This Day in History

[GordMay]

October 28
1919: Congress passes the Volstead Act [National Prohibition Enforcement Act] , enforcing 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto.

[Alan Mighty]

Originally Posted by Alan Mighty

The antarctic pole is not so covered with stars as the arctic, for there are to be seen there many small stars congregated together, which are like to two clouds a little separated from one another, and a little dimmed, in the midst of which are two stars, not very large, nor very brilliant, and they move but little: these two stars are the antarctic pole.

...

When we were in the middle of this open sea we saw a cross of five stars, very bright, straight, in the west, and they are straight one with another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellanic_Clouds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma_Octantis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_pole
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crux

[Alan Mighty]

Originally Posted by Alan Mighty

From Pigafetta's journal (Book 2, Milan edition; trans. Lord Stanley of Alderley.

Wednesday, the twenty-eighth of November, 1520, we came forth out of the said strait, and entered into the Pacific sea, where we remained three months and twenty days without taking in provisions or other refreshments, and we only ate old biscuit reduced to powder, and full of grubs, and stinking from the dirt which the rats had made on it when eating the good biscuit, and we drank water that was yellow and stinking. We also ate the ox hides which were under the main-yard, so that the yard should not break the rigging: they were very hard on account of the sun, rain, and wind, and we left them for four or five days in the sea, and then we put them a little on the embers, and so ate them; also the sawdust of wood, and rats which cost half-a-crown each, moreover enough of them were not to be got. Besides the above-named evils, this misfortune which I will mention was the worst, it was that the upper and lower gums of most of our men grew so much that they could not eat, and in this way so many suffered, that nineteen died, and the other giant, and an Indian from the county of Verzin. Besides those who died, twenty-five or thirty fell ill of diverse sicknesses, both in the arms and legs, and other places, in such manner that very few remained healthy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10570371/

[El Pinguino]

'When we had gone out of this strait, if we had always navigated to the west we should have gone without finding any land except the Cape of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, which is the eastern head of the strait in the ocean sea, with the Cape of Desire at the west in the Pacific sea. These two capes are exactly in fifty-two degrees of latitude of the antarctic pole.'
Interesting that he discounted some great south land connecting the australian land mass with the polar regions.
Also interesting that the cape of 11,000 virgins is now just the cape of the virgins. Guess they ran out of virgins somewhere along the line.

[GordMay]

On Friday, October 28, 1707, at 2:00 p.m., an earthquake hit south-central Japan. The quake, dubbed the 1707 Hōei earthquake, caused damage throughout southwestern Honshu, Shikoku and southeastern Kyūshū.

The Hōei quake, which was the biggest in Japan until the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, is the only event to rupture all of the segments of the Nankai megathrust at the same time.

The event also triggered a tsunami that reached heights as high as 23 m in Tanezaki. The tsunami killed over 5,000 people and destroyed 29,000 houses. It also triggered a major landslide which buried a 1.8 km2 area.

The earthquake might have triggered the eruption of Mount Fuji, which occurred 49 days later. There was evidence that the earthquake caused a shift in static stress, which caused a pressure change in the magma chamber under Mount Fuji.

In 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami killed 20,000 people, and injured an additional 6,242.

[Alan Mighty]

Originally Posted by El Pinguino

Also interesting that the cape of 11,000 virgins is now just the cape of the virgins. Guess they ran out of virgins somewhere along the line.

The 11K virgins were supposedly companions of St Ursula. About that I found no more (but Pigafetta's chartlet seems to acknowledge all of them as 'ij m vir.' with Ursula taken for granted. I assumed ij m was roman numerals meaning 11K).

Christians have, generally, become less 'physical' than the old days. Remember that the Gregorian calendar was designed such that the year started on 1 January, instead of 25 March (when his mother became pregnant - the Annunciation).

Why 1 January as the start of the year? Because for any male of that particular religious preference born on 25 Dec, that's when he would be circumcised. So 1 January was seen as the dinkum start of his life as a male person, hence the Feast of the Holy Circumcision.

Before Pope Gregory and his calendar, the year sort of started on Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation, 25 March.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Ursula
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_...sion_of_Christ
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_the_Annunciation

[Alan Mighty]

29 October

312 Maxentius's corpse was fished out a river and beheaded (see 27 & 28 October).

437 Valentinian 3, Emperor of Rome, married a cousin once removed to unify the branches of the Theodosian family - one of the oligarchic dynasties that contested for dominance in the later/western Roman Empire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentinian_III https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodosian_dynasty

1618 Walter Raleigh was executed, beheaded by axe, after being found guilty of treason for participating in a plot against James 1, who followed Elizabeth 1 as monarch of Britain. Raleigh was the first published writer (to my limited knowledge) to use in English the sailing terms: 'weather gage' for the relative position of one vessel from another with respect to the wind (1591); 'up' to mean towards the wind, in his example 'luffing vp' (1591); 'fore and aft' to mean the whole of a vessel from bow to stern (1618); and 'pilotage' to mean close quarters navigation of ports and coasts, and the local knowledge of it (1618). Raleigh also highlighted the importance of scope ratio when anchoring, writing 'the length of cable is the life of the ship' (1618). Note that he did much of his writing while awaiting the axeman. Motivating, one supposes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Raleigh

1665 A small Brazilian-Portuguese army led by Luis Lopes de Sequeria defeated the military of the Kingdom of Kongo and beheaded King Antonio of Kongo (aka Nvita a Nkanga). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mbwila

1675 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz started using the long-s glyph [ſ] to mark the integral, such as the area under a curve, in calculus. The long-s, once much used in manuscript and print, is often confused with the letter f by moderns - if no cross-bar, then it's likely a long-s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral

1795 Traditional/family date for the birth of John Keats, a romantic poet who died from tuberculosis. He studied a little medicine and once contemplated becoming a ship's surgeon, but did not. His experience of the sea seems limited to wind waves striking a coast. He mentions a ship in only one or two poems. His birthdate seems muddled with his baptismal date or perhaps that's just the way things were. On the sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats

1863 18 European duchies, kingdoms, and empires -- each with a predilection to solving any and all disputes by waging war -- resolved to form an entity to give succour to soldiers wounded on battlefields. A big step towards establishing the International Red Cross and Red Crescent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intern...scent_Movement

1888 10 European powers signed a convention in Constantinople to regulate how they and other economies would use the Suez Canal running through Egypt, but without taking heed of Egypt. Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956 (see below for a related event), 32 years before the Convention was due to expire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conven...Constantinople

1889 Li Dazhao born to an unfortunate peasant family in what is now Hebei province. His father died before his birth and his mother died a few months later. At age 10, Li was married to a 16 year old girl, whose family fostered him. Li spent two years at Waseda University in Nippon, his studies cut short by being expelled for spending more time in protests against the regime of Yuan Shikai - known to all as The Toad, Yuan pushed aside Sun Zhongshan (aka Sun Yat-sen) as provisional president of the Republic of China and made himself Emperor of China and then (in 1916) president of the Republic of China - than in attending classes. Back in China, Li was active as a public intellectual arguing for modernisation of China and its culture in an intellectual movement that reached a peak on 4 May 1919 associated with the Paris Peace Conference. Li became head of the library and later a professor at Beijing University (that's when BeiDa was in the Red Building just east of Jingshan Park and close to the NE corner of the Palace complex, not the current main campus). As head librarian he hired Mao Zedong as an assistant librarian. Li started a number of socialist and communist discussion groups. Li and Chen Duxiu formed the Communist Party of China, but Li was unable to attend the first national congress of the Party. Li joined the Nationalist Party of China and became a strong ally of Sun Zhongshan. Li forged an alliance between the Nationalist and Communist Parties. A warlord with a base in northern China, Zhang Zuolin, pursued Li who took refuge in the Embassy of the USSR. Zhang's men breached the diplomatic immunity of the Embassy and had Li Dazhao (and a dozen or more others, from both the Nationalist and Communist Parties) executed by strangling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Dazhao https://www.lib.pku.edu.cn/portal/en...yange/lidazhao https://www.lib.pku.edu.cn/portal/en...gjs/lishiyange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Culture_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Fourth_Movement

1911 Death of Joseph Pulitzer who owned a very large twin-screw steam-powered yacht, Liberty, of 1,600 tonnes and 268 ft (82 m) length; Pulitzer died aboard Liberty. Pulitzer made his money as a newspaper proprietor, a rival of William Randolph Hearst. He was politically active including as a Congressman. He funded the first university schools of journalism and the prize that carries his name. In his later years Pulitzer's enjoyment was challenged by blindness and sensitivity to noise; Liberty had ramps instead of companion ladders and was ran silently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SY_Liberty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pulitzer

1914 Ottoman Empire, long derided as the sick man of Europe, joined hostilities in the Great War of 1914-18 with a naval attack on ports in the Russian Empire. Events did not necessarily develop to the benefit of the Ottoman Empire (not to mention a bizarre Churchillian idea to use Australian and New Zealander troops to force a landing at a place later misunderstood as Gallipoli, but the more serious consequences were to the Pontic Greek population and the Armenian population - talk about genocide, will you?) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoma...to_World_War_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontic_Greeks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallipoli_campaign

1929 The New York Stock Exchange crashed yet again. Black Tuesday followed Black Thursday (26 October) and Black Monday (28 October). Investors dumped 16 million shares in one trading session (market value dropped just short of 12 per cent). Talking Great Depression Blues. Stock traders tried to fly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929

1941 At Kaunas in Lithuania, Joachim Hamann, Karl Jäger, Helmut Rauca, and about 10 soldiers killed perhaps 10,000 men, women, and children. Once you start talking about genocide it's hard to stop. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaunas...tober_29,_1941 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_J%C3%A4ger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Rauca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Hamann

1948 Israel military entered the village of Safsaf and killed at least 50 men, raped many women, and raped and killed a 14-year old girl. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safsaf_massacre

1956 Israel military invaded the Sinai of Egypt, starting the Suez Crisis. When French and British militaries followed, the moniker Tri-partite Agression was coined. Globalisation; multiple economic interests; complex diplomacy; and the end of the simple idea that the UN could be a tool of US national interests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suez_Crisis

1999 Tropical cyclone killed 10 people in Myanmar, disappeared about 200 Bangladeshi fishers at sea, and then caused the death of perhaps 30,000 people and catastrophic damage to buildings in the state of Odisha, India. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Odisha_cyclone

2015 Based on projections in the 2014 national economic and development statistical report, the 5th plenum of the 18th Central Committee of the Party embraced a two-child policy in China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-child_policy

[Alan Mighty]

^ that was my 7th contribution, making my one week of This Day in History.

Apologies for the typos, grammar infelicities, and general poor editing. I prefer to write fast and edit at leisure (and didn't have enough leisure to make the structure of each entry parallel).

Thanks for being a tolerant audience.

I've distorted GordMay's creation of what was fairly comprehensive and apparently an objective or factual history.

As if any history can escape being written by the victors.

In its stead, I've tried to use a touch of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, removing the fourth wall and delivering a selected or biased socially-constructed history, focused on my preferences of geography, my distaste for the absurdity of resolving conflicts by resorting to military measures, and my dislike of war and genocide at all, let alone as a means of stealing economic resources.

By selecting a small number of events in the history, I've been able to add URLs for further reading and my own gloss to underline relevance and importance.

I don't want to be tiresome to you. The political-economy of eastern parts of Afro-Eurasia is not everyone's favourite. None of the published works I authored or co-authored sold well (most of them were published by the federal government of Australia, which removes author's names for the most part, so don't waste your time searching the library catalogue under M).

Time to let someone else have a trick at the tiller or wheel.

Time to see and appreciate a different focus and a different set of guiding ideas. Diversity is a good aspect of CF.

Who's up for the next 7-day trick? Any one with a B or C at the start of their CF handle? What about you, D, or you E, over in the corner?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distancing_effect

[El Pinguino]

Originally Posted by Alan Mighty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distancing_effect

Golly, didn't that take me straight down a rabbit hole!
Right to here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafiction

Where else have I seen that Meta word today.

[GordMay]

October 29, 1998: Hurricane 'Mitch' made landfall, hitting northern Honduras; one of the deadliest Atlantic hurricanes on record, it caused some 11,000 deaths, in Central America.
➥ https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wiki...cane_Mitch.htm
➥ Hurricanes: Science and Society: 1998- Hurricane Mitch

[GordMay]

October 30, 1961: The USSR detonates a 50+ megaton hydrogen bomb, ‘RDS-220', or "Tsar Bomba" [‘King of Bombs’], over the Mityushikha Bay test range, on the Novaya Zemlya Island, in the Arctic Ocean.
It is still the largest explosive device, of any kind, ever detonated on Earth, and the flash of light, when it exploded at a height of 13,000 feet, was visible over 1000 kilometers away.

Video from Rosatom, Russia’s state atomic energy agency
➥ https://youtu.be/wSbxoRDhtqU

More Reporting About ➥ https://globalnews.ca/news/7311444/t...ear-explosion/

Meanwhile:
Scientists Spot the Biggest Known Explosion in the Universe
➥ https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...-the-universe/
➥ https://chandra.si.edu/press/20_rele...ss_022720.html

[GordMay]

November 2, 1743: The ‘Eclipse Hurricane’

The severe storm that struck, what was then the American colonies, on Nov. 2, 1743, was a little unusual. It may have been a late-season hurricane, or a strong mid-latitude cyclone. But whatever its nature, that one storm played an outsized role in expanding the science of meteorology.

The storm is known as the "eclipse hurricane", striking on the night of a lunar eclipse. Its clouds thwarted famed savant, and scientist, Benjamin Franklin's eclipse observation efforts from Philadelphia, and he seemed to have comforted himself by focussing his talents on the hurricane instead.

At first he thought the storm had come from the northeast, and presumed his brother in Boston had been similarly robbed of the eclipse. But to his surprise, he found his brother had a clear view of the eclipse, and the storm only struck there several hours later.

Intrigued, Franklin concluded that the storm moved in the opposite direction, to winds from the surface. Without satellites or a nation-wide weather station network, it was hard for him to test that hypothesis, but he managed: When another hurricane travelled up the colonies' eastern seaboard, in October 1749, he was able to trace it’s passage, using newspaper accounts, from the communities in its path.

With these observations, this "eclipse hurricane" led to scientists making an important breakthrough:
Rather than being driven by surface winds, storms had wind circulations, that were independent of the storm's actual motion and direction [the surface winds of a storm system were only incidental to the forward movement of the storm], a theory that would be refined in the following century.

More:

➥ https://noaahrd.wordpress.com/2013/1...pse-hurricane/

➥ https://www.pbs.org/benfranklin/l3_i...g_weather.html

➥ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...TcxL_blog.html

[GordMay]

Nobody was killed during one of the worst earthquakes in U.S. history

On Nov. 3, 2002 [22:12:41 UTC, or 1:12 PM Local Time], the Great Alaskan tremor struck. It was officially called the ‘Denali Earthquake’, because its epicentre was 66 km east-southeast of Denali National Park, Alaska.

The earthquake registered a 7.9 magnitude, the largest recorded in the United States, since the 1965 'Rat Islands' 8.6 tremor.[1]

Eleven days prior, on Oct. 23, there was a magnitude 6.7 magnitude earthquake, centred on the Denali fault. So, by definition, any other quake registering a lower magnitude would be considered an aftershock.
However, due to its occurrence as close as it was to the Nov. 3 event, in date and location, this particular earthquake is regarded as a foreshock, and was concluded to have likely been the catalyst, that directly triggered the main shock.

Due to the remoteness of the epicentre, there were no fatalities and only a few injuries. The quake's depth was shallow enough for its shock to be registered as far away as Seattle, generating seiches [standing waves] in enclosed, or partially enclosed, bodies of water, as far away as Texas and New Orleans. Of the population centers, the hardest hit were the villages of Mentasta and Northway, located at the eastern end of the rupture zone. This event caused significant damage to the transportation systems in central Alaska. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline suffered some damage, but no oil spills occurred. Multiple land slides and rock avalanches occurred in the Alaska Range with the largest slide on the Black Rapids Glacier.

More ➥ https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/old.2003/fs014-03/

And ➥ https://earthquake.alaska.edu/earthq...ult-earthquake

[1] Rat Islands tremor ➥ https://earthquake.alaska.edu/earthq...nds-earthquake

[GordMay]

On November 4, 2016, the ‘Paris Agreement’ [Paris Climate Accords] came into effect.
It was adopted by 196 Parties, at COP 21, in Paris, on 12 December 2015, and entered into force on 4 November 2016.
A sweeping international pledge, to dramatically reduce carbon emissions, the agreement remains a potential turning point, in the history of human relations with the Earth’s climate.
The agreement’s goal was to keep the global average temperatures from rising, by more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, by dramatically reducing carbon emissions, and to aim for an increase of fewer than 1.5 degrees.

More About ➥ https://unfccc.int/process-and-meeti...aris-agreement
And ➥ https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/paris-agreement

Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
The Document ➥ https://unfccc.int/sites/default/fil.../eng/10a01.pdf

[GordMay]

On November 6, 1917 [Old Style Oct 24], the Bolshevik ‘October Revolution’, begins, with bombardment of the Winter Palace, in Petrograd [now St. Petersburg], during the second phase of the Russian Revolution.

After the February Revolution [1917] overthrew Russia's centuries-old monarchy, the conflict between the Provisional Government, led by Alexander Kerensky, and the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, intensified around the country.

On 7 November [October 25 in OS] Bolshevik Red Guard forces, under Lenin's command, seized government buildings in Petrograd, and the following day the Winter Palace. This began the Soviet rise to power, and on 9 November, the Bolsheviks proclaimed the creation of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the first socialist state so created.

The revolution did not end the struggles. Over the next 5 years the country descended into the chaos and anarchy of the Russian Civil War; the Soviets would triumph, leading to the creation of the Soviet Union [USSR], in 1922.

More ➥ https://www.history.com/this-day-in-...volt-in-russia