In 335 BC, Alexander III's bid for Greek hegemon was ruined by a poor decision to execute Demosthenes (pictured) and other anti-Macedonian agitators in the Athenian assembly.

The Execution of DemosthenesAlthough they had urged Greece to revolt, and even gone so far as to write to Persian Generals for support, their speeches were merely antaganonisms that his father had the good sense to ignore. Nevertheless Philip II had been assassinated, and his dreams of invading Asia Minor were left to his overbold son Alexander III to realise. Such a conquest would have required not only Greek unity, but the acquiescence of the Greek cities in Asia Minor. And the real trouble was that the once mighty Persian Empire had collapsed into satraps, such that the Greek Cities enjoyed a surprisingly large amount of freedom inhibited only be the occasional payment of taxes. By striking so overtly at Athenian democracy, Alexander had demonstrated that the real threat to Greek Civilization was his aspiration to megalomania.

In 986, on this day the Byzantine emperor Basil the Young was killed in the pass of the Gate of Trajan after his army was overwhelmed by the forces of Tsar Samuil of Bulgaria.

Basil the Young dies at the Battle of the Gates of TrajanThe Byzantine army retreated from the Sofia Valley towards Ihtiman where it stopped for the night. The rumours that the Bulgarians had barred the nearby mountain routes stirred commotion among the soldiers and on the following day the retreat continued in growing disorder. When the Bulgarians saw that, they rushed to the enemy camp and the retreat turned to flight. Only the Byzantine advance guard managed to squeeze through slopes which were not yet taken by the Bulgarian attackers. The rest of the army was surrounded by the Bulgarians. The elite Armenian unit from the infantry attempted to break out with heavy casualties and to lead their Emperor to safety through secondary routes, but they were captured along with the Imperial insignia.

Enormous numbers of Byzantine soldiers perished in the Pass. Battlefield commanders Comitopuli Samuel and Aron were now the undisputed masters of the Balkans. Because just fifteen years after the fall of their capital Preslav, an unbroken string of successes had elevated the Bulgarian Empire to the now dominant power in the region. Worse was to come, the nobility in Asia Minor, led by the general Bardas Phokas rose in rebellion, and the very future of the Byzantine Empire hung in the balance.

In 1779, the Revolutionary War ended with the final surrender of British forces to the Continental Army at Yorktown, Virginia.

Double Jeopardy Part 13
Battle of YorktownFor the American colonials this moment represented the triumphant conclusion of their four-year-long struggle for freedom from British rule; for the British themselves it was the ultimate grim evidence of their failure to tame the North American continent; and for the citizens of the Quebec Republic it meant a chance to further secure their own independence.


Ironically, the rise of Napoleon's dictatorship in France during the early 19th century would spark the establishment of an unlikely U.S.-Quebec-U.K. coaltion to stop Napoleon's quest for a global empire. In the Great European War of 1914-17, all three nations would side with France against Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany.
Read the whole thread.

In 1940, on this day Mackenzie King (pictured) and Franklin D. Roosevelt met at Ogdensburg the little border town in New York State just across the St. Lawrence River from Prescott, Ontario.

Canadian Heroes 1The negotiation of the so-called Ogdensburg Agreement was to set up the Canada-US Permant Joint Board of Defence. But a serious problem arose over the proposed exchange of American destroyers for British colonial bases.

The dismantlement of the British Empire was a privately declared war aim of Roosevelt. But King had a bigger issue at stake: the 1837 hanging of his grandfather William Lyon Mackenzie, a leading proponent of the Responsible Government movement that had delivered an Independent Canada in 1867.

In 1786, on this day the ninth President of the United States David ("Davy") Crockett (pictured) was born in Greene County, Tennessee, close to the Nolichucky River and near the community of Limestone.

Davy Crockett
9th President of the United States
March 4, 1844 - 1852At the time of his birth, however, the surrounding area was part of the autonomous territory known as the State of Franklin. He was named after his paternal grandfather, who was killed in 1777 at his home near today's Rogersville, Tennessee, by Indians led by Dragging Canoe. Crockett's father was one of the Overmountain Men who fought in the Battle of Kings Mountain during the American Revolutionary War.

Between 1811 and 1813 Crockett fought under General Andrew Jackson in the Creek War. After years as a Democratic Jacksonian, Crockett broke ties with Jackson in 1828 and became a Whig for the remainder of his political career. Ironically for a man so accustomed to death, Crockett was to witness President Jackson's assassination at the hands of Richard Lawrence in 1935.

Based upon an original idea by Robbie TaylorHero of the successful battle of Texican forces at the Alamo, Crockett returned to Tennessee and American politics in 1838 by winning the governorship of his home state. The Whigs nominated him for president in 1840, but he lost by a narrow margin to Martin Van Buren, who was widely considered one of the worst presidents America has ever elected.

Crockett was nominated again in 1844, and this time he won on a platform of small government asking voters to: "Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have".

During his second term that principle would be pushed to the breaking point by his fellow Whigs. Seeking to expand the Union westwards at the expense of Mexico and Great Britain, those expansionist forces were about to push those two belligerent nations into a powerful alliance.

In 1985, on this day Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Miriam was assassinated while reviewing a military parade in Addis Ababa.

Miriam AssassinatedAccording to a UPI reporter who was covering the parade at the time, Mengistu was shot six times by a gunman riding a Soviet-made motorcycle; the first two shots, however, were enough to kill him as the first bullet ripped through his brain just above the left eye and the second pierced the center of his heart. It would later be determined that the assassination had been carried out by three Eritrean separatists who bitterly resented the Mengistu regime's suppression of Eritrea's independence movement. The gunman himself managed to escape to neighboring Somalia(where he would later fight in that nation's civil war), but his two co-conspirators were seized by Ethiopian security forces within days and tortured to death less than two weeks after the assassination.


For the Marxist oligarchy that had ruled Ethiopia since Emperor Haile Selassie was ousted in 1974, the assassination was a fatal blow: even before Mengistu's death his government had been on shaky ground as the result of a famine which had been plaguing Ethiopia since mid-1984 and a steady decline in Soviet economic aid as the PLM's anti-Communist guerrilla war continued to rage on. Mengistu's assassination triggered a chain reaction which culminated in the violent overthrow of Ethiopia's ruling Marxist junta less than six weeks after Mengistu was killed. The end of the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia marked the beginning of a two-year span in which Communist regimes and political factions throughout Africa collapsed like a house of cards, stripping the Soviet Union of much of what little influence it still had left in the Third World. Only Libya, which boasted one of the world's largest oil industries and was capable of sustaining itself economically and militarily regardless of what happened to the U.S.S.R., managed to buck this trend.

In 1863, Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, hosted the president and vice-president of the independent Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stephens, in a day-long celebration.

Confederate Celebrations at Fort SumterIn April 1861 Fort Sumter had been the site of the first armed confrontation between Confederate forces and those of the United States, when a U.S. naval vessel, Star of the West, had been fired upon by CSA ships while attempting to relieve the besieged federal fort. Military conflict had quickly escalated, extending into the diplomatic realm when on November 8 of that year the USS San Jacinto intercepted the British mail packet Trent and seized diplomatic envoys James Mason and John Slidell.

A new story by Eric LippsThe Lincoln administration released the two after several weeks of escalating tension and disavowed the actions of the San Jacinto's captain, Charles Wilkes. President Lincoln's efforts proved fruitless, however, as British public and governmental opinion was inflamed by telegraphic reports that Wilkes was being treated as a hero throughout the USA. When Mason and Slidell were permitted to resume their travels, they found receptive audiences not only in London but in Paris, Slidell's destination, where the Emperor Napoleon III was interested in gaining influence in troubled Mexico and saw the new Confederacy as easier to persuade in the matter than the United States. The result of the two diplomats' mission was overt support of the CSA by both London and Paris.

And with both Britain and France on Richmond's side, the British openly arming the CSA while harassing Union shipping and sending thousands of additional troops to Canada for what looked like a possible land assault while the French intrigued to entice the Mexican Republic into attacking the U.S. with promises of restoration of the territories lost in the U.S.-Mexican war of the 1840s - promises Napoleon had neither the means nor the intention of fulfilling, but that the struggling President Benito Juarez saw as offering a possible way out of national bankruptcy - President Lincoln had been forced to capitulate in April of 1863.

That decision had led to his impeachment, elevating Vice-President Hannibal Hamlin to the U.S. presidency just as that office, in Hamlin's bitter words, seemed to have "shriveled like a corpse in the desert". Civil unrest on a massive scale had followed the end of U.S./CSA hostilities, and on the very day of the Sumter celebration a huge riot was raging in New York City in which hundreds of blacks, whose race was widely blamed for "causing" the war and defeat, would be killed.

In 1947, the subcontinent of India, ruled for nearly a century by the British Crown, was broken into its many states following its independence just two days before. The Punjab, a term denoting the area rich in diversity with Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs, was to be broken into West Pakistan for the Muslim population and India for the Hindu population.

Radcliffe Cloud UnveiledAs the British Raj was preparing to leave (Parliament had declared on July 15 that its government would end in a months' time), Sir Cyril Radcliffe was appointed as chair of committees to draw this line as well as another for the separation of Bengal to become East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).

A new story by Jeff ProvineIt was hoped that Radcliffe, who had never been to India, could serve as a fair and impartial decider. The Muslim League and the India National Congress had many of their own ideas to submit, but voting was so balanced that the final decision belonged to Radcliffe. Behind secrecy to avoid political pressures, speculation, and reprisals before the publication of the decision, Radcliffe worked with haste to determine an objective border that would grant proper transport, communication, and waterways to both sides while keeping both sides toward their majority population. At the same time, he worked to develop another line to demarcate India, East Pakistan, and Burma.

Upon hearing of the Buddhist majority in the Chittagong Hills, yet another people-group to recognize, Radcliffe suffered something of a breakdown. No matter what he did to draw boundaries, no one would be completely satisfied. The pressure of coming up with at least something workable in five weeks had pushed him, and Radcliffe made the decision to have the people vote for themselves.

On August 15, Independence Day, Radcliffe gave his plan with the new government and left the country. With political turmoil slowing down publication, it was not until the 17th that Radcliffe's plan became published. He had drawn intense and complicated borders through states, creating mini-states within populated sectors. He recommended that special elections held by the people would establish whether these countries would go toward Pakistan, India, Burma, or even strike out on their own. The "Radcliffe Cloud" was born.

A cry went out that Radcliffe had overstepped his powers to create new countries, but, via telegraph from his ship, he assured governments and peoples alike that he had simply drawn the borders. Without the peoples' agreement in the first place, there would be no government. A commission through the winter would investigate Radcliffe, but in the end he would exonerated and, in many circles, applauded.

Elections, well guarded by the Punjab Boundary Force, carried through the rest of August. The hills above Chittagong, now in East Pakistan, voted to stay with India, despite the inaccessibility (which would be later solved by a massive bridge and highway project). Several new small states that had been split by Radcliffe's many lines divided into India and Pakistan. A few states tried for independence, but most were absorbed within the end of the decade after facing budgetary constraints. Only the nations of Kashmir, Sikkim, and South Pakistan (now Hyderabad) stand as independent to this day.

Not everyone was content, however, and fighting broke out sporadically after the separation. Businessmen and farmers complained about water rights in certain areas, and legal issues have caused minor conflicts. There have been several border altercations since, such as 1971 when India became involved in the Pakistani Dissolution that gave independence to Hyderabad and Bangladesh, but no wars of international importance have come out of the balkanized Indian Subcontinent to this day.

In 1896, gold was discovered in Alaska, starting a rush of prospectors which led to mounting tensions between Russia and the United States ad ultimately to war between those countries the following year.

Gold Rush by Eric LippsRussia had explored selling the distant and thinly-settled region to the U.S. in the 1860s, but in the bitter aftermath of the War of the States Washington was in no position to accept any such offer. Too much of its gold was committed to the war reparations to which British mediators had forced the Hamlin administration to agree after the collapse of the Union war effort had led to President Abraham Lincoln's (pictured) defeat for renomination by the Republican Party in 1864 and his subsequent resignation. Nor had the McClellan administration which followed been in any better spot. The payment of reparations to the newly independent Confederate States of America would not end until 1876. By then, enthusiasm for the sale had cooled in St. Petersburg, thanks in no small part to skilled diplomacy on the part of Great Britain, which also coveted Alaska and which had a connection with the Russian Empire, through the blood relationship between Russia's and Britain's ruling families, which the USA could not equal.

In 1960, on this day New York City suffered the worst storm in its history as a hurricane that by today's standards would be graded Category 4 hit just after 12:30 PM; dubbed "the Jamaica Bay hurricane" because it made landfall near the Jamaica Bay section of Queens, the storm flooded large sections of Queens and Brooklyn and also devastated much of Manhattan and the Bronx. Many of New York's most famous landmarks were heavily damaged or destroyed by the hurricane, which also brought the city's mass transit systems to a screeching halt as flood waters blocked subway tunnels and overran most of the city's major bus routes. Jamaica Bay Hurricane by Chris Oakley

The hurricane also trashed much of Boston and dumped heavy rains on the White Mountains region of New Hampshire before it finally dissipated off the Maine coast. In its death throes the storm even briefly touched parts of Canada, battering several villages in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia with high winds. The storm left behind more than fifty thousand New Yorkers dead or missing and an estimated 125 million USD in property damage in metropolitan New York alone. And it wasn't just the city's trains and buses that were knocked out by the storm; Idlewild Airport would effectively be out of commission for six weeks.

The U.S. Coast Guard received more than a hundred and fifty SOS calls and seventy missing craft reports related to the Jamaica Bay hurricane.

The Yankees, who had been leading the American League standings by one and a half games before the storm, saw their team morale take a shattering blow when manager Casey Stengel suffered a fatal heart attack from the shock of learning that Yankee Stadium had been among the buildings leveled by the hurricane. Deprived of his leadership at a time when it was urgently needed, fell into a protracted slump and would finish the 1960 season nine and a half games behind the eventual AL champion Baltimore Orioles. And having to play their remaining home games at an unfamiliar park across the Hudson in New Jersey didn't help matters much.

One of the biggest casualties of the Jamaica Bay hurricane was the administration of then-mayor Robert F. Wagner, which had been caught largely unawares by the storm and drew intense criticism for its handling of post-storm recovery efforts; by early October, Wagner would resign from office and City Council president Abe Stark would be appointed to serve out the remainder of Wagner's term. 1960 Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon, who was also Dwight Eisenhower's vice-president, would see his own political ambitions dealt a serious blow; as point man for the federal response to the Jamaica Bay hurricane, Nixon would bear the brunt of most of the criticism of that response; in the November general elections he would lose 34 of 50 states to Democratic presidential challenger John F. Kennedy.


The Jamaica Bay hurricane was the kind of mega-storm America hadn't seen since the New England hurricane of 1938 - and wouldn't see again until Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans 45 years later.

In 2008, on this day a Virginia resident was arrested on forgery charges after state and federal investigations found that documents in his house which he claimed would prove the United States was still under British control were in fact out-and-out fakes he had doctored up himself as part of an elaborate con game reminiscent of the "Hitler diaries" fraud twenty-five years earlier. Fakes by Chris Oakley

The forger was also webmaster of an online conspiracy theory magazine which he used to bilk unwary believers out of thousands of dollars and fund his high-rolling lifestyle.

In 1513, at Guinegate in the Pas-de-Calais department of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, a body of French cavalry under Jacques de La Palice managed to survive a surprise attack by English and Imperial troops under Henry VIII and Maximilian I.

Battle of the SpursFending off a ferious attack by English and Burgundian cavalry, the French horse held the field in a famous rearguard action that became known to history as the "Battle of the Spurs". Subsequently, La Palice was able to relieve the besieged town of Therouanne, preventing it falling into the hands of Henry VIII of England. One of the most notable fatalities was the captain of the Kings bodyguard, Sir Henry Bourchier, 2nd Earl of Essex. A veteran of the Italian Wars, he was being groomed for the position of Chief Captain of the King's forces. Another loss was the reputation of Mother Shipton, the English soothsayer who had confidently predicted a famous victory for Henry.

In 1979, on this day the ultra-nationalist Canadian Tory prime minister John George Diefenbaker died in Ottawa, Ontario. He was eighty-three years old.

Death of architect of Diefenbaker PlanHis term of office was shaped by the dramatic events of October 1962; the often unilateral judgements he took, and the heavy-handed way he communicated those decisions to his colleagues and allies. In his diaries, he rejected these charges, claiming that President Kennedy told him bluntly that, "When I tell Canada to do something, I expect her to do it!". What is indisputed is that on the 22nd, his Defense Minister Douglas Harkness advised him that Kennedy had approved an escalation of the NORAD measurement from two (peace) to three (enhanced awareness) on the way to five (war) without consulting Ottawa even though Canada was supposedly an equal partner to America in NORAD.

Two days later, World War Three broke out and the boot was on the other foot. American Cities were devastated by Soviet nuclear missiles. Under the Dieffenbaker Plan, the Canadian Government laid claim to territory possessed by the United States in order to rehabilitate that land "back to a standard of civilization".
This is an installemend from the Cuba 62 - Canada thread.

In 1841, the Bank of the United States had a troubled past. The First Bank had begun in 1791 to aid in the central government of the young nation. Its charter had run out in 1811, and Congress chose not to grant a new one.

Tyler Signs New Charter for Third Bank of the United StatesOverall, the bank had done much good in loans to the growing country and its citizens, but it had also served as a haven for speculators. In 1816, the Second Bank gained a twenty-year charter, and it served much like the first, keeping down inflation caused by the War of 1812.

A new story by Jeff ProvineNational banks, however, were terribly unpopular with the Democrats and, especially, Andrew Jackson. He and many others held that the bank was built for the rich and offered no real aid to the poor, only taking its money in taxation. While in office, Jackson worked to hobble the bank by giving an executive order not to deposit government funds there. John Tyler (pictured), a Whig, agreed with Jackson about banking policies despite the rest of his party being staunch supporters of improving the business environment.

In 1836, the Second Bank's charter expired, and it was not renewed. Despite efforts of Whigs and anti-Jacksonians, they could not override Jackson's veto during his presidency. The Bank became private, surviving only five years. After the Panic of 1837, Henry Clay and his Whig allies attempted a new charter, but it became obvious that Tyler would be against it as he had already vetoed much of the Whigs' agenda.

Swallowing his pride, Clay sat down with the president and the two talked for more than seven hours, finally working out a plan for a new kind of bank. Rather than a single national bank against the many state banks that stood around the country, this bank would serve as a link between the state and federal level, operating to moderate speculation but also supply good loans to growing areas. There was not precedent for it in the Constitution, but it could be enacted as a bill from Congress. At last, Tyler agreed.

The Third Bank of the United States was given a twenty-year charter like the former two and served with success. Scholars noted investment money from the South flow northward and then back again, creating a tie between wealthy Southerners and the growing industrial class in the North. With loans available in the South during bad growing seasons, farmers were able to float their harvests and maintain a booming agricultural environment. As the crisis over slavery loomed, it was decided that the economy was strong enough to put forth an effort to "buy out" the slaves from Southern owners, a bill put forth by Democrat Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi and signed by Republican Abraham Lincoln.

With a large available workforce and a system of loans, the South became heavily industrialized through the later half of the nineteenth century. It was estimated that the government made more than its money back through taxation for purchasing freedom for the former slaves. With its titan economy, the United States entered the world scene in the early days of the twentieth century, which it would dominate despite dark days of a southern communist rebellion in the 1930s.

In 1773, on this day the Brotherhood of Liberty carried out its most dramatic pre-Revolutionary War act of defianace against British rule: the Boston Tea Party.

Double Jeopardy Part 6
Boston Tea PartyJust after 7:00 PM that evening Brotherhood members stormed three British merchant ships docked in Boston Harbor and threw hundreds of tea chests overboard in protest of the increasingly heavy taxes American colonists were being forced to pay to the British crown. Most of the participants in the Tea Party would go on to fight in the Revolutionary War, with some of them playing a significant role in the liberation of Boston by the Continental Army in 1775.

Despite British colonial authorities' most diligent efforts to locate and arrest the Tea Party's organizers, no one was ever caught; in fact one Brotherhood partisan actually suceeded in infiltrating the very British Army regiment deployed to apprehend him. In the post-Revolution era the tavern where the Tea Party plan had first been conceived would become a shrine to the struggle for American independence; around 1900 the U.S. Department of the Interior would declare it a national historic landmark.

In the early 21st century the phrase "Tea Party" would come into vogue as a metaphor for the emergence of a political movement sparked by what some Americans considered excessive spending and taxation by their government.

In 2009, on this day President Shimon Peres asked Avigdor Lieberman (pictured) to form a new government following the assassination of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Cometh the hour, cometh the manDuring Netanyahu's first administration Mr Lieberman (born Evet Lvovich Liberman) served as Chief of Staff, gaining the full trust of the now demised Prime Minister. After the 1999 election, Lieberman formed the ultra-right wing Yisrael Beiteinu Party, issuing a number of extreme policy proposals.

• "Who is a Jew?" legislation advocated by the hard-core Orthodox to delegitimatise Reform and Conservative Judaism
• Trade Israeli-Arab populated areas for Jewish areas of Judea and Samaria creating a unified Zionist state. Specifically, Lieberman would hand over the Um El-Fahm area of the southern Galilee, known as the Triangle, to foreign sovereignty. By thus redrawing Israel's borders, he wishes to retain Israel's overwhelming Jewish majority.
• A new security model based upon the "Cyprus" solution. "Before 1974, the Greeks and Turks lived together and there were frictions and bloodshed and terror. After 1974, they constituted all Turks on one part of the island, all Greeks on the other part of the island and there is stability and security".
• More robust Iran policy. Israel is on the "front line of a clash of civilizations between the free world and extremist Islam, [Iran] is the base of an axis of evil which is a problem for all the world. Every week, the president of Iran declares his intention to destroy us".