It takes imagination to identify an economic principle. It takes still more imagination to follow the implications of the principle outside the context of commercial activity and explore its psychological, social, and political meanings.
Stephen Cox, in Cox and Paul Cantor, Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture (2010).
In 1752, throughout the British Empire, September 2 was followed, the next day, by September 14, as the government adopted the Gregorian calendar, skipping eleven days.
On September 14, 1944, Maastricht becomes the first Dutch city to be liberated by allied forces.
John Calvin [pictured above] returned to Geneva on September 13, 1541, after three years of exile. His subsequent work in church reform and theology became known as Calvinism, and profoundly influenced the course of European and (eventually) American civilization, including several concepts of servitude and liberty.
On the same date in 1989, Desmond Tutu led South Africa’s largest march aganst Apartheid.
Even during my father’s 1984 gubernatorial campaign, it was, ‘Do you want to grow up and be governor one day?’ ‘No. I am four.’
On September 12, 1848, Switzerland became a unified federal state with a constitution limiting central government powers and providing decentralized state (canton) power patterned on the U.S. Constitution.
In 1880 on this date, H.L. Mencken was born. One of his earliest books was a debate with a socialist, The Men versus The Man (1910); his greatest lasting contribution was probably The American Language (1919) and its supplements (1945, 1948). His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, such as Alistair Cooke’s Vintage Mencken (1955) and the author’s own Mencken Chrestomathy.
The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and establishment of the new constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism.
John Caldwell Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government (1851), p. 90. Calhoun’s image (above), a detail from a portrait by George Peter Alexander Healy.
Ah, the Most Interesting Election Year just became more interesting yet. Click on over to Townhall, then come back here for a little R & R (Research and References).
September 11 marks several dates in the history of the clash between the West and the Islamic East:
• In 1526, the Ottoman army occupied Buda after the crushing Hungarian defeat in the Battle of Mohács.
• In 1565, Ottoman forces retreated from Malta, ending the Great Siege of Malta.
• In 1609, an expulsion order announced against the Moriscos of Valencia began the expulsion of all Spain’s Moors.
• In 2001, Muslim jihadists associated with Al Qaida hijacked two airliners flying out of Boston, Massachusetts, one out of Newark, N.J., and another out of Washington’s Dulles airport, and comandeered two of those jets into the World Trade Center in New York and one into the Pentagon near the nation’s capital. The fourth crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania — making this flight, United 93, the only one of the terrorist attacks that day prevented from achieving its target, the agency of the prevention being the united efforts of civilians on the flight.
Well, this is something completely different:
September 10, 1918, is the estimated date of birth for Rin Tin Tin, one of a litter of shell-shocked puppies found by an American serviceman in a bombed-out kennel in Lorraine, less than two months before the end of World War I. The dog went on to become the lead actor in a number of very popular films, and one of the great celebrities of his age.