Category: History

On this date in 1966, Robert C. Weaver became Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the first black cabinet member. And on this date in 1990, Douglas Wilder took the oath in Richmond to became the nation’s first elected black governor.

was born in the British West Indies on this date in 1757 (or possibly 1755).

Soldier-Statesmen of the Constitution, a work prepared by the U.S. Army Center of Military History in 1987, has a fine chapter on Hamilton from which the following is extracted.

Alexander Hamilton, who represented New York at the Constitutional Convention, was a brilliant political theorist and a leading advocate of centralized government. As an immigrant, Hamilton was able to transcend loyalty to any single state or region and think in terms of nationhood. He combined a natural affinity for aristocratic values with a generally pessimistic view of human nature and concluded that successful government must be strong and must win the support of men of property and social standing. Hamilton was among the most intellectually gifted of the Founding Fathers, rivaling in ability his arch foe, Thomas Jefferson, but he lacked practical political experience and failed to win support for many of his most cherished ideas. A blunt, practical man, he never understood the role that idealists like Jefferson played in shaping society. Ironically, his major contributions to the political life of the nation occurred only when his specific policies were adopted and carried forward by others with broader vision….

Although Hamilton was a great innovator and statesman, his lack of legislative experience and of faith in the common man made him a poor politician. His tactical failures as a leader of the Federalists on both the state and national level fractured the party into competing groups and contributed directly to the election of Jefferson as President in 1800. Both Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr received the same number of electoral votes. To Hamilton’s credit, he refused to back a plan by some members of the party to cast votes for Burr to deny Jefferson a victory. Burr’s bitterness over that decision, coupled with his long-standing rivalry with Hamilton in local politics, led inexorably to tragedy. On 11 July 1804 the two men met at dawn at Weehawken Heights, New Jersey. Hamilton, who detested dueling, participated because he felt that his honor had been impugned. Mortally wounded, he was carried back to New York City where he died the next day.

began a 2,400-mile flight from Honolulu to Oakland on this date in 1935. Read The New York Times article on the flight — Miss Earhart Off On Pacific Flight; Heard About 3 Hours Out.

Earhart had already flown the Atlantic solo.

ratified the U.S. Constitution on this date in 1788, thereby becoming the fifth state.

was born on this date in 1412.

Jeanne d’Arc, called the Maid of Orléans, national heroine and patron saint of France, who united the nation at a critical hour and decisively turned the Hundred Years’ War in France’s favor.

Joan was born of peasant parentage in Domrémy (now Domrémy-la-Pucelle). When she was 13 years old, she believed she heard celestial voices. As they continued, sometimes accompanied by visions, she became convinced that they belonged to St. Michael and to the early martyrs St. Catherine of Alexandria and St. Margaret. Early in 1429, during the Hundred Years’ War, when the English were about to capture Orléans, the “voices” exhorted her to help the Dauphin, later Charles VII, king of France. Charles, because of both internal strife and the English claim to the throne of France, had not yet been crowned king. Joan succeeded in convincing him that she had a divine mission to save France. A board of theologians approved her claims, and she was given troops to command. Dressed in armor and carrying a white banner that represented God blessing the French royal emblem, the fleur-de-lis, she led the French to a decisive victory over the English. At the subsequent coronation of the Dauphin in the cathedral at Reims, she was given the place of honor beside the king.

Although Joan had united the French behind Charles and had put an end to English dreams of hegemony over France, Charles opposed any further campaigns against the English. Therefore, it was without royal support that Joan conducted (1430) a military operation against the English at Compiégne, near Paris. She was captured by Burgundian soldiers, who sold her to their English allies. The English then turned her over to an ecclesiastical court at Rouen to be tried for heresy and sorcery. After 14 months of interrogation, she was accused of wrongdoing in wearing masculine dress and of heresy for believing she was directly responsible to God rather than to the Roman Catholic church. The court condemned her to death, but she penitently confessed her errors, and the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Because she resumed masculine dress after returning to jail, she was condemned again—this time by a secular court—and, on May 30, 1431, Joan was burned at the stake in the Old Market Square at Rouen as a relapsed heretic.

Twenty-five years after her death, the church retried her case, and she was pronounced innocent. In 1920 she was canonized by Pope Benedict XV; her traditional feast day is May 30.

“Joan of Arc, Saint,” Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2004
http://encarta.msn.com — 1997-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

was admitted to the Union as the 47th state on this date in 1912.

was admitted to the Union as the 45th state on this date in 1896.

was admitted to the Union on this date in 1959, becoming the 49th state.

ratified the U.S. Constitution on this date in 1788, thereby becoming the fourth state.

Historian Thomas P. Slaughter on the real significance of Lewis and Clark.

The Lewis and Clark expedition did not matter two centuries ago. The explorers were not the first to make the transcontinental journey, as they well knew, having been preceded in both travels and publication by the Canadian Alexander Mackenzie. They followed Cook, Vancouver, and dozens of trading ships that made landfall on the West Coast and had ongoing contacts with Indians in the Northwest, just as French and Anglo-Canadian fur traders had already engaged Indians east of the Rockies.

And if Lewis and Clark didn’t get there first, neither did they achieve any of the major goals of their expedition: they did not find a water route to the Pacific, a Lost Tribe of Israel, or Welsh Indians. During the return leg of their journey, they met up with traders who had believed them dead and were proceeding west nonetheless. The explorers’ survival and the information they brought back with them were irrelevant to the westward course of American empire. They did not publish their journals in a timely fashion and eventually did so, after Lewis’s death, in an abridgement that achieved limited circulation. Quickly, the explorers and their achievements faded from public memory.

Lewis and Clark were rediscovered after the passing of the American frontier. Celebration of them is a twentieth-, now twenty-first-century phenomenon that reflects more on the creation of a national origins myth than it does the historical significance of the expedition in its own time….Lewis and Clark matter, then, because our nation needs their contribution to the multicultural and ecologically sensitive stories that we now tell about ourselves. They are central characters in the superficial “feel-good” brand of American history that catapults books to the top of nonfiction bestseller lists.

An interesting brief essay. Slaughter is the author of Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness (2003).

was signed by James Gadsden, U.S. Minister to Mexico, and General Antonio López de Santa Anna, President of Mexico, in Mexico City on this date in 1853. The treaty settled the dispute over the exact location of the Mexican border west of Texas and gave the U.S. approximately 29,000 square miles of land in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona for the price of $10 million.

The Mexican Republic agrees to designate the following as her true limits with the United States for the future: retaining the same dividing line between the two Californias as already defined and established, according to the 5th article of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the limits between the two republics shall be as follows: Beginning in the Gulf of Mexico, three leagues from land, opposite the mouth of the Rio Grande, as provided in the 5th article of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; thence, as defined in the said article, up the middle of that river to the point where the parallel of 31° 47′ north latitude crosses the same; thence due west one hundred miles; thence south to the parallel of 31° 20′ north latitude; thence along the said parallel of 31° 20′ to the 111th meridian of longitude west of Greenwich; thence in a straight line to a point on the Colorado River twenty English miles below the junction of the Gila and Colorado rivers; thence up the middle of the said river Colorado until it intersects the present line between the United States and Mexico.

Read the entire Gadsden Purchase Treaty.

was annexed into the United States as the 28th state on this date in 1845.

the 17th President of the U.S. was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, on this date in 1808.

was born in Staunton, Virginia, on this date in 1856.

After graduating from Princeton in 1879, Wilson studied law at the University of Virginia for one year. He received a Ph.D. in political science from Johns Hopkins University in 1886. Wilson remains the only American president to have earned a doctoral degree.

Wilson served on the faculties of Bryn Mawr College and Wesleyan University before joining the Princeton faculty as professor of jurisprudence and political economy in 1890. He became President of Princeton in 1902. His commentary on contemporary political matters led to his election as Governor of New Jersey in 1910 and as President in 1912.

Wilson was the second of two sitting American Presidents to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. (Theodore Roosevelt was the other.)

The Washington Post reports on three University of Virginia professors assessing the historical accuracy of the new film Cold Mountain.

…[I]f you want to understand the way Americans process their past, the analysis of such fictional “history” is a perfectly reasonable enterprise. For, as real historians know all too well, the Hollywood Version has more influence on what we believe than all their efforts combined….

But Gallagher, who is one of the most prominent students of Civil War, knows what he’s up against here. “I think ‘Gone With the Wind’ has shaped what people think about the Civil War probably more than everything we’ve written put together, or put together and squared,” he says. Nobody thinks this film will have that kind of impact, but it will surely have more than his own work or that of any other academic historian.

Before this night’s discussion is over, Gallagher and his U-Va. colleagues will field questions about the film’s take on slavery, on the role of Civil War women, and on the nature of home-front vigilantism in “our beloved South.” Ed Ayers will respond in part by pointing out that Minghella’s movie is structured more like a western than a true Civil War film.

t’s an interesting, lengthy assessment of history and cinema.

rode out on what is now Sun Point in search of lost cattle on this date in 1888 and first saw Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde. That afternoon, Richard found Spruce Tree House, and the next day, the two men discovered Square Tower House. Al Wetherill, Richard’s brother, saw Cliff Palace sometime the year before, but he did not enter the dwelling, so the credit for “discovering” the dwelling has been given to Richard Wetherill and Charles Mason.

In 1901, Richard Wetherill homesteaded land that included Pueblo Bonito, Pueblo Del Arroyo, and Chetro Ketl in what is now Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Wetherill remained in Chaco Canyon, homesteading and operating a trading post at Pueblo Bonito until his controversial murder in 1910. Chiishch’ilin Biy, charged with his murder, served several years in prison, but was released in 1914 due to poor health. Wetherill is buried in the small cemetery west of Pueblo Bonito.

[NewMexiKen photo, 2003]

ratified the Constitution on this date in 1787, thereby becoming the third state.

Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully made the first four sustained flights of a heavier-than-air machine under the complete control of the pilot at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, on this date 100 years ago.

The Smithsonian has a well-presented site on The Invention of the Aerial Age.

took place on this date in 1773.