What Happened Today

Topsy the Elephant was a female Asian elephant who had been performing in circuses, but got a reputation as a "bad elephant" and so her owners decided to euthanize her. They also decided to make a public spectacle of hanging her at their amusement park at Coney Island in Brooklyn. After a large outcry, the owners of Luna Park agreed to make it an electrocution done only for ticketed guests and the media, including cameramen from the Edison Manufacturing Company. The whole event seems somehow other, or like it could not have happened in the same universe that modern people live in. Yet it is precisely these sort of macabre mass spectacles that reveal the most about the early 20th century, rather than the accounts of battles, elections, or trade negotiations.

For 250 years, Japan was shut off from foreigners, ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate, and revered the Emperor as a figurehead and symbol. That all changed in the mid-19th century, when the Emperor Meiji declared that the authority and powers of the shogun now belonged to him. This was largely accomplished through minor lords who wished to Westernize and modernize Japan against the Tokugawa shogun's policies, especially the Satsuma and the Chosu. Really, the teenaged, recently crowned Emperor was simply a vessel for these changes, but he embraced it wholeheartedly and took his own authority. After a civil war and negotiations with the Tokugawa power structure, the Emperor Meiji was able to take all of the powers accumulated by the shogunate under his own authority.

For nearly 800 years, the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula were fighting the Muslim invaders that held much of the land in modern day Spain and Portugal. This all changed in 1492, when armies of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, finally took the city of Granada, the last Muslim-ruled area of Spain. This was in some ways a foregone conclusion, as the unification of Ferdinand and Isabella's kingdoms meant that the Christian kingdoms were prosecuting a war for nearly a decade to slowly chip away the lands controlled by Muslim rulers. By 1491, Boabdil, the last Emir of Granada, knew that his time was up and negotiated a treaty to give up Granada. Nonetheless, the final reconquest of Spain by Christian armies changed the world, leading to the Spanish Inquisition, the voyage of Christopher Columbus, and a New World Empire for Spain.

When Haiti became an independent nation, it was the second independent former colony in the Western Hemisphere and the first to gain its independence through a slave rebellion. Yet much of the good about Haiti's independence was overshadowed by the way Jean-Jacques Dessalines would govern Haiti as first the "Governor-General for Life" and then as "Emperor Jacques I." Most appalling was large massacre of all white people remaining in Haiti after French rule ended, which featured extreme violence and sadism. Dessalines also kept most of the former slaves in Haiti in working conditions which were not that different from before the Haitian Revolution. Despite all of the issues, it was still remarkable that Haiti was able to declare its own indpependence in 1804.

For decades, telephone service was provided by AT&T, which was the descendant of Alexander Graham Bell's original company and was often known as the Bell Company or even "Ma Bell." They had a vertical monopoly, whereby they owned the equipment, the research labs, the long distance lines, and the regional exchanges. Many people thought this was a problem, but it was hard to change this. That all changed when the US Department of Justice leveled an anti-trust suit on AT&T. AT&T offered to be broken up themselves in the early 1980s, letting their regional operators spin off into individual companies. Remarkably, this did erase any semblance of a monopoly in phone service, just before the advent of cell phones.

Ted Bundy was one of the most notorious serial killers in American history. Partly it was because Bundy killed an astonishing amount of people, but mostly it was because Bundy's crimes were the most brazen acts. Bundy also dramatically escaped from jail while on trial for murder for the first time. He grew up in Washington State, began committing murders there, then moved to Utah and continued committing kidnapping and murder. He would be put in jail in Utah for a kidnapping where the victim got away, but then he would be put on trial for a murder in Colorado. Due to his usual modus operandi, kidnapping young women in public, leaving little trace evidence, and taking the victims to remote locations to kill them, Bundy might have gotten away without a murder charge because it would have been hard to prove. Bundy decided to flee from jail in Colorado, however, then he would make his way to Florida, where he would commit the crime spree that he would be executed for in 1989.

When the US Cavalry came towards the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in late December, their instructions were to round up all the Native Americans not on reservations and put them on reservations. And yet when they came upon a band of Lakota Sioux outside the reservation newar Wounded Creek, shots were fired while they took the Sioux guns. At once, the Cavalry opened fire with large guns outside the encampment, and over 300 Native Americans were kileld in a matter of minutes. The entire massacre was the culmination of fear about the Ghost Dance, reservation policies, and the way the Cavalry behaved in the Indian Wars. Many people who saw the aftermath were appalled, but the larger American society mostly thought it was a great victory for the United States Army.

In 1958, professional football was still decidedly a second class citizen on the American sports scene, but things had begun to change. Football was a great sport to watch on television, and it had developed into an extremely exciting sport. This got showcased in the 1958 NFL Championship Game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants, which took place in Yankee Stadium and was broadcast nationally by NBC. The game itself was also exciting, as it was a back and forth affair featuring quarterback Johnny Unitas for the Colts and running back Frank Gifford for the Giants. Unitas would lead a game tying field goal drive in the last minutes. This created an unprecedented scenario: the sudden death overtime, which had never happened in an NFL game. So not only did a national audience see an exciting championship game, they also saw the NFL at its most interesting, leading to a boost in the NFL's popularity.

The Zwickau Prophets were three men who were much more radical in their idea of religion than the Reformation inaugurated by Martin Luther in 1521. The three lay preachers, not always easily identified outside of their leader Nicholas Storch, argued that their authority stemmed from divine revelations received directly from the Holy Spirit. This was a direct challenge on Luther's idea of deriving Christian doctrine solely from Scripture. On the other hand, when the Zwickau Prophets came to Wittenberg, Luther was hiding from Imperial authorities in the Wartburg Castle at the time and challenging the Zwickau Prophets proved difficult without Luther. So the Elector of Saxony allowed Luther to return to Wittenberg to fend off the challenge of the Zwickau Prophets.

The official dissolution of the Soviet Union is one of those historical events that stands as a sea change in the way the world operates. Once the USSR was ended, the very nature of international relations changed permanently. On the other hand, when the Soviet Union officially ended, the writing was on the wall. Communist government across Eastern Europe had lost power in 1989 and 1990, while the internal politics of the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev had become constantly problematic. Soviet Republics were declaring independence left and right, while the actual power of the Soviet government was waning. After a coup attempt in August, the recently elected President of Russia Boris Yeltsin gained in popularity. On Christmas Day, Gorbachev gave his power to Yeltsin, while the Council of Republics would declare the Soviet Union dissolved on the next day.