POPnews - January 27th

[Although the ignition source of the fire which killed Grissom, White, and Chaffee on this day in 1967 was never conclusively identified, the astronauts' deaths were attributed to a wide range of lethal design hazards in the early Apollo command module - the kind of clusterfuck which that normally comes from accepting the lowest bid.]

661 CE - The Rashidun Caliphate ended with death of Ali.

1142 - General Yue Fei of the Southern Song Dynasty was executed on orders of Chancellor Qin Hui which may or may not have come directly from Emperor Gaozong; nevertheless, for his groundless act Qin Hui is today remembered as a traitor to the Han race whereas Yue Fei is still considered a paragon of loyalty.

1186 - King of Germany, King of Italy, and Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI (the son and heir of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I and Beatrix of Burgundy) married Constance of Sicily, who was herself the sole legitimate heir of Sicily's King William II - thus adding that crown to his already impressive collection.

1595 - Following a failed attack on San Juan, Puerto Rico, English privateer Sir Francis Drake died of dysentery off the Panamanian coast near Portobelo; he was 55.  Drake was later buried at sea in a lead coffin wearing his full armour - a treasure which continues to elude discovery to this day...

1606 - Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators went on trial in London's Westminster Hall for their role in the Gunpowder Plot.

1785 - The University of Georgia was founded, making it the first public university in the United States.

1870 - The Kappa Alpha Theta fraternity was founded at DePauw University.

1880 - Thomas Edison filed a patent for the electric-incandescent lamp, more commonly known today as a light-bulb.

1888 - The National Geographic Society was incorporated in Washington, DC, by Gardiner Greene Hubbard - having been founded two weeks earlier at the Cosmos Club.

1909 - The Young Left was founded in Norway.

1918 - The first hostilities occurred in the Finnish Civil War - pitting the White Guards and the German Empire against the Red Guards and the Russian SFSR.

1939 - The Lockheed P-38 Lightning made its first flight.

1944 - The 900-day Siege of Leningrad was lifted after the 13-day Leningrad-Novgorod Strategic Offensive saw Soviet forces rout the city's Nazi occupiers.

1945 - The Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz was liberated.

1951 - Nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site began with a one-kiloton bomb dropped on Frenchman Flats.

1967 - Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee were killed when a fire broke out during a training exercise on the Apollo I spacecraft.

1973 - Colonel William Nolde was killed in action at An Loc eleven hours before the signing of the Paris Peace Accords officially ended the Vietnam War, making him the conflict's last recorded American combat casualty.

1996 - International Holocaust Remembrance Day was first celebrated in Germany.

2003 - The first selections for the National Recording Registry were announced by the Library of Congress; they included 50 diverse offerings such as those made by Thomas Edison when first exhibiting his phonograph in 1888, the Metropolitan Opera's Mapleson Cylinders, Ragtime piano rolls by Scott Joplin, Booker T. Washington's 1895 Atlanta Exposition speech, and a recording of Casey at the Bat as performed by vaudevillian DeWolf Hopper among others.

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POPnews - August 23rd

[The case of Sacco and Vanzetti electrified the punditocracy of
the 1920s - including the artist Ben Spahn, who created
this portrait of them in their honour in 1931-2.]

1305 - Scottish patriot William Wallace was executed by order of England's King Edward I at London's Smithfield for high treason following a show trial; a plaque on the wall of the city's St. Bartholomew's Hospital marks the site today, and is itself a place of pilgrimage for his modern-day compatriots.

1328 - At the Battle of Cassel French troops under King Philip VI stopped a peasant revolt in Flanders led by Nicolaas Zannekin.

1514 - The Battle of Chaldiran - in what is now north-western Iran - ended with a decisive victory for Sultan Selim I of the Ottoman Empire over Shah Ismail I, founder of the Safavid Dynasty.

1541 - Jacques Cartier made landfall at Stadacona (near the future Quebec City) during his Third Voyage to the New World.

1595 - Romania's Michael the Brave confronted an Ottoman army led by Sinan Pasha at the Battle of Calugareni, yielding a tactical victory for the Wallachian commander during the so-called Long War.

1614 - Holland's University of Groningen was established.

1708 - Meidingnu Pamheiba was crowned King of Manipur.

1784 - Eight counties in western North Carolina (now eastern Tennessee) declared themselves an independent state under the name of Franklin, with its capital at Greeneville... Despite appeals to its namesake, Benjamin Franklin, the fledgeling state never garnered much support; after just four years it became part of the Southwest Territory, while the would-be state's governor, John Sevier, went on to become the first governor of Tennessee.

1793 - During the French Revolution a levée en masse (or mass conscription) was decreed by the National Convention.

1813 - At the Battle of Grossbeeren, a combined force of Prussians and Swedish under Friedrich von Bülow and Crown Prince Charles John fought off the French army commanded by Nicolas Oudinot during the War of the Sixth Coalition. While Napoleon had ordered the battle in hopes of removing Prussia from the Sixth Coalition by capturing their capital the swampy terrain south of Berlin combined with poor weather and the ill-health of Marshal Oudinot all conspired against him.

1839 - The United Kingdom captured Hong Kong for use as a base of operations while it prepared to go to war with Qing China; the ensuing 3-year conflict would later become known as the First Opium War.

1873 - London's Albert Bridge, connecting Chelsea on the north bank of the River Thames with Battersea on the south, was opened without ceremony... Designed and built by Rowland Mason Ordish as an Ordish-Lefeuvre Principle modified cable-stayed bridge, when it soon proved structurally unsound - soldiers from the Chelsea Barracks who marched over it caused the bridge to shimmy, earning it the sobriquet 'The Trembling Lady' - it was redesigned as a suspension bridge by Sir Joseph Bazalgette; further modifications made in 1973 gave it elements of a beam bridge, making the current structure a rather unique hybrid of three different styles rarely seen in a single bridge.

1921 - Faisal I was crowned King of Iraq.

1927 - Sacco and Vanzetti were executed for the murders of Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli and the the theft of $15,776.51 from the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company of South Braintree, Massachusetts.

1944 - Romania's King Michael dismissed the pro-Nazi government of General Ion Antonescu, who was then arrested, in what came to be known as King Michael's Coup; Romania then switched sides from the Axis to the Allies. The action distracted the Nazis long enough to allow the Red Army to occupy Romania, and may in fact have shortened World War II in Europe by as much as six months.

1948 - The World Council of Churches was formed, in Amsterdam, by the merger of the Faith and Order Movement and Life and Work Movement.

1977 - The Gossamer Condor won the Kremer prize for human powered flight.

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1979 - Soviet dancer Alexander Godunov defected to the United States while on tour with the Bolshoi Ballet in New York City.

2006 - Natascha Kampusch - who was abducted in March 1998 at the age of 10 - managed to escape from her captor Wolfgang Priklopil after more than 8 years of captivity.
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