On this day in History, June 13 ... On this day in 323 BC, Alexander the Great, the young Macedonian military genius who forged an empire stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to India, dies in Babylon, in present-day Iraq, at the age of 33. Born in Macedonia to King Phillip II and Queen Olympias, Alexander received a classical education from famed philosopher Aristotle and a military education from his father. At the age of 16, Alexander led his first troops into combat and two years later commanded a large part of his fathers army that won the Battle of Chaeronea and brought Greece under Macedonian rule. In 336 B.C., Phillip II was assassinated, and Alexander ascended to the throne. --- During the Peasants Revolt, a large mob of English peasants led by Wat Tyler marches into London and begins burning and looting the city on this day in 1381. Several government buildings were destroyed, prisoners were released, and a judge was beheaded along with several dozen other leading citizens. The Peasants Revolt had its origins in a severe manifestation of bubonic plague in the late 1340s, which killed nearly a third of the population of England. The scarcity of labor brought on by the Black Death led to higher wages and a more mobile peasantry. Parliament, however, resisted these changes to its traditional feudal system and passed laws to hold down wages while encouraging landlords to reassert their ancient manorial rights. In 1380, peasant discontent reached a breaking point when Parliament restricted voting rights through an increase of the poll tax, and the Peasants Revolt began. --- On this day in 1777, a 19-year-old French aristocrat, Marie-Joseph Paul Roch Yves Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, arrives in South Carolina with the intent to serve as General George Washingtons second-in-command. Silas Deane, during his service as the Continental Congress envoy to France, had, on December 7, 1776, struck an agreement with Johann de Kalb and Lafayette to offer their military expertise to the American cause. However, Deane was replaced with Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee, who were unenthused by the proposal. Meanwhile, King Louis XVI feared angering Britain and prohibited Lafayettes departure. The British ambassador to the French court at Versailles demanded the seizure of Lafayettes ship, which resulted in Lafayettes arrest. Lafayette, though, managed to escape, set sail and elude two British ships dispatched to recapture him. --- Having hurried ahead of the main body of the expedition, Meriwether Lewis and four men arrive at the Great Falls of the Missouri River, confirming that the explorers are headed in the right direction on this day in 1805. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had set out on their expedition to the Pacific the previous year. They spent the winter of 1804 with the Mandan Indians in present-day North Dakota. The Hidatsa Indians, who lived nearby, had traveled far to the West, and they proved an important source of information for Lewis and Clark. The Hidatsa told Lewis and Clark they would come to a large impassable waterfall in the Missouri when they neared the Rocky Mountains, but they assured the captains that portage around the falls was less than half a mile. --- President Thomas Jefferson receives a subpoena to testify in the treason trial of his former vice president, Aaron Burr, on this day in 1807. In the subpoena, Burr asked Jefferson to produce documents that might exonerate him. Burr had already been politically and socially disgraced by killing former Treasury secretary and Revolutionary-era hero Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. After killing Hamilton, Burr, still Jeffersons vice president, went into hiding to avoid prosecution for murder. (The charges were later dropped.) Burr then concocted a seditious plan to enlist the help of Britain and Spain to create a separate nation in the southwestern reaches of the American continent, including parts of Mexico, over which Burr would rule. The outrageous plan failed miserably when one of Burrs co-conspirators, General James Wilkinson, betrayed Burr and alerted Jefferson to the plot. Burr was hunted down and arrested in 1806 and indicted for treason. --- On June 13, 1913, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany leaves Konopischt, Bohemia (today the Czech Republic), the hunting lodge and country estate of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, after a weekend visit. Although Wilhelm had ostensibly come to admire the lavish gardens at Konopischt, the reality was that he and Franz Ferdinand wanted to discuss Austria-Hungarys insecurities about the tenuous balance of power in the tumultuous Balkan region. In 1908, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, formally still a province of the Ottoman Empire, and populated not only by Bosnians but also by Croats and Serbs. Serbia reacted angrily to the annexation, reasoning that if Bosnia were not under Turkish rule, it should be governed by Serbia. After two successful Balkan Wars—and enjoying support from the Russian empire, the other great European power in the region apart from Austria-Hungary—Serbia had emerged as a more powerful and ambitious nation than ever before, thus threatening the position of the Dual Monarchy, already in decline. --- On this day in 1944, Germany launches 10 of its new V1 rockets against Britain from a position near the Channel coast. They prove to be less than devastating. Mired in the planning stages for a year, the V1 was a pilotless, jet-propelled plane that flew by air-driven gyroscope and magnetic compass, capable of unleashing a ton of cruise missile explosives. Unfortunately for the Germans, the detonation process was rather clumsy and imprecise, depending on the impact of the plane as the engine quit and the craft crash-landed. They often missed their targets. --- On this day in 1966, the Supreme Court hands down its decision in Miranda v. Arizona, establishing the principle that all criminal suspects must be advised of their rights before interrogation. Now considered standard police procedure, You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can, and will, be used against you in court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford one, one will be appointed to you, has been heard so many times in television and film dramas that it has become almost cliche. The roots of the Miranda decision go back to March 2, 1963, when an 18-year-old Phoenix woman told police that she had been abducted, driven to the desert and raped. Detectives questioning her story gave her a polygraph test, but the results were inconclusive. However, tracking the license plate number of a car that resembled that of her attackers brought police to Ernesto Miranda, who had a prior record as a peeping tom. Although the victim did not identify Miranda in a line-up, he was brought into police custody and interrogated. What happened next is disputed, but officers left the interrogation with a confession that Miranda later recanted, unaware that he didnt have to say anything at all. --- On this day in 1967, President Lyndon Johnson appoints U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Thurgood Marshall to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice Tom C. Clark. On August 30, after a heated debate, the Senate confirmed Marshalls nomination by a vote of 69 to 11. Two days later, he was sworn in by Chief Justice Earl Warren, making him the first African American in history to sit on Americas highest court. The great-grandson of slaves, Marshall was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1908. In 1933, after studying under the tutelage of civil liberties lawyer Charles H. Houston, he received his law degree from Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1936, he joined the legal division of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), of which Houston was director, and two years later succeeded his mentor in the organizations top legal post. --- On this day in 1971, the New York Times begins to publish sections of the so-called Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Department of Defense study of Americas involvement in the Vietnam War. The papers indicated that the American government had been lying to the people for years about the Vietnam War and the papers seriously damaged the credibility of Americas Cold War foreign policy. In 1967, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered his department to prepare an in-depth history of American involvement in the Vietnam War. McNamara had already begun to harbor serious doubts about U.S. policy in Vietnam, and the study--which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers--substantiated his misgivings. Top-secret memorandums, reports, and papers indicated that the U.S. government had systematically lied to the American people, deceiving them about American goals and progress in the war in Vietnam. The devastating multi-volume study remained locked away in a Pentagon safe for years. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department employee who had turned completely against the war, began to smuggle portions of the papers out of the Pentagon. These papers made their way to the New York Times, and on June 13, 1971, the American public read them in stunned amazement. The publication of the papers added further fuel to the already powerful antiwar movement and drove the administration of President Richard Nixon into a frenzy of paranoia about information leaks. Nixon attempted to stop further publication of the papers, but the Supreme Court refused to issue an injunction. --- On this day in 1973, representatives of the original signers of the January 27 cease-fire sign a new 14-point agreement calling for an end to all cease-fire violations in South Vietnam. Coming at the end of month-long negotiations between Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the settlement included an end to all military activities at noon on June 15; an end to U.S. reconnaissance flights over North Vietnam and the resumption of U.S. minesweeping operations in North Vietnamese waters; the resumption of U.S. talks on aid to North Vietnam; and the meeting of commanders of opposing forces in South Vietnam to prevent outbreaks of hostilities. Fighting had erupted almost immediately after the original cease-fire that had been initiated as part of the Paris Peace Accords. Both sides repeatedly violated the terms of the cease-fire as they jockeyed for position and control of the countryside. This new agreement proved no more effective than the original peace agreement in stopping the fighting, which continued into early 1975 when the North Vietnamese launched a massive offensive that overran South Vietnam in less than 55 days. The war was finally over on April 30, 1975, when North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon. --- After more than a decade in space, Pioneer 10, the worlds first outer-planetary probe, leaves the solar system on this day in 1983. The next day, it radioed back its first scientific data on interstellar space. On March 2, 1972, the NASA spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to Jupiter, the solar systems largest planet. In December 1973, after successfully negotiating the asteroid belt and a distance of 620 million miles, Pioneer 10 reached Jupiter and sent back to Earth the first close-up images of the spectacular gas giant. On June 13, 1983, the NASA spacecraft left the solar system. NASA officially ended the Pioneer 10 project on March 31, 1997, with the spacecraft having traveled a distance of some six billion miles. --- On this day in 1986, Bishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Prize for Peace, meets with South African President P.W. Botha to discuss the nationwide state of emergency declared by Botha in response to the anti-apartheid protests. This is not likely to help restore law and order and peace and calm, Tutu said of the government crackdown after the meeting. If we do have any calm, it will be very brittle, it will be superficial, it will be sullen, and at the slightest chance, it will be broken again. In 1948, South Africas white minority government institutionalized its policy of racial segregation and white supremacy known as apartheid--Afrikaans for apartness. Eighty percent of the countrys land was set aside for white use, and black Africans entering this territory required special passes. Blacks, who had no representation in the government, were subjected to different labor laws and educational standards than whites and lived in extreme poverty while white South Africans prospered.
Posted on: Fri, 13 Jun 2014 11:57:50 +0000
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