Category: History

Cinco de Mayo

Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day, a popular misconception.
Instead, it commemorates a single battle.

In 1861, Benito Juárez—a lawyer and member of the Zapotec tribe—was elected president of Mexico. At the time, the country was in financial ruin after years of internal strife, and the new president was forced to default on debt payments to European governments.

In response, France, Britain and Spain sent naval forces to Veracruz, Mexico, demanding repayment. Britain and Spain negotiated with Mexico and withdrew their forces.

France, however, ruled by Napoleon III, decided to use the opportunity to carve an empire out of Mexican territory. Late in 1861, a well-armed French fleet stormed Veracruz, landing a large force of troops and driving President Juárez and his government into retreat.

The Battle of Puebla
Certain that success would come swiftly, 6,000 French troops under General Charles Latrille de Lorencez set out to attack Puebla de Los Angeles, a small town in east-central Mexico. From his new headquarters in the north, Juárez rounded up a ragtag force of 2,000 loyal men—many of them either Indigenous Mexicans or of mixed ancestry—and sent them to Puebla.

The vastly outnumbered and poorly supplied Mexicans, led by Texas-born General Ignacio Zaragoza, fortified the town and prepared for the French assault. On May 5, 1862, Lorencez gathered his army—supported by heavy artillery—before the city of Puebla and led an assault.

The battle lasted from daybreak to early evening, and when the French finally retreated they had lost nearly 500 soldiers. Fewer than 100 Mexicans had been killed in the clash.

Although not a major strategic win in the overall war against the French, Zaragoza’s success at the Battle of Puebla on May 5 represented a great symbolic victory for the Mexican government and bolstered the resistance movement. In 1867—thanks in part to military support and political pressure from the United States, which was finally in a position to aid its besieged neighbor after the end of the Civil War—France finally withdrew.

I had never heard of ‘LapuLapu Day’ before, but it turns out we all here have a sort of connection to the festival.

Lapulapu or Lapu-Lapu, was a Datu (chief) of Mactan, a Philippine island. Lapulapu is known for the Battle of Mactan in 1521, where he and his men defeated Spanish forces led by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan on his voyage of circumnavigation. Magellan’s death in that battle delayed the Spanish occupation of the islands until the expedition of Miguel López de Legazpi reached the islands in 1565.

250 years ago – to the day – some of our forefathers decided they would resist tyranny…at gunpoint.
This imaginary news ‘report’ is what we’d likely see published in today’s leftist controlled media.

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Date Line – BOSTON,

Units of the Massachusetts Governor’s Counter Terrorist Task Force seeking to confiscate a cache of recently banned assault weapons were ambushed today by elements of a para-military extremist faction. Military and Law Enforcement sources estimated that 72 were killed and more than 20 injured before government forces were compelled to withdraw.

Speaking after the clash, Governor Thomas Gage declared that the extremist faction, which was made up of local citizens, has links to the radical right-wing tax protest movement. Gage blamed the extremists for recent incidents of vandalism directed against internal revenue offices.

The governor, who described the group’s organizers as “criminals,” issued an executive order authorizing the summary arrest of any individual who has interfered with the government’s efforts to secure law and order.

The military raid on the extremist arsenal followed wide spread refusal by the local citizenry to turn over recently outlawed assault weapons. Gage issued a ban on military style assault weapons and ammunition earlier in the week. This decision followed a meeting in early April between government and military leaders at which the governor authorized the forcible confiscation of illegal arms. One government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, pointed out that; “none of these people would have been killed had the extremists obeyed the law and turned their weapons over voluntarily…”

Government troops initially succeeded in confiscating a large supply of outlawed weapons and ammunition, however, troops attempting to seize arms and ammunition in Lexington met with resistance from heavily-armed extremists who had apparently been tipped off regarding the government’s plans.

During a tense standoff in Lexington’s town park, Major John Pitcairn, commander of the advance contingent of government troops, ordered the armed group to surrender and return to their homes. The impasse was broken by a single shot, which was reportedly fired by one of the extremists, however there is some doubt about who actually did fire it.
Eight civilians were killed in the ensuing exchange.

Ironically, the local citizenry blamed government forces rather than the extremists for the civilian deaths. Before order could be restored, armed citizens from surrounding areas had descended upon the guard units. Colonel Francis Smith, in command of the entire force, finding his troops overmatched by the armed mob, ordered a retreat.

Governor Gage has called upon citizens to support the state/national joint task force in its effort to restore law and order. The governor has also demanded the surrender of those responsible for planning and leading the attack against the government troops. Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and John Hancock, who have been identified as ringleaders of the extremist faction, remain at large.

Luke 23

1  And the whole multitude of them arose, and led him unto Pilate.
2  And they began to accuse him, saying, We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar, saying that he himself is Christ a King.
3  And Pilate asked him, saying, Art thou the King of the Jews? And he answered him and said, Thou sayest it.
4  Then said Pilate to the chief priests and to the people, I find no fault in this man.
5  And they were the more fierce, saying, He stirreth up the people, teaching throughout all Jewry, beginning from Galilee to this place.
6  When Pilate heard of Galilee, he asked whether the man were a Galilaean.
7  And as soon as he knew that he belonged unto Herod’s jurisdiction, he sent him to Herod, who himself also was at Jerusalem at that time.
8  And when Herod saw Jesus, he was exceeding glad: for he was desirous to see him of a long season, because he had heard many things of him; and he hoped to have seen some miracle done by him.
9  Then he questioned with him in many words; but he answered him nothing.
10  And the chief priests and scribes stood and vehemently accused him.
11  And Herod with his men of war set him at nought, and mocked him, and arrayed him in a gorgeous robe, and sent him again to Pilate.
12  And the same day Pilate and Herod were made friends together: for before they were at enmity between themselves.
13  And Pilate, when he had called together the chief priests and the rulers and the people,
14  Said unto them, Ye have brought this man unto me, as one that perverteth the people: and, behold, I, having examined him before you, have found no fault in this man touching those things whereof ye accuse him:
15  No, nor yet Herod: for I sent you to him; and, lo, nothing worthy of death is done unto him.
16  I will therefore chastise him, and release him.
17  (For of necessity he must release one unto them at the feast.)
18  And they cried out all at once, saying, Away with this man, and release unto us Barabbas:
19  (Who for a certain sedition made in the city, and for murder, was cast into prisn.)
20  Pilate therefore, willing to release Jesus, spake again to them.
21  But they cried, saying, Crucify him, crucify him.
22  And he said unto them the third time, Why, what evil hath he done? I have found no cause of death in him: I will therefore chastise him, and let him go.
23  And they were instant with loud voices, requiring that he might be crucified. And the voices of them and of the chief priests prevailed.
24  And Pilate gave sentence that it should be as they required.
25  And he released unto them him that for sedition and murder was cast into prison, whom they had desired; but he delivered Jesus to their will.
26  And as they led him away, they laid hold upon one Simon, a Cyrenian, coming out of the country, and on him they laid the cross, that he might bear it after Jesus.
27  And there followed him a great company of people, and of women, which also bewailed and lamented him.
28  But Jesus turning unto them said, Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children.
29  For, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck.
30  Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us.
31  For if they do these things in a green tree, what shall be done in the dry?
32  And there were also two other, malefactors, led with him to be put to death.
33  And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left.
34  Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. And they parted his raiment, and cast lots.
35  And the people stood beholding. And the rulers also with them derided him, saying, He saved others; let him save himself, if he be Christ, the chosen of God.
36  And the soldiers also mocked him, coming to him, and offering him vinegar,
37  And saying, If thou be the king of the Jews, save thyself.
38  And a superscription also was written over him in letters of Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew, THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS.
39  And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us.
40  But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation?
41  And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss.
42  And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom.
43  And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise.
44  And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.
45  And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst.
46  And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.
47  Now when the centurion saw what was done, he glorified God, saying, Certainly this was a righteous man.
48  And all the people that came together to that sight, beholding the things which were done, smote their breasts, and returned.
49  And all his acquaintance, and the women that followed him from Galilee, stood afar off, beholding these things.
50  And, behold, there was a man named Joseph, a counsellor; and he was a good man, and a just:
51  (The same had not consented to the counsel and deed of them;) he was of Arimathaea, a city of the Jews: who also himself waited for the kingdom of God.
52  This man went unto Pilate, and begged the body of Jesus.
53  And he took it down, and wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein never man before was laid.
54  And that day was the preparation, and the sabbath drew on.
55  And the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid.
56  And they returned, and prepared spices and ointments; and rested the sabbath day according to the commandment.

Just to add to the history of today:

The Doolittle Raid, conducted on April 18, 1942, was an air raid by the United States Army Air Forces on Japan during World War II. Led by Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle, the specially modified B25 Mitchell bombers, were launched from the carrier USS Hornet (CV-8) and targeted military and industrial sites in Tokyo and other cities, marking the first American air operation to strike the Japanese homeland.

The raid aimed to, and did, inflict both material and especially psychological damage on Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor, boosting American morale and demonstrating that Japan was vulnerable to American air attacks.

It also re-energized the Imperial Japanese Navy’s plan to assault and invade Midway Island, some historians saying that it caused Admiral Yamamoto to so hasten implementing the operation, the IJN didn’t fully prepare for it.

1775-

Isaiah Thomas -revolutionary patriot and printer of the Boston newspaper, The Massachusetts Spy, most influential for spreading revolutionary news in New England – on the advice of John Hancock, disassembles his printing press and under the cover of darkness, on the evening of April 16 moves it out of Boston, ferrying it across Boston Harbor to Charlestown, where his friend Timothy Bigelow hides it in the basement of his home in Worcester.

1775-
Massachusetts Colonial Governor General Thomas Gage receives instructions from Lord Dartmouth, King George’s Cabinet Minister as Secretary of State for the Colonies, authorizing the use of military force in Massachusetts and directing him to arrest leaders of the rebellion.

Saint Patrick’s Day, or the Feast of Saint Patrick is a religious and cultural holiday held on 17 March, the traditional date that Saint Patrick , the patron saint of Ireland died in 461 A.D.

Saint Patrick’s Day was made an official Christian feast day in the early 17th century and is observed by the Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion, especially the Church of Ireland, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Lutheran Church. The day commemorates Saint Patrick and the arrival of Christianity in Ireland.

Saint Patrick was a Christian missionary and bishop in Ireland. Much of what is known about him comes from St. Patrick’s Confession, which was allegedly written by Patrick himself. He was born in Roman Britain in the fourth century, into a wealthy family. His father was a Christian deacon and his grandfather a priest. According to the Confession, at the age of sixteen, he was kidnapped by Irish raiders and taken as a slave to Gaelic Ireland. It says that he spent six years there working as a shepherd and that during this time he found God. The Confession says that God told Patrick to flee to the coast, where a ship would be waiting to take him home. After making his way home, Patrick went on to become a priest.

According to tradition, Patrick returned to Ireland to convert the pagan Irish to Christianity and that died on 17 March and was buried at Downpatrick.

March 15, 2024

Beware the Ides of March! : Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2

The Ides of March – Idus Martiae – is the 74th day in the Roman calendar, corresponding to 15 March. It was marked by several religious observances and was a deadline for settling debts in Rome.

Having been proclaimed Permanent Dictator – Dictator Perpetuo – almost exactly a month earlier, Julius Caesar got sliced and diced on this day in 44 B.C., due to the fear of a power grab, ending the Roman Republic with Caesar becoming King.

It’s debated whether the problems the Republic had been going through were solvable by any means. Nevertheless, Caesar’s assassination changed world history in ways we are still dealing with today.

Davy Crockett and the Geopolitics of the Alamo
The Texans’ sacrifice at the Alamo and their improbable victory at San Jacinto still define our world.

Today marks the 189th anniversary of the martyrdom of the heroes of the Alamo, who died to delay the dictator Santa Anna’s army long enough so that Texian troops could rally and defend their homes. Singular among those heroes was Colonel and Congressman David S. Crockett, “King of the Wild Frontier.”

Born in 1786 in that part of North Carolina which was then the renegade “State of Franklin” but not yet the State of Tennessee, “Davy” Crockett was a legend even in his own time, and long before the Texas Revolution.

The son of John Crockett, one of the Overmountain Men unleashed by Joseph Martin to turn the tide of the Revolutionary War at Kings Mountain, the future legend in his teenage years repeatedly traveled on foot from eastern Tennessee to Virginia across the Appalachian mountains, developing skills and achieving feats for which he’d become so well known later.  He served under General Andrew Jackson in the Creek War and in Jackson’s campaign, late in the War of 1812, to drive the British out of Florida. By the age of 32 he’d been appointed a justice of the peace, elected lieutenant colonel of the Tennessee Militia, and started several successful business enterprises.

In the Tennessee legislature and in the U.S. House during Jackson’s Presidency, he fought untiringly against Congress’s overspending and unconstitutional expansion of its powers. He also vociferously opposed Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act, the only member of the Tennessee delegation to do so. For this, the voters of Tennessee sent Crockett home. Undaunted, he ran again two years later and returned to the House, resuming his previous crusades and also collaborating with Kentucky Congressman Thomas Chilton to produce his autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, Written by Himself.

Crockett embarked upon an extensive book tour which, combined with larger-than-life stage productions such as Lion of the West and mythologized biographies like Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee, cemented in the national mind his legend as a pioneer and frontiersman. Everywhere he went, from New York to Little Rock, adoring fans swarmed him.  More and more, he took the opportunity they afforded him to speak against the military threat and growing tyranny of Mexican dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna and the need to support an American-style revolution in Texas.

By the time the voters dumped him again in August 1835, Crockett’s heart was consumed with the Texian cause.  No longer seeing Washington or the pettiness of politics as worthwhile, he famously told his erstwhile constituents, “You all can go to Hell, I’m going to Texas.”  And he went.

He arrived in Nacogdoches with a company of volunteers just five months later in January 1836, swearing an oath to the Provisional Government of Texas.  Barely a month later he and his group were in San Antonio de Bexar, with fellow Texian heroes Jim Bowie, Antonio Menchaca and Don Erasmo Seguin, a Founding Father of the Mexican republic who helped feed and finance the Texas Revolution (Don Erasmo was also the father of Juan Seguin, a defender of the Alamo who survived to become a hero of San Jacinto and a Senator of the Republic of Texas).

Less than a month later, Crockett died defending the Alamo.

Moderns appreciate little of the importance of this.  Some (outside Texas at least) see the Alamo as a minor incident at most. Many today view the Texas Revolution as an Anglo brutalization of a victimized Mexico. They ignore, willfully or otherwise, the multilingual, multi-ethnic nature of the affair, the many prominent Mexican statesmen who, loyal to the principles of their lost republic, took up arms in favor of the Revolution: men such as Erasmo Seguin and his friend Lorenzo de Zavala, the first Vice President of Texas, who was born in Yucatan and had previously served as Mexico’s Minister of Finance.

The revisionists also ignore the widespread opposition throughout Mexico to Santa Anna’s dictatorship and scrapping of the 1824 Constitution. In addition to Texas, both Yucatan and the Mexican states immediately across the Rio Grande from Texas formed republics and seceded from Mexico, albeit unsuccessfully.

But beyond the unquestionable rightness of the Texian cause, the successful Revolution served to answer the burning geopolitical question of that era, namely, would America or Mexico — and would liberty or tyranny — dominate the New World?

Santa Anna had proclaimed himself “the Napoleon of the West”:  his ambitions were vastly greater than just holding a few farms on the Brazos.  Had he imposed his tyranny on the Texians, he would have been liberated to threaten — and possibly conquer — New Orleans, the continent’s single most strategic point.

Had Santa Anna taken New Orleans, he would have reversed Jefferson’s achievement in securing the Louisiana Purchase and accomplished what the British in 1815 could not: the reduction of the United States to a servile position. And with all commerce in the Ohio, Missouri and Mississippi river basins bottled up at Santa Anna’s mercy, not only might America never have generated the capital, industrial strength and military might needed to become a great power, but an authoritarian Mexico might well have supplanted it, expanding throughout the West and the Caribbean Basin as well.

But for Houston’s victory at San Jacinto — but for Davy Crockett’s martyr’s death at the Alamo, enabling Houston’s triumph — the American experiment might well have come to nothing.  America might well have been recolonized in that era of global European expansion which saw India and China subjugated (as indeed Mexico was by France for a time, during the 1860s). And with the coming of the 20th Century, freedom might well have perished from the Earth.

History has long honored the greatness of David S. Crockett, and rightly so. He quite literally paid for our lives with his own.

Sebastien Valentinus was a 3rd century Roman clergyman – either a priest or a bishop who ministered to persecuted Christians, whose martyrdom is commemorated in Western Christianity on February 14.

From the High Middle Ages, his feast day has been associated with a tradition of courtly love. He is also a patron saint of Terni, epilepsy and beekeepers.

While under house arrest of Judge Asterius, and discussing his faith with him, Valentinus was discussing the validity of Jesus. The judge put Valentinus to the test and brought to him the judge’s adopted blind daughter. If Valentinus succeeded in restoring the girl’s sight, Asterius would do whatever he asked. Valentinus, praying to God, laid his hands on her eyes and the child’s vision was restored.

In the year 269 AD, Valentine was sentenced to a three part execution of a beating, stoning, and finally decapitation all because of his stand for Christian marriage. The story goes that the last words he wrote were in a note to Asterius’ daughter, inspiring today’s romantic missives by signing it, “from your Valentine.”

His body buried on the Via Flaminia on February 14, which has been observed as the Feast of Saint Valentine since at least the eighth century.