“Hey, wait a minute. That was the same day he was at Ticonderoga, how could he be in two places at once?” – Bart Simpson
One of the most popular substitute teachers at my high school would read us interesting, “On this day in history…” type trivia before class. He’d recite funny little stories about ancient battles and scientific discoveries from this old, yellowed trivia book. He might be subbing for history, biology or literature, it didn’t matter; I even saw him read it in gym once. He was famous for it and his temporary pupils wouldn’t let him start class until we’d had our fix.
That book is probably long out of print, but we have plenty of decent internet stand-ins. Today, for instance, is the twenty-ninth of August and you can find out all about it in just a few minutes. According to todayinsport.com the first heavyweight title fight using Marquis of Queensberry rules was held in 1885. The good people over at reference.com have today as the invention of chop suey in 1896. IMDB tells us that John McCain (1936) and Michael Jackson (1958) were both born on 29 August, and that Slobodan Milosevic and Robin Leach started life outside the womb on this very day in 1941. On-this-day.com has this tremendous bit of musical trivia, not only was 29 August 1958 Michael Jackson’s birthday, it also saw a young man named George Harrison join a group known as “The Quarrymen”, eight years later on 29 August 1966 they held their last public performance as “The Beatles” in San Francisco.
In addition to trivia sites, most news organizations have daily links to their past stories. (Some consultant probably told them it’s a good way to maximize page views from archived content.) I’m particularly fond of the BBC’s version, it’s a daily stop for me; today there are links to stories about the arrival of British troops in Korea (1950), the Gemini V space capsule’s return to Earth (1965) and, of course, Hurricane Katrina striking New Orleans (2005). Unlisted by the BBC, I assume because there was no public story about it at the time, is perhaps the most significant 29 August of the twentieth century, that of 1949. On that day in history the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb.
This was not the decrepit Soviet Union of the 1980s that was forced to import grain; this was the Soviet Union that inflicted the overwhelming majority of Nazi casualties. All of our Nazi killing heroes, from Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca to Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, are a bunch of pussies compared to these Soviets. This was our great nemesis in the Cold War, a fierce nation at the height of its power that now had the bomb.
29 August is a date that I find very comforting. That may seem perverse, but allow me to explain. Fifty-eight years ago, the largest country on Earth, a ruthless totalitarian state with an enormous and formidable military, gained access to the most terrible weapon ever conceived. Yet today that terrifying event barely rates a mention as a piece of historical trivia. There is no modern corollary for this, there isn’t anything close. No threats coughed up by today’s world are remotely as scary as a globe-spanning battle-hardened empire with nuclear weapons.
All the Muslim bogeymen in the world put together don’t pose anything like that kind of threat. I like to remember that, especially as we approach a more recent and raw anniversary, now less than two weeks away. Those Soviet (now Russian) nuclear weapons are still with us, but we are still here in spite of them. Terrorism, Muslim or otherwise, will likely be with us for a long time to come, but we will also still be here.
A week from Tuesday, when we’re all stuck in the muck and the mire of war politics and patriotic blather, let’s remember some other anniversaries as well, the birthday of D.H. Lawrence (1885), Brian De Palma (1940), and Moby (1965), the next to last time the Red Sox won the World Series (1918), the first public performance of “Oh, Susannah” which Stephen Foster sold for a bottle of whiskey (1847), the victory of William Wallace at Stirling Bridge (1297 – the first battle scene in Braveheart), the discovery of the island of Manhattan by Henry Hudson (1609) and the Pinochet coup in Chile (1973). It’s not much, but hopefully it can start to give us all a little perspective, so that in thirty or forty years, when people in their forties and fifties are the youngest ones left who can remember that awful September day, only the high school kids who are into history will know the date off the top of their head. It won’t mean we’ve forgotten it, only that we’ve moved on from it.
