What Happened Today

The Kingdom of Hawai'i had been unified and ruled by one monarch from 1810, with the Kamehameha dynasty asserting its authority on an international level. So when an Anglo-Franco Proclamation recognized Hawai'i's sovereignty in 1843, the act might have seemed a bit overdue. Actually, though, King Kamehameha III carefully cultivated this proclamation through diplomatic efforts in order to guarantee the safety of his nation after a handful of international incidents. Part of the larger effort by Kamehameha III was the creation of a new constitution, providing for a constitutional monarchy rather than his predecessors' absolute monarchy. Kamehameha III also guaranteed religious liberty for Catholics in Hawai'i and worked to have actual international diplomacy. So even though Hawai'i did not need to declare indpendence, the Anglo-Franco Proclamation ensured exactly what Kamehameha III had been working to achieve.

Dan White did not fit the typical profile of an assasin. Most strikingly, he was a former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, serving under one victim, Mayor George Moscone, and alongside his other victim, Supervisor Harvey Milk. This fact would make the act shocking with no other context, but actually every other context made the killing of Moscone and Milk more bizarre. Most importantly, Harvey Milk was the first openly gay politician elected to a seat for the first time when he became a Supervisor. Moscone's death led to San Francisco gaining its first female mayor, Dianne Feinstein, who would later become a Senator from California. More notably, White would only be convicted of "involuntary manslaughter," due to a successful argument by his lawyers that White was in a diminished mental state. The verdict would cause riots in San Francisco, and White would later commit suicide after he served his jail sentence.

Tutankhamun was a boy Pharoah who ruled Egypt in the 14th century BCE for about ten years, and overall did not stand out that much in Egyptian history. Once his tomb was discovered, intact and full of treasures, Tutankhamun would become one of the symbols of Ancient Egypt. The discovery of the tomb goes to the genius of Howard Carter, a brilliant archaeologist and Egyptologist, and the funding of Carter's excavations by Lord Carnarvon. Carter waited for Carnarvon to come to Egypt before he would actually open the tomb. It turned out Carter's thought about the value of the tomb was correct. Tutankhamun, rechristened as "King Tut," would travel the world with his funerary artifacts three millenia after his death, making the world learn more about Ancient Egypt.

William Adelin was the only legitimate son and heir to Henry I, King of England and Duke of Normandy. As such, he was a pampered prince (which is what "Adelin" meant) who was being groomed for his future rule, including becoming the titular Duke of Normandy. Yet when he was seventeen, he was one of the many victims of a shipwreck when he was traveling in the very fast and impressively built White Ship that was going from Normandy to England. The White Ship was trying to overtake the King's ship, which had left Normandy earlier, in a party atmosphere and subsequently hit a rock and killed all but one person aboard. More significantly, the death of William Adelin would directly lead to the large scale civil war known as the Anarchy that happened after the death of Henry I.