February 18 in History

British troops suffered their heaviest single-day casualties of the Second Boer War on Bloody Sunday, the opening assault of the Battle of Paardeberg. Frontal charges against entrenched Boer positions proved catastrophic, but the subsequent siege forced General Piet Cronje's surrender nine days later — the first major British victory after months of demoralizing defeats.

Frederick II got Jerusalem back by speaking Arabic with the Sultan over dinner. No battle. No papal blessing — the Pope had excommunicated him. Al-Kamil and Frederick exchanged philosophy texts and geometry problems. They signed a ten-year truce in 1229. Christians got Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethlehem. Muslims kept the Dome of the Rock. Both sides were furious. The Pope called it blasphemy. Islamic scholars called al-Kamil a traitor. It worked anyway. For exactly ten years.

George, Duke of Clarence, drowned in a barrel of wine. His older brother, King Edward IV, had him convicted of treason — the third time George had switched sides in England's civil war. The execution was private, at the Tower of London, and George got to choose the method. He picked malmsey, a sweet imported wine. His body was never shown. Shakespeare later made the story famous, but the wine barrel was real. Even medieval England thought it was bizarre.

The Spanish fleet caught them off Cornwall in 1637. Twenty ships gone — half the convoy. England and Spain weren't even at war. The Dutch were fighting Spain, England was neutral, but Spanish commanders didn't care. They needed the cargo and the statement. England's navy, supposedly protecting these waters, did nothing. Parliament exploded. Charles I had been cutting naval funding for years. This raid, more than any policy debate, convinced England it needed a real fleet again.

René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, missed the Mississippi River by 400 miles. He meant to build his colony at the river's mouth. Instead he landed at Matagorda Bay in what's now Texas. He built Fort St. Louis anyway. France claimed the entire region based on this mistake. The fort lasted three years before disease and Karankawa raids destroyed it. La Salle was murdered by his own men. Spain found the ruins and panicked into colonizing Texas themselves.

Pakubuwono II needed a new capital. His old one, Kartasura, had been sacked by Chinese rebels and Madurese mercenaries. The palace was burned. The sacred regalia was stolen. So in 1745, he moved his court fifteen kilometers east to a village on the Bengawan Solo River. He called it Surakarta — "the brave city." The kingdom split seventeen years later, but Surakarta survived. Today it's still Java's cultural heartland, home to the oldest palace still inhabited by a sultan's descendants. The city born from a sacking outlasted the kingdom it was built to save.

Captain Thomas Shirley sailed for West Africa's Gold Coast in 1781 with orders to seize Dutch forts while the Netherlands was distracted by war in Europe. The Dutch had thirteen trading posts there. Shirley took them in six weeks. The forts controlled access to gold and enslaved people — Britain wanted both. The Fourth Anglo-Dutch War gets forgotten because it happened during the American Revolution. But it permanently shifted who controlled African trade routes. The Dutch never got their forts back.

Vermont governed itself for 14 years before Congress let it join. It had its own constitution, its own currency, its own postal service. It negotiated with Britain and France. New York claimed Vermont's land and blocked its admission — Vermont had been carved from New York's territory without permission. The dispute ended when Vermont paid New York $30,000. On March 4, 1791, it became the fourteenth state. First new state after the original thirteen. Also the first state to ban slavery in its constitution and allow men without property to vote. The republic that paid its way in.

The Know-Nothings picked a former president who'd never won an election. Millard Fillmore had inherited the job when Zachary Taylor died in office. The party's real name was the American Party, but everyone called them Know-Nothings because members were supposed to say "I know nothing" when asked about their secret meetings. They wanted to ban Catholics and immigrants from holding office. They'd won 52 seats in Congress two years earlier without anyone seeing it coming. Fillmore won one state in the general election. Maryland. The party collapsed within four years, destroyed by the slavery question they'd tried to ignore.

Sherman's troops burned Columbia, South Carolina, on February 17, 1865. The State House caught fire — whether from Union soldiers or retreating Confederates, nobody knows. What's certain: South Carolina had started the war. It was the first state to secede. Fort Sumter was in Charleston Harbor. Sherman's men knew this. The fire left bronze stars marking where shells hit the building. They're still there. South Carolina kept them as monuments.