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Highlights for November 5
In the early morning, King James I of England learns that a plot to explode the Parliament building has been uncovered, hours before he was scheduled to sit with the rest of the British government in a general parliamentary session. At about midnight the night before, Sir Thomas Knyvet, a justice of the peace, found Guy Fawkes lurking in a cellar of the Parliament building, and ordered the premises searched. Nearly two tons of gunpowder were found hidden within the cellar. The authorities determine, in part through an extended torture of Fawkes, that the suspect was a participant in an English Catholic conspiracy, largely organized by Robert Catesby, to annihilate England's entire Protestant government.
During the next few months, English authorities kill or capture all of the conspirators, and put the survivors on trial along with a number of innocent English Catholics. Guy Fawkes himself is sentenced, along with other chief conspirators, to be hanged, drawn, and quartered in London. However, moments before the start of his gruesome execution, Fawkes jumps from a ladder while climbing to the hanging platform, breaking his neck and dying instantly.
In remembrance of the Gunpowder Plot, Guy Fawkes Day is celebrated across Great Britain every year on the fifth of November. As dusk falls in the evening, villagers and city dwellers across Britain light bonfires, set off fireworks, and burn an effigy of Guy Fawkes, celebrating his failure to blow Parliament and James I to kingdom come.
1862 More than 300 Santee Sioux are sentenced to hang.
On this day in Minnesota, more than 300 Santee Sioux are found guilty of raping and murdering Anglo settlers and are sentenced to hang. A month later, President Abraham Lincoln commuted all but 39 of the death sentences. One of the Indians was granted a last-minute reprieve, but the other 38 were hanged simultaneously on December 26 in a bizarre mass execution witnessed by a large crowd of approving Minnesotans.
The Santee Sioux were found guilty of joining in the so-called "Minnesota Uprising," which was actually part of the wider Indian wars that plagued the West during the second half of the nineteenth century. For nearly half a century, Anglo settlers invaded the Santee Sioux territory in the beautiful Minnesota Valley, and government pressure gradually forced the Indians to relocate to smaller reservations along the Minnesota River.
At the reservations, the Santee were badly mistreated by corrupt federal Indian agents and contractors; during July 1862, the agents pushed the Indians to the brink of starvation by refusing to distribute stores of food because they had not yet received their customary kickback payments. The contractors callously ignored the Santee's pleas for help.
Outraged and at the limits of their endurance, the Santee finally struck back, killing Anglo settlers and taking women as hostages. The initial efforts of the U.S. Army to stop the Santee warriors failed, and in a battle at Birch Coulee, Santee Sioux killed 13 American soldiers and wounded another 47 soldiers. However, on September 23, a force under the leadership of General Henry H. Sibley finally defeated the main body of Santee warriors at Wood Lake, recovering many of the hostages and forcing most of the Indians to surrender. The subsequent trials of the prisoners gave little attention to the injustices the Indians had suffered on the reservations and largely catered to the popular desire for revenge. However, President Lincoln's commutation of the majority of the death sentences clearly reflected his understanding that the Minnesota Uprising had been rooted in a long history of Anglo abuse of the Santee Sioux.
1990 Jewish Extremist Assassinated in New York
Meir Kahane, an American-born rabbi and founder of the far-right Kach movement, is shot dead in New York City. Egyptian El Sayyid Nosair is later charged with the murder, but is acquitted in a state trial. However, the federal government later decides that the killing was part of an alleged terrorist conspiracy and thus claims the right to retry Nosair. In 1995, he is convicted of committing the murder as part of the conspiracy trial of alleged terrorist leader Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, and is sentenced to life imprisonment.
Kahane, a charismatic Jewish leader who advocated expelling all Arabs from Israel, found many followers in Israel and the United States. His racist Jewish supremacy group, Kach, found support among the most extreme, heavily armed Jewish settlers in Israel's West Bank. In 1994, after a Jewish settler once affiliated with the Kach movement guns down twenty-nine Arabs worshipping in a mosque in the West Bank town of Hebron, Israel outlaws the organization. In 1995, Kahane's controversial impact on the history of Israel deepens when Yigal Amir, a Jewish law student, assassinates Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin. Amir is affiliated with Eyal, a Jewish extremist group that branched off from Kahane's Kach movement.
If you have other Birthdays or events to add for this day please E-Mail me.
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