This Week in History: John Adams, Balfour Declaration, Luther, Daniel Boone, Guy Fawkes, Battle of Britain, Keats, Chiang Kai-Shek, & More
One of the greatest problems plaguing and tearing apart our society now is ignorance of or deliberate rewriting of history. As we learn the truth about the people and nations who came before us, we are equipped to fight the lies of the terrorists, Marxists, and would-be tyrants today. Here are some of the most important events that happened this week in world history.
October 30
1340 - “Battle of Rio Salado (or Tarifa): King Afonso IV of Portugal and King Alfonso XI of Castile defeat Sultan Abu al-Hasan 'Ali of Morocco and Yusuf I of Granada, last Marīnids invasion of Iberian Peninsula [Spain/Portugal].” It was a victory for Christianity against Islam.
1735 - Founding Father and second U.S. President John Adams is born in Braintree, Massachusetts. Adams, a member of the Continental Congress, was a major moving force behind the writing of the Declaration of Independence and America’s break away from Great Britain. He worked hard for French support of the American cause and was a “key figure in the negotiation of the Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the Revolutionary War and recognized American independence.” After the Constitution was ratified, Adams served as the first U.S. Vice President during the presidential term of George Washington. He became president when Washington voluntarily returned to private life, serving one term from 1797 to 1801, and was the first president to live in the White House. His eldest son with his much-beloved wife Abigail, John Quincy Adams, also became a U.S. President. John Adams died on July 4, 1826, the same day as his erstwhile friend and rival Thomas Jefferson.
1882 - U.S. Navy Admiral William "Bull" Halsey is born in New Jersey. “He was the American fleet commander during World War II in the Pacific and played a leading role in the defeat of the Japanese. In 1942, he launched the Doolittle Raid, the first air raid on Japan. From 1942-44, he coordinated successful attacks on the Solomon Islands and New Guinea. In 1944, he led the U.S. fleet to victory at the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in history.”
1905 - Tsar Nicholas II issues the “October Manifesto,” ushering in an era of constitutional monarchy in Russia.
1938 - Orson Welles’s broadcast of “War of the Worlds” accidentally creates a nationwide panic as some Americans believe it was a real invasion being described, not fictional.
October 31
1451 - Approximate date for the birth of Christopher Columbus, the Genoese explorer who discovered the Americas (he was born sometime between August 25 and Oct. 31).
1517 - Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses onto the door of Wittenburg’s cathedral, beginning the Protestant Revolt. Luther was the founder of Protestantism, a form of Christianity which has since splintered into tens of thousands of different denominations, some inventing teachings which had no precedent or scarcely any precedent in Christian history (such as denying Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist or “The Rapture”) and some renewing old heresies (such as iconoclasm, or the destruction of sacred images). Luther himself admitted that he changed his thinking on the Mass and the papacy based on what Satan told him.
Ironically, while Luther claimed to be devoted to the Bible, he removed whole books from the Bible (that didn’t fit well with his theology) insisting they were too Jewish, and many of his teachings are directly contradicted by the Bible. For instance “faith alone”—see James 2:17, “So faith also, if it have not works, is dead in itself”; or “sola scriptura”—see 2 Thess. 2:15, “Therefore, brethren, stand fast; and hold the traditions which you have learned, whether by word, or by our epistle”; or see 2 Peter 1:20, “Understanding this first, that no prophecy of scripture is made by private interpretation”; or 1 Tim. 3:15 “the church of the living God is the pillar and ground of the truth”.
Interesting information: “Luther’s first German translation was missing 25 books (i.e., Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Esther, Job, Ecclesiastes, Jonah, Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach (i.e., Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Matthew, Luke, John, Acts, Romans, Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation. He referred to the Epistle of James as ‘straw not worthy to be burned in my oven as tinder.’ The rest he called ‘Judaizing nonsense.’ Subsequent Protestants, deciding that Luther wasn’t really inspired by the Holy Spirit, replaced most of the books he had removed.” Luther also evidently thought he knew better than God what God should have said in the Bible, because he added the word “alone” to Romans 3:28.
1541 - The unveiling of Michelangelo’s magnificent painting of “The Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel.
1795 - English Romantic poet John Keats is born. Some of the beautiful poetry he wrote before his untimely death are “Ode to a Nightingale,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” and “Endymion.”
1864 - Nevada is admitted as a state to the U.S.A.
1887 - Chiang Kai-shek is born in China. He was the leader of the KMT or Nationalist forces in the struggle against Communist leader and unsurpassed mass murderer Mao Zedong. After Mao’s takeover of mainland China, Chiang Kai-shek founded the democratic Republic of China on Taiwan.
1892 - Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” is published.
1922 - Fascist Benito Mussolini becomes the youngest prime minister of Italy.
1940 - “The Battle of Britain concluded. Beginning on July 10, 1940, German bombers and fighters had attacked coastal targets, airfields, London and other cities, as a prelude to a Nazi invasion of England. British pilots in Spitfires and Hurricanes shot down over 1,700 German aircraft while losing 915 fighters. ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,’ declared Prime Minister Winston Churchill.”
1941 - Mt. Rushmore National Memorial is completed, 60-foot-tall sculptures in the side of one of South Dakota’s Black Hills, featuring four U.S. presidents’ faces: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt. Gutzon Borglum, who spent 14 years carving the massive sculptures, said, “The purpose of the memorial is to communicate the founding, expansion, preservation, and unification of the United States with colossal statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt.” Borglum died in 1941 before completing the carvings, and the finishing touches were done by his son Lincoln.
1950 - Earl Lloyd is the first black American to play in an NBA game.
1961 - “The body of Joseph Stalin was removed from the mausoleum in Red Square and reburied within the Kremlin walls among the graves of lesser Soviet heroes. This occurred as part of Russia's de-Stalinization program under his successor Nikita Khrushchev. Stalin's name was also removed from public buildings, streets, and factories. Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd.”
November 1
1776 - The Spanish Catholic mission of San Juan Capistrano is founded by Franciscan missionary St. Junipero Serra in what is now California. It was named for the famous St. John of Capistrano who led a crusade to stop Muslim incursions into Europe. The mission was originally both a church and a center of education and agriculture for the local natives. Abraham Lincoln restored the mission’s ownership to the Catholic Church in 1865. San Juan Capistrano is most famous for the swallows that leave the mission in October but return every year in March.
1800 - John Adams moves into the White House, the first U.S. president to live there.
1814 - Following the Napoleonic Wars and the defeat of French Emperor Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna convenes to redraw the map of Europe.
1922 - Formal abolition of the Ottoman Empire’s Sultanate, as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founds the Republic of Turkey.
1963 - South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother are assassinated during a U.S.-backed military coup. Despite persistent maligning from both U.S. sources and his terroristic Communist opponents, Ngo Dinh Diem was not a “brutal tyrant”; he was an imperfect politician, but a devout Catholic who wanted to restore Vietnamese nationalism after French rule. He was certainly better than the mass murdering Communist Viet Cong.
1993 - The Maastricht Treaty comes into effect, marking the formal establishment of the European Union (EU), which is now a major institution for promoting leftist globalism.
November 2
1734 - Frontiersman and American legend Daniel Boone is born in Pennsylvania. “Daniel Boone was an early American frontiersman who gained fame for his hunting and trailblazing expeditions through the Cumberland Gap, a natural pass through the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. Boone achieved folk hero status during his lifetime.” Boone had no formal education but he had daring, courage, and greatness. He fought in the Revolutionary War battle where his son was killed, lost another son in a brutal Indian attack, and was pretty much a failure as a businessman. It is said Boone inspired the massively popular novel The Last of the Mohicans with his rescue of his daughter and two other girls who had been kidnapped by Indians. While moderns have found his legacy controversial due to his one-time ownership of slaves, he inspired many romantic tales of wilderness daring and adventure which, even if exaggerated or invented, created an inspiring hero for generations of Americans to model themselves after.
1755 - Austrian royal and future Queen of France Marie Antoinette is born. Read my previous piece for more details on the many lies told about this much-maligned queen, and the evidence that Marie Antoinette, who lived to see her husband and beloved children torn from her, was an exceptionally good-hearted woman (who did NOT say “let them eat cake”).
1889 - North and South Dakota become states.
1917 - Marks the issuance of the “Balfour Declaration” from the British government, approving “the establishment…of a national home for the Jewish people.” It will eventually lead to the founding of the modern nation of Israel, in the same area as the ancient Biblical Israel.
1949 - Ratification of the Hague or Round Table Conference Agreement between Indonesia and the Netherlands, attempting to end a conflict between the countries following Indonesia’s declaration of independence.
November 3
644 - The second Muslim caliph, Umar I, under whom Arab Muslims conquered Syria and Mesopotamia, dies after being attacked by a Persian Christian slave (Umar had begun the Arab conquest of Persia; the early Muslim Arabs were religiously intolerant rulers of Persians).
1534 - British Parliament passes the first Act of Supremacy, declaring heretic King Henry VIII the Supreme Head of the Church of England. Henry VIII would eventually have six wives—some of them he divorced, two he killed, one predeceased him, and one outlived him—in his quest for a male heir. He would also institute a persecution of Catholics faithful to the Church and opposed to Henry’s adulterous marriages, costing the lives of more than 400 Catholics. The victims of this bloody tyrant, including thousands who participated in uprisings against his reign, were as many as 57,000.
1839 - The beginning military clash of the First Opium War between China and Great Britain occurs.
1903 - Panama’s “Separation Day,” or the day on which the Republic of Panama separated from Columbia after a revolt backed by the U.S.
1957 - The dog Laika becomes the world’s first astronaut (or cosmonaut, as the Soviets said) as the Soviet Russians launch the first inhabited space capsule, the Sputnik II.
November 4
1576 - The Spanish capture Antwerp during the Eighty Years’ War, beginning the bloody Sack of Antwerp.
1841 - The first settler wagon train arrives in California.
1862 - “Richard Gatling patented his first rapid-fire machine-gun which used revolving barrels rotating around a central mechanism to load, fire, and extract the cartridges.”
1922 - Howard Carter’s team discovers and begins to excavate the ancient Egyptian tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun (“King Tut”) in the Valley of the Kings, Egypt. King Tut “ruled from 1333 BC…(when he was just nine years old) until his death in 1323 [BC]. After he died, Tutankhamun was mummified, according to tradition, and buried in a tomb filled with artwork, jewelry, and treasures. Shifting desert sands quickly hid the tomb, and it lay mostly hidden for more than 3,000 years. On November 4, Carter's team found the first step of a staircase. The next day, his team exposed the whole staircase, and by the end of November, an antechamber, a treasury, and the door to the tomb itself were uncovered. After making a tiny breach in the door, Carter saw a room filled with gold treasures on November 26. But it wasn't until much later that the sarcophagus containing Tutankhamen’s mummy was revealed.”
1942 - The Nazis retreat from victorious British forces after a long battle at El Alamein in Egypt during WWII.
1979 - Start of the Iran hostage crisis as a mob of young Iranian militants stormed Tehran’s U.S. Embassy, taking 90 hostages (which included 52 Americans), who were held captive for 444 days.
1980 - Republican Ronald Reagan beats disastrous Democrat President Jimmy Carter. Reagan would play a key role in defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War and in reforming and renewing the USA.
November 5
1556 - “Second Battle of Panipat: Hindu Emperor of north India Hem Chandra Vikramaditya defeated by forces of Mughal Emperor Akbar, who captures and later beheads Hem Chandra.”
1605 - The discovery of the idiotic “Gunpowder Plot” of a small group of upper-class Catholics (including Guy Fawkes), who were seemingly driven to insanity by the persecution of Catholicism in England at the time and foolishly planned to blow up Parliament. The plot was unfortunately weaponized as justification for a harsh crackdown on British Catholics. “Guy Fawkes Day” is still celebrated as a holiday in Britain.
1775 - George Washington bans the celebration of “Guy Fawkes Day” in the American Revolutionary Army, beginning the end of its celebration in America permanently, due to the holiday’s anti-Catholicism. Washington’s 1775 order:
“As the Commander in Chief has been apprized of a design form’d for the observance of that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the Effigy of the pope–He cannot help expressing his surprise that there should be Officers and Soldiers in this army so void of common sense, as not to see the impropriety of such a step at this Juncture; at a Time when we are solliciting, and have really obtain’d, the friendship and alliance of the people of Canada, whom we ought to consider as Brethren embarked in the same Cause. The defence of the general Liberty of America: At such a juncture, and in such Circumstances, to be insulting their Religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered or excused; indeed instead of offering the most remote insult, it is our duty to address public thanks to these our Brethren, as to them we are so much indebted for every late happy Success over the common Enemy in Canada.”
Did I miss any important events? Let me know in the comments!