What Happened Today

It is hard to imagine New York City without the Subway. Even before it officially opened, the Subway was a long wished for project that could alleviate traffic at street level and allow people to quickly move through the city. Elevated trains were in certin, less congested areas, and people had tried to get some sort of railway beneath the city since just after the Civil War. All of these ideas were costly, and nobody wanted to fund a large scale project that involved massive construction. Yet after the City of Greater New York Act united the five boroughs in 1898, the idea of the city government building the infrastructure and leasing the operation to private companies. When the Subway opened in 1904, it ran nearly the length of Manhattan island, and quickly went to more locations across all the boroughs.

Park Chung-Hee, the President of South Korea, was killed by his close associate and old friend Kim Jae-Kyu, the Director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Park Chung-Hee was the kind of figure who was a ripe target for assassination, as he was a strongman that had taken on dictatorial powers and faced serious backlash among political opponents. Kim Jae-Kyu was not a political opponent of Park Chung-Hee, but instead ran the KCIA as Park's secret police under the draconian Yushin constitution. Most likely, Kim Jae-Kyu targeted Park Chung-Hee's bodyguard Cha Ji-Chul, who was taking over Kim's spot as the chief advisor to the President. But Kim Jae-Kyu would say during his trial he acted as a patriot who acted on behalf of democracy, not that these statements saved him from being hanged. With all of this conflicting evidence, the actual motive of Kim Jae-Kyu may never be determined.

The Battle of Agincourt is maybe the greatest military victory in English history, and deservedly so. Agincourt was a strategic master class by King Henry V of England against the French Army led by Constable Charles d'Albret. The famous story is that Henry's use of longbowmen against French knights created an advantage that allowed him to defeat a much stronger army. Actually, he was brilliant on every level, taking the better position on the field, limiting the French knights, and weakening the French Army's numerical superiority. After that, Henry retained possessions on French soil and gained the hand of Catherine of Valois, the French princess. Yet the meaning of Agincourt has always been more appropriately understood through historical memory and its remembrance in popular culture.

The Thirty Years' War was a nasty, nearly European wide conflict that began as a conflict between Catholicism and Protestantism, but evolved into a much more complicated collision of the great powers of the time. It was so wearing and horrible that when the end of the war was negotiated, the main parties sought a truce that would bring about a new balance of power. Instead, they created a new international order. Put simply, religious toleration was guaranteed across mainland Europe, national borders would be recognized more closely, and the sovereignty of each nation would not be threatened by foreign. These ideas would come to be known as "Westphalian sovereignty" and governed international relations for three hundred years.

As far as gang leaders of the 1930s go, Dutch Schultz leaned more to the brutish end. He was a narcotics trafficker, bootlegger, and racketeer, but the main defining feature of his career was a ruthless brutality. This made him a target for authorities as well as an opponent of other gang leaders. These two facts would come together to end Schultz' life. U.S. Attorney Thomas E. Dewey began targeting Schultz above others, because as a Jewish mobster he had less connections than Italian gangsters and as an obnoxious thug he had few friends among Jewish gangsters. Schultz then asked the Mafia Commission to place a hit on Dewey. The Commission turned it around on Schultz and ordered their hit squad Murder, Inc. to take him out. This assassination would set a new precedent for how the Mafia dealt with authorities and themselves.

William Miller was a lay preacher who had studied the Bible and predicted that the Second Coming of Jesus would occur on October 22, 1844. He used a prophetic reading of the Bible, seeing every verse as a guide to the future, and from that developed a complicated and exacting system that used the Book of Daniel to describe when exactly Christ's Second Coming would be. This teaching was incredibly appealing to many people, and, thanks to a publisher named Joshua Vaughan Himes, Miller's ideas developed a significant following. Although he gave two earlier dates, all of the Millerites were certain October 22, 1844, was the true date. The Great Disappointment did cause many people to abandon Miller's other teachings, but remarkably many other people tried to figure out what the event of October 22, 1844 actually meant.

The Medicine Lodge Treaty was supposed to settle conflicts between the United States government and the Comanche, Kiowa, Apache, and Arapahoe tribes. The idea was that the Native American groups would be restricted to reservations in Indian Territory, what is now Oklahoma, and live "civilized" lives like Americans in the east. Initially, the reservations were large, but the various Native American tribes fought being placed there. After various skirmishes and battles, most tribes gave up and moved to reservations. The U.S. Government kept ignoring their promises. So in 1902, a Kiowa Chief named Lone Wolf sued the Department of the Interior. Although the Supreme Court heard Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, it ultimately ruled that the U.S. Congress had the power to abrogate any treaties with Native American tribes.

Lynyrd Skynyrd had just released the brand new album Street Survivors and was on a national tour when their plane ride from Greenville to Baton Rouge ended in a crash. The crash killed lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaine, and backup singer Cassie Gaines. As with many tragic events involving famous people, this plane crash helped cement Lynyrd Skynyrd's legendary status as the quintessential Southern rock band. Yet this legend also tends to obscure the reality of who Lynyrd Skynyrd was. They played a unique blend of hard rock, blues, and country, with songs that would present Southern culture from a counter-cultural perspective. They were also a dynamic live band at their height. But the plane crash looms over everything, making their actual music almost secondary.

The actual fighting of the American Revolutionary War ended after the Siege of Yorktown, where British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered to American General George Washington. Yet the war was not officially over until the Treaty of Paris was signed two years later. The symbolism of the moment was not lost on anyone in the moment, however. Legend has it that the British marched out of Yorktown to a ballad called "The World Turned Upside Down." In reality, the world turned much like it always had before Yorktown. The British government was dissolved, but then a new a Parliament was called without causing a Constitutional crisis. The Americans had crafted the Articles of Confederation months before. The world would truly turn upside down in France seven years later, thanks to the aftereffects of Yorktown.

Even among Spanish Conquistadors, Hernando de Soto is notable for his ruthlessnesness, blood lust, and general obnoxiousness. He was an Extremaduran minor noble, like other Conquistadors, and participated in the conquest of the Incas. His real abilities came when he took his own expedition throughout what is now the Southeastern United States. On his journey, de Soto encountered many different Native American polities, looking for gold. Almost all of them tried to get rid of him as soon as possible. When he wound up in present day central Alabama, he met a chief named Tuskaloosa. Tuskaloosa convinced de Soto that he could get supplies at the village of Mabila. When this did not satisfy de Soto, he had the town burned to the ground, killing Tuskaloosa and most of his men.