History of the Week: Articles of Confederation, St. Peter’s, Burning of Atlanta, Somme, Lewis & Clark, Hungarian Republic, Elizabeth I, & More

We must know the truth of the past if we are not to be fooled by lies in the present. Below are some of the important events that occurred this week in history.

November 13

1850 – Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson was born.

1945 – Gen. Charles de Gaulle becomes head of the provisional government of liberated France.

November 14

1765 – Inventor Robert Fulton is born.

1840 – Painter Claude Monet is born.

1971 – America’s Mariner 9 becomes the first spacecraft to orbit another planet.

November 15

1533 – Spaniard Francisco Pizarro captures and enters the Incan capital of Cuzco (Cusco).

1777 – The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union are finalized by the Continental Congress. The Articles were the governing document of what would become the original 13 United States.

1805 – History Link: “On November 15, 1805, Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Volunteers for Northwestern Discovery reach the Pacific Ocean at the mouth of the Columbia River, one year, six months, and one day after leaving St. Louis, Missouri, in search of the legendary ‘Northwest Passage’ to the sea.”

1864 – Date during the “Burning of Atlanta,” one of the most lied-about events in American history (unsurprising, since Democrat/Confederate propaganda was involved). Firstly, Confederates under Gen. Hood had already destroyed certain targets to prevent Union capture, including burning an ammunition train, which caused a huge explosion. Furthermore, the city had been bombarded during the Union siege; a fair amount of damage was done in the back-and-forth of battle, not from Union soldiers gleefully thrusting torches into buildings.  Sherman specifically aimed to destroy certain targets valuable from a military perspective upon evacuation. Union officer Major Hitchcock estimated conservatively that about 25% of Atlanta was burned by Union troops, and Union officer Captain Poe estimated about 37%. It seems pretty clear that more of Atlanta was burned than was intended by Sherman intended, but even Confederate locals at the time admitted much of the city—especially the churches—were still largely intact. It is a fact that the Union troops tried to clear all civilians out of Atlanta before burning even military targets—Sherman specifically had a 10-day truce to ensure evacuation—whereas the Confederate military rampaged through multiple Union states rounding up all the black citizens to ship South as slaves; or, at Ft. Pillow, deliberately and gleefully massacred Union troops who’d surrendered.

1891 – German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is born, famous as a successful Nazi general.

1969 – The largest anti-war protest in U.S. history occurs in Washington, D.C., to protest the Vietnam War. For years, ignorant and self-righteous hippies viciously abused U.S. soldiers and their families.

November 16

42 BC – Future Roman Emperor Tiberius is born.

534 – The final revised version of the Codex Justinianus, named for Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian, is published. The codex comprises the foundational jurisprudence documents of the Western legal tradition.

1918 – Hungary becomes an independent republic for the first time.

November 17

1558 – Queen Elizabeth I becomes monarch of England. Though Protestants have long built around her the myth of “Good Queen Bess,” and she supported important exploratory efforts in the New World, English Catholics faced harsh persecution under her reign (including hundreds of executions). Many more Catholics were killed in Ireland.

1800 – U.S. Congress meets in the then-new capital of Washington, D.C., for the first time.

1989 – The Velvet Revolution protests against Communist rule begin in Czechoslovakia.

November 18

1307 – Having defied Austrian authority, Swiss William Tell is forced to do a trial of marksmanship, and famously succeeded in shooting an apple off his son’s head.

1626 – Construction on the current St. Peter’s Basilica is completed, a triumph of Renaissance and Baroque architecture and art.

1916 – The First Battle of the Somme ends with an Allied advance of six miles at the bloody cost of 146,000 soldiers killed.

1928 – Debut of Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks’s animated short “Steamboat Willie”—and thus the debut of one of the most popular and iconic fictional characters in history, Mickey Mouse.

November 19

1530 – Issuance of “‘The Recess’, the final decree of the Diet of Augsburg.

1600 – Future British King Charles I is born.

1863 – President Abraham Lincoln delivers one of the most famous and memorable speeches in all history, the immortal Gettysburg Address.

1942 – The Soviets launch a counterattack against the Nazis at Stalingrad during WWII.