March 13
When I compile each Book of Days post, I review everything I can find about events of that day. I’ve been doing this for a while now. I’ve noticed that for most dates, there are plenty of battles, wars, massacres, assassinations, sieges, and attacks. If you wanted to write a book of days focused on nothing but military history, you’d have so much material you’d have to choose carefully. On the other hand, there are relatively few events that don’t involve violence. There’s the odd invention here and there, and a great many dates can boast a scientific discovery, of course. But overall, violence generally rules the day. Rules each day.
Part of this is simply because the material I have to work with includes only the events from history that somebody thought was important enough to write down. Then that set of events gets filtered down to the events that were written down that somebody else thought would be interesting for others to read, so they were included in summaries of history created in the “western world,” which is a very squishy concept but mostly means that events in Asia, Africa, and the Americas before the Europeans arrived are vastly underrepresented in history books, biographies, and encyclopedias. Then that material gets filtered again — I work with online sources, and although the Internet is big, it doesn’t include everything.
So let’s say that recorded history amounts to about 2500 years — it does go back further, but even that long ago the records we have are generally pretty sparse. That means that as a rule of thumb, there are 2500 versions of each day of the year that could potentially have events that I would end up reading about and thinking about whether to include. Out of our 2500 possibilities for March 13, let’s take a limited look, not at what happened, but at what categories of things happened. My most important source is the English version of Wikipedia, so I’ll just use that as a yardstick. Using Wikipedia alone introduces yet another filter, I know, but for the purposes of this exercise it’s at least a starting place.
For March 13, excluding births and deaths of notable individuals, there are just 35 entries. Kind of remarkable right there; 2500 March 13ths and there are only 35 events to choose from. Out of those 35, five are disasters. Storms, earthquakes, and crashes for the most part. Another five are crimes. To get on the Wikipedia list, a crime has to be enormous — mass killings and record-setting robberies are pretty the only ones ever listed. For March 13, they’re all mass killings. The next category is war. March 13 has certainly seen wars begin and notable battles occur. Fourteen of them in all. In some cases, it’s hard to draw the line cleanly between war-related events and crimes. Is a revolt that topples a government a battle, or a crime? Maybe it depends on who wins.
If you’ve been keeping a tally, you’ll know that we’re left with eleven events that aren’t some form of violence. Three of them are scientific discoveries: William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781, and the Lowell Observatory announced the discovery of Pluto in 1930. Then in 2003, an article in Nature announced the discovery of hominid footprints that are 350,000 years old (lucky for me that history is not the same as recorded history). Another two events are engineering feats. The Seikan Tunnel opened in Japan in 1988. It’s the world’s longest with an under-the-ocean segment. And in 1969, March 13 was the day the Apollo 9 mission got back home. That’s the one that tested the Lunar Module for the first time (but not by landing it).
Continuing on, there were three announcements from the Catholic church, or parts of it. In 1826 the Pope pointed out that Catholics were (and maybe still are; I don’t know) banned from joining the Masons. In 1997 Sister Nirmala was chosen as the successor to Mother Teresa, and then in 2013 Pope Francis was elected. Of the three remaining events, one was a law. The US Congress passed a bill in 1862 prohibiting the return of fugitive slaves to their owners. One was a naming: in 1639 in Massachusetts, a school was renamed Harvard College after John Harvard left it his library (pretty sizable for that time and place) and good sum of money in his will. And that leaves us with one single event to represent the creative side of humanity. March 13, 1845 was the premiere of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. It debuted in Leipzig.
One of the events that made it through the gauntlet to be mentioned is a good illustration of how little we really know about what happened on any given date. There’s a statue in Harvard Yard to commemorate John Harvard. It doesn’t mention his date of birth because nobody knows what it was. He was born in England, but not to a notable family. His father was a butcher. The only record kept of baby John was his baptismal certificate — he was baptized in late 1607, so he was probably born not too long before that. He did well in school and became a clergyman, but nobody knows if he was ever formally ordained. He and his wife moved to the New World in 1637, and he became an assistant preacher and a “teaching elder” of the church (it wasn’t a teaching position; it was more like being on the board of directors). He had inherited some money, but wasn’t rich, and he really hadn’t accomplished anything noteworthy when he died the very next year, in 1638. He was somewhere around 30 years old. He bequeathed half his money and his library of 400 books to the “schoale or colledge” at Newtowne. His gift got the school on its feet, and the masters decided to call the place Harvard in commemoration. John Harvard never saw his school. And although the school eventually placed a statue to him in its center, the school never saw him, either. Nobody knows what he looked like. The statue just shows a man he might have resembled.
The Harvard Library still has John Harvard’s original bequest, and it now contains over 20 million items. But even that doesn’t mention everything that’s happened in the past. They don’t even know much more about March 13 than we do.
What John Harvard didn’t look like.
