History of the Week: Hamilton, Joan of Arc, Common Sense, Battle of New Orleans, Rubicon, Nazis, Irish Free State, & More
It’s a new year, with the same old political, religious, and social problems. How do we face them and solve them? A good way to start is to learn history, so that we can see where our forefathers made mistakes—and where they were victorious. Below are some of the important events that occurred and individuals who were born or died this past week in history.
January 4
1643 - Isaac Newton is born in England. He went on to be a very influential scientist, including through his three laws of motion.
1785 - German Jacob Grimm is born; with his brother, he collected and published the famous Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tales.
1809 - Louis Braille is born in France. Blinded after an accident at the age of three years, Braille nevertheless became a talented musician and is famous for inventing the Braille system of writing that allows blind people to read and write.
January 5
1477 - The Burgundian Wars end with the Battle of Nancy, which results in the death of the Duke of Burgundy and many of his men.
1919 - The German Workers’ Party is founded. In 1920, the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, better and more infamously known as the Nazis. Under Adolf Hitler’s leadership, the Nazis would ultimately become one of the most destructive and reviled forces of the 20th century.
1938 - Future Spanish monarch Juan Carlos I is born. Juan Carlos took the throne after the death of fascistic leader Francisco Franco, transitioning Spain to an apparently more democratic form of government, and ruled until his abdication in 2014. Juan Carlos had to leave Spain to reside in the United Arab Emirates in recent years after allegations of financial irregularities.
1943 - American scientist George Washington Carver, who went from slavery to developer of hundreds of products using peanuts, dies.
1976 - Communist Khmer Rouge dictator Pol Pot announces a new constitution for Cambodia, legalizing his Communist government and renaming the country as Kampuchea. Under Pol Pot’s genocidal reign of terror, between 1.5 million and 3 million Cambodians died, wiping out almost a quarter of the country’s citizens in just four years.
January 6
1066 - The last Anglo-Saxon king of England, Harold II, is crowned. He would be conquered and killed later that year by Norman William the Conquerer at the Battle of Hastings.
1412 - St. Joan of Arc is born in France. After receiving visions of Sts. Michael, Catherine, and Margaret while still a teenager, telling her to drive the invading English from French territory, Joan managed to gather military supporters and reach the royal court, where the Dauphin Charles gave her his trust. She rode with the army to multiple victories, wearing armor and bearing a standard; though she did not fight herself, her divinely-inspired advice was adopted by those who did. Charles was crowned and Joan survived serious wounding in battle, only to be captured by the English-allied Burgundians. In a sham trial got up by the English and Burgundians, Joan was accused of false crimes, including being a sorceress. Despite her innocence and holiness, she was burned at the stake. Politics likely prevented her canonization, which did not occur until the 20th century.
1759 - George Washington and Martha Washington wed on “Twelfth Night”; i.e., the twelfth day after Christmas, otherwise known as Epiphany (celebration of the magi visiting Christ).
1919 - Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt dies. A Republican, he had some good policies but also expanded government unconstitutionally.
2021 - After President Donald Trump specifically called for peace, some MAGA protestors are entrapped into entering normally public Capitol grounds and ultimately enter the Capitol building. The majority of protestors were peaceful, and the only individuals killed were protestors brutally murdered by Capitol police, who engaged in unlawful and aggressive attacks on peaceful protestors. The event, which was likely orchestrated and certainly manipulated by federal agents, was weaponized to justify the Democrats’ stealing of the 2020 election and the arrest and torture of 1,200+ Americans.
January 7
1536 - Catherine of Aragon dies. She was the first and only legitimate wife of heretic King Henry VIII of England, who divorced her and broke with the Catholic Church in quest of a male heir (who, ironically, died not too many years after Henry did, leaving his sisters to reign instead). Catherine’s daughter was the Queen Mary who has been so grossly misrepresented by Protestant historians.
1610 - Galileo Galilei discovers Jupiter’s moons, evidence in support of the Copernican hypothesis that not all heavenly objects revolve around Earth.
1714 - “[IBM] History tells us that the first known patent for a typewriting device to make characters ‘so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print’ was granted by Queen Anne of England on January 7, 1714. This patent was issued to a man named Henry Mill, an English engineer. No record or description of the invention has survived.”
1989 - Emperor Hirohito of Japan dies after more than 60 years on the throne. Despite having been in power during Japan’s genocidal mass murder in multiple countries during WWII, Hirohito was allowed to remain on the throne after Japan’s surrender to the Allies.
January 8
1324 - Venetian explorer Marco Polo dies. He famously traveled to Asia and spent years living in China, with his Travels of Marco Polo being considered a classic work.
1790 - President George Washington delivers the first State of the Union address (or “Annual Message”) in New York, which was then the capital of the U.S. Unlike most presidents throughout our history, who simply delivered the address in writing, Washington gave his in person.
1798 - Ratification of the 11th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is made official, with the Amendment declaring, “The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.”
1815 - Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812: “In the Battle of New Orleans, future President Andrew Jackson and a motley assortment of militia fighters, frontiersmen, slaves, Native Americans and even pirates [including famous Jean Lafitte] weathered a frontal assault in January 1815 by a superior British force, inflicting devastating casualties along the way. The previous month, Great Britain and the United States signed a treaty in Ghent, Belgium, that effectively ended the War of 1812. But news was slow to cross the pond, and in January the two sides met in what is remembered as one of the conflict’s biggest and most decisive engagements. The victory vaulted Jackson to national stardom, and foiled British plans for an invasion of the American frontier [History.com].” Unfortunately, Jackson’s popularity led to his election as the first Democrat president, and he began the Democrat tradition of openly violating the Constitution to serve his own political ends.
1935 - Rock music icon Elvis Presley is born.
1964 - Corrupt Democrat President Lyndon Johnson declares a war on poverty. “Since then, the taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Johnson's war [Heritage],” but the poverty rate is almost exactly the same; the war on poverty was a failure, but government power has expanded and more people than ever are dependent on a bloated federal government.
1984 - Estimated date of the birth of current North Korean Communist dictator Kim Jong-Un.
January 9
1760 - Battle of Barari Ghat, in which the Afghans defeat the Indian Marathas.
1878 - Victor Emmanuel II, first king of a united Italy, dies.
1913 - Future Republican President Richard Nixon is born. He resigned from the presidency in 1974 after a scandal surrounding his coverup of the Watergate affair.
January 10
49 BC - Roman general Julius Caesar defies the Roman Senate and crosses the Rubicon River, an act that launched civil war, famously saying, “Alea iacta est (the die is cast).”
1475 - The Battle of Vaslui results in a great victory for the Christians under Stephen of Moldova against the Muslim Ottomans.
1776 - Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense is published. One of the most impactful pieces of writing in American history, it convinced many colonists of the evils of monarchy and the necessity of a break with the British tyrant. Founding Father George Washington said of it, “I find that Common Sense is working a powerful change there in the minds of many men. Few pamphlets have had so dramatic an effect on political events.” Paine’s words are still powerful today:
“The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances have, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all lovers of mankind are affected, and in the event of which, their affections are interested. The laying a country desolate with fire and sword, declaring war against the natural rights of all mankind, and extirpating the defenders thereof from the face of the earth, is the concern of every man to whom nature hath given the power of feeling; of which class, regardless of party censure, is THE AUTHOR.”
1861 - Florida secedes from the Union. About 44% of Florida’s population in 1860 were slaves.
1908 - Actor Paul Henreid is born in Austria-Hungary. He is most famous for playing anti-Nazi freedom fighter Victor Laszlo in the iconic film Casablanca. I personally also enjoy his pirate movie The Spanish Main.
1922 - Following the formation of the Irish Free State, Arthur Griffith becomes its president. The Irish Free State was originally supposed to remain part of the British Commonwealth but has since become the independent Republic of Ireland.
1946 - First meeting of the United Nations (UN), which has since become a force for spreading wokism and supporting dictators and terrorists around the globe.
January 11
1755/1757 - Estimated date of Alexander Hamilton’s birth in the Caribbean. Born out of wedlock, he rose from obscurity to fame after he joined the American Revolutionary Army while still a teenager. He went on to serve on George Washington’s staff and then commanded his own battalion, with notable leadership in the Battle of Yorktown. One of the most prominent and influential Founding Fathers, Hamilton was a brilliant thinker and writer who was part of the Constitutional Convention as a New York delegate and became the first—and very able—U.S. Secretary of the Treasury under Washington’s presidency. During the Revolution, Hamilton’s racially integrated unit included the black soldiers of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, and after the war he opposed slavery and aimed for its abolition. Hamilton’s life was tragically cut short when he was murdered by Aaron Burr during a duel. Hamilton had eight children with his wife Eliza.
1861 - Alabama secedes from the Union. Like Democrats in recent history as well, Alabamian politicians objected to the election of an (anti-slavery) Republican to the presidency: Abraham Lincoln. The secession ordinance, after babbling about the Constitution and peace and security, specifically mentions slavery, the reason for which all the Confederate states seceded: “And…it is the desire and purpose of the people of Alabama to meet the slaveholding States of the South, who may approve such purpose, in order to frame a provisional as well as permanent Government upon the principles of the Constitution of the United States.”
Did I miss any important events? Let me know in the comments.