Category: History

Know what yonder document is?

It’s the Magna Carta (Latin, "Great Charter").

The document is considered a landmark in the development of constitutional government.

Basically, a buncha barons twisted King John of England’s arm into ceding a buncha his authority.

It was signed today, June 15, in A.D. 1215 at Runnymede, which is not a kind of soft cheese, despite its name.

The document was immediately repudiated by him, plunging England into a civil war.

He died during the civil war (of dysentery–ouch!).

Pope Innocent III–who had bad relations with John–also didn’t cotton to the document.

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AND MORE.

Y’know that whole key/kite/lightning experiment thingie that Ben Franklin did to prove that lightning is electrical (something that seems obvious to us today)?

Well, that happened today, June 15, in 1752.

Fortunately, Franklin was insulated at the time.

Others trying Franklin’s proposed experiment weren’t.

Wikipedia notes: "Others, such as Prof. Georg Wilhelm Richmann of St. Petersburg, Russia, were spectacularly electrocuted during the months following Franklin’s experiment."

Ouch!

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See Londo?

See Londo preen?

Preen, Londo, preen.

Now: See the brooch thingie that Lond’s wearing on his jacket?

I wanna know what it is.

Thing is: I’ve see other high men of state in historical pictures and illustrations wearing them, but I’d assumed that they were just pieces of jewelry of some kind.

A piece back I got evidence that they were more than that: I have reason to believe that thingies like this (in Earth history, anyway) are some kind of insignia used by political parties.

I have specific reason to think that such insignia were used by the liberal and conservative parties in England in the 19th century and that ministers of parliament would wear them to signify their party affiliation.

I’ve done some Googling, but I haven’t turned up anything on them–like what they were called.

So: Does anybody know there name or can anybody provide a link to some web info about them?

Much obliged, folks!

106 years ago today, on June 11, 1899, Leo XIII consecrated the whole of humanity to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

He explained:

[S]ince there is in the Sacred Heart a symbol and a sensible image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ which moves us to love one another, therefore is it fit and proper that we should consecrate ourselves to His most Sacred Heart-an act which is nothing else than an offering and a binding of oneself to Jesus Christ, seeing that whatever honor, veneration and love is given to this divine Heart is really and truly given to Christ Himself.

READ THE ENCYCLICAL.

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Stomach cancer may be what carried off H. P. Lovecraft. And it may be what Napoleon’s doctor put on his death certificate, but new findings strengthen the case that it wasn’t what carried off French emperor Napoleon.

Poison was.

Specifically, arsenic.

Some time ago, hair samples from Napoleon were found to contain abnormally high traces of arsenic, leading to speculation that he was poisoned.

SOME DISAGREED.

Some of the speculation centered on the idea that the abnormally high levels of arsenic might be due to environmental factors, such as the use of arsenic in certain kinds of wall paper at the time.

But new findings suggest that the arsenic in his hair was absorbed from his bloodstream, indicating frighteningly high serum concentrations of arsenic and thus a deliberate poisoning.

EXCERPTS:

The toxic form of arsenic, used for centuries as rat poison, was found in Napoleon’s hair samples at 37 to 42 times above the normal level in the new study.

"I can’t imagine Napoleon fed himself rat poison, even if he wasn’t a gourmet," joked Damamme of Montreal-based INS.

"The arsenic was in the ‘spinal cord’ of the hair, which implies that it came from the blood and food ingested," he said.

"Somebody in his circle gave him arsenic in small doses to poison him little by little to avoid another violent uprising by those who still supported the emperor in France," Damamme said.

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Now if they just had biological samples from the emperors Augustus and Claudius to verify the poisonings that reportedly did them in.

Remember in hide and seek when the seeker calls "Olly Olly Oxen Free" and all the hiders get to come back?

I thought that the tales of Japanese soldiers holed up in remote Pacific islands long after World War II was over were the stuff of legend. Apparently not.

"Sixty years after the guns of World War II went silent, reports that two Japanese Imperial Army soldiers had been found in the mountains of the southern Philippines sent Japan’s diplomats on a frantic mission Friday to try to contact them.

"The two men, in their 80s, reportedly have lived on the restive southern island of Mindanao since they were separated from their division, staying on for fear they would face court-martial if they returned to Japan."

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The city of Carthage, in modern-day Tunisia, has a bit of an image problem that some historians would like to attribute to ancient Roman propaganda: The ancient city of Carthage was accused of infanticide and at least one archaeologist is trying to prove the tradition to be bunk:

"An expert on ancient Carthage — a city obliterated by the Romans more than 2,000 years ago — Mr. [Mhamed Hassine] Fantar is campaigning to clear his forefathers of a nasty stigma: a reputation for infanticide.

"’We didn’t do it,’ says the 69-year-old archaeologist, rejecting accusations that the ancient citizens of this North African land sacrificed babies to appease their gods."

On the other side of the academic divide over the issue, another archaeologist says the revisionist version of Carthage’s history is a "whitewash":

"Lawrence Stager, a Harvard University archaeology professor and expert on the subject, calls the revisionism a whitewash. He’s now editing a book that will include the results of long forensic analysis of charred bones he helped dig up in Carthage in the 1970s. This, says Mr. Stager, will prove beyond reasonable doubt that Mr. Fantar and his followers are wrong. Still, he isn’t expecting to win them over. ‘No one really relishes having ancestors who committed such heinous acts,’ he says."

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Note to archaeologists two thousand years from now who may be arguing over whether Western societies of the twenty-first century committed infanticide to appease their "gods":

It’s true. We really did do it.

JIMMY ADDS: Carthago delenda est!

Today in 1453 Constantinople fell to attacking Muslim forces, ending the Byzantine Empire.

That this happened was a great tragedy and yet another instance of jihad being successfully waged against Christendom.

The tragedy could have been prevented had European Christians worked together, and both western and eastern Christians are responsible for the fact that they didn’t.

The fall of Constantinople also comes as a salutary warning for Europe today, whose demographic trends are dooming them to cultural extinction in the face of Muslim demographic jihad.

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IMPORTANT NOTE: Do not pronounce "Diet of Worms" as it it was a new weight-loss fad involving nematodes. A "diet" is an assembly and "Worms" is a German place-name pronounced with a /v/ sound on the front of the word. "Diet of Vorms" is more how it sounds. Think: Frau Blucher!

Today–May 25, is the anniversary of the Edict of Worms, which was issued in 1521 against Martin Luther and his writings.

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You’ve probably heard of historical revisionism pertaining to the World War II-era, but the kind you’ve probably heard of is the anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying revisionism.

That’s not the only kind, though.

Military historian Victor Hansen explains another kind.

EXCERPTS:

As the world commemorated the 60th anniversary of the end of the European Theater of World War II, revisionism was the norm. In the last few years, new books and articles have argued for a complete rethinking of the war. The only consistent theme in this various second-guessing was a diminution of the American contribution and suspicion of our very motives.

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(NOTE: I can’t tell from what he wrote how Hansen regards the immorality of the nuking of Hiroshima or the firebombing of Dresden. The deliberate targeting of civilians, of course, is inconsistent with Catholic moral theology, but whatever Hansen’s views on this point may be, his survey of how WWII is being handled in modern politically correct treatments is informative.)