February 1 in History

Edward III was crowned at fourteen. His mother Isabella and her lover Mortimer ran everything. They'd murdered Edward's father by shoving a red-hot poker through his bowels. Edward played along for three years. Then at seventeen, he and a few friends entered Nottingham Castle through a secret tunnel. They arrested Mortimer in his bedroom while Isabella screamed outside the door. Mortimer was hanged. Isabella lived under house arrest for twenty-eight years. Edward ruled for fifty.

King John of Bohemia was blind. He'd lost his sight in battle years earlier but still led armies across Europe. In 1329, he took Medvėgalis, a Lithuanian fortress that had never fallen to crusaders. He baptized 6,000 defenders on the spot — mass conversions at swordpoint were standard practice. Most returned to paganism within months. Lithuania wouldn't actually convert until 1387, making it the last pagan state in Europe. John died at Crécy, charging into battle he couldn't see.

Charles XII of Sweden refused to leave Ottoman territory for five years after losing at Poltava. The sultan got tired of paying for his 1,000-man entourage and sent troops to arrest him. Charles barricaded himself in a house with forty men. The fight lasted eight hours. He lost two fingers. They dragged him out unconscious. The Ottomans kept him under house arrest for eight more months. He still wouldn't go home. When he finally returned to Sweden in 1714, he'd been gone for fifteen years.

Julia Ward Howe wrote "Battle Hymn of the Republic" in one night at the Willard Hotel in Washington. She'd visited Union Army camps the day before and couldn't sleep. She woke at dawn with the words fully formed and scribbled them in the dark so she wouldn't wake her baby. The Atlantic Monthly paid her $4. It became the Union's anthem. She later said she had no memory of writing it — just waking up and finding it done.

Twenty Molly Maguires were hanged between 1877 and 1879. The evidence came from a single Pinkerton detective who'd infiltrated the group for three years. James McParlan testified they'd murdered mine supervisors and sabotaged equipment. The trials were held in company towns. The juries were selected by coal company officials. Defense attorneys were paid by the same companies prosecuting the men. Ten were executed on a single day — June 21, 1877. Pennsylvania called it the Day of the Rope. The condemned men maintained they were a labor organization, not assassins. Whether they were terrorists or union organizers depends entirely on who's telling the story.

Edison's motion picture studio looked like a police wagon — same black tar paper, same nickname: Black Maria. He built it on a pivot so the entire building could rotate to follow the sun. No artificial lights strong enough yet. The roof opened like a hinge. Actors performed on a tiny stage while a single camera recorded through a peephole. It cost $637.67 to build. Within two years, Edison was filming everything: vaudeville acts, boxing matches, a man sneezing. Cinema started in a rotating shed.

President Paul Kruger set aside 3,000 acres outside Pretoria in 1895 and called it Fountains Valley. First nature reserve on the continent. Not for tourism — for water. The springs there fed Pretoria's drinking supply, and Kruger wanted them protected from mining companies and settlers. He'd seen what gold rush development did to land. The reserve worked. Pretoria never ran dry, even during droughts that killed cattle across the Transvaal. What started as infrastructure became a model. Within twenty years, Kruger's nephew used the same legal framework to create Kruger National Park. Protecting water accidentally invented African conservation.

Quisling's name became the English word for "traitor" while he was still alive. On February 1, 1942, Germany's occupation chief installed him as Norway's puppet leader. He'd tried to seize power himself two years earlier, failed within days, and spent the interim as a joke. Now he had actual authority. Norway's resistance grew stronger in response. After the war, he was executed by firing squad. His surname entered the dictionary before his death.

Northeast Airlines Flight 823 hit a snowbank during takeoff at LaGuardia, skidded across Bowery Bay, and slammed into Rikers Island. Twenty dead, 78 injured. The DC-6 was overloaded—luggage piled in the aisles, passengers squeezed into jump seats. Investigators found the crew rushed the departure to beat a storm. They never reached takeoff speed. The wreckage landed 200 feet from the prison mess hall during lunch. Inmates helped pull survivors from the water. Within a year, the FAA rewrote weight-and-balance rules for commercial aviation. Every passenger weighed, every bag accounted for. A crash into a prison saved thousands of future passengers.