This Day In History - June 15: Magna Carta Sealed, The Battle of Kosovo Fought & Lightning Strikes Ben

Art: Romantic Landscape With Ruined Tower, Thomas Cole, 1836

1215 – King John of England met with his barons at Runnymede and there, affixed his seal to the Magna Carta. John was a highly unpopular king who heavily taxed his subjects, engaged in disastrous wars and was excommunicated by the Pope. When his barons had finally had enough and were near open revolt, they instead agreed with John to the terms set forth in the Magna Carta. A millennium later, Churchill would dryly observe, "When the long tally is added, it will be seen that the British nation and the English-speaking world owe far more to the vices of John than to the labours of virtuous sovereigns."

The Magna Carta is one of the most famous and important documents in our history. The U.S. Constitution, with but a few notable differences, is largely an amalgam of the rights of Englishmen as existed in common law and by solemn compact with the crown in 1776. One of the first of those compacts was the Magna Carta and indeed, many of the rights set out therein are found directly in our Constitution and Bill of Rights today. The fine blog Brits At Their Best lists them, and I have, in brackets, annotated where they exist in our founding documents:

THE MOST IMPORTANT RIGHTS AND LIBERTIES OF MAGNA CARTA

- The right to trial by jury. [6th Amendment]

- The right to habeas corpus. —We cannot be arrested and kept in prison without trial. [Const. Art. I, Sec. 9]

- The right to own property, which cannot be taken from us without due payment or process of law. [5th Amendment]

- The right not to be fined so heavily as to have our livelihood destroyed. [8th Amendment]

- The right to reasonable taxation levied only with the general consent of the kingdom. [Const. Art. I, Sec. 7-8] . . .

- The right to travel freely in and out of the country except during war. (recognized at common law)

- These rights to be observed not only by the king but by all men.

The version agreed to by John included the right to redress through an advisory council to the king and planted the seed of representative government. [In Britain, it would grow into Parliament; in the U.S., to our bi-cameral legislature]

You can find the Magna Carta here. Brits At Their Best has much more on the events leading up to the signing of this document and its historic significance.

1389 – An Ottoman army won a close but critical victory over a combined force of Serbs and Bosnians at the Battle of Kosovo. Though a loss, the battle did succeed in stopping the Ottoman advance into Europe for a period. As a result of the battle, Serbia was reduced to a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire and Christianity repressed. Serbia remained under Ottoman rule until revolution in 1817.

1667 – The first blood transfusion to a human is administered by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Denys, personal physician to the French King. Denys gave a transfusion of lambs blood to a sick child who later died of his illness.

1752 – Ben Franklin famously flew his kite in a thuderstorm to prove that lightning is electricity.

1775 – George Washington was appointed commander-in-chief of the Continental Army.

1804 – New Hampshire approved the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratifying the document.

1836 – Arkansas was admitted as the 25th U.S. state.

1844 – Charles Goodyear received a patent for vulcanization, a process to strengthen rubber.

1864 – Arlington National Cemetery was established when 200 acres around Arlington Mansion, formerly owned by Confederate General Robert E. Lee, were officially set aside as a military cemetery.

1888 – Crown Prince Wilhelm became Kaiser Wilhelm II - and is the last emperor of the German Empire. He led Germany into the disaster of World War I. He abdicated the crown in 1918 following a mutiny against his rule.

1911 – IBM is incorporated.

1916 – U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signs a bill incorporating the Boy Scouts of America, making them the only American youth organization with a federal charter.

1934 – The U.S. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is founded.

1985 – Rembrandt's painting Danaë is attacked by a man (later judged insane) who throws sulfuric acid on the canvas and cuts it twice with a knife.

1992 – The United States Supreme Court rules in United States v. Álvarez-Machaín that it is permissible for the USA to forcibly extradite suspects in foreign countries and bring them to the USA for trial, without approval from those other countries.

1994 – Israel and Vatican City establish full diplomatic relations.

1996 – In Manchester, UK, an IRA bomb injures over 200 people and devastates a large part of the city centre.


Births

1330 – Edward the Black Prince, Prince of Wales (d. 1376)

1519 – Henry FitzRoy, 1st Duke of Richmond and Somerset, illegitimate son of King Henry VIII of England (d. 1536)


Deaths

923 – Robert I of France (b. 866)

2002 – Choi Hong Hi, founder of Taekwon-Do (b. 1918). The precursors to Tae Kwon Do stretch far back into Korea's history. Choi consolidated the various strands of this martial art and turned it into the TKD that we know today. It is the national sport of South Korea.

Holidays and observances

Today was ninth and final day of the ancient Roman celebration of Vestalia in honor of Vesta.

Several Eastern Orthodox Churches celebrate a feast for St. Augustine of Hippo. Augustine, a 5th Century ascetic, did more to stigmatize sex within Christianity than any other Christian thinker.

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The Taste Of . . . Civilization

The sign above is one that, in a slightly differnt form, was on the wall of my favorite pizza parlor where I grew up. Later, when I began to study history, I was amazed to find out just how significant a role beer, wine and mead played in the development of modern civilization. Its mind altering tendincies were no doubt appreciated, but more important by far was the fact that the process of making alcohol kills off all the other nasty bacteria and the like. In other words, beer provided a safe alternative to polluted water. George Will ponders this relationship in an interesting column today, "Survival of the Suddsiest."

This from Mr. Will:

Perhaps, like many sensible citizens, you read Investor's Business Daily for its sturdy common sense in defending free markets and other rational arrangements. If so, you too may have been startled recently by an astonishing statement on that newspaper's front page. . . . The story asserted: "The [alcoholic beverage] industry's continued growth, however slight, has been a surprise to those who figured that when the economy turned south, consumers would cut back on nonessential items like beer."

"Non wh at"? Do not try to peddle that proposition in the bleachers or at the beaches in July. It is closer to the truth to say: No beer, no civilization.

The development of civilization depended on urbanization, which depended on beer. To understand why, consult Steven Johnson's marvelous 2006 book, "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World." It is a great scientific detective story about how a horrific cholera outbreak was traced to a particular neighborhood pump for drinking water. And Johnson begins a mind-opening excursion into a related topic this way:

"The search for unpolluted drinking water is as old as civilization itself. As soon as there were mass human settlements, waterborne diseases like dysentery became a crucial population bottleneck. For much of human history, the solution to this chronic public-health issue was not purifying the water supply. The solution was to drink alcohol."

Often the most pure fluid available was alcohol -- in beer and, later, wine -- which has antibacterial properties. Sure, alcohol has its hazards, but as Johnson breezily observes, "Dying of cirrhosis of the liver in your forties was better than dying of dysentery in your twenties." Besides, alcohol, although it is a poison, and an addictive one, became, especially in beer, a driver of a species-strengthening selection process.

Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.

To avoid dangerous water, people had to drink large quantities of, say, beer. But to digest that beer, individuals needed a genetic advantage that not everyone had -- what Johnson describes as the body's ability to respond to the intake of alcohol by increasing the production of particular enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenases. This ability is controlled by certain genes on chromosome four in human DNA, genes not evenly distributed to everyone. Those who lacked this trait could not, as the saying goes, "hold their liquor." So, many died early and childless, either of alcohol's toxicity or from waterborne diseases.

The gene pools of human settlements became progressively dominated by the survivors -- by those genetically disposed to, well, drink beer. "Most of the world's population today," Johnson writes, "is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol."

. . . Suffice it to say that the good news is really good: Beer is a health food. And you do not need to buy it from those wan, unhealthy-looking people who, peering disapprovingly at you through rimless Trotsky-style spectacles, seem to run all the health food stores.

So let there be no more loose talk -- especially not now, with summer arriving -- about beer not being essential. Benjamin Franklin was, as usual, on to something when he said, "Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." Or, less judgmentally, and for secular people who favor a wall of separation between church and tavern, beer is evidence that nature wants us to be.

Read the entire article.

Update: A wine snob differs, based on the drinking habits, apparently, of our mammal cousins in the bush. Certainly by the time of the great civilization of Egypt, there is no question that beer was king. My own study led me to believe that mead was the first alcoholic beverage in popular use, at least amongst northern Europeans. Whatever the case may be, this pedantic pondering is building a thirst, and an ice cold glass of mead is sounding mighty good at the moment.

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