July 15

Many people today seem gripped by a strong sense of malaise. We as a people appear to be uncertain and unwilling to take a role in our national affairs. Jimmy Carter pointed this out as early as 1979. Taking a stand in the political life of one’s country carries both moral and temporal responsibilities as well as risks. Consider John Ball. He took a very proactive role in the affairs of England in the 14th century. I mean he was British after all so this seems quite appropriate, right? On the 15th in 1381 as the British monarch, King John II, looked on Ball was hanged, then drawn and quartered, which is a particularly nasty way to die. It seems that good King John did not seriously consider the option of simply giving him a time out.

July 14

On the 14th in 1789 a bunch of possibly irritated, but certainly irritating, French people stormed the Bastille in Paris. The nominal reason for this action was the desire to free those inside who, it was believed, were improperly imprisoned in its massive bulk. In reality, their reasons were somewhat more pragmatic. They wanted to seize the 30,000 pounds of gunpowder stored there. For all the uproar it caused I was rather disappointed to discover that the only prisonersheld in the Bastille at the time were four forgers, two lunatics and one ‘deviant’ aristocrat, Comte de Solages.

The Marquis de Sade had been confined to the Bastille, for a variety of reasons, but he was transferred out of the Bastille a few days prior to its being stormed by the revolutionaries.

July 13

When people refer to the 60s, they generally think of the 1960s with its anti-war protests, tempers flaring all over the place and invariably landing on the new carpet and widespread anti-government activism. They were all of that and much more. The 1960s pale, however when you turn your gaze back a century. On July 13, 1863, New York City, indeed much of the northeast, was embroiled in a series of anti-draft riots which make the 1960s look like a cakewalk; the most dramatic of these riots engulfed the entire City of New York for three days. In the 1960s about the only things that lasted three days were the hangovers.

July 12

The fashion of wearing of gloves seems to have largely fallen out of favor, unlike its cousin – the wearing of absurdly huge sunglasses. If you are considering bank robbery as a career choice, you might want to seriously consider wearing them (the gloves, not the sunglasses) however. On the 12th in 1987, a group of people broke in to the Knightsbridge Security Deposit Center in London (England not Canada) and stole £63.6 million, making that robbery second, after the robbery of the Central Bank of Iraq on March 18, 2003, in the ranking of the world’s most lucrative bank robberies. Forensic specialists found precisely one fingerprint at the Knightsbridge facility, which led them to Valerio Viccei, and he was then arrested for the crime.

I

July 11

Salomon August Andrée was an ambitious sort of guy. He was a Swiss engineer who briefly had a promising career as an aeronaut. Or what passed for aeronautics at the end of the 19th century. He also was wrapped up in the mania for polar exploration that seems to have been rampant then. Combining these two interests, on the 11th in 1897, Andree and two younger, less-experienced adventurers, climbed into a hydrogen-filled balloon at Svalbard, Sweden and gently rose into the sky hoping to pass over the North Pole on their way to either Russia or Canada. It appears that either location would have been just fine, Andree apparently wasn't picky. The balloon didn’t make it nearly that far, and the bodies of Andree and his two friends were not recovered until 1930.

The image is from film recovered at the site of the crash.

The 10th in 1925 featured the start of the trial of John Scopes, an inexperienced high school science teacher. Scopes had been charged with teaching evolution (instead of intelligent design). When Clarence Darrow had finished the People’s closing argument, Judge John T. Ralston, with a sense of resignation, inexplicably called the case to a halt, refusing to allow the defense to make a closing argument. It took the jury all of eight minutes to find Scopes guilty and he was fined $100, which Scopes’ lead attorney, William Jennings Bryan gallantly offered to pay.

On this date in 1938, Howard Hughes, a man who proved that it is indeed possible to have too much money, completed an airplane flight around the world that had taken 91 hours

July 9

On the 9th in 1850, Millard Fillmore became the 13th president of the United States upon the death of Zachary Taylor. He was the second person to become president upon the death of his predecessor. In a column, which was intended to be humorous, published on December 18, 1917 in the New York Evening Mail, H. L. Mencken wrote that Fillmore had the first bathtub installed in the White House. Much to the Fillmore families chagrin, this has been widely accepted as true.

Whenever I come across someone who was the second of anything, my first impulse is to find out who was first. In this instance it was John Tyler who became the first to achieve that honor upon the death of William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, who died 31 days after his inauguration in 1841