POPnews - November 25th

[The most poignant image from the State Funeral of slain US President
John F. Kennedy came when the President's son, John F. Kennedy, Jr.
saluted the passing cortege as it emerged from Washington DC's
St. Matthew's Cathedral; for an added blow to the solar plexus,
consider that the event occurred on John-John's third birthday.]
1034 - When Scotland's King Máel Coluim mac Cináeda (otherwise known as Malcolm II) died Donnchad (anglicized as Duncan) - the son of Malcolm's daughter Bethóc and Crínán of Dunkeld - inherited his throne; Duncan I is best remembered today as a character in William Shakespeare's play Macbeth.

1120 - The White Ship Disaster claimed William Adelin, the only male heir of Henry I of England; his death resulted in The Anarchy, a crisis over a disputed succession considered by many to have been the first English civil war which wouldn't be settled until the signing of the Treaty of Wallingford by Empress Matilda in 1153 and the accession of Henry II the following year after the death of King Stephen.

1177 - Saladin was defeated at the Battle of Montgisard by Raynald of Chatillon and Baldwin IV, King of Jerusalem.

1758 - The city of Pittsburgh was founded.

1767 - Poland's King Stanislaus II was crowned at St. John's Cathedral in Warsaw.

1783 - The last British troops withdrew from New York City under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, marking the end of the American Revolution.

1795 - Poland's King Stanislaus II was forced to abdicate, and thereafter went into exile to Russia.

1809 - British diplomat Benjamin Bathurst disappeared in the German town of Perleberg, and is presumed to have been murdered, although his body has never been found.

1839 - 300,000 people died when Coringa, India, was hit by three tidal waves as part of a 40 foot storm surge; it had previously been hit in 1789 and rebuilt, but in the wake of this tragedy was abandoned.

1864 - The so-called Confederate Army of Manhattan, led by one Jacob Thompson, attempted to burn down New York City on that year's Election Day.

1874 - The United States Greenback Party was established as a political party consisting primarily of farmers affected by the Panic of 1873.

1947 - The so-called Hollywood Ten - Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo - were officially blacklisted, prevented from working in American movies due to their supposed Communist sympathies.

1952 - The Mousetrap, Agatha Christie's redoubtable sleuther, hit the boards of London's New Ambassadors Theatre; transferred next door to the St Martin's Theatre in 1974, it's still running after 24,000+ performances. Based on a true story made fiction as Three Blind Mice (also by Christie) it's the longest-running stage play in history.

1960 - The Dominican Republic's Mirabal sisters were assassinated.

1963 - President John F. Kennedy was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery.

1970 - Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima committed ritual suicide - seppuku - in Tokyo following a failed coup attempt.

1973 - Greece's far-right-wing junta, headed by George Papadopoulos, was ousted by another, slightly-less-right-wing, junta led by Dimitrios Ioannides under the figurehead President Phaidon Gizikis.

1984 - Largely at the behest of Bob Geldof, Band Aid recorded Do They Know It's Christmas - at Midge Ure's home studio in London's Notting Hill.

1992 - Czechoslovakia voted to split itself into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, which it would do just 36 days later.
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POPnews - October 14th

[For all its propitious beginnings - having been opened in person by The Queen herself! - Canada's 23rd Parliament was otherwise a wash... Consisting of a single session, and presided over by the minority government of John Diefenbaker, it would be the second shortest such gathering in Canadian history.]
1758 - Austria's Marshal Leopold Josef Graf Daun defeated the Prussian army of Frederick the Great at the Battle of Hochkirk during the Seven Years' War.

1773 - The first recorded Ministry of Education, the Komisja Edukacji Narodowej (Polish for Commission of National Education) was formed in Poland; the event is still commemorated there as Teachers' Day.

1805 - At the Battle of Elchingen, France's Marshal Michel Ney defeated the Austrian forces of Graf Johann von Riesch.

1806 - The Battle of Jena-Auerstädt pitted France's Emperor Napoleon and his commander Louis Nicolas Davout against Prussia's Frederick William III; the German loss to France was likely hard on Gebhard von Blücher and the Prince of Hohenlohe but a third Prussian commander, the Duke of Brunswick, got the worst of it - he died in battle.

1882 - The University of the Punjab was founded in present-day Pakistan.

1916 - Perm State University was founded in Russia.

1920 - Part of Petsamo province was ceded to Finland by the Soviet Union under the terms of the Treaty of Tartu.

1942 - A German U-boat sank the ferry SS Caribou in Newfoundland's Cabot Strait, killing 137.

1943 - Prisoners at the Sobibor death camp in Poland revolted, resulting in the death of 11 SS officers; about half of the camp's 600 prisoners escaped, of whom some 50 survived the war.

1944 - Nazi Field Marshal Erwin Rommel committed suicide rather than face Roland Freisler's People's Court and potential implication in the bomb attack of July 20th that nearly succeeded in assassinating Hitler.

1956 - Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, leader of India's Untouchable (or Dalit) caste, converted to Buddhism along with 385,000 followers, sparking the Neo-Buddhism movement.

1957 - Canada's 23rd Parliament was opened in Ottawa by Elizabeth II in her role as Queen of Canada, marking the first time a Canadian sovereign had delivered Her Government's Speech from the Throne in person.

1959 - Tasmanian-born action hero Errol Flynn died while on a business trip in Vancouver.

1964 - Leonid Brezhnev became General Secretary of the CPSU and de facto leader of the Soviet Union, ousting Nikita Khrushchev.

1966 - The Montreal Metro opened for business.

1968 - A 6.9 magnitude earthquake destroyed the Australian town of Meckering in under 40 seconds, rupturing all major roads (including the Great Eastern Highway) and railways nearby in the process.

1973 - During Thailand's Thammasat student uprising over 100,000 people protested against the Thanom military government; 77 are killed and 857 are injured by soldiers.

1981 - Vice President Hosni Mubarak was elected President of Egypt, one week after the assassination of his predecessor Anwar Sadat.

1994 - Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres shared the Nobel Peace Prize.
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POPnews - June 23rd

[The above image is a detail taken from a three panel mural by William Hole, located in Edinburgh's Scottish National Portrait Gallery; it's just one of countless depictions of the Battle of Bannockburn which permeate Scottish life and inform the country's nationalism, the most recent of which is Mel Gibson's factually inaccurate but emotionally resonant 1995 film Braveheart, whose final scene depicts the battle in all its gory glory.]
1305 - The Treaty of Athis-sur-Orge was signed by France's King Philip IV and Robert III, Count of Flanders following the Battle of Mons-en-Pévèle.

1314 - During the First War of Scottish Independence the first day of the Battle of Bannockburn pitted England's Edward II against Robert the Bruce.

1565 - Turgut Reis, Dragut of the Ottoman Navy, died during the Siege of Malta.

1661 - A marriage contract between England's King Charles II and Portugese princess Catherine of Braganza was completed.

1757 - At the Battle of Plassey 3,000 British troops under Robert Clive defeated a 50,000 strong Indian army led by Siraj Ud Daulah.

1758 - During the Seven Years' War Anglo-German forces under Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick defeated the French troops of Le Comte de Clermont at the Battle of Krefeld.

1760 - During the Seven Years' War General von Laudon's Austrians defeated the Prussian forces of General Fouqué at the Battle of Landeshut.

1810 - John Jacob Astor formed the Pacific Fur Company.

1860 - Operations began at the Government Printing Office, which the US Congress had established in March of that year.

1865 - More than two months after the end of the American Civil War, General Stand Watie became the last Confederate commander in the field to surrender to Union forces, which he did at Fort Towson in the Oklahoma Territory.

1894 - The International Olympic Committee was founded at the Sorbonne in Paris upon the initiative of Baron Pierre de Coubertin.

1919 - During the Estonian Liberation War the German Freikorps were defeated at the Battle of Cesis; the day is still celebrated as Victory Day in Estonia.

1931 - Wiley Post and Harold Gatty took off from New York City's Roosevelt Field in an attempt to circumnavigate the world in a single-engine plane.

1941 - The Lithuanian Activist Front declared the country's independence from the Soviet Union; it lasted only briefly, as the Nazis occupied Lithuania a few weeks later.

1947 - The US Senate followed the House of Representatives in overriding U.S. President Harry Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Act.

1967 - During the Cold War US President Lyndon B. Johnson met with Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin in Glassboro, New Jersey for the three-day Glassboro Summit Conference.

1969 - Warren E. Burger was sworn in as chief justice of the US Supreme Court by retiring chief Earl Warren.

1983 - Pope John Paul II met with Polish labour leader Lech Wałęsa, marking one of the rare times the hypocritical pontiff ventured into politics without committing hate crimes against gays and lesbians.

1985 - Thanks to the efforts of one Inderjit Singh Reyat, a terrorist bomb aboard Air India Flight 182 exploded, bringing the aircraft down off the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 aboard.
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POPnews - May 21st

[Upon his landing at Le Bourget Field near Paris, Charles Lindbergh was greeted by as many as 150,000 spectators, whose cheers and jostling nearly did in the exhausted pilot and his plane; only the quick thinking of the military, on hand for crowd control, managed to rescue Lindbergh from trampling and his now famous plane from being pulled to pieces by souvenir hunters. Alas, it was a far worse Fate that befell The White Bird, which had taken off from Le Bourget on May 8th seeking to trump Lindbergh's feat, only from the other direction... Neither the plane nor its pilots, Charles Nungesser and François Coli, were ever seen again - making them among the dozens of aviators who died trying to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize.]
996 CE - The sixteen-year-old King of Germany Otto III was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Gregory V, who was not only the first German pope but also His Majesty's cousin - the former Bruno of Carinthia, whose election to the papacy Otto II had engineered.

1502 - The island of Saint Helena was discovered by the Portuguese navigator João da Nova.

1554 - England's Derby School received its royal charter from Queen Mary I.

1674 - John Sobieski was crowned King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, two days after his election to the throne by the nobility.

1725 - The Order of St. Alexander Nevsky was instituted in Russia by the empress Catherine I; it would later be discontinued in 1917 following the Bolshevik Revolution and then reinstated by the Soviet government in 1942 as the purely military Order of Alexander Nevsky.

1758 - Mary Campbell, then aged about ten, was abducted from her home in Pennsylvania by members of the Lenape Nation during the French and Indian War; she was returned, unharmed, five years later.

1894 - England's Manchester Ship Canal was officially opened by Queen Victoria, who knighted its designer, Sir Edward Leader Williams, at the dedication ceremony.

1917 - During a disastrous fire much of Atlanta's Fourth Ward was destroyed in ten hours.

1924 - University of Chicago students Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr. murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in notorious a 'thrill killing' which was later made the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 film Rope, as well as the 1992 film Swoon by Tom Kalin among others.

1927 - Charles Lindbergh's plane Spirit of St. Louis touched down at Le Bourget Field in Paris, having completed the world's first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean.

1932 - Owing to bad weather Amelia Earhart landed in a pasture in the Ulster village of Culmore, near Derry, making her the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean; the date of her flight was chosen purposely to emulate Lindbergh's own, five years earlier.

1941 - 950 miles off the coast of Brazil, the freighter SS Robin Moor became the first United States ship sunk by a German U-boat.

1945 - Screen legend Humphrey Bogart married up-and-coming model-actress Lauren Bacall.

1951 - The opening of the Ninth Street Show, otherwise known as the 9th Street Art Exhibition, was a gathering of a number of notable artists, and became the stepping-out of the post war New York avant-garde, collectively know as the New York School.

1972 - Michelangelo's masterpiece sculpture Pietà, at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, was damaged by a vandal named Laszlo Toth, who took a hammer to the exquisitely rendered marble shouting 'I am Jesus Christ!' Thanks to him, the work is now displayed behind bullet-proof glass.

1979 - During the White Night riots in San Francisco following the manslaughter conviction of Dan White for the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk (handed down on what would have been Milk's birthday) the city's sizable gay community rioted, destroying 12 police cruisers and causing significant property damage around that city's Civic Centre; in retaliation, police officers raided the Elephant Walk bar in the largely gay Castro District, destroying fixtures and assaulting patrons. Strangely enough, a grand jury was unable to lay charges against the SFPD for lack of evidence. Like, say, dozens of eyewitnesses...

1996 - The MV Bukoba sank in Tanzanian waters on Lake Victoria, killing nearly 1000.

1998 - Suharto, the Indonesian dictator who had been in power for 32 years, resigned.

2004 - Sherpa Pemba Dorjie climbed Mount Everest in 8 hours 10 minutes, breaking his rival Sherpa Lakpa Gelu's record from the previous year.
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