History of the Week: Marines, Berlin Wall, Patton, Armistice Day, Bolshevik Revolution, Cortes, Dracula, Kristallnacht, Bonnie Prince Charlie, & More
As we celebrated Veterans’ Day and the Marine Corps birthday this week, it was a reminder of how important it is to recall and understand history, and also to appreciate the heroes of the past. Below are some of the important historical and cultural events that occurred this week.
November 6
1429 - Almost eight-year-old Henry VI is crowned King of England.
1494 - Muslim caliph Suleiman the Magnificent is born. He conquered huge swathes of land in North Africa, Asia, and Europe, though his advance into the latter was eventually halted by the Christians—the Holy Roman Empire and Polish King John Sobieski.
1854 - Famous composer and conductor John Philip Sousa is born in Washington, D.C. Probably the most famous of his marches is the “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
1860 - “Abraham Lincoln was elected as the 16th U.S. President and the first Republican. He received 180 of 303 possible electoral votes and 40 percent of the popular vote.” Southern states began seceding from the Union even before Republican Lincoln took office, as his goals for a gradual abolishment of slavery infuriated slavery-loving Southern Democrats. Lincoln brought a fractured America through the bloody Civil War and ultimately lost his life to assassination after his suggestion of civil rights for all black Americans outraged Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth.
1917 - The bloody, months-long WWI Third Battle of Ypres (Belgium), also called Battle of Passchendaele, concludes with the British and Canadians capturing the village of Passchendaele. Both the Allies and the Germans suffered heavy casualties. While the Allies were later reinforced with American troops, the Germany Army did not recover. An estimated 325,000 Allies and 260,000 Germans died for an Allied advance of a mere five miles.
November 7
1659 - The Franco-Spanish War ends with the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees.
1665 - The London Gazette, oldest surviving continuously published newspaper, has its first publication.
1811 - Americans and native Indians clashed at the Battle of Tippecanoe, on Indiana’s Keth-tip-pe-can-nunk river. The battle ended with a victory for the American soldiers under Gen. William Henry Harrison, who later ran for president and won under the slogan/song “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.”
1837 - “A pro-slavery mob attacked and killed American abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy at his printing works in Alton, Illinois.”
1867 - “Marie Curie…Polish-born French physicist, famous for her work on radioactivity and twice a winner of the Nobel Prize [is born]. With Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie, she was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. She was the sole winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and she is the only woman to win the award in two different fields [Britannica].”
1917 - The Bolshevik Revolution, also called the October Revolution (it was October in the calendar the Russians used), under Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the provisional government of Russia with an armed uprising. Bolsheviks invaded the Winter Palace that night and arrested members of the government. Soon the country was being transformed into a Marxist dictatorship.
1944 - An ailing Franklin D. Roosevelt wins an unprecedented fourth term as president (a constitutional amendment has since been implemented to prevent more than two presidential terms). While Americans have a rosy picture of FDR as the president who led us toward victory during WWII, his “New Deal” policies were largely anti-constitutional and he forever altered the American character for the worse, transforming fierce independence into a false expectation that government should and can solve all crises. FDR praised Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini before WWII, and received praise in return from Mussolini. Roosevelt was also a racist, responsible for locking Japanese-Americans in internment camps.
1989 - The pro-democracy protest movement triggered the resignation of the Soviet-controlled East German government. A mass exodus of East Germans was occurring at the same time, escaping from the hellhole of Soviet-run German territory.
November 8
391 - Roman Emperor Theodosius removes state support from other religions except Christianity.
1431 - Estimated date of the birth of the Romanian leader known to legend as “Vlad the Impaler,” the inspiration for Dracula.
1519 - Spain’s Hernan Cortes and his men enter Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital. The Spanish would later conquer Tenochtitlan with the help of other local natives. The Aztecs were famous for sacrificing countless victims every year in human sacrifices to their demonic gods—there’s even evidence of ritual cannibalism. Many of the Aztecs’ victims were captives, and their brutal deaths served both for ritual purposes and for intimidation. Needless to say, the local tribes weren’t exactly fans of the Aztecs—which is probably why they were happy to join up with the Spanish to conquer the Aztec capital and kill their ruler, Montezuma. In recent years, research even uncovered evidence of Aztec contemporaries capturing, killing, and cannibalizing a Spanish convoy. Contrary to later woke or anti-Catholic propaganda, it was an excellent thing when the Spanish conquered the Aztecs (the native tribes oppressed by the Aztecs certainly thought so).
1745 - Catholic Stuart royal and claimant to the British throne “Bonnie Prince Charlie” and his Jacobite army enter England, aiming to restore the rightful line to the throne. They were eventually defeated and the Dutch usurpers to the British monarchy continued to maintain power.
1847 - Bram Stoker, author of the magnificent and iconic horror novel Dracula, is born in Ireland.
1889 - Montana becomes a state.
1923 - “Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch took place in the Buergerbraukeller in Munich. Hitler, Goering and armed Nazis attempted, but ultimately failed, to forcibly seize power and overthrow democracy in Germany.”
1942 - Operation Torch, the Allied (British and American) invasion of French North Africa during WWII, begins.
2016 - In a massive upset, Republican Donald J. Trump wins the presidency, beating Democrat “Crooked Hillary” Clinton.
November 9
1494 - Piero “the Unfortunate” de’ Medici loses his power as ruler of Florence.
1799 - Napoleon Bonaparte seizes power as First Consul of France in the “Coup of 18 Brumaire.”
1872 - The Great Fire of Boston, which caused more expensive property damage than almost any other American fire, begins.
1918 - Kaiser Wilhelm II resigns as devastating WWI draws to a close, marking the end of German monarchy.
1922 - German Albert Einstein wins the Nobel Prize in Physics for “his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”
1938 - Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night” or “Night of Broken Glass”) happened on Nov. 9 and 10 in Nazi Germany. The rioting Nazis “torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses, and murdered close to 100 Jews,” according to History.com. Of course, tragically, the Nazi hatred for Jews led to the Holocaust, in which between 5.8 million and 6.6 million Jews were murdered.
1989 - The Berlin Wall, dividing Soviet-controlled East Germany from democratic West Germany, was opened up—and then torn down by jubilant Germans. Family and friends who had not seen each other in years reunited. Many people died trying to scale the Berlin Wall to freedom in Easy Germany, but on this day Ronald Reagan’s demand was finally met: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
November 10
1775 - In Tun Tavern, Philadelphia, the Marines—now the U.S. Marine Corps—came into being. Read my previous Untold Stories article for more details on Marine heroes.
1925 - Great Shakespearean actor Richard Burton is born.
1928 - Emperor Hirohito, one of a Japanese imperial line stretching back to the 600s B.C., is crowned. Hirohito ruled during WWII and, due to his willingness to surrender and negotiate (when other Japanese leaders did not want to surrender) after the second atom bomb was dropped by America on Japan, Hirohito was allowed to live and continue to retain his status until death. Under Hirohito, during WWII, the Japanese massacred up to 10 million people, including POWs, but largely other Asians, including Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese.
1938 - Kate Smith becomes the first singer to perform Irving Berlin’s iconic “God Bless America” live (on radio).
1975 - Infamous wreck of the freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior.
November 11
1620 - The historic Mayflower Compact is signed. Following arguments between the Pilgrims and non-Pilgrim voyagers to the New World on the Mayflower ship, the compact was drawn up, affirming self-governance, religious practice of Christianity, and mutual cooperation. It laid the foundations of self-governance in what would become America.
1744 - Abigail Adams, later the second U.S. First Lady, is born. She is one of only two women to have both a husband (John Adams) and son (John Quincy Adams) who were presidents.
1821 - Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky is born, famous for his books including Crime and Punishment.
1885 - Gen. George Patton is born in California. According to the Museum of the American G.I., “he is recognized as the greatest battlefield commander and well-known American general from the modern war era.” During World War II, unlike so many other commanders, the fearless Patton led from the front (including a first-of-its-kind company of black soldiers, the “Black Panthers”). His awards included the Distinguished Service Cross, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart, and the Meritorious Service Medal. After the Normandy invasions stalled, Patton and his fast-moving 3rd Army had to go in, liberating some 45,000 square miles of France in only two months.
The political correctness of his far less capable commanders and peers, including Eisenhower and Bradley, led to Patton’s being given far less latitude and command during WWII than he should have received; many thousands of men would probably not have died in North Africa, for instance, if Patton instead of the disastrous generals Montgomery and Eisenhower had been in charge. After Patton slapped a couple of soldiers in the hospital for “battle fatigue”—perhaps a difficult condition to deal with, but hardly something that commanders can afford to indulge when needing every able-bodied man to help fight for survival—he was wrongly castigated and punished. Patton was the greatest Allied general of WWII, and it is unfortunate that utterly incompetent politicians like Eisenhower and Montgomery should get so much praise while Patton should still be maligned.
1889 - Washington becomes a state.
1918 - “At 5 a.m., in Marshal Foch's railway car in the Forest of Compiegne, the Armistice between the Allied and Central Powers was signed, silencing the guns of World War I effective at 11 a.m. – the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. In many places in Europe, a moment of silence in memory of the millions of fallen soldiers is still observed.” Formerly called Armistice Day, the holiday is now celebrated in America as Veterans’ Day.
November 12
763 - Reported date of the 15-day Tibetan military occupation of Chinese capital Chang'an.
1866 - Sun Yat-Sen, later the first president of the Republic of China, is born.
1880 - Bestselling novel “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ” is published, written by Civil War Union general Lew Wallace.
1918 - Following Emperor Charles’s resignation, Austria becomes a Republic.
1942 - The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal between Americans and Japanese begins during WWII at the Solomon Islands.
1974 - UN suspends South Africa over racial apartheid.
Did I miss any important events? Let me know in the comments!
1935 11/6 The baseball player and American Evangelist & Revivalist Billy Sunday Died in Chicago IL
1483 11/10 The Great Reformer Martin Luther (orig. Luder) was born in Eisleben, Germany