across Germany, the peasants’ army grew into the hundreds of thousands, and their elected officials served effectively, especially those lesser nobles who volunteered after losing their claims in the failed Knights’ Revolt. Scholars would later describe this joining of forces by the lower and middle class as instrumental in toppling the Holy Roman Empire and spreading their ideals to Italy, England, and Eastern Europe. The resulting confederacies would follow much of the Swiss style, creating the Reformed Era of Europe. For the next several centuries, the absolute monarchies of nations such as France, Sweden, and Russia would war against the Confederations, despite their inherent religious ties through Christendom. Technology and industry made leaps and bounds in central Europe, especially after advancements in capitalism and banking, and well judged political systems would ensure the sharing of resources and the rights of workers as early as the late eighteenth century as outlined by English philosopher John Locke.

Luther himself would enter a monastery on his sixtieth birthday, serving there until his death two years later.

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In reality, Martin Luther was unconvinced by his father to avoid becoming a monk and entered a closed Augustinian friary only a few weeks later. He would be disenfranchised, writing "I lost touch with Christ the Savior and Comforter, and made of him the jailor and hangman of my poor soul,” and soon set out to reform the practice of selling indulgences when only God may forgive. The resulting Reformation would split Europe along battle lines of Catholics and Protestants for centuries.

October 30, 1340 – Moroccans Rout Would-be Crusaders in Spain

2011-08-15T21:33:00.000-07:00

For some seven hundred years, the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, descended from the old Visigoths who had wrested it from the dying Roman Empire, had attempted to reconquer territory from the Muslims. Originating in the Middle East, the Muslim Caliphate had swept across North Africa, taking up lands as the Byzantine Empire declined. Under the Umayyad Emirates, the Muslims had moved across the Strait of Gibraltar and onto mainland Europe, taking over all but the most northern reaches of Hispania. An expedition even marched far into what would become France, though they would be turned about by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732.

From that peak, the Muslim influence on Europe would begin to decline as the Christians counterattacked. The northern march had been stopped on the peninsula in 722 at the Battle of Covadonga, and the next 510 years would be spent pushing against Muslim strength. Feudal Christian kingdoms began with the aid of other nations, such as the Frankish liberation of Barcelona making way for the Catalonia, which would later be absorbed by Aragon. Eventually the realms of Portugal, Leon, Aragon, Navarre, and Castille would stand in a loose confederation with the Emirate of Granada as the last bastion of the Muslim Al-Andalus that had once dominated the peninsula. Infighting among the Christians slowed the last piece of conquest, and finally Castille turned Granada into a tributary state in 1238.

For the next century, Granada hung onto its lands on the southeastern edge of Spain and made tribute payments with gold that had been brought across the Sahara by merchants on camelback. The Nasrid people there worked in an uneasy alliance with Castile, fighting alongside in Spain and against the Muslim Kingdom of Fez and its ally Aragon in the early 1300s. Gradually, however, the peace began to crack. In 1325, King Alfonso XI of Castile declared war on Granada and set out to conquer while giving an invitation to other Christian kings to join his crusade. While his call went largely unanswered in the first campaign, the second was answered by Portugal and a contingent of Scottish knights bearing Robert the Bruce’s heart in 1330. They attacked and took Teba, a key castle Granada, which prompted King Yusuf I to call for aid from the Marinid sultan of Morocco, Abu al-Hasan 'Ali.

Abu Hasan sent a small force in 1333, conquering Gibraltar and securing a foothold for his larger army to land. In late summer of 1340, Abu Hasan’s fleet wiped out the Castilian ships, outnumbered three-to-one, and then he move moved his vast new army onto the Spanish mainland. King Alfonso hurried to put together an army to face him and, most importantly, rebuild his fleet. In October, Alfonso’s new fast-built fleet of 27 ships joined 15 hired from Genoa and secured the Strait for Castile. Cut off from his supply-lines, Abu Hasan moved onto a siege of the castle at Tarifa. In mid-October, Alfonso marched with his army and joined up with his father-in-law, the King of Portugal, to create a force some 20,000 strong. Abu Hasan moved back from his siege and onto a defensive hill with the Granadan army of Yusuf on a hill nearby.

Upon the night of his arrival, Alfonso sent a force of 1,000 cavalry and 4,000 infantry to reinforce Tarifa. They met with Abu Hasan’s light cavalry on patrol, who pinned them with skirmishes until finally driving them back to Alfonso’s main army. The cavalry officer reported proudly to Abu Hasan that no Christian had managed to enter the city. This would become instrumental in keeping the Tarifa garrison unable to aid the Castilian forces as they faced the sultan while the Portuguese and Leonese attacked Yusuf the next morning across the Rio Salado.

Initially, the battle seemed to go to Castilians, whose right flank took a bridge and center crossed to smash through the Moroccan’s line and be caught fighting with the militia as it raided the Muslim camp. In the chaos, Abu Hasan ordered an all-out attack, which came at the same time Alfonso found himself isolated from the main army. Though he tried to escape, both Alfonso and the Archbishop of Toledo would be cut down. The Castilian rearguard arrived too late; the drop in morale gave Abu Hasan the chance to push and break the Christian army. Yusuf’s forces were overrun, but Abu Hasan managed to turn about his army and defeat the remaining Christians while driving the attackers from their attempt to take his camp before resuming a successful siege against Tarifa.

The tide of power would change to give Muslims a stronger grip on southern Spain as the war with Castile ended in a stern treaty. Granada became a Moroccan vassal, and Abu Hasan would work to increase his navy to firmly establish control of the Strait of Gibraltar, having learned his lesson about maintaining supply lines. The coming of the Black Death suspended ideas of further warfare, and afterward the Ottomans would absorb the Moroccan wealth under Suleiman the Magnificent with aid from the Franco-Ottoman alliance that promised France conquest of the small kingdoms in northern Spain.

While the Mediterranean saw more concrete Islamic dominance, an Italian with an Anglicanized name of Christopher Columbus approached the English court of Henry VII to back an expedition westward, and his resulting discoveries would be the focus of much of the later Henry VIII’s rule, establishing an English Empire across the New World.

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In reality, the Castilian contingent reached Tarifa and reinforced the garrison despite the cavalry commander’s claim. In the next day’s battle, the garrison was able to attack the Moroccan camp also, then joining up with the Castilian forces to surround Abu Hasan’s army. The Muslim army broke and was pursued relentlessly with many slain and the riches of the camp seized. It would be the last Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. The completion of the Reconquista in 1491 after the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Aragon would unite Spain, which would dispatch the expedition by Cristóbal Colón in 1492.

October 29, 1929 – Banker’s Committee Stops Panic of ‘29

2011-08-13T12:44:00.000-07:00

The wild financial speculation of the Roaring Twenties came to a sudden halt in October when the stock market began to slide. Worries spread through the economic community about the passing of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Tariffs had always been a point of contention among Americans, even spurring South Carolina to threaten secession over the Tariff Act of 1828. Producers such as farmers and manufacturers called for protective tariffs while merchants and consumers demanded low prices. The American economy soared while post-war Europe rebuilt in the ‘20s, and the Tariff Act of 1922 skimmed valuable revenue from the nation’s income that would otherwise have been needed as taxes. The country barely noticed, and the economy surged forward as new technological luxuries became available as well as new disposable income.

Meanwhile, however, the nation faced an increasingly difficult drought while food prices continued to drop during Europe’s recovery. Farmers were stretched thinner and thinner, prompting calls for protective agricultural tariffs and cheaper manufactured goods. In his 1928 presidential campaign, Herbert Hoover promised just that, and as the legislature met in 1929, talks on a new tariff began. Led by Senator Reed Smoot (R-Utah) and Representative Willis C. Hawley (R-Oregon), the bill quickly became more than Hoover and the farmers had bargained for as rates would increase to a level exceeding 1828 for industrial products as well as agricultural. The revenue would be a great boon, but it unnerved economists, who wondered if it could kill the economic growth already slowing by a dipping real estate market.

The weakened nerves shifted from economists to investors, who took the heated debate in the Senate as a clue that times may become rough and decided to get out of the stock market while they could. Prices had skyrocketed over the course of the ‘20s as the middle class blossomed and minor investors came into being. Another hallmark of the ‘20s, credit, enabled people to buy stock on margin, borrowing money they could invest at what they hoped would be a higher percentage. The idea of a “money-making machine” spread, and August of 1929 showed more than $8.5 billion in loans, more than all of the money in circulation in the United States. The market peaked on September 3 at 381.17 and then began a downward correction. At the rebound in late October, panicked selling began. On October 24, what became known as “Black Thursday”, the market fell more than ten percent. On Friday, it did the same, and the initial outlook for the next week was dire.

Amid the early selling in October, financiers noted that a crash was coming and met on October 24 while the market plummeted. The heads of firms and banks such as Chase, Morgan, and the National City Bank of New York collaborated and finally placed vice-president of the New York Stock Exchange Richard Whitney in charge of stopping the disaster. Forty-one-year-old Whitney was a successful financier with an American family dating back to 1630 and numerous connections in the banking world who had purchased a seat on the NYSE Board of Governors only two years after starting his own firm. Whitney’s initial strategy was to replicate the cure for the Panic of 1907: purchasing large amounts of valuable stock above market price, starting with the “blue chip” favorite U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation.

On his way to make the purchase, however, Whitney bumped into a junior who was analyzing the banking futures based on the increase of failing mortgages from failing farms and a weakening real estate market. He suggested that the problems of the new market were caused from the bottom-up, and a top-down solution would only put off the inevitable. Instead of his ostentatious show of purchasing to show the public money was still to be had, Whitney decided to use the massive banking resources behind him to support the falling. He made key purchases late on the 24th, and then his staff worked through the night determining what stocks were needlessly inflated, what were solid, and what could be salvaged (perhaps even at a profit). Stocks continued to tumble that Friday, but by Monday thanks to word-of-mouth and glowing press from newspapers and the new radio broadcasts, Tuesday ended with a slight upturn in the market of .02%. Numerically unimportant, the recovery of public support was the key success.

With the initial battle won, Whitney spearheaded a plan to salvage the rest of the crisis as real estate continued to fall and banks (which were quickly running out of funds as they seized more and more of the market) would soon have piles of worthless mortgaged homes and farms. Banks organized themselves around the Federal Reserve, founded in 1913 after a series of smaller panics and determined rules that would keep banks afloat. Further money came from lucrative deals with the wealthiest men in the country such as John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and the Mellons of Pittsburgh. Businesses managed to continue work despite down-turning sales through loans, though the unemployment rate did increase from 3 to 5% over the winter.

The final matter was the question of international trade. As the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act continued in the Senate, economists predicted retaliatory tariffs from other countries to kill American exports, but Washington turned a deaf ear. Whitney decided to protect his investments in propping up the economy by investing with campaign contributions. Democrats took the majority as the Republicans fell to Whitney’s use of the press to blame the woes of the economy on Congressional “airheads.” Representative Hawley himself lost his seat in the House, which he had held since 1907, to Democrat William Delzell. President Hoover, a millionaire businessman before entering politics, noted the shift, but remained quiet and dutifully vetoed the new tariff.

By 1931, it became steadily obvious that America had shifted to an oligarchy. The banks propped up the market and were propped up themselves by a handful of millionaires. If Rockefeller wanted, he could single-handedly pull his money and collapse the whole of the American nation. Whitney took greater power as Chairman of the Federal Reserve, whose new role controlled indirectly everything of economic and political worth. As the Thirties dragged on, the havoc of the Dust Bowl made food prices increase while simultaneously weakening the farming class, and Whitney gained further power by ousting Secretary of Agriculture Arthur Hyde and installing his own man as a condition for Hoover’s reelection in ’32.

Chairman Whitney would “rule” the United States, wielding public relations power and charisma to give Americans a strong sense of national emergency and patriotism during times like the Japanese War in ’35 (which secured new markets in East Asia) and the European Expedition in ’39. He employed the Red Scare to keep down ideas of insurrection and used the FBI as a secret police, but his ultimate power would be that, at any point, he could tamper with interest rates or stock and property value, and the country would spiral into rampant unemployment and depression, dragging the rest of the world with it.

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In reality, the bottom of the market fell out on Black Tuesday, the worst day in the Stock Market Crash with sixteen million shares traded, a record that would hold until 1968. Whitney’s plan of using “blue chip” stocks was too little much too late. Though he was considered a Wall Street guru for much of his life, it would be proven in 1938 that his company was insolvent and he was an embezzler. Whitney would plead guilty and was sentenced to Sing Sing, where he served as a model prisoner and afterward became a successful small businessman. Despite a petition signed by 1028 economists, President Hoover did not veto the Smooth-Hawley Tariff after it was approved in the Senate in March of 1930.

October 28, 312 – Maxtenius Victorious at Milvian Bridge

2011-08-11T22:53:00.001-07:00

The Roman Empire had reached a turning point after centuries of military dictatorship powered by the wheels of bureaucracy. Since the domination of Octavian over Julius Caesar’s assassins, the Senate had been largely a stamp for the emperor to pass his decrees. Many men pursued this utmost position, and civil wars erupted often when capable generals overtook weak emperors. The empire itself became unwieldy, and Diocletian divided Rome into western and eastern parts with co-rulers in each. By the early fourth century, further divisions and murky agreements had created a Tetrarchy where four men controlled the empire as Caesars and Augusti.

In 306, Augustus Constantius Chlorus died, and his son Constantine was proclaimed by his soldiers on the frontier of Britannia that he would be the new emperor. Currently controlling Rome, however, was Maxentius, who had taken the title of Augustus by force after defeating Severus, the legal appointee by the eastern Augustus, Galerius. Licinius, another would-be emperor, had been proclaimed emperor by a conference of the leading political figures of Rome. By 312, Constantine was already moving on Rome to defeat the usurper Maxentius and making plans for alliance with Licinius.

Constantine organized the execution of Maxentius’s father, Maximinian, and marched with an army of some 40,000, racing over northern Italy and defeating armies more than twice his size, even killing Maxentius’s highest general, Ruricius Pompeianus, at Verona. Maxentius had already held Rome successfully through two sieges, but he decided to deal with the upstart from the north himself, setting up an army on the far side of the Milvian Bridge over the Tiber River. On the evening of the 27th, Constantine’s forces prepared for battle the next day, and a vision came upon them. Looking into the setting sun, they saw a cross made of light and words in Greek reading, “In this sign, conquer.” A dream that night explained that the sign was from a sect of worshippers of the Hebrew god, practically the only one without a temple in Rome where Maxentius had already made substantial sacrifices toward victory in the battle.

As the morning dawned, Constantine prepared his men to mark the sign on their shields, but he was unnerved by the use of Greek letters chi and rho spelling the first sounds of “Christ” when the chi could have easily been his own “Constantine.” Hubris came over him, and he edited the sign for his soldiers from the “P” into an “O” for the omicron that would spell his own second letter. The move would prove disastrous, as the rounded shape formed a handy target at the top of the Roman shields where they would be knocked into the faces of their bearers, distracting them while missiles or blows from swords followed. Despite losing the opening cavalry skirmish, Maxentius’s army won the day and pressed Constantine’s army into breaking. Constantine himself was killed while trying to rally his retreating soldiers.

Maxentius returned victoriously to Rome. Constantine’s onetime ally, Licinius, had overseen affairs in the east along with Maximinius Daia but now sought to support Maxentius. Encouraged by Maxentius’s victory, Maximinius attempted to overthrow Licinius with an invasion of Byzantium, but Licinius defeated him at Tzirallum and pursued him to utter defeat and suicide at Tarsus. The remainder of Licinius’ reign was spent holding off Sassanid attack, while Maxentius went about legitimizing himself and working to stitch the eastern empire back to dependency on Rome as he lent Licinius great masses of wealth to aid in defense.

A century later, the Roman Empire would fall as German barbarians stormed across the Alps and repeatedly sacked and finally conquered the Eternal City in 476. Without a particular seat of strength in the east, the rest of the empire shattered into bases of power in Egypt, the Bosporus, and Syria. The end of Roman authority finally meant an end to centuries-long persecution of the Christian sects, whose monotheism was grown out of Jewish doctrine. With a plethora of Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek, Roman, and now German gods in veneration, monotheism would serve as a minority in Europe. Norse gods would come to dominate during the Viking Age, but the cohesion of Allah in the Arabic Islam would eventually sweep across Europe, Africa, and well into Asia, carried even further by converted Mongol conquerors a millennium later.

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In reality, Constantine was victorious at Milvian Bridge when his soldiers bearing the cross-symbol broke the defenses of Maxtenius. The bridge collapsed under the retreating army, and Maxtenius himself was among the drowned. Constantine took Rome and later conquered Licinius on grounds of harboring traitors, reuniting the Roman Empire and strengthening it with his new capital at Constantinople. Meanwhile, he would end the persecution of the Christians, himself convert, and codify Christianity into what would soon become the new state religion for Rome.

October 27, 1936 – Mrs. Simpson Found Dead

2011-08-08T12:44:00.000-07:00

When a maid came to rouse her mistress, American socialite Wallis Warfield Simpson was discovered lying dead on her bedroom floor, having been shot twice. As no one could recall hearing gunshots, the matter became an international mystery and one of the greatest unsolved crimes of the twentieth century. Papers were found in her desk that would have confirmed the process of divorce from her second husband, Ernest Aldrich Simpson. Mr. Simpson was detained for questioning, but no more than circumstantial evidence arose, and he was eventually released with no further serious suspects.

The murder was a climactic end to one of the most scandalous affairs of the modern age born out of two people already famous for scandal. Wallis, a divorcee of US Naval officer Win Spencer, had numerous affairs as part of a rocky relationship due to Mr. Spencer’s travel with the Navy and his alcoholism. They divorced in December of 1927, and Wallis remarried less than a year later to shipbroker Ernest Aldrich Simpson, also his second marriage. After staying with her mother until her death, Wallis moved to London, where the Simpsons lived beyond their means amid the upper crust.

At a dinner on January 10, 1931, Mrs. Simpson met the other party to the affair, Edward Windsor, Prince of Wales. They were introduced by Edward’s mistress of the time, Thelma, Lady Furness. He lived as a passionate womanizer and was privately criticized for having the maturity of an adolescent by his secretary, Alan Lascelles. Edward and Wallis met often at house parties. She was even presented at court, which caused further scandal. In January of 1934, Lady Furness went on a trip to New York City, during which time Wallis and Edward’s affair eclipsed all others. Servants caught them in bed together, but Edward was quick to deny this to his father, King George V.

Scandal continued to climb as Edward and Wallis were seemingly everywhere together. He gave her tremendous gifts of jewels and took her on trips through Europe as well as shorter holidays on his yacht. Government officials began to worry about Edward’s overwhelming affection for the American divorcee almost to the point of enslaving himself to her. After visiting an antique store, the shopkeep noted that Wallis had Edward “completely under her thumb.” Upon the death of George V in January of 1936, Edward became King of the UK and Emperor of India, yet he seemed dominated by someone outside of the bounds of government.

After months of continuing the affair with officials scrambling to keep it out of the news, Mrs. Simpson began proceedings to divorce her husband so she might marry the king. Aldrich Simpson had been working to keep his shipping firm afloat during the Great Depression and seemed nearly forgotten by his wife, who was so close to the King as not to feel the financial difficulties of their lifestyle. For these stressful reasons, when Wallis was found dead, Aldrich was the prime suspect. However, after intense questioning from many levels of police, it was believed that he was still genial with his wife, would have gone through with the divorce, and moved on with his life. Aldrich, a naturalized British citizen, left for New York and never returned. He would marry again twice.

Another suspect was the ousted Thelma, Viscountess Furness, who had divorced her husband the viscount in 1933. After being cast off by Prince Edward, she had a brief fling with Prince Aly Khan, Imam of Ismaili Shi’a Islam. She carried resentment toward Wallis, but there was no proof as to grounds for murder upon hearing that her stolen prince might be married.

Darker conspiracy theories suggest actions from MI5 or royal agents hoping to keep the crown clear from further scandal and tampering foreign hands.

The truth remains unknown, and Edward continued his reign heartbroken. He rarely appeared in public, and, when he did, he was described as in deep mourning or “sporting a faraway look in his eyes.” The king let matters of politics fall mainly upon his Prime Ministers Baldwin, Chamberlain, and Churchill, assisting only when necessary. He quietly applauded Chamberlain’s ambitions for “peace in our time” and determined that Britain should not worry about matters on the Continent, expanding his melancholy to his foreign policy.

When World War II broke out, Edward gave dour speeches and encouraged Churchill to “give Hitler what he wants” so that England might be “left alone.” With the king’s weakness felt, the morale of Britain tumbled, finally prompting a discouraged nation to sue for peace after a narrow victory in the Battle of Britain and the dark days of the Blitz. As Britain came out of the war and America saw less need to join, Hitler took up his allies to march on Moscow, battling Stalin until 1949 in a war that crippled his own rule. Britain, meanwhile, began decolonization as the empire fell to revolutions calling for independence. By the time Edward’s niece Queen Elizabeth II ascended the throne, only a few countries still remained in what would become the Commonwealth.

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In reality, Mrs. Wallis Simpson went through with her divorce of Aldrich Simpson. The two remained amiable toward one another with gifts and commentary on memoirs. Edward abdicated in favor of marrying Wallis, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor settled in the Bahamas quietly as World War II engulfed the world.

October 26, 1947 – Kashmir Remains Independent

2011-08-07T19:38:00.000-07:00

As Britain prepared to grant India its independence during the scaling down of an empire upon which the sun could not set, the question of the mountain kingdom of Kashmir seemed easily solved as the population was 77% Muslim and it stood at some of the headwaters of the Indus River; it would simply go along with the newly created Dominion of Pakistan. However, when its King Hari Singh was slow to act after the British left, Pakistan funded the Azad (“Free”) Kashmir army to press the king into acceptance through guerrilla terrorism.

Kashmir had not long been its own nation. It originally stood as the Kashmir Valley, a geographic feature of the Himalayas that carved a rich valley nearly surrounded by the world’s tallest mountain range. Long populated by Hindus and Buddhists, the Muslim influence came gradually and harmoniously. After centuries of increasing corruption, the reigning Hindu Lohara were overthrown in 1339 by the Muslim Shams-ud-Din Shah Mir, who began a long dynasty of Islamic rule in a period where Islam became the dominant religion. Kashmir would eventually lose its self-determination as it come under control of the Mughal Empire in the 1580s and was passed on to the Afghani Durrani and Sikh empires over the next centuries.

Gulab Singh, a grandnephew and courtier of the Sikh’s first Maharaja Ranjit Singh, was awarded Kashmir as a subsidiary kingdom after his excellent services in northern campaigns that helped secure the region. He went on to conquer nearby Jammu and worked with the increasing British presence in the region. In 1846, the First Anglo-Sikh War would knock down much of the Sikh’s power in favor of the growing British Empire, and Gulab would prove himself an able negotiator after British victory at the Battle of Sobraon. Gulab’s son and successor Ranbir sided with the British in the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which prompted another award as the British officially named him ruler of the Princely State of Kashmir and Jammu. For the next century, Kashmir was a relatively quiet subordinate kingdom with its own maharajas.

After World War II and the success of India’s independence movement, the partition of Pakistan and India led to humanity’s largest mass migration as Muslims and Hindus tried to sort themselves out amid the new borders. When King Hari Singh did not move to join Pakistan after the British officials left their posts, the Pakistan government attempted to force the land into submission with scare tactics and raids. Hari Singh turned to Louis Mountbatten, the man who had been the last Viceroy of India and oversaw its transition as Governor-General of the Union of India; Mountbatten replied that aid could only be given if Kashmir were part of his jurisdiction in India. After great thought, Hari Singh refused to the offer and addressed his people with a speech relayed by radio of the decision to remain free and the importance of standing up to Pakistani aggression. Pakistan became embarrassed by the international outcry, and the resulting UN resolution gave foreign aid while a plebiscite was held. The votes to remain independent narrowly won out, and many commentators agreed that if Pakistan had not moved so harshly, that the people would have eagerly joined.

In 1950, across the Himalayas, China would march into Tibet nearly unopposed. Taking note from the lack of international action, Pakistan would make its own march into Kashmir. King Hari Singh simply fled, and the people were largely complacent. India led a cry for Kashmiri independence, prompting an Indian army marching into Kashmir to restore the king, which resulted in an outpouring of aid from China, who feared an Indian supremacy in the region. While China sent only a few soldiers, their influence in Kashmir increased greatly and soon funded, ironically enough, the violent separatists, many of them minority Hindu and Sikh.

The disappearance of the Mo-e-Muqaddas (the Hair of the Prophet) relic from the Hazratbal shrine on December 26, 1963, prompted swift crackdown on minorities and violations of human rights such as illegal arrest, searches, and seizure of property. Although the relic was found again only days later, the policies remained, prompting another invasion from India in 1965 in an effort to liberate the oppressed Hindus in Jammu as well as to capture high ground for tactical advantage. The war reached a standoff, and Kashmir remained bloody and tense until the USSR’s occupation of Afghanistan sparked another conflict in the Third Kashmir War. Using American arms and reinforcements, Pakistan held its advantage.

Since the 1980s, Kashmir has remained one of the most notoriously troubled regions in the world. The development of nuclear weapons in both India and Pakistan has caused a sense of nervous peace, though skirmishes crop up, such as gunfire in 1999 and raiding following the 2005 earthquake.

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In reality, King Hari Singh agreed to Mountbatten’s condition that Kashmir become part of India. An Indian army fought off the Pakistani forces, and a UN resolution sponsored a ceasefire, though no plebiscite would be made. Politically contested with regions claimed by India, Pakistan, and China, Kashmir is a major stumbling block for international discussion, but free from violence for the most part.

October 25, 1400 – Chaucer Freed from Prison and Composes “Croun Retorned” (“Crown Returned”)

2011-08-05T13:54:00.000-07:00

Middle English writer Geoffrey Chaucer is known as the first to show the potential for literature in his native tongue, but he was also very active in his political life. Born in a family of comfortable wealth with land in Ipswich and dozens of shops in London, Chaucer gained his first foothold into politics as page to Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Ulster. For the rest of his professional life, he would work as a diplomat, civil servant, and member of influential courts.

After being captured and ransomed as a young man during the Caroline War, he traveled extensively, especially in Italy, where he would be introduced to poetry in the Italian vernacular. While English poetry was predominately in French and Latin at the time, Chaucer brought back the idea of a poetry of the people. He created works such as “The Book of the Duchess” and most famously his Canterbury Tales (completed in 1408 with its 116 stories). Edward III granted Chaucer “a gallon of wine daily for the rest of his life” on St. George's Day, 1374, believed to be royal endorsement of his artistic advancements.

While writing, Chaucer continued his political career. His children by his wife Phillipa Roet, lady-in-waiting to the queen, did well in society, such as his son Thomas serving as chief butler to kings throughout Europe and Speaker of the House of Commons and daughter Alice marrying the Duke of Suffolk. Chaucer himself climbed upward through the hierarchy of public service, gaining positions as envoy, Comptroller for Customs in London, and clerk of king's works. Toward the end of Chaucer's career, childless Richard II once again came to troubles maintaining his hold on the throne. While campaigning in Ireland, Richard was overthrown by Henry of Bolingbroke, who easily marched his army through England in 1399 while Richard's knights were away. Richard eventually surrendered at Flint Castle to be spared his life for imprisonment in the Tower of London.

Amid the turmoil, Chaucer lost his pay. With creditors in constant pursuit, Chaucer was eager to get renewed grants from the new king, Henry IV, who was distantly his step-nephew by his wife's sister's third marriage. Chaucer wrote his poem “The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse” in hopes of making his plight known in a clever manner. In its final stanza, he set about a challenge to Henry in what notes suggest was more daring from the original draft.

“Are ye our newe Brutes Albyoun
Who stand fore from line and battle
Our verray king? This song to yow I sende,
Be ye that mowen alle oure harmes amende
Have minde upon my questiun.”

Henry responded to the poem with a heavy hand, firing Chaucer from his positions and having him arrested on grounds of debt-evasion. While he contained the potential political stink, the action was enough to convince the young Edward of Norwich to permit his fellow earls Salisbury, Huntingdon, and Kent to go forth with their Epiphany Rising and capture Henry at a tournament in Windsor. In the chaos, Henry's supporters deserted the man who proved not to be heir to Brutus. Richard II was returned to the throne while Henry was executed and his son Henry relegated to positions in Cornwall and Ireland. Upon his return to command, Richard praised Chaucer for questioning the usurper and paid the poet's debts as well as promising a handsome pension, provided he continued to write for the good of England, first producing a long poem praising Richard.

Until his death in 1411, Chaucer produced numerous works highly regarded in English literature. Richard worked to hold onto his throne, struggling against an increasingly independent Northumberland and the Liberation in Wales circa 1415. He finally managed somewhat stable peace with France, despite encouragement from Henry and others that victory could be pressed through Calais.

Richard was succeeded by the next in line for the throne in 1424 by Edmund Mortimer, who became Edmund III and led the merging of the Lancaster and Plantagenet houses through his grandmothers. England continued on a path of stability over the rest of the Middle Ages, producing great works of art and literature but proving politically unambitious.

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In reality, Chaucer wrote flatteringly to Henry IV,

“O conquerour of Brutes Albyoun
Which that by line and free eleccioun
Been verray king, this song to yow I sende,
And ye that mowen alle oure harmes amende
Have minde upon my supplicacioun.”

Henry promised to return grants to Chaucer, though records are unclear whether they were actually paid. Chaucer is believed to have died October 25, 1400, though even this date was written on a tomb erected a century after his death. Some historians, such as Python Terry Jones, speculate that his sudden death and lack of will or surviving papers could have been a political murder to clear the remains of Richard II's influence. Whatever the truth, Chaucer was buried in Westminster Abbey, and ever since English writers have sought to be buried with him in what has become Poet's Corner.

Alternate History Improv Show

2011-07-26T19:12:00.001-07:00

From April 9, 2011, the folks from OKC Improv tackle alternate history featuring Ancient Egyptian newspapers, The Toby Keith-Oprah Wars, and Sam Walton's spirit journey through Portugal to create Wal-mart and its subsequent domination of the world.

Check it out!

1863 - Lee Falls at Gettysburg

2011-07-02T16:10:00.000-07:00

Union General Robert E. Lee would face his darkest hour as his armies were broken up during an assault against the invading Confederate forces of General James Longstreet. By 1863, the Civil War had dragged on through three of its six Aprils, and times were difficult for the Union. Draft riots sent New York City up in flames, the presidency of Abraham Lincoln came under question, and the South intended to follow up victories in Virginia by an invasion of Northern territory, hopefully impressing foreign powers to recognize the Confederacy.

Times were also difficult for Robert E. Lee. A native Virginian, he had very nearly seceded along with his state, but a personal intervention by retiring General Winfield Scott convinced him that his duty was to the United States government. He was branded a traitor by many in the South, who quickly seized his wife's property at Arlington, looting furniture that had once belonged to George Washington, inherited through Lee's wife Mary Custis, great-granddaughter of Martha Washington. In the North, many suspected the accented general as a potential conspirator. Further questions were raised as Lee's campaigns in the East were slow, though knowledgeable officials recognized that he spent much of the early war assembling key supply lines and training a terribly green Union army.

The invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania came as a surprise to many, but Lee seemed almost ready for the expedition, quickly maneuvering his armies to force a battle near the town of Gettysburg, PA. Here, however, his plans failed. He had long studied the effectiveness of an artillery bombardment followed by an infantry charge as used by Garibaldi in the wars of Italian unification, but his emulation in Pennsylvania would suffer problems of wet powder, crosswinds, and unshakable dug-in positions. When his army broke, Lee was reported to have rode among them and said, "I've lost this battle, not you."

Longstreet finished his plans of rooting his army at the rail center in Harrisburg, effectively cutting off Maryland and, more importantly, Washington, D.C. Despite the victory, it would be quickly overwhelmed by a reformed Union army under General Meade. Lee was shifted into a support position, where he would ride out the rest of the war, while command shifted to the new celebrity of Ulysses Grant, whose simultaneous conquest of Vicksburg, MS, would herald the beginning of the end of the war in the West.

After the war, Lee would be a component for reconciliation with the South, accepting a lecturing position at Washington College, now known as Washington University, in Lexington, VA.

June 30, 1908 – Tunguska Impact Alters the World

2011-06-30T19:49:00.000-07:00

In an event unable to be understood at the time, a pinpoint black hole struck the Earth near the Stony Tunguska River in Siberia, Russia. The impact itself was significant with a shockwave estimated at 5.0 on the Richter scale that knocked trees flat in an 800 square mile spread, blew people off their feet, and destroyed windows for hundreds of miles. The aftershock, however, was far more important. As the black hole bore through the Earth, it shed the event-horizon shell of cosmic matter and evaporated with the energy from friction and pressure of the Earth's core. The shockwaves continued through the molten core and mantle like an isolated earthquake, meeting on the opposite side of the world near the Strait of Magellan. There, the edge of the Antarctic Plate buckled with the South American Plate, causing a massive upheaval that would turn the Drake Passage into an enormous mountain range connecting the Andes and the Antarctic Peninsula.

Newspapers and scientists would consider the event purely tectonic until the Leonid Kulik expedition in 1921 determined the mysterious explosion happened only hours before the upheaval. His mineralogy team excavated radioactive material not uncommon to Siberia that would later be tested again in 2007 and found to coincide with isotopes from space such as cesium as well as heavy polonium and magnetic nickel.

At the time, however, the world's attention was turned to the new landmass that had suddenly cut off the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans (what would later be termed as the “exit wound” of the black hole, though it was really only backlash from the collision). As ocean currents adjusted, climatological alterations began such as the increase of rainforest to the south of the Amazon and the widening of the Kalahari Desert. Sea life suffered greatly as migration routes were cut off, causing the extinction of several whale species, already over-hunted. Most notable to the time was that the most-used passage to the Pacific had been cut off. Since its discovery by Balboa, the Pacific had struck Europe as a new, calmer ocean for exploration and colonization. The Pacific had been especially instrumental to the Americans, who used it as the main route connecting them to the quickly populated West Coast even after the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. A faster route was currently under construction through a canal in Panama, but at the time of the Upheaval, it was still years from completion. The long-sought Northwest Passage had only recently been completed by Roald Amundsen from 1903 to 1906 and could be crossed only at the warmest points of summer by reinforced icebreaker ships.

Effectively, the Pacific had become cut off from the East. Shipping could still flow through the Indian Ocean, but the journey from New York to San Francisco by steamer had increased from weeks to months. Calling the times “desperate,” US President Theodore Roosevelt began his campaign for his unprecedented third term and vowed not to leave office until his canal was completed (which occurred years before schedule in 1911). The rest of the world looked with shock and envy at America controlling the only access to the eastern Pacific, and soon multiple European-backed companies began plans to dig canals through Honduras, Costa Rica, and, especially, Nicaragua. Only the Nicaraguan Canal would see completion in 1923, after changing hands twice.

Other plans, however, determined that overland routes would be suitable. On February 12, 1908, the New York to Paris Race began, traveling by motor car and partially by steamer west from Times Square to the French capital. A month after the Upheaval, the American team arrived victorious in their Thompson Flyer. Savvy newspapermen used the event as an example of the efficiency of overland travel. The Germans (whose team arrived second), took notice of the feat and began work with the ABC Powers (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile) to complete a rail and motorway that would bring goods from Buenos Aires to Santiago. German imperial attention turned to South America, bringing commerce and tourism, so much so that commentators doubted the Kaiser had even noticed the short-lived Austrian occupation of Serbia.

Gradually, the world would become accustomed to its new scar of what came to be known as the Drake Mountains, but the idea that an object from space could bring such devastation to a planet continues to unnerve the human spirit.

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In reality, the mysterious Tunguska blast was most likely an air burst of a meteoroid. It produced an explosion that would not be rivaled by man until atomic weapon tests of the 1950s. Other hypotheses about the explosion have labeled it the activity of antimatter, aliens, Nikola Tesla, or, famously in 1973, University of Texas physicists Albert Jackson and Michael Ryan suggesting the idea of a small black hole (though it would not have left the telltale minerals found in later expeditions).

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More info on Tunguska at Matt's Today in History blog. http://mattstodayinhistory.blogspot.com/2011/06/tunguska-event-june-30-1908.html

June 24, 1812 – Napoleon Reorganizes his Grande Armée

2011-06-24T19:45:00.000-07:00

On the night before his army number more than half a million men crossed the Neman River in the Second Polish War, Napoleon suddenly came down with wind and cramps from his chicken marengo that kept him from sleeping. While battling his discomfort, he read from one of his favorite classics, The Art of War by the Chinese ancient Sun Tzu. He paused between bouts of painful attacks and contemplated the army he had camped around him. Rather than Sun Tzu's model force of fast, elite troops, Napoleon had assembled the largest army known to man. He had hoped the army would strike fear into Czar Alexander and his generals, forcing them to bend to his will, but the “Little General” in him at last decided victories could not be won with simple weight. After all, many of the battles he had won to bring him here had been against much larger armies.

In the morning, Napoleon ordered the movement of his troops across the river as was planned, but he himself worked with his secretaries and generals in whittling down the necessary army. Of his 554,000 men (300,000 of whom were French and Dutch, 100,000 Lithuanians and Poles, and the rest a mishmash from around Europe), he determined a main fighting force of about 200,000. The other troops suddenly seemed unnecessary, but Napoleon refused to let a man go to waste. He put the local Poles and Lithuanians as well as some Croats and Austrians into skirmishing parties while the rest he dedicated to building a massive supply line capable of supporting his army, though he had always planned to live off the land as Sun Tzu recommended.

Napoleon's new army moved with incredible speed across the Russian Empire despite its poor roads. The Russian army under Field Marshall Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly initially attempted to stop the smaller French force but was defeated. The Field Marshall kept his army from being crushed and fell back to a strategy of scorched earth, but the system of retreat did not stop Napoleon. When the French took St. Petersburg, the Czar and his court was forced to flee, and the disgraced de Tolly was replaced by Prince Mikhail Kutuzov. Napoleon moved toward Moscow, but Kutuzov met him with the bulk of the Russian forces at Borodino. There, in the largest single-day fight of the Napoleonic Wars, more than 250,000 men and 1,2000 cannon fought allout. Napoleon won a close victory, and the Russian army returned to retreat.

Victory at Borodino might have been a Pyrrhic one but for Napoleon's well built supply lines. The forty thousand casualties of the Russians could be replaced, and, though it would require longer to return to maximum strength, so could Napoleon's losses of 30,000. The march to Moscow continued. City governor Count Fyodor Rostopchin suggested that the city be set to torch, but Czar Alexander capitulated rather than seeing another capital fall violently. He met with Napoleon the Poklonnaya Hill and surrendered while Napoleon granted him continued control of the Russian Empire, sans the numerous lands such as Poland and the Ukraine that would be granted their freedom (at least, freedom from Russia, as they would be granted governments friendly to Napoleon's Continental System).

Napoleon spent the next years solidifying his command in Europe, putting down Cossack uprisings, quelling Spain, and pacifying the English, whose economy continued to crumble while rebels stirred from the French-backed Irish. He later turned back to expansion, taking Constantinople and conquering the Ottoman Empire. This sparked another war with England in which Napoleon would take the Mediterranean (and, most importantly, Egypt) and incite India to rebellion. Napoleon would die of stomach cancer shortly after Britain's surrender of Egypt in 1823, and his son Napoleon II would prove unable to carry on his father's work.

The French Empire would crumble, but the impact of Napoleonic conquest would be felt for centuries. In what had been efficiency, Napoleon had organized people-groups into states, leading to senses of Nationalism and the unifications of Germany and Italy. Smaller groups such as Serbs, Lithuanians, Poles, Basque, and so on, received new levels of self-government. Most notably, Napoleon would free the serfs of Russia, organizing them and creating a new environment of independence that would make the Russian kingdom a leader in the Second Industrial Revolution and a model of capitalism and progress through the twentieth century.

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In reality, Napoleon kept his enormous army, which became bogged down with an indecisive flanking battle at Polotsk that stopped him from his march on St. Petersburg. He moved on Moscow, which he took, but found the city in flames. Surrounded by scorched earth and Russian skirmishers and drained of supplies because of his unintentionally long marches, Napoleon turned back to France, leaving much of his Grande Armée to fend for itself. Roughly 400,000 troops would die or become captured, leaving less than a quarter surviving to return to Paris. The loss would cripple his empire and lead to his first downfall in 1814.

June 22, 1941 – Hitler Calls off Invasion of Soviet Union

2011-06-22T12:43:00.000-07:00

Upon the receipt of confirmed espionage of the military preparedness of the Soviet Union, German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler gave the last-minute order scrubbing his intended invasion. Knowledge of Stalin's military buildup was well known, but the exact numbers were suddenly daunting. As seen by Hitler then and later calculated upon declassified documents by state historian Mikhail Meltyukhov in his work, Stalin's Gift, Russians outnumbered the Germans and their allies 1.4-to-1 in infantry and artillery, 2.6-to-1 in aircraft, and stunningly more than 3.8-to-1 in tanks. Hitler had surprise on his side as Stalin, despite the advice of several spies who had given him the exact date of invasion, believed Hitler would hold longer than two years to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and wait until he finished war with Britain. Hitler had already postponed the intended Operation Barbarossa several weeks from its initial deadline in May due to logistical problems, and now he knew certainly he was too late.

Germany and the Soviet Union seemed doomed to fight each other, however. Stalin addressed military academy graduates with, “War with Germany is inevitable,” just weeks before the intended invasion. Both nations were diametrically opposed with policies in Hitler's fascism and Stalin's communism. Both were hopeful for expansion as Hitler called for “elbow room” and Stalin worked to rebuild the Russian Empire, such as dominating Finland in the 1939-40 Winter War. Because Stalin understood Hitler's need for oil to fuel his power would bring him to Baku, the Soviet leader began programs to expand the Russian military by leaps. From '39 to '41, he more than doubled the size of the army and especially built aircraft, which increased from 7,700 to 18,700.

As Hitler and his staff reviewed the numbers, he knew that Germany would be unable to maintain the blitzkrieg he had used successfully against Poland and France without control of the air and against numerically superior tanks, with Russian heavy tanks even arguably superior to Panzers one-on-one. Finally Hitler realized that the Russians were simply too powerful by weight and determined that he would need new kinds of weapons to fight, redoubling his already heavy investment in research and development for rockets, atomic bombs, and more. He let continue the lie that his massing troops on the border with the Soviet Union was keeping them away from attacks by Britain and eventually recalled them for Operation Sea Lion, which had been postponed indefinitely since September, 1940.

Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought Britain's near-ally America into the war fully that December. With American resources turned toward the Pacific, Hitler's invasion of Britain began, which quickly turned into a quagmire of resistance and sabotage of nearly every public work. Although Hitler held Western Europe for several years, the Allied counter-attack through Africa enabled Britain to be liberated by the D-Day landing at Devon, June 6, 1944.

In early 1945, with Hitler reeling despite some Soviet support Stalin made good on his original strategy of waiting. Called the “Icebreaker” theory by exiled historian Viktor Suvorov, Russia swept in as liberators across Europe, meeting with American and British allies as they took Berlin and continued toward the Western Front, spreading as far as France and Italy. Churchill and Roosevelt encouraged Russia to relinquish their control of Europe as soon as order could be maintained, but Stalin decided to stay. As war with Japan ended with the new A-bomb, political stakes were raised with the Americans holding a powerful card, but Russia practically fresh for a fight.

War-weary President Truman decided to leave the Russians in Europe, establishing doctrine that would work just to keep the Soviets from expanding further. This, too, would prove a blunder of waiting as the Russians would use captured German scientists, now pampered celebrities outside Moscow, to surpass the atomic bomb with an H-bomb and rocketry capable of intercontinental delivery by the 1950s. An Iron Curtain fell from East France to North Italy and across the Soviet Balkans that looked to expand through the Middle East, Africa, even Latin America, and absorb Chinese Communism into the Soviet-led World Community. Any opposition to the world superpower had to be covert, such as escapes across the Swiss border and arming of Afghan guerillas, as no nation could stand against Stalin's legacy until it eventually collapsed into corruption and civil war.

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In reality, Operation Barbarossa proceeded. With army strengths of more than seven million, Hitler and Stalin fought bitterly over Eastern Europe for months until the Germans were finally stopped and held by sheer numbers. Eventually, the tide would favor the Russians, who would come to take much of Eastern Europe under their influence after World War II and hold it until the wave of independence movements in 1989.

June 21, 1916 – Battle of Carrizal Sparks Second Mexican-American War

2011-06-21T15:56:00.001-07:00

The chaotic Mexican Revolution finally began war with the United States after an altercation at the town of Carrizal in the northern state of Chihuahua, Mexico. About one hundred troopers from the US 10th Cavalry attacked some 150 Mexican Federal soldiers, leading to a Mexican victory even though they had taken two-thirds casualties. Two American cavalry officers and fourteen troopers were killed while twenty-three more were captured. In a move that is surrounded by controversy to this day, many of the prisoners were killed. News of the mass execution struck deeply in the American conscious, pushed the deeper by Hearst newspapers, which called for war.

While there had been routine troubles with American outlaws and Mexican banditos on either side using the border to their advantage since before the first Mexican War (1846-1848), the Mexican Revolution began a whole new environment of turmoil between the nations. In 1910, Francisco Madero overthrew the dictator Porfirio Díaz, who had held onto power as president since 1884 and twice before. Díaz had worked to free Mexico of American influence while furthering Mexico on pseudo-liberal lines with a theme of "Order followed by Progress." Decades after Díaz suspended the non-consecutive presidencies rule that he himself had implemented, Madero finally spoke up that he would run in the 1910 election. Díaz imprisoned him, but Madero escaped and published “Plan de San Luis Potosí” calling for no re-elections, which made him into a revolutionary craved by the Mexican people.

Unfortunately, the goal of the revolution was unclear. Numerous movements began from agrarianists, socialists, anarchists, and more. Madero remained focused on simple election reform; after his ragtag army of peasants and Indians defeated the Federal forces, he insisted on an election in 1911, which he handily won. His goals did not match the calls for social reform, so, by 1913, Madero had lost the public approval needed to stave off a coup by General Victoriano Huerta, Felix Díaz (nephew of Porfirio), and US Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson, creating a stable Mexico under military rule to combat the numerous armies forming under commanders such as moderate socialist Venustiano Carranza, populist Emiliano Zapata, and militaristic democrat Francisco “Pancho” Villa. When Huerta fled Mexico City, Carranza came to power and was backed by US President Woodrow Wilson.

Villa, meanwhile, formed up his army in the north and fought on. He believed wholly in the Plan de San Luis and distrusted Carranza, who sent General Álvaro Obregón to put down Villa. On April 13, 1915, Villa was badly defeated at the Battle of Celaya, losing in a headlong assault that ended with 4,000 men dead and 6,000 captured. Blaming an American arms dealer for bad ammunition, Villa raided Columbus, NM, stealing from an army depot and destroying much of the town before his cavalry was driven off by American infantry. The American public, which had taken Villa as a romantic hero despite numerous border raids already, turned against him and agreed with Wilson’s encouraging Carranza as the basis for a stable government for Mexico. Unwilling to risk war but needing to control public outrage, Wilson dispatched Brigadier General John J. Pershing with a force of some 10,000 into Mexico to catch Villa. Early in the Punitive Expedition, Pershing gained intelligence that Villa was in Carrizal, and he sent cavalry under Captain Charles Trumbull Boyd to investigate. Boyd ordered an attack even though the soldiers in Carrizal were Federal Mexican, and the battle was quickly lost.

The following execution of prisoners is believed to have been the action of soldiers who had lost their commander, General Felix Gomez. In chaos or under questionable orders, twelve of the Americans were killed. Conspiracy theories suggest that Villa was behind the slayings, using double-agents or simple bribes to bring about the deaths. Word returned to Pershing, who sent it on to Washington with a request for leniency on orders to respect Mexican sovereignty and move freely. Congress, egged on by a suddenly bloodthirsty America, approved despite Wilson’s call for peace. Although he would work effectively to mobilize America, Wilson’s attempts at diplomacy would be used against him in the 1916 election with the slogan “He kept us out of war” as many believed that a swifter, wider military action could have spared much of the destruction on and across the border. At the beginning of his two-term presidency in 1917, Charles Evans Hughes directed Pershing to move on Mexico City quickly, seize control, and work with local leaders to establish occupation zones.

The Second Mexican War would be short, but bloody, and also thrust America into war with Germany, Mexico’s ally by 1917. Longer and even bloodier would be the occupation of Mexico, which would easily prove as problematic as that of the Philippines. While the middle region of Mexico would come to order fairly swiftly, the north would continue to fight under the image of Pancho Villa (who would be killed in battle in 1919) and the south was barely less than a warzone under "The Attila of the South" Zapata. The result would be the splitting of Mexico into Mexico, an independent state of South Mexico (nicknamed Oaxaca), and territory in Baja and Chihuahua that would come under American sovereignty. Today, Mexico is a thriving nation in open trade with the United States and Canada, while Oaxaca works to recover from its Cold War communist dictatorship.

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In reality, the captured American soldiers were traded diplomatically. The ABC Powers (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile) aided in diplomacy that would maintain peace between the United States and Mexico as both sides were truly reluctant for war.

June 20, 451 – Attila’s Victory at the Catalaunian Plains

2011-06-20T16:16:00.000-07:00

One of the greatest victories in the career of the great conqueror Attila the Hun came as he swept the allied Roman-Visigoth force from the field and assured his conquest of Gaul. As very little of the Hunnic culture included portraiture, it is difficult to know what Attila looked like, but he was recorded by the Roman historian Priscus, attendee to the Hun court in 448 as an attaché to the Byzantine ambassador. Priscus described Attila as, “Short of stature, with a broad chest and a large head; his eyes were small, his beard thin and sprinkled with grey; and he had a flat nose and tanned skin, showing evidence of his origin.”

The origin of the Huns themselves remains a mystery. The prevailing hypothesis has the nomadic people as descendants from the Xiongnu, tribes who had lived north of China and migrated westward. Over the course of the fourth century, the Huns came to the Volga River (having apparently taken up the practice of head-binding) and began building an empire that would control a swath of Europe from the Rus to the Atlantic. The horsemen had been beaten back from an invasion of Armenia by the Sassanid Empire who then turned north and west. Over several decades, the Huns under the brother-kings Blenda and Attila exploited the exhaustion of Roman troops while the Sassanids approached from the east and the Vandals seized Africa to establish the Danube as a tentative border with the Byzantine Empire. Blenda died after the Huns turned back from their invasion of the Balkans (even to the gates of Constantinople), loaded down with some 1450 pounds of gold in tribute. As the sole ruler of the Huns and with vast wealth at his command, Attila ravaged the Byzantines again before conquering westward.

He allied himself with Emperor Valentinian III of the Western Empire and began a crossing of Gaul toward the Visigothic kingdom Toulouse. His alliance with Rome fell apart as Valentinian’s sister Honoria, who had an arranged betrothal to a senator, attempted to escape it by asking for political aid from Attila. As proof of her turmoil, she sent along the engagement ring, which Attila took as a proposal. He agreed to this imaginary proposal and asked for a dowry of half the Western Empire. Valentinian tried unsuccessfully to convince Attila of the illegitimacy of the proposal, and the Hun continued westward into Rome, now as an enemy. Aetius, Roman general and former friend to Attila, formed up the troops of a new Visigothic and Roman force, blocked Attila’s path, and caught the army at the Plains of Catalaunian.

While skirmishes erupted between the various Hunnic vassals and Roman allies, the main forces arrived at the field. Inspired by augurs, Attila turned his soldiers back quickly and seized the ridge at the top of the plain. The Romans had attempted to beat them, and their forces became disorganized. The Visigoths hurried to flank, but their king Theodoric was fell from his horse and was trampled. With the Visigoths slowed, the Huns pressed the attack on the Sangiban allies in the center, who broke and became confused with the Visigoths. Seeing their allies crumble under the onslaught of Hunnic horse archers, Aetius ordered the Romans to retreat.

Reining his victorious troops, Attila would push through the little Roman defense left in Gaul and conquered the Visigoths, whose tribal chiefs fought each other over the throne as much as the Huns. Seeking to defend Italy against invasion, Aetius convinced Valentinian to honor his sister’s “proposal.” In 452, Attila won his bride along with Gaul and northern Hispania and with the Visigoth lands between the two. With an affirmed alliance between the Huns and Romans, Attila went on to press the Franks into vassals and then turned eastward to collect tribute the Byzantine emperor Marcian had stopped. Early in 453, Attila suffered fatal bleeding from the nose and throat, which was taken as witchcraft (or simply assassination by poison) conducted by Marcian.

The Huns would be unified with the death of Attila in seeking vengeance on Constantinople, which would not fall for two generations. Using Gothic vassals as bulk soldiers and driving the Danes from mainland Europe, the Hunnic Empire stretched from the Atlantic to the Caspian and the Mediterranean to the North Sea for nearly three centuries. It fell to an uprising sparked by the Frankish noble Charlemagne, who would build a powerful empire in its western half while a new breed of horsemen, the Magyar, conquered the east. Meanwhile, the Muslims of Africa would cross the Mediterranean and conquer as far north as the Alps, eventually to become the uncontested major world religion after the fall of Rome.

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In reality, the Romans took the left side of the ridge, and they halted the Huns from taking the strategic center. As the Hunnish augurs predicted, the Huns would face a great loss, but one of the enemies would be killed; Attila hoped it would be Aetius. Attila fell back to lick his wounds, refitting his troops for a campaign against Marcian that would never happen due to his death (which may or may not have been natural causes) while at a feast for his latest marriage to a Gothic princess. His soldiers rode in circles around his funeral tent, chanting, “Who can rate this as death, when none believes it calls for vengeance?” Attila’s sons would turn to infighting, and the Hunnish Empire would collapse a year later with a Gothic confederation.

June 17, 1579 – Drake Founds New Albion

2011-06-17T12:43:00.000-07:00

After pillaging the once-untouchable Pacific towns and sea lanes of the Spanish, Francis Drake and his fleet led by the Golden Hind continued northward. They had captured cargoes estimated at some 37,000 ducats (~$57,000,000), but they had also cut off their escape. To return to England, the fleet would have to slip by numerous Spanish colonies and ships either rounding the Cape of Magellan or through the South Seas, and then return via friendly Portuguese ports. Instead, Drake decided to continue northward and explore where even the Spanish had not yet reached. Far into uncharted territory, he came upon a bay that reminded his crews of home.

Francis Petty, one of Drake’s gentlemen-at-arms, wrote, “Our General called this country Nova Albion, and that for two causes; the one in respect of the white banks and cliffs, which lie towards the sea, and the other, because it might have some affinity with our country in name, which sometime was so called. There is no part of earth here to be taken up, wherein there is not some probable show of gold or silver.” Petty’s prophecy of gold would come true as bad weather forced Drake and his expedition out of their bay and through the Golden Gate into what would become known as Saint George’s Bay. Facing mutinous sailors who did not wish to continue north, Drake decided to conquer their foul spirits by taking some of them with him on expeditions up various rivers to chart the area. In early July, they would find gold flakes and even pebble-sized nuggets simply sitting in the riverbed.

Upon their return to the bay, Drake began construction of a fort to guard the area and solidify the English claim. The local natives were very amiable; French lawyer and historian Jules Verne wrote, citing Drake’s logs, “They appeared to be greatly astonished, and showed us great respect, thinking we were gods, and they received us with a great deal of reverence.” The Indians gave the Englishmen gifts of feathers and tobacco and always set aside their weapons before approaching. Their women stayed at a distance and scratched themselves to the point of bleeding, which Drake eventually learned was a method of sacrifice. With aid from the Indians, Drake completed Fort Elizabeth and staffed it with some of his most trusted advisors, including Petty.

Drake returned to England amid much aplomb in 1580. While the war with Spain had lulled into peace, his feat of circumnavigating the world gained him a knighthood. He became Mayor of Plymouth as well as a Member of Parliament and used his positions to begin the Albion Company, to which Elizabeth would grant a charter for a colony on the western coast of America. A well funded expedition left in 1584, shortly before the national attention would be shifted toward the Spanish Armada. The war would destroy Sir Walter Raleigh’s attempts at creating an English colony in North America on the eastern coast, which would later be settled by Puritans and planters as well as French, Dutch, Swedes, and Scottish.

England’s real hold on the Americas would turn to west. The West Indies and eastern seaboard remained important economic points for triangular trade in the Atlantic, but thousands of settlers would cross the Pacific for Albion, where gold seemed impossibly plentiful. England (and then Britain in 1707) explored the vast ocean, setting up important trading posts through Oceania and soon colonizing Hawai’i. Albion’s population soared as gold-mining served as a base to numerous industries such as logging, fur trading, and agriculture.

In 1776, the culturally diverse Eastern American Colonies rebelled, and a small movement arose in Albion for independence as well, but fears of Spanish incursion determined that the Albionians would remain British. The remoteness of Albion, however, gave the region its own sense, distinguishing their society from Britons, Americans, or Canadians. Albion eventually clarified its frontier into borders stretching from Spanish Baja in the south to Canadian Yukon and Russian Alaska in the north. When the Mexican-American War handed the bulk of Mexico’s northern territory to the land-hungry Americans, war to maintain independence from Manifest Destiny became inevitable. The Utah War involving Mormon settlers and the American Federal Government spilled over into Albion, and Albionian troops marched in support of Governor Brigham Young. Fears of going to war with Britain eventually brought the war to a diplomatic end with an independent Deseret dividing much of the border between Albion and the United States.

By maintaining neutrality in the American Civil War, Albion would return to good relations with the United States, who began to expand southward into the Caribbean in war with Spain. Albion, meanwhile, gained dominion status and began its own expansion across the Pacific, soon running afoul of the Japanese Empire, who would serve as their major nemesis in World War II.

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In reality, Francis Drake explored the Pacific Coast of North America, possibly as far north as Canada, but did not settle. Gold was not discovered there until 1848, when James Marshall spotted it near Sutter’s Mill. The resulting gold rush would make California into one of the most important centers of the United States of America.

June 14, 1926 – Brazil Remains in the League of Nations

2011-06-14T16:59:00.000-07:00

During his famous “Fourteen Points” speech in 1918, ten months before the Great War would reach its armistice, United States President Woodrow Wilson concluded with his fourteenth point about the terms needed for a peaceful and stable Europe: “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.” While the combined session of Congress applauded, genuine reception was cold. Many Americans felt that they had been needlessly involved in Europe’s war despite the submarine warfare and that “return to normalcy” was preferred to making the United States an international figure. During the next year, Wilson began to realize the difficulties of his envisioned League of Nations and decided to refine its character before its institution during the Paris Peace Conference in January of 1919.

The idea of a League of Nations was not new. It could be traced back to ancient ideals in Greek city-state confederations, Enlightenment writings of nations that openly welcome and talk with foreigners, and more overtly in the Concert of Europe opposing Napoleon. Formally, the international community began to come together with the Inter-Parliamentary Union in 1889 with a voluntary parliament collecting delegates from dozens of countries by the Great War. With millions dead across Europe, activism for peace amid the horrors of modern weapon technology grew powerful, and Wilson took advice from South African Prime Minister Jan Christiaan Smuts’ The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion to institute a central point for world diplomacy.

However, as the reluctance for admission to a voluntary League became obvious, Wilson determined that volunteerism, while idealistic, would not be enough. For a League of Nations to ensure that this was “the war to end all wars,” nations needed to be encouraged, though not quite forced, into the league as a stern father would encourage a son into education. Warfare as diplomacy would be outlawed and treaties allowable only overtly to fellow member nations in the league. Rather than disarmament, the armies of the nations would be at the disposal of the league to punish violations. Nations might never come to such an agreement on their own volition, but the aftermath of the Great War was the precise timing for strong institution.

Thusly emboldened, the League of Nations met in Council on January 16, 1920, with its first General Assembly meeting five days later with the closing of the Paris Peace Conference. The United States notably did not join the league with its Senate refusing to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and President Wilson and his Democrats losing power. The nations of the world pointed out the stipulation that no new treaties could be made with America, and so the United States technically continued at war well into the Harding administration until combined economic and political pressures made the US join in 1923, shortly after Harding’s death. Coolidge called the action Harding’s “dying wish” and commented on the League’s advances in labor, health, and technology, furthering rights to refugees, non-white races, and women, and working internationally to abolish trade in slaves and drugs. After several unsuccessful bids blocked primarily by the French, Esperanto was taken as one of the four official languages of the League (added to Spanish, which had joined the original French and English). The “artificial language” would soon become one of the world’s major trade languages and commonly spoken by millions.

The test of the League of Nations came as famously libertarian Costa Rica decided to shed the restrictions and codes, announcing on December 24, 1924, that it would withdraw. The question of secession raised, but the Latin American state would be allowed to leave, though it would be severed from new treaties the nations within the league. Theorists noted that Costa Rica would thusly be open to imperialization by any country wishing to do so, and the United States was quick to speak up with its old Monroe Doctrine protecting the Western Hemisphere from interference. Costa Rica left the League, and in June of 1925, Brazil announced that it would do the same. Having been a founding member, the stakes were higher, and political pressure settled on the South American nation. When Italy spoke up about its opportunities for expansion and numerous trade partners giving up renewing treaties, Brazil determined to stay, deciding that the Soviet Union and remnants of Germany would not be suitable trade partners.

Germany soon joined the League, and its Fuhrer Hitler eagerly began building influence. However, the majority of the League moved to block him and other Fascists. Using the same militaristic speed that had solved the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay, Italy was punished for its invasion of Ethiopia using illegal tactics (such as chemical warfare and water poisoning) by a naval blockade that would ultimately bring down Mussolini’s government. The Spanish Civil War became a divisive matter that finally led Hitler, who had chafed in the League since 1933, to leave and propose his own “Axis” of nations. While Germany, Japan, and a few others left, the Soviet Union joined as an antagonist, Stalin having held out for years. The call for aid from China in the Second Sino-Japanese War would prompt a war almost as massive as the Great War as the League descended upon Japan and its German allies with the Soviet Union taking the brunt of the fighting.

Victory in the Axis War proved the League to be solid. It governed much of the decolonization period with plebiscites it had perfected in the Balkans and Middle East. Still, outside of the walls of the Palace of Nations in Geneva, countries work covertly and economically to one-up or hinder one another in what has been termed “Cold Warfare.” Costa Rica, after its government being overthrown repeatedly by different factions, rejoined in desperate need of aid in 1960.

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In reality, the League of Nations ultimately proved impotent. The United States rode the Roaring Twenties and Great Depression without ever seeking membership. While the League made great strides promoting international health, the unnoticed sanctions on Italy for its Abyssinian invasion showed that it had very little real power. As World War II erupted, the League would disintegrate, ultimately to be replaced with the United Nations in 1945.

June 13, 1981 – Queen Elizabeth II Killed in Accident

2011-06-13T20:27:00.000-07:00

In what some describe as a “misguided teenage prank gone terribly wrong” and others “the greatest tragedy of our time”, Queen Elizabeth II of England died in a fall from her horse due to a starting pistol being fired by Marcus Sarjeant.

Elizabeth had been queen since the death of her father, George VI, in 1952. Her reign would see a time of major changes as Britain adapted to the new world order after World War II. The Empire had shifted into the Commonwealth of Nations over the course of the past decades, and Elizabeth acted as head of only a portion of the lands once under Britain and queen of seven countries (six in 1972 when Ceylon became republican Sri Lanka). In the Fifties, Britain worked to rebuild after the war, leading to the Swinging Sixties when England underwent a Renaissance exporting fashion and music and Britain overall returned to economic prowess.

The Seventies brought difficulty back to Britain. While foreign policies had been successful in peaceably breaking down the Empire into independent nations in the Commonwealth after the Churchill prime ministership, Britain had distanced itself from its allies in America by the Suez Canal crisis and opting out of the Vietnam War. Britain was becoming more isolationist, and its own problems were more than enough. Stagflation, energy crises, and union strikes began to cripple the British economy. Meanwhile, the Troubles continued to terrorize citizens as the IRA used bombing attacks not only in Northern Ireland, but on the mainland of England as well. The Labour government faltered under these pressures, bringing in a Conservative government with Margaret Thatcher as the first female prime minister.

During this time, Marcus Sarjeant grew up normally in Kent and attended Astor Secondary School in Dover, an accomplished Scout member and local patrol leader before joining the Air Training Corps at twelve. Marcus was an exceptional marksman, and he began training in the Royal Marines as well as the Army but seemed unable to fit into the discipline required of the armed services. Not even the police or fire department took him, and instead Marcus worked at a zoo, arts centre, and with children at a youth centre before ultimately being unemployed. In late 1980, he joined the Anti Royalist Movement and attempted to gain a gun license, but was unable to do more than take up a gun club and hold onto his father’s Webley revolver (which had no ammunition).

Looking for more in life, Marcus became inspired by the assassination of John Lennon (December 8, 1980) and the assassination attempts on Ronald Reagan (March 30, 1981) and Pope John Paul II (May 13, 1981). The fame seemed to explode around the attackers, and Marcus wanted it, noting to a friend, “I would like to be the first to take a pot shot at the Queen.” He wrote about becoming the most famous teenager in the world, but he did not seem to want to hurt Queen Elizabeth, only gain the fame, so he armed himself with a starting pistol and blanks. Marcus even sent a letter to Buckingham Palace (which arrived three days too late), warning, “Your Majesty. Don't go to the Trooping the Colour ceremony because there is an assassin set up to kill you, waiting just outside the palace.” He also sent letters and photos to magazines, which he hoped would expedite the growth of his fame once it began.

During the Trooping of Colour, Marcus became another face in the crowds until the Queen passed, when he fired six shots in her direction. The Queen’s horse, Burmese, became startled and reared, throwing the Queen, who would die in the fall. Marcus was seized out of the shocked crowd and apprehended by police while the Sovereign’s Escort closed up around the fallen Queen. Sarjeant would be found innocent of regicide as the actual death had been accidental, but he would be found guilty of “firing with intent to alarm the queen" under the Treason Act of 1842. Many called for his execution, but the seventeen-year-old would be given a life sentence, outraging many Royalists and beginning the feeling of harsh conservatism that would come to dominate the United Kingdom under the time of Thatcher. Marcus Sarjeant gained his fame only as hatred, and he would disappear into the prison system.

Any anti-British sentiment quickly invoked the same spirit of vengeance that haunted many in the mourning of the Queen. When IRA members in prison attempted a hunger strike to regain status as political prisoners, they were force-fed, and the IRA became the target of an immense military crackdown. In 1982, Britain came upon an international war when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, and the UK counter-invaded to remove dictator Leopoldo Galtieri. Many commentators believed that Galtieri’s government would have fallen apart on its own, but the government of Britain refused to take any assault.

As the occupation of Argentina dragged on and surviving Galtieri and, especially, anti-British cells carried out attacks, unemployment and taxes continued to climb in the recession of the 1980s. When the 1984 Miner’s Strike began, the military force turned on Britons themselves, arresting strikers en masse and encouraging scabs. Bombings not just by the desperate IRA increased amid the oppressive government, such as the nearly successful attempt on Thatcher’s life at the Grand Hotel in Brighton on October 12, 1984. Blaming the attacks on increasing leftist adversaries, the Conservative Government outlawed several smaller parties and instituted social control schemes not seen since the desperate days of the War. More controversial were the secret actions, such as the disappearance of Michael Heseltine in 1990.

The darker days lightened as the Nineties saw economic recovery and the social control lessened, though the Conservative Government continues in power with opponents disappearing seemingly before they can rise. Meanwhile, the Royal Family disintegrated amid scandal with separations and divorces as well as the death of Queen Diana while in Paris in 1997. Bright hope shines around William, Prince of Wales, who is never seen without his Conservative bodyguard.

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In reality, Queen Elizabeth’s horse did not buck, and her able horsemanship brought Burmese under control. Marcus Sarjeant was sentenced to five years imprisonment but was released in 1984, when he changed his identity to live a new life.

June 10, 1840 – Queen Victoria Assassinated

2011-06-10T15:45:00.000-07:00

In what is commonly called the greatest tragedy of the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria of England was assassinated by eighteen-year-old Edward Oxford. She was only twenty-one years old, newly married, and was four months pregnant (a revelation that came out scandalously during Oxford’s trial). News of the death of the beloved queen set England into a time of mourning as it had never seen, and it created a new environment of politics as the crown shifted to her uncle, Ernest Augustus I of Hanover.

Victoria was born May 24, 1819, and was fifth in line for the throne. However, a series of bad luck producing heirs gradually brought her closer in the line of succession until she was told at age eleven that she would succeed her uncle, William IV, whose daughters had died in infancy. The morose young girl replied, “If I am to be queen, then I shall be good.” Upon the death of William IV, eighteen-year-old Victoria became queen. Her mother, with whom both William and Victoria had strained relations, was to act as regent in the case that Victoria was still a minor, but William declared on his seventy-first birthday, “"I trust to God that my life may be spared for nine months longer…” rather than place the affairs of the crown someone he saw as “incompetent” and “surrounded by evil advisers.”

The king made good on the hope, dying on June 20, 1837, a month after Victoria had come of age. She became very popular with her subjects and especially with the Whigs in Parliament under Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, who guided the impressionable Victoria in her early days. In 1839, political upheaval tossed aside the Whigs as the Radicals and Tories led to Melbourne’s downfall. That October, Victoria gained a new influence as she proposed to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, whom her uncle, the King of Belgium, hoped she would marry. The two had fallen deeply in love, and their short time together is often portrayed as the subject of numerous tragedies both on stage and film; notably, 2009’s The Young Victoria won seven Oscars.

On a visit to her mother (famously not in St. James Palace) while riding in her carriage with Prince Albert, Edward Oxford fired two shots from a pistol, killing Victoria with one and wounding Albert with another. Oxford was quickly seized by the crowd that had gathered to see the Queen and nearly killed before Her Majesty’s guard managed to drag him away. He would be convicted and executed for high treason in July of 1840 with many calling to renew the punishment of being drawn and quartered, which hadn’t been done in England since 1681. Although the government would have no part in such punishment, Oxford’s heart would be stolen in an unsolved crime.

The widower Albert went back to Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and returning from Germany was Victoria’s sixty-nine-year-old uncle Ernest Augustus, who would be crowned King Ernest I of Great Britain. Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, had participated in the Napoleonic Wars, but numerous scandals had made him into something of an unwanted dog in British politics. In 1810, his valet Joseph Sellis had apparently attempted to murder him for cuckoldry, and, in 1813, he had dabbled in elections in the House of Commons, which was very frowned upon for a peer. After the war, he earned the wrath of Wellington by pushing against the Catholic Relief Act in 1829 and general disgust by being one of the few to vote against the Reform Act of 1832. He had even been considered part of a supposed conspiracy by the anti-Catholic group the Orange Lodges to put Ernest on the throne instead of Victoria, whom they took as a young girl unfit for the crown.

Instead, upon the death of William IV, Ernest took the title of King of Hanover as Salic Law would not allow female Victoria to inherit. William IV had never even visited Hanover, but Ernest took interest in the small German kingdom. He seemed chased from England by Wellington, who said, "Go before you are pelted out," and Victoria, who had asked him to give up his apartments in St. James Palace, which he refused as he planned to visit England regularly. He disliked Albert (a feeling held very mutual) and denied him precedence, citing the decades-old establishment of order at the Congress of Vienna. Away from Britain, he had faced a crisis as the locals of Hanover preferred the viceroy, Ernest’s brother, the Duke of Cambridge. Ernest sought to reform the kingdom in his own image, dissolving the parliament, voiding the constitution, and demanding new oaths of allegiance, which seven professors of Göttingen University, including the Brothers Grimm, refused. Professors were exiled and protests put down until the political system came to gradual stability in 1840 with new parliamentary deputies, just in time for Ernest to be summoned to Britain as king.

Ernest’s decade-long reign would serve as the last of the British monarchs. He was staunchly conservative and royalist, even disapproving of many of Prime Minister Robert Peel’s modest reforms. When the Potato Blight struck Ireland, he was dubbed “The Famine King” and was blamed for the lack of aid, even opposing the repeal of the Corn Laws. Peel’s government hung onto power despite its unpopularity by royal “hot air”, to quote cartoons in The Times, and when revolutions broke out in 1848 in other countries, it struck Britain by focusing on the Crown. Although Ernest had instituted a number of benefits upon the people such as funding for the opera and hospitals, he was seen as an aged relic from another time and many presumed he was part of Victoria’s assassination since her mother lived in a rented house rather than the palace. Ernest’s son George, next in line for the throne, was blind after illnesses in 1828 and ’33 and viewed to be even more militantly royalist than his father. When Ernest set about putting down workers’ uprisings with cavalry and exiling professors, Parliament moved to privatize the Royal Family in 1849. Ernest departed to Hanover, where he sought to build an army and retake Britain by force, but he died in 1851 before his invasion could be put into motion.

Hanover, too, would soon be lost when Prussia deposed George V after winning the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 during the campaign of uniting Germany under the Prussian Kaiser. The powerful royalist government would soon become the mortal enemy of the British Republic, fighting a number of wars between 1871 and 1945.

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In reality, Edward Oxford missed his shots. He was acquitted on grounds of insanity and taken to Bethlem Royal Hospital before ultimately being exiled to Australia. Queen Victoria went on to rule until 1901, during which time Britain undertook major reforms and expanded into the British Empire, governing one-quarter of the Earth’s people. She had nine children, all married into the royal houses of Europe and infamously carrying hemophilia.

June 4, 1989 – Soldiers Join Tiananmen Square Protest

2011-06-04T17:24:00.000-07:00

The site at Tiananmen Square has been crucial to political change in China since its establishment as the foundation for the Tiananmen Gate by the Ming Dynasty. The gate was rebuilt with an added square after damage during the violent shift from Ming to Qing, and it served as the landmark near where European troops camped in the invasion of 1860 that forced the opening of China. When the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 besieged many of the compounds in Beijing, the square was again used to organize European troops who had fought putting down the uprising.

Just as it had been representative of changes in China for hundreds of years, the shift to Communism also showed its impact. Leader Mao Zedong demolished the gate in 1950 and pushed the expansion of the square in 1958, which in ten months of construction become the largest place of public gathering in the world, capable of holding up to 500,000 people. Around the square, the Ten Great Buildings were built, creating a center for museums, hotels, the hall for the National People’s Congress, a rail station, and the Workers’ Stadium. In 1976, shortly after the Mao’s death, his body was embalmed to be placed in a mausoleum, which was built over where the Gate had stood decades before.

Once again, the square would be crucial to the alteration of China as young people gathered there in 1989 and protested government control. Through the past twenty years of communism, liberalizing agents had suggested methods of loosening government and encouraging democracy and free enterprise. While there had been some successful policies, many had been suppressed forcefully. The greatest had been in 1987, when Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Communist Party of China for five years and member of the NPC since 1954, was ousted for encouraging too much liberalization. He died two years later, and a group gathered in Tiananmen Square in his memory. The commemoration became a demand for recognition for his ideals in freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and some 50,000 students marched to the square to attend the funeral while delivering a petition to the premier, Li Peng.

Li was not moved by the display, and the protestors decided to stay until the call for reform was understood. Their numbers swelled over 100,000, and the government worked toward dispelling the protestors with editorials and leaflets. Riots broke out in various places, but the protest at the square remained peaceful. Rather than fight back overtly, the protestors began hunger strikes and directed their voice against policies and never the Party. On May 20, with the crowd still unmoved, Li declared martial law. Rather than quelling the protest, the declaration seemed to solidify it, and much of the city joined in with the protest. It seemed as if the students were emulating the successes of revolutions past such as the Young Turks and China’s own May Fourth Movement of 1919.

Finally, as the philosophy of the protestors went further from free media toward democracy, the CPC leaders agreed to clear the square. Soldiers from the 27th and 38th Armies were brought to Beijing. Word spread about the movement of troops, and Beijing became a city on edge. On June 3, the commander of the 27th (a relative of the Chinese President Yang Shangkun) fell ill, and the 38th was brought up into the lead. In the early hours of June 4, the troops moved into Beijing, which was bristling with barricades and rioters. When they reached the outskirts, however, an unknown figure nicknamed “Tank Man” for hopping on top of one of the tanks while in motion waved a banner and proclaimed, “The military has come to join us!”

The unfounded rumor spread quickly through the city, and local elements of the People’s Liberation Army who supported the protest hurried to join in. Overwhelmed by support, the 38th was escorted to the square as if on parade. There, the troops disbanded and did in fact join the protest. The 27th followed behind shortly thereafter, and soldiers began to refuse orders for live fire to clear the streets.

With the army divided and protests increasing throughout China, the CPC broke into factionalism. Hard communists demanded display of force while others wanted to see the liberalization through. Inevitably, the chaos broke into violence, but the Tiananmen Revolution would see victory with its numbers, passion for the cause, and military allies. It would be many more months before the renewed Chinese government assembled for a nation of mixed socialism and widespread free enterprise. China would grow to become the fourth largest world economy over the next decades, and attempts to track billions of dollars worth of money that disappeared during the uprising would ultimately be given up as the price of change.

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In reality, the 27th Army entered Beijing first, and tear gas and live fire was used to clear rioters, who fought with Molotov cocktails and improvised weapons. The protestors in the square left voluntarily but were still pursued by violent soldiers. Though the protest would be put down, the demand for freedom continued, as seen by the famous stand of the Tank Man halting at column of tanks from leaving the square on June 5.

May 30, 1431 – Jeanne d’Arc Takes Vows

2011-05-30T11:55:00.000-07:00

Against the backdrop of the bitter Hundred Years War, Saint Joan of Arc completed her novitiate and took her first vows to become a nun. Daughter of moderately wealthy farmer and local magistrate Jacques d’Arc, Joan had been a pious and upstanding girl. Around the age of 12 in 1424, she began claiming visions from God. In a field, she saw Saint Catherine (patron of girls), Saint Margaret (patron of peasantry and suffering), and Saint Michael (patron of war) stand before her and tell her to end the English domination of France, particularly by orchestrating the crowning of the Dauphin and reviving French nationalism. Four years later, she asked to go to the remnants of the French court, but her every request was denied, particularly by Count Robert de Baudricourt, leader of the local garrison who literally laughed at her. Discouraged, Joan returned home and decided to forget warfare.

The rest of France was similarly discouraged. For nine decades, the French had suffered defeat after defeat with the English gaining ground. The Hundred Years War had begun in 1337 when a birthright to the throne of France was claimed by Edward III (1312-1377), who was the only surviving male heir to Philip IV and closest relative to Charles IV of France. The French nobility refused to have a foreign king and instead chose Philip of Valois, to be crowned as Philip VI, grandson of Philip III. When the Second War of Scottish Independence broke out and Edward moved to put down the rebellion, the French held up their side of the Auld Alliance, attacking English shipping and seizing Gascony. England attempted to counterattack, but the lack of support from the Lowlands and cost of German mercenaries dragged the war into a stalemate until the Battle of Crécy, where the English longbow devastated the French knight and ended the Age of Chivalry in many respects.

Through temporary peaces, ongoing warfare, and even the Black Death, the Hundred Years War continued to roll onward. England made its greatest success at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, where Edward’s army, outnumbered nearly three-to-one, defeated the French and even captured King John II. Mercenaries on either side ravaged the countryside already bled out by heavy taxation, leading to peasant uprisings such as the Jacquerie, which had to be suppressed violently. Afterward, the French began to reassemble, gradually taking back lands taken by the English. Irish rebellion, the Peasants’ Revolt against poll tax, and courtly intrigue with the death of Richard II slowed the English war effort, and the French faced their own problems as a civil war broke out between the House of Burgundy and the House of Armagnac, led by the French king, Charles VI who supported the antipope of the Western Schism.

The entire region of France was thusly split and split again by varying loyalties. There seemed no rational way of sorting out the political difficulties except through killing the opposition. The English took up an alliance with Burgundy, whose head John the Fearless had been assassinated while under King Charles’ protection, deepening the rift between the French. Burgundy insisted that Charles was illegitimate, and England hoped to use the division to firmly conquer France.

Joan wished to aid the French war effort, but her exclusion seemed final, and instead she turned toward aiding the national spirit through the Church. The French, meanwhile, pieced together an expedition in 1429 to lift the siege of Orleans and capitalize on the death of English King Henry V in 1422. Though it is questionable what impact an untrained girl could have had to change it, the expedition was a catastrophe. While the French initially made great impact on the English forces, the English stand at the fort of St. Loup turned back the tide. French troops, disheartened by the seemingly unbreakable English hold on France, retreated and suffered great causalities. The new English king, Henry VI, did not seem to have the heart to continue the bitter wars as his forefathers had, giving over rule increasingly to regents and his Burgundian allies.

Finally, in 1453, the war came to an end with a divided France. England faced bankruptcy and an empire that it could not afford to control. Instead, it sold much of its southerly holdings to Burgundy, who established their own kingdom in the north, creating a buffer between England and France proper, which stretched from Chinon southward. The two French kingdoms would routinely fight wars, finding themselves on either side of international conflicts in the coming centuries: the English Wars of the Roses, colonial wars among the Spanish, Dutch, and English, and the Republican War of 1789-95.

Through all of them, nuns of the famous Order of Joan would aid both sides with food and care, encouraging French cooperation and brotherhood. Visions of reunification, however, would not become realized, even after the toppling of communist south France in 1990.

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In reality, Joan persevered her way though to the Dauphin and even passed a theological inquiry, gaining the support of French looking for a prophet of deliverance. She was instrumental in victory at Orleans, which gave Charles VII a militaristic upper hand and encouraged his coronation in 1429. Joan became captured at Margny in 1430 by Burgundians while leading the rear guard and covering retreat. She was sold to England, who put her on trial for witchcraft and burned her May 31, 1431. In 1456, she would be given a posthumous retrial and found innocent, then beatified in 1909 and finally canonized in 1920 as a patron of France.