POPnews - August 5th

[The Mayflower, shown here in a rather romantic engraving.]

642 CE - At the Battle of Maserfield - which may have been on this day in 642 CE, or else on this day in 641 CE (at least according to the Venerable Bede) but probably wasn't on this day in 644 CE as reported by the Annales Cambriae (who knows what they were thinking!) - Penda of Mercia defeated and killed Oswald of Bernicia. Not content with this victory, Penda then went all early medieval on his foe and dismembered him; also in on the action on that day was Mercian ally Cynddylan ap Cyndrwyn of Powys.

910 CE - The last major Viking army to raid England was defeated at the Battle of Tettenhall - near modern-day Wolverhampton - by a combined force led by Edward the Elder, King of Wessex, and Earl Aethelred of Mercia.

1100 - England's King Henry I was crowned at Westminster Abbey; the fourth son of William the Conqueror succeeded his older brother William II following a suspicious hunting accident in New Forest three days earlier.

1305 - William Wallace was captured by the English at Robroyston, near Glasgow; from there he was transported to London, where he would be executed on August 23rd.

1388 - According to the Scottish*, at the Battle of Otterburn - a border skirmish between the Scottish and the English in Northumbria - Scotland's commander James Douglas, 2nd Earl of Douglas was given the ultimate Pyrrhic victory over England's Henry 'Hotspur' Percy, son of the first Earl of Northumberland; while Douglas was clearly the victor in the field he also died in battle.

*According to the English the battle was fought on August 19th; since they lost, it's only fair that they also lose the right to select the day of the battle. ~ MSM

1583 - Sir Humphrey Gilbert established England's first North American colony - at first little more than a seasonal fishing station - at St. John's, Newfoundland, at the same time claiming the entire island and much of the sea around it in the name of Elizabeth I.

1620 - The Mayflower - mastered by Christopher Jones - first attempted to depart England via Southampton on its first attempt to reach the New World; shortly after leaving port, her sister ship the Speedwell developed a leak, and the Pilgrim Fathers were forced to put in at Dartmouth in order to make necessary (and costly) repairs - and not for the last time, either. Later on, it would be revealed that the source of the damage to the Speedwell was sabotage by the crew, who were reluctant to take on such a lengthy, dangerous commitment for the poor compensation they were offered.

1716 - The Battle of Petrovaradin took place, giving the Habsburg Empire (with its Hungarian and Croatian allies) under Prince Eugene of Savoy a decisive victory over the Ottoman Empire and its commander, Silahdar Damat Ali Pasha, who died in battle.

1735 - In an important early victory for freedom of the press, New York Weekly Journal publisher John Peter Zenger was acquitted of seditious libel for criticizing the city's royal governor, William Cosby, on the basis that what he'd published was true. Zenger's attorney in the action was Andrew Hamilton, who defended him on a pro bono basis; in gratitude, Hamilton was later awarded the freedom of the city of New York.

1763 - During the so-called Pontiac's War, at the Battle of Bushy Run, British forces led by Henry Bouquet defeated a combined force of Delaware, Shawnee, Mingo, and Huron warriors under Chief Pontiac's commanders Guyasuta and Keekyuscung (who died in battle) at Bushy Run in western Pennsylvania.

1772 - The First Partition of Poland began; within 25 years the three partitions in total would bring an end to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

1862 - At the Battle of Baton Rouge - during the American Civil War - along the Mississippi River near the Louisiana capital Confederate troops drove Union forces back into the city.

1884 - The cornerstone of the Statue of Liberty's pedestal was laid.

1906 - Sydney's Central Railway Station was opened.

1925 - The political party Plaid Cymru was established - partly to preserve Welsh language and culture, which was then at risk of dying out - and partly to remove Wales from the political control of Great Britain in the most excruciatingly polite way possible - although Plaid Cymru members David John Williams and Lewis Valentine were jailed for their part in the September 1936 burning of the bombing school at RAF Penrhos, an action which saw their membership numbers double.

1957 - After five years of local success in Philadelphia, American Bandstand made its national TV debut on ABC affiliates in the United States, hosted by Dick Clark. It ran daily during the week (either live or on kinescope) until 1963, when it became a weekly show, typically airing on Saturday afternoons. Turns out the show had a good beat and you could dance to it; it ran until 1989.

1962 - Nelson Mandela was captured and imprisoned in the Johannesburg Fort. He would spend 18 of his 27 years in jail at Robben Island; in 1982 he was moved to Pollsmoor and subsequently Victor Verster Prison, from which he was famously released in February 1990.

1964 - American aircraft from carriers USS Ticonderoga and USS Constellation bombed North Vietnam as part of Operation Pierce Arrow in retaliation for strikes against US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. The effective start of the air portion of the Vietnam War, the operation yielded the conflict's first prisoner of war, Everett Alvarez Jr., who endured 8 and a half years of torture while in captivity.

1981 - US President Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 striking air traffic controllers, which I'm sure had nothing whatsoever to do with the major increase in airline fatalities through the 1980s. After all, who cares about public safety when there's a union to be broken?
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POPnews - August 2nd

[This February 1937 cover of Bernarr Macfadden's Physical Culture
magazine describes marijuana as a 'sex-crazing drug menace' -
almost as though that were a bad thing!]

686 CE - Pope John V died; he was succeeded by Pope Conon on October 21st. As it happens, Conon was a compromise candidate... Initially the clergy favoured archpriest Petros, while the military favoured another priest named Theodoros, and it took a couple of months of delicate diplomacy to solve the quandary.

1100 - England's King William II - better known as William Rufus - died while on a hunting trip in New Forest, when his companion Walter Tyrrel accidentally struck him in the chest with a stray arrow intended for a buck; he was succeeded by his younger brother, who reigned as Henry I.

1589 - France's King Henri III (shown, at right) died, having been stabbed by a Dominican friar named Jacques Clément the previous day while lodged with his army at Saint-Cloud during preparations for an impending siege of Paris... Clément himself was killed on the spot by the King's bodyguard. The last of the Valois kings (his own marriage to Louise of Lorraine being childless likely due to his rather open homosexuality) the fourth son of Henri II and Catherine de' Medici was succeeded by the Huguenot King of Navarre Henri III, who would reign as the first of the Bourbon kings under the name Henri IV - although he wouldn't be crowned until February 1594, having been forced first by the Catholic League and then by Spain to win the throne through a rather arduous conquest.

1610 - Henry Hudson reached what would later be called Hudson Bay on board Discovery, thinking he'd passed through the Northwest Passage into the Pacific Ocean.

1790 - The first US Census was conducted.

1798 - During the French Revolutionary Wars the Battle of the Nile (Battle of Aboukir Bay) concluded in a British victory for Sir Horatio Nelson over French vice-admiral François-Paul Brueys D'Aigalliers, who died in battle.

1870 - Tower Subway, the first underground tube railway in the world, opened in London; not a subway in the modern sense but more a horizontal lift, it connected Tower Hill to Vine Lane south of the River Thames.

1903 - The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization led an unsuccessful rebellion against the rule of the Ottoman Empire, an event now known as the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising.

1916 - Austro-Hungarian sabotage was blamed for causing the sinking of the Italian battleship Leonardo da Vinci in the harbour at Taranto, killing 249 of the thousand men aboard; although the vessel was salvaged after World War I, planned repairs were never finished, and it was sold for scrap in 1923.

1923 - Following the sudden death, at San Francisco's Palace Hotel, of Warren G. Harding - who took ill a week earlier during a visit to Vancouver - his Vice President Calvin Coolidge became the 30th President of the United States.

1934 - Adolf Hitler became Führer of Germany following the death of Reichspräsident Paul von Hindenburg.

1937 - Marijuana was made illegal in the United States following passage of the Marihuana Tax Act.

1943 - PT-109 was rammed by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri in the Blackett Strait between the Solomon Islands of Kolombangara and Arundel; in charge of the vessel was Lieutenant, junior grade (LTJG) John F. Kennedy, future US President, who managed to save all but two* of his crew from the ship, which sank. Kennedy then led his crew to safety by swimming to uninhabited Plum Pudding Island** (deep in enemy waters which were also shark- and crocodile-infested) before they could be rescued, six days later, from the more resource rich Olasana Island nearby.

*Seamen Andrew Jackson Kirksey and Harold W. Marney.
**Which was renamed Kennedy Island in his honour.

1945 - The Dutch Royal Family returned to Holland from their exile in Canada, apparently.

1964 - During the Gulf of Tonkin Incident North Vietnamese gunboats allegedly fired on US destroyers USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy, an event which President Lyndon B. Johnson used as a justification for the Vietnam War (despite the fact that it may have never happened) under the terms of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

1967 - The second Blackwall Tunnel opened, connecting the London boroughs of Greenwich and Tower Hamlets.

1973 - A flash fire killed 51 at the Summerland amusement centre at Douglas on the Isle of Man.

1980 - The Pro Football Hall of Fame Game ended with 5:24 remaining when it was canceled due to severe lightning, ending the game in a 0-0 tie.

1990 - Iraq invaded Kuwait - or 'Province 19' as Saddam Hussein liked to call it - sparking the first Gulf War.
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