If you read yesterday’s “book of days” post, you might have noticed that the Christmas Carol Good King Wenceslaus showed up because one of the two Kings Wenceslaus — Wenceslaus II in that case — was born that day in 1271. If you didn’t read it, you have a second chance — because the other Wenceslaus (Wenceslaus I, fairly obviously) was assassinated September 28 of 935.
If you look more deeply into it, you’ll see that Wenceslaus II was not, in fact, the son of Wenceslaus I. That’s pretty obvious too, when you notice the nearly 200 years between Wenceslauses. The Wenceslaus having the unfortunate association with September 28 (Wenceslaus I) has a better claim on being the one in the carol. For one thing, he was eventually made a saint. Or (I’m not entirely clear on how this works) he was a saint already and that was later formally recognized.
The family seems to have been known for highly recognizable personality traits. At the time Wenceslaus I was also known as Vaclav the Good, and his brother (who might have been the one who had him assassinated) was called Boseslaus the Cruel. His son Boseslaus II was Boseslaus the Pious. You see this kind of thing in other historic figures like Ivan the Terrible, but the practice doesn’t seem to have survived to modern times. After all, you never see current leaders called anything like Ralph the Passive Aggressive.
Speaking of leaders with nicknames, September 28 is the day William the Conqueror landed in England in 1066 and, well, conquered. By 1779, though, when Samuel Huntington was elected President of the US Continental Congress on the 28th, the nickname thing had faded away. That’s the same thing that happened to his job; President of Congress no longer exists because it wasn’t included in the Constitution. In 1779 the Constitution was still being written, and it didn’t take effect until ten years later. The US document influenced many other Constitutions (until recently), but interestingly enough, the number of countries that have fully emulated the US system of government remains at zero, although Liberia came close.
The team of pilots, mechanics, and crews that completed the first circumnavigation of the world by air had a good view of many of the countries that studied (and declined to adopt) the US Constitution. They landed back home on September 28, 1924 after using two open-cockpit biplanes to make the 42,398 kilometer journey. We’re able to express that distance in terms everybody understands because on September 28, 1889, the length of the meter was defined.
Measurement is important — particularly in sports, where the most minute measurements can fuel endless discussion and argument. But nobody argues about the measurement recorded on September 28, 1941. That’s the day the Major League Baseball season ended, leaving Ted Williams with a season batting average of .406 — nobody’s recorded a batting average over .400 since. By 1941, nicknames were being applied to sports figures much more than political leaders. Ted Williams had several: The Splendid Splinter, The Thumper, The Kid,” and Teddy Ballgame.
September 28 even has some events with memorable names, including the Spaghetti House Siege and the Drama Uprising. But those aren’t nicknames — the Spaghetti House Siege happened in London in 1975 when a gang was trying to rob a place actually called The Spaghetti House. And the 1941 Drama Uprising got its name because it took place in Drama, which is a city in Greece. It’s not where the English word “drama” comes from; that’s just a coincidence. Kind of like memorable events involving Wenceslaus I and Wenceslaus II happening on subsequent days in September — separated by a couple of centuries. Historically speaking, two centuries is not that much. After all, it was just a couple of centuries ago that the Convention of 1800 was being negotiated. It ended the war between the US and France. Oh, you didn’t know we were at war with France in the late 1700s? Well ending it was the biggest accomplishment of John Adams’ presidency. A couple of centuries earlier, he might have been known as John the Correspondent (he wrote a lot of letters).
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