JUNE 22 — 1774 Royal Assent of the Quebec Act; 1945 Battle of Okinawa ends; 1832 John Howe invents 1st practical machine to invent pins
JUNE 22
1774 — the Royal Assent of the Quebec Act.
After the British won the Seven Years War in 1763 against the French, our brethren across the pond came over and tried to collect taxes for what they thought was rightfully theirs in the North American colonies. After taxation without representation became a big problem in North America, the colonists gave Britain the proverbial middle finger by dumping hundreds of crates of British tea in the waters of Boston harbor.
Parliament punished the colonists in Massachusetts with the intolerable Acts, which affected all thirteen colonies. The colonists were also affected by the Quebec Act when they lost some precious ground and religious freedom. I don’t normally talk about Canada on a US History show, but the Quebec Act helped out the French Canadians by offering them three things: their own language and religion, their land, and their own laws and even their own seigneur systems.
The French Knuckleheads said thanks Great Britain and right when it came to the signing, Parliament added just…one more thing. That Proclamation of 1763 that was signed at the end of the French and Indian Wars, part of the Seven Years War between that spilled from Europe into North America, reneged the western boundaries and basically extended Quebec all the way to the Ohio river on the south and the Mississippi River on the west.
All of a sudden the Roman Catholics who moved to the New World to get away from religious persecution were now silenced by the Protestants. So as tensions mounted and the American Revolution broke out, it’s no wonder that four years later on February 6, my mom’s birthday that Benjamin Franklin would be in France signing the Treaty of Alliance.
Because you know, at some point in some century, France is going to eventually have to win a war, might as well have the Americans on her side.
1611 – Hudson set adrift by mutineers.
…As told by americaslibrary.gov, on the misty morning of September 3, 1609, explorer Henry Hudson and his crew aboard the Half Moon sailed into the majestic river off the Atlantic coast by chance. Strong head winds and storms forced them to abandon the northeast voyage they had been assigned.
Rather than return to Holland with nothing to report, the crew voted to look for the Northwest Passage, a legendary waterway that would carry a ship all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. They passed by the island we know today as Manhattan and and sailed up the river.
Hudson was a headstrong but courageous commander. Though he often mismanaged his crews by playing favorites or letting morale suffer, he was a competent navigator. He undertook four dangerous voyages and made huge contributions to geographical knowledge. His exploration of the Hudson River led to Dutch colonization of the area.
But for Hudson, it ended badly.
The crew was forced to camp on shore during the winter with little or no food or supplies, dealing with extreme cold all winter. Many of the crew held Hudson responsible for their misfortune, and on June 22, 1611, with the coming of summer, they mutinied against him, and set him, Hudson, his teenage son, and seven supporters adrift in a small, open boat. Hudson and the eight others were never seen again.
1945 – Battle of Okinawa ends.
…The 82-day battle, one of the bloodiest of all of WWII, was fought on the Ryukyu Islands of Okinawa, a strategic Pacific island located midway between Japan and Formosa. U.S. Lt. Gen. Simon Bolivar of the US 10th army v Japanese Lt. Gen. Mitsuru Ushijima.
The result was an allied victory and Okinawa was owned by the US until 1972. The battle began on April 1, 1945; the 10th Army launched the invasion, hoping to possess the land so the US could have a base large enough for an invasion of the Japanese mainland.
There were more than 100,000 Japanese defenders on the island, but most were deeply entrenched in the island. The battle raged for a month and Japanese troops and kamikaze fliers would make Americans pay dearly for every strategic area of land and water won. On June 18, with US victory imminent, General Bucker, the hero of Iwo Jima, was killed by Japanese artillery.
Three days later, his 10th Army reached the southern coast of the island, and on June 22 Japanese resistance effectively came to an end. Like a boss! The Japanese lost 120,000 troops in the battle, Americans suffered 12,500 dead and 35,000 wounded.
90% of the buildings on the island were destroyed, along with countless historical documents, artifacts, and cultural treasures, and the tropical landscape was turned into a vase field of mud, lead, decay, and maggots.
1832 – John Howe invents the first practical machine for manufacturing pins.
…He was a physician from Ridgefield Connecticut who noticed that pins were being made manually. How silly. We’re Americans, c’mon. He established the Howe Manufacturing Company in 1833 and had a machine make the pins for him.