Category: History

Legend and a number of historical accounts have it that on this date in 1626, Manhattan Island was purchased from the Canarsee Delawares by the Dutchman Peter Minuit. Most accounts state that Dutch beads were part of the deal.

The only known document specifically relating to the acquisition was written in Amsterdam late in 1626 as a report to the board of the West India Company. It said, in part:

They [the crew and passengers of a returning ship] report that our people are in good heart and live in peace there; the women have also borne some children there. They have purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders; ’tis 11,000 morgens (about 22,00[0] acres) in size.

60 guilders has been estimated as worth from $24 to $300. Manhattan is actually about 15,000 acres, not 22,000.

The late bead historian Peter Francis argued in his prize-winning 1986 article “The Beads That Did Not Buy Manhattan Island” that, because this contemporary report does not mention beads, we cannot assume that beads were part of the transaction. According to Francis, beads were added to the story by Martha J. Lamb in her History of the City of New York (1877). It was only from then on that Dutch beads became part of the story. And, as a result, making the Delawares seem even more ignorant in light of Manhattan’s growing importance and wealth.

NewMexiKen however, wonders whether “for the value of 60 guilders” does not imply trade goods rather than coin. What use would Dutch money have been to the Delawares? And, if the transaction was strictly for money, why not report “for 60 guilders” rather than the vague “for the value of 60 guilders”? Trade goods were used in the purchase of Staten Island in August 1626 according to a copy of the deed – “Some Diffies, Kittles, Axes, Hoes, Wampum, Drilling Awls, Jew’s Harps, and diverse other wares” [Diffies are cloth]. What does “Wampum” mean in this Dutch account if not beads? The word “Wampum” comes from the Narragansett word for white shell beads.

More than likely the Delawares assumed they were “leasing” the use of the land. Permanent title would not have occurred to them. And $24 to $300 for a lease (whether in cash or goods) would not have been unattractive.

As the result of war, the Dutch traded New Amsterdam to the English in 1667 for what is now Suriname (Dutch Guyana).

Lindbergh landed in Paris on this date in 1927, 33½ hours after take off.

From the take-off in New York, he flew north over Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, navigating by checking maps against the landmarks he could see on the ground. He reached Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, and then flew in toward the city of St. John’s because he wanted people to know he’d gotten at least that far. People who saw his plane said they could almost read the serial number on the underside of the wing. It was the last land Lindbergh would see until he reached Ireland.

He turned east toward Europe just as night was falling. For the next 15 hours, no one would know if he was alive or dead. People across America would later say that they stayed up thinking about Lindbergh that night, praying for his safety. The humorist Will Rogers wrote in his column, “No attempt at jokes today. A … slim, tall, bashful, smiling American boy is somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, where no lone human being has ever ventured before.”

After reaching the halfway point of his journey, Lindbergh began to hallucinate, and even saw a coastline before his calculations said that he should. When he flew toward it, the coastline vanished. After more than 24 hours, Lindbergh spotted fishing boats on the water. He reached Ireland a few hours later, and turned south toward Paris.

From a longer essay at The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media.

President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862. The act provided settlers with 160 acres of surveyed public land after payment of a filing fee and five years of continuous residence. Designed to spur Western migration, the Homestead Act culminated a twenty-year battle to distribute public lands to citizens willing to farm. Concerned that free land would lower property values and reduce the cheap labor supply, Northern businessmen opposed the act. Unlikely allies, Southerners feared homesteaders would add their voices to the call for abolition of slavery. With Southerners out of the picture in 1862, the legislation finally passed.

Library of Congress

Anne Boleyn lost her head on this date in 1536.

She was never described as a great beauty, but even those who loathed her admitted that she had a dramatic allure. Her olive complexion and straight black hair gave her an exotic aura in a culture that saw milk-white paleness as essential to beauty. Her eyes were especially striking: ‘black and beautiful’ wrote one contemporary, while another averred they were ‘always most attractive,’ and that she ‘well knew how to use them with effect.’

Karen Lindsey, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry Viii

Anne’s charm lay not so much in her physical appearance as in her vivacious personality, her gracefulness, her quick wit and other accomplishments. She was petite in stature, and had an appealing fragility about her…she shone at singing, making music, dancing and conversation…Not surprisingly, the young men of the court swarmed around her.

Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII

Whatever, Henry VIII wanted her badly enough to overthrow the Church in England.

Anne was the mother of Elizabeth I. Interesting that two such promiscuous parents gave birth to the Virgin Queen.

Pvt. William Henry Christman, 67th Pennsylvania Infantry, was buried at Arlington on this date in 1864. More than 260,000 individuals have been interred there since.

The United States Congress declared war on Mexico on this date in 1846. (Open hostilities had begun in April.)

Two days earlier, in a message to Congress, President Polk had claimed:

The cup of forbearance had been exhausted even before the recent information from the frontier of the Del Norte [Rio Grande]. But now, after reiterated menaces, Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil. She has proclaimed that hostilities have commenced, and that the two nations are now at war.

(Of course, Mexico did not recognize the Rio Grande as the border.)

Within a few hours the House passed a resolution authorizing war 173-14. The Senate interrupted its debate about whether to abolish West Point and discussed the matter of war for a day before agreeing 42-2.

At a cabinet meeting on the 13th, Polk corrected Secretary of State Buchanan of the notion that the U.S. did not intend to acquire New Mexico or California. Such acquisition might be necessary to indemnify us Polk said, and he would accept war with “either England or France or all the Powers of Christendom” rather than pledge “that we would not if we could fairly and honourably acquire California or any other part of Mexican territory which we desired.”

The very first Coca-Cola was sold at Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta on this date in 1886. Dr. John S. Pemberton created the formula, which until 1905 had extracts of cocaine, as well as caffeine-rich kola nut. Bookkeeper Frank Robinson coined the name and it’s his handwriting we know from the trademark.

Today is Sigmund Freud’s birthday. He was born on May 6, 1856.

In the following pages, I shall demonstrate that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams, and that on the application of this technique, every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance, and one which may be assigned to a specific place in the psychic activities of the waking state. Further, I shall endeavour to elucidate the processes which underlie the strangeness and obscurity of dreams, and to deduce from these processes the nature of the psychic forces whose conflict or co-operation is responsible for our dreams.

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899)

In dreams I walk with you. In dreams I talk to you.
In dreams you’re mine. All of the time we’re together
In dreams, In dreams.

Roy Orbison, “In Dreams” (1963)

Herb Morrison reporting, 71 years ago today.

Thirty-six were killed — 13 of the 36 passengers, 22 of the 61 crew, and one ground crew member.

The Hindenburg did not explode because it was filled with hydrogen as long thought. The outer skin of the big German aircraft — longer than three 747s — was painted with an iron oxide, powdered aluminum compound to reflect sunlight (to minimize heat build up). The powdered aluminum was highly flammable and was ignited by an electrostatic charge in the imperfectly grounded zeppelin.

How flammable is iron oxide and aluminum? It’s the fuel used to launch the Shuttle.

On the evening of May 4, 1886, a few thousand people assembled in the Haymarket area at the intersection of Randolph and Desplaines Streets, across the South Branch of the Chicago River about eight blocks west of City Hall. The purpose of the rally was to protest the killing of two workers the previous day by the police when they broke up an angry confrontation between locked-out union members and their replacements at the McCormick reaper factory on the city’s Southwest Side. This confrontation was one of many outbreaks of violence at the time due to labor and class tensions. Central among labor’s demands was the eight-hour workday.

As the protest meeting in the Haymarket was nearing a close, about 180 police marched from the nearby Desplaines Street station to the makeshift speakers’ stand. Immediately after a police commander ordered the rally to disperse, someone threw a dynamite bomb into the ranks of the officers. One officer was killed almost instantly, and six more would die in the next few days and weeks of wounds either caused by the bomb or sustained in the riot that followed. Acting with overwhelming public support, the police arrested dozens of political radicals. In the trial that followed, eight anarchists were found guilty of murder. After appeals to the Illinois and United States Supreme Courts failed, four of the defendants were executed on November 11, 1887. One day before the hangings, another defendant committed suicide. Illinois Governor Richard Oglesby commuted the capital sentence of two other defendants to life in prison. The jury had sentenced the eighth defendant to fifteen years at hard labor.

Scholars have long considered the Haymarket trial one of the most notorious miscarriages of law in American history. At this time of cultural crisis, the defendants were convicted by a prejudiced judge and jury because of their political views, rather than on the basis of solid evidence that linked them to the bombing. Although most middle-class Americans and even many working people at the time cheered this action and praised the police as defenders of public order, the executions transformed the anarchists into martyrs of labor in this country and throughout the world. The cultural memory of Haymarket has echoed ever since through many other events.

The above excerpted from the excellent The Dramas of Haymarket, an online project produced by the Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University.