Today in History: February 16-19
The Sixth Crusade ends, the Battle of Lugdunum takes place, and more
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February 16, 1804: A small US naval crew enters Tripoli harbor and destroys the grounded USS Philadelphia. The frigate had run aground in late October amid the First Barbary War and despite an attempt by her crew to scuttle it the ship remained salvageable. Though not that sizable a vessel in the grand scheme of things, the Philadelphia was one of the largest ships in the US Navy and, more importantly, would have been easily the largest in the Tripolitanian fleet had they successfully refloated her. The embarrassment of her loss also seemed to embolden Tripolitanian Pasha Yusuf Karamanli and so US leaders decided that they had to either recover her or destroy her. Lieutenant Stephen Decatur Jr. volunteered to lead a mission to enter the harbor, board the Philadelphia, and determine whether to recover or destroy it. He opted for the latter, and in pulling it off became one of the earliest US naval icons.
February 16, 1923: British archeologist Howard Carter opens the inner burial chamber of the 14th century BCE Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun. Carter’s discovery the previous November of Tutankhamun’s tomb, regarded as the best preserved burial site in Egypt’s “Valley of the Kings,” remains arguably the best known achievement in the field of Egyptology. The inner burial chamber was the best preserved part of the tomb and contained a large number of valuable finds. Interest in the tomb’s discovery made celebrities out of Carter and Tutankhamun (AKA “King Tut”) and helped spark a new outbreak of “Egyptomania” around the world, particularly in the US.
February 17, 1979: The Sino-Vietnamese War begins with a Chinese invasion, in response to Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia (ousting the Khmer Rouge) the previous year. The “war,” such as it was, lasted only about a month and ended when the Chinese army, having stalled out around 20 kilometers over the border, declared victory and withdrew. Vietnam also claimed victory in repelling the invasion, and their claim is generally more accepted today—though admittedly the Chinese military did do serious damage to northern Vietnam’s infrastructure.
February 17, 2008: Kosovo declares its independence from Serbia. The Kosovan parliament voted (with ethnic Serb MPs boycotting) to declare independence after United Nations-supervised negotiations on a sort of independence-in-all-but-name status fell apart. Though still not recognized by Serbia and an ongoing source of tension in the Balkans, this date is commemorated as Independence Day in Kosovo.
February 18, 1229: The Sixth Crusade ends after a bizarre sequence of events that saw its leader, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen, excommunicated. Frederick had something of a habit of promising to go on Crusade. He had, for example, flaked out on the Fifth Crusade despite repeated promises that he would be heading to Egypt any day now, and had subsequently promised then-Pope Honorius III that he would definitely lead a Crusade no later than 1227. He then married the daughter of the “king of Jerusalem,” John of Brienne, and declared himself the new king of Jerusalem. He did send an army to the Holy Land in August 1227 but he wasn’t with it, as he was recuperating from illness in Sicily. New Pope Gregory IX excommunicated him. Frederick eventually led the Crusade anyway and actually wound up regaining control of the city of Jerusalem via negotiation, though the terms (agreeing to leave the city unfortified, for example) made it a paper victory only. Still, as Crusades go this was one of the more successful ones.
February 18, 1878: Members of the Jesse Evans Gang murder businessman John Tunstall in Lincoln County, New Mexico, sparking what became known as the “Lincoln County War.” Tunstall’s gang, the “Lincoln County Regulators,” retaliated for the killing by murdering county Sheriff William Brady and the festivities continued from there. The “war” lasted until the “Battle of Lincoln” in July and is today remembered mostly for having launched the career of the most famous of the Regulators, outlaw Billy the Kid.
February 19, 197: The Roman army under Emperor Septimus Severus faces off against forces loyal to Roman usurper Clodius Albinus in the Battle of Lugdunum. After a two day fight Severus and his army were victorious, and Albinus either committed suicide or was murdered. Exact casualty figures are obviously impossible to tabulate, but there were a large number of Roman soldiers involved (a total of between 100,000 and 150,000, split more or less evenly between the two principals) and later reports suggest high casualties on both sides. Consequently, many historians hold that Lugdunum produced the greatest number of Roman military casualties of any single battle in the history of the empire.
February 19, 1913: Mexican politician Pedro Lascuráin enjoys the shortest presidency in history, clocking in at somewhere between 15 and 55 minutes. Lascuráin had been serving as foreign minister under President Francisco Madero, which unfortunately put him in the line of succession when General Victoriano Huerta overthrew Madero in a coup. In what I guess was an attempt to give that coup some gloss of legitimacy, Huerta opted not to simply assume the presidency himself, but to advance Lascuráin to that office first. Lascuráin’s two acts as president were to appoint Huerta as his interior minister—next in line constitutionally—and then resign. As a reward for playing along he got to live, unlike Madero, and passed away at the ripe old age of 96 in 1952. Huerta fled the country about a year later amid ongoing rebellions. He wound up dying in US jail after having been caught conspiring with the German government.
February 19, 1942: US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs “Executive Order 9066,” which in so many words permitted the forced relocation of Japanese nationals and Japanese-Americans to internment camps. Roosevelt finally suspended the order in December 1944 and the camps were shut down by 1946. If December 7, 1941, was “a date which will live in infamy” because of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, this date lives in a different kind of infamy. In an act of pure xenophobia for which the US government eventually apologized and made reparations payments—when I say “eventually” I mean survivors received reparations in the 1990s—the Roosevelt administration incarcerated tens of thousands of people without charge and in the process destroyed their lives and livelihoods.