POPnews - November 18th

[By 1450, when this image was made, the Renaissance St. Peter's Basilica which had grown up around the tomb of Saint Peter had itself grown too old-fashioned for the silk- and velvet-dressed, perfumed and bejewelled he-men who lived and worked there; originally intending to preserve the old building, Pope Julius II eventually tore one architectural masterpiece down with an unshakable faith that someday an even greater one would arise...]
326 CE - The Old St. Peter's Basilica was consecrated, during the papal reign of St. Sylvester I.

1302 - When Pope Boniface VIII issued the Papal bull Unam sanctam - 'The One Holy' - it wasn't the first bull issued by a Pope (and Lord knows it wouldn't be the last) but it was one of the strongest statements to date about Papal infallibility, and is probably responsible for that holier-than-Thou attitude of theirs the rest of us must contend with to this day.

1307 - According to legend, William Tell shot an apple off his son's head.

1477 - When William Caxton produced Dictes, or Sayengis of the Philosophres (written by the King's brother-in-law Earl Rivers, whose sister Elizabeth married Edward IV), it would be the first book printed on a printing press in England.

1626 - The extensively remodeled St. Peter's Basilica was re-consecrated by Pope Urban VIII.

1803 - At Battle of Vertières, the last major battle of the Haitian Revolution, Jean-Jacques Dessalines defeated French troops under Vicomte de Rochambeau - leading to the establishment of the first black republic in the Western Hemisphere, the Republic of Haiti, where the day is still celebrated.

1863 - Denmark's King Christian IX signed that country's November Constitution, which (in part) declared Schleswig to be part of Denmark; this was seen by the German Confederation as a violation of the London Protocol and would eventually lead to the German-Danish War of 1864.

1865 - Mark Twain's story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was first published, in the New York Saturday Press.

1905 - Denmark's Prince Carl became King Haakon VII of Norway following the 1905 dissolution of the union between the two countries.

1916 - The First Battle of the Somme ended when British Expeditionary Force commander Douglas Haig called off the battle - which had started on July 1st.

1928 - The animated short Steamboat Willie, the first fully-synchronized sound cartoon, was released; directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, it featured the second appearances of cartoon stars Mickey and Minnie Mouse. This date is also considered by the Disney Corporation to be Mickey's birthday.

1929 - The Grand Banks earthquake - a submarine seismic event recorded at 7.2 on the Richter scale and centred on the Grand Banks in the Atlantic Ocean off the south coast of Newfoundland - broke 12 underwater transatlantic telegraph cables and triggered a tsunami that destroyed many south coast communities in the Burin Peninsula area.

1947 - A fire at Ballantyne's Department Store fire in Christchurch killed 41, making it the worst such catastrophe in New Zealand history.

1978 - At the Jonestown incident in Guyana, Jim Jones led his Peoples Temple cult in a mass murder-suicide that claimed 918 lives in all, 909 of them at Jonestown itself, including over 270 children; the event had been precipitated by the fact-finding mission of Congressman Leo Ryan (D.-Calif.) and his subsequent murder (along with four journalists) at the hands of Jonestown thugs, also on this day.

1985 - Bill Watterson's legendary comic strip Calvin and Hobbes debuted.

1987 - During a fire in London, 31 people died at the city's busiest Tube station, King's Cross St Pancras.

1991 - Following the 87-day siege of Vukovar, that Croatian city capitulated to the besieging Yugoslav People's Army and allied Serb paramilitary forces.

2000 - Welsh beauty Catherine Zeta-Jones married Hollywood royalty Michael Douglas at New York City's famed Plaza Hotel.

2003 - The UK's Local Government Act 2003 received Royal Assent, repealing the Thatcher government's controversial anti-gay amendment Section 28 in England and Wales; Scotland had already repealed it in June 2000 with the passage of its Ethical Standards in Public Life etc. (Scotland) Act 2000. First passed in May 1988 and championed by, among many others, Michael Howard, Section 28 remains one of the most loathsome pieces of legislation ever produced by the Mother of All Parliaments.
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POPnews - July 11th

[The Hollywood Bowl - a Los Angeles landmark since it opened on this day in 1922 - was built on the site of a natural rock amphitheatre known until then as Daisy Dell.]

1302 - At the Battle of the Golden Spurs a coalition in Flanders defeated King Philip IV of France's massive army; it's a victory celebrated by Belgium's Flemish community to this day.

1346 - The House of Luxembourg's Charles IV was elected Holy Roman Emperor to replace Louis IV of the House of Wittelsbach.

1789 - Jacques Necker was dismissed as France's Finance Minister, sparking the Storming of the Bastille three days later.

1801 - French astronomer Jean-Louis Pons discovered his first comet; over the next 27 years he would go on to discover 36 more - more than any other person in history.

1848 - London's Waterloo railway station opened.

1859 - Charles Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities... Fortunately for both Mr. Dickens and his publisher, the two cities in question were Paris and London, not Duluth and Akron, and so the novel was (to say the least) a rousing success.

1889 - The Mexican border town of Tijuana was founded; in those days (and, in fact, well into the 1930s) it was known as Tia Juana.

1893 - The first cultured pearl was obtained by Kokichi Mikimoto.

1897 - Swedish explorer Salomon August Andrée left Spitsbergen to attempt to reach the North Pole by balloon; his craft crashed en route, resulting in his death.

1906 - The murder of 20 year-old Grace Brown by Chester Gillette at Big Moose Lake in Upstate New York would later inspire Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel An American Tragedy, which was later still adapted for the cinema as A Place in the Sun (1951) which starred Shelley Winters and Montgomery Clift as the star-crossed lovers.

1914 - Babe Ruth made his Major League baseball debut, with the Boston Red Sox. Ruth's sale to the New York Yankees in 1920 is said to have brought on the Curse of the Bambino, which turned the lacklustre Yankees into the winningest team in professional baseball while the once red-hot Red Sox had to wait another 84 years to capture another World Series pennant.

1922 - The Hollywood Bowl was opened to the public; nestled into a natural curve in the Earth, it has since hosted many well-known bands as well as the Los Angeles Philharmonic and (appropriately enough) the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

1936 - New York City's Triborough Bridge was opened; actually three bridges spanning Ward's Island and Randall's Island in the East River, it connects Manhattan with The Bronx and Queens. Construction began in 1930 but was soon halted by the Depression; it was finished by money from the WPA, and today generates massive revenues for the New York City Transit Authority, which are used to offset the cost of public transit.

1955 - The phrase In God We Trust was added to all US currency.

1957 - Prince Karim Husseini Aga Khan IV inherited the office of Imamat as the 49th Imam of Shia Imami Ismaili worldwide, after the death of Sir Sultan Mahommed Shah Aga Khan III.

1960 - To Kill A Mockingbird, written by Harper Lee and widely regarded as one of the finest novels ever written in English, was published.

1975 - Archaeologists working in China unearthed a massive and rare find; more than 6000 life-sized terracotta statues of warriors guarding the tomb of an early Emperor, Qin Shi Huang. The sculptures date from 221 BCE, and no two are alike. Since 1987 the site has been recognized by UNESCO for its unique contribution to world heritage.

1990 - The Oka Crisis, which gripped Canada throughout the summer of 1990, can be said to have begun on this day - even though our panel of experts at the Pop Culture Institute believe it began at least 300 years earlier.

2006 - 209 people were killed and over 700 were injured in a series of coordinated terrorist bombings in Mumbai, India. Seven blasts over 11 minutes disrupted the evening's commute on the city's Suburban Railway.
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POPnews - May 18th

[That the Meiji Restoration was responsible for creating the modern nation of Japan out of the tiny, fractious fiefdoms of the late Edo period via the mighty Empire of Japan is a matter of historical record... The jingoism which marked the 45 years of the Meiji Era (leading to the country's military domination of Asia in the first four decades of the 20th Century as well as its disastrous involvement in World War II which brought all that to an end) though, has only recently begun to be studied by English-language scholars, especially those investigating the reigns of Meiji's successors - his son Emperor Taishō (known in life as Yoshihito) and his grandson Emperor Shōwa (the redoubtable Hirohito). The best of these studies, which comes highly recommended by the Pop Culture Institute, is Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix, which is such a thrilling read that hopefully one of these days I'll be smart enough to finish it!]

1152 - Henry, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy, married Eleanor of Aquitaine at Bordeaux Cathedral; the groom was a 19 year-old noble who within two years would become Henry II of England, and the bride a 30 year-old mother of two whose marriage to France's King Louis VII had only recently been annulled - albeit reluctantly - by Pope Eugenius III, for failing to provide her husband with a male heir*.  She would have no such trouble with her new husband, eventually providing him with five sons (and three daughters besides!); which is no surprise since, as we now know, the sex of a baby is determined by the father. Three of those sons - or two-and-a-half, anyway - would go on to serve as Kings of England: Richard I (better known as Richard the Lionheart), the hapless King John, and the pseudo-monarch Henry the Young King.

*At the wedding of Louis and Eleanor, which took place in the same church 15 years earlier, things had been quite different in at least one way - on that day the bride was 15 and the groom 17 - although in both instances she was far savvier than he!

1268 - The crusader state of the Principality of Antioch fell to the forces of Mameluke Sultan Baibars during the Battle of Antioch, sending Bohemond VI into exile and his title into extinction.

1302 - Following the so-called Bruges Matins - a nocturnal massacre of French troops garrisoned in Bruges by members of the local Flemish militia under Pieter de Coninck and Jan Breydel - only a handful of troops and the governor, Jacques de Châtillon, managed to escape with their lives.

1593 - Playwright Thomas Kyd's accusations of heresy against his colleague led to the issuance of an arrest warrant for Christopher Marlowe; two days later Marlowe appeared before the Privy Council to defend himself, and ten days after that he was murdered in mysterious circumstances...

1765 - Fire destroyed as much as one-quarter of Montreal, including 100 homes.

1803 - At the outset of the Napoleonic Wars the United Kingdom revoked the Treaty of Amiens and declared war on France; in all there had been peace between the two nations since March 25th of the previous year - surely a record! - but soon enough the new Prime Minister William Pitt was organizing the Third Coalition in an effort to curb Napoleon's desire to reign over the whole of Europe.

1804 - Napoleon Bonaparte was proclaimed Emperor of the French by the French Senate.

1811 - The Battle of Las Piedras - the first great military triumph in the struggle for Uruguay's independence from Spain - saw a victory by Jose Artigas over Spain's José Posadas.

1848 - The first of Germany's National Assemblies - the Nationalversammlung - met at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt; its existence was both part and result of the March Revolution which united the 39 states of the German Confederacy.

1869 - Japan's Ezo Republic - founded by the remaining supporters of the defeated Tokugawa Shogunate on the island of Hokkaidō - surrendered to the imperial forces of Emperor Meiji, represented by Prime Minister Kuroda Kiyotaka.

1896 - A mass panic known as the Khodynka Tragedy occurred on Khodynka Field in Moscow during the festivities surrounding the coronation of Russia's Tsar Nicholas II, resulting in the deaths of 1,389 people.

1910 - The Earth passed through the tail of Halley's Comet.

1948 - The First Legislative Yuan of the Republic of China officially convened in Nanking.

1959 - The National Liberation Committee of Côte d'Ivoire was founded in Conakry, capital city of Guinea.

1974 - Under the aegis of Project Smiling Buddha, India successfully detonated its first nuclear weapon, becoming the sixth nation to do so.

1980 - Students in South Korea's sixth largest city began demonstrations, calling for democratic reforms; their efforts would bring about the Gwangju Massacre, one of the most brutal events during the dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan.

1983 - The Irish Government launched a crackdown to defend its radio monopoly, putting Dublin's popular pirate station Radio Nova off the air.

1993 - During anti-EU rioting in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen - caused by the approval of the four Danish exceptions in that day's Maastricht Treaty referendum - police opened fire against civilians for the first time since World War II, injuring 11 demonstrators by firing a total of 113 bullets against them.

2006 - Nepal's post Loktantra Andolan ('Democracy Movement') government passed a landmark bill curtailing the power of the monarchy and secularizing the Himalayan nation, a crucial step in the process that would eventually see Marxist forces outlaw the stabilizing effects of the monarchy of King Gyanendra.
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