Today in history—February 2
962: Pope John XII crowns 49-year-old Otto I (“the Great”) as Holy Roman Emperor, reviving the title after a gap of some 40 years.
1509: The Muslim monopoly on Far East trade is shaken by the Portuguese naval victory over a much larger Turkish/Egyptian fleet at the Battle of Diu, off the Indian coast.
1536: Pedro de Mendoza, in charge of a gold-hunting expedition, founds the village of Santa María del Buen Ayre (“Our Lady of Fair Winds”), which will later become Buenos Aires.
1653: The town of Nieuw-Amsterdam, founded on Manhattan Island 28 years earlier by the Dutch East India Company to defend its fur-trading operations in the Hudson Valley, is incorporated.
1708: Alexander Selkirk, who will ten years later inspire Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and scores of similar novels, is rescued after four years alone on an uninhabited island in the Juan Fernandez chain.
1812: Russian traders establish a fur trading colony at Fort Ross (short for “Rossiya” or “Russia”), California, north of Bodega Bay. The area is acquired from the local Kashayas for “three blankets, three pairs of breeches, two axes, three hoes, and some beads.”
1848: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is signed, ending the U.S.-Mexican War and turning what is now the southwestern United States over to the Americans for $15 million.
1876: The National League of Professional Baseball Clubs is formed; the only three original teams that survive are the Cincinnati Reds, Chicago White Stockings (now Cubs), and the Boston Red Stockings (now Atlanta Braves).
1888: Sir Henry Sumner Maine dies in Cannes, France. “[T]he movement of the progressive societies,” he famously said, “has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract.”
1895: George Stanley Halas is born in Chicago. As a sales rep for the A.E. Staley Co. in Decatur, Illinois, he will organize a company team, the “Decatur Staleys,” and lead them into the new National Football League in 1920—playing end, coaching the team, and manning the ticket booth. In 1922 he will change the name to “Chicago Bears.”
1905: The apostle of selfishness, Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum (pen name Ayn Rand) is born at St. Petersburg, Russia.
1947: Actress Farrah Fawcett is born at Corpus Christi, Texas. In 1976 she will create the modern poster industry by selling 8 million copies of her “red swimsuit” poster.
1962: For the first time in 400 years, the planets Neptune and Pluto align. This explains much of what happened in the Sixties.
1967: Sensing that what America really needed was another professional sports league, the American Basketball Association opens for business. Its points of difference are the three-point shot and the tri-color ball.
Today is Groundhog Day in the U.S. and Canada.