Good News in History, May 9

638 years ago today, the Treaty of Windsor, the world’s oldest international accord still in force, was signed between Great Britain and Portugal. It was signed and sealed by King Richard II of England and King John I of Portugal to cement commercial ties and mutual defense. Subjects of one king had the rights, under the treaty, to relocate to the kingdom of the other king without special procedure, and it also gave the right of both countries to trade on the terms enjoyed by the subjects of that country, rather than their monarchs. READ more… (1386)

In October of 1943, Winston Churchill gave a speech to the House of Commons in which he referred to the alliance between Britain and Portugal as “ancient” and “an alliance without parallel in world history.” While it didn’t date back to the construction of the Pyramids, 1386 was a year where there were still kings trying to recreate the Mongol Empire.

The treaty was celebrated by the marriage of King John to Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster, following a battle in which John’s armies were assisted by English longbowmen.

During WWII, Portugal proved that it was still strongly committed to the alliance. In spite of Portuguese neutrality, British ships were allowed to refuel in Portuguese ports and Portuguese planes participated in reconnaissance missions for the Atlantic convoys. Moreover in 1943, Portugal agreed to British and American air force squadrons being stationed in the Azores.

In a telegram to the Foreign Office dated 23rd June 1943, the British ambassador to Portugal Sir Ronald Hugh Campbell confirmed that the British government had invoked the 600-year-old alliance between the two countries as a basis for requesting the use of military facilities on the Azores.

MORE Good News on this Day:

• First political cartoon to appear in an American newspaper: The new British colonies as a divided snake (8 colonies pondering revolution) with the caption “Join or die” – by Benjamin Franklin (1754)
• The white preacher John Brown, who was an abolitionist who led armed anti-slavery raids in Kansas and at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, was born in Connecticut (1800)
• Mike Wallace, the investigative journalist and media personality known for his four decades on 60 Minutes, was born in Massachusetts (1918– 2012)
• Czechoslovakia was liberated from Nazi occupation (National Day) (1945)
• Ten years after the Nazis surrendered, West Germany joined NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (1955)
• John Paul II announced a reversal of the Catholic Church’s condemnation of Galileo in 1633 –350 years after the scientist’s declaration that the earth was not the center of the universe (1983)

102 years ago today, the International Astronomical Union voted to formally and universally adopt Annie Jump Cannon’s Harvard Stellar Classification system, a system of assigning a variety of numbers and letters to classify each star in the sky, and that with minor changes is still used today. Nicknamed “Int” for “Intensity” Cannon was probably the most prolific identifier of stars in world history, and considering most astronomers today work with computers and advanced telescopes, Cannon recorded 350,000 stars manually.

In 1896, Cannon became a member of the Harvard Computers, a group of women hired by Harvard Observatory director the Henry Draper Catalogue, with the goal of mapping and defining every star in the sky. While building the stellar catalogue, Cannon made some changes to simplify it, which are referred to now as the Harvard System.

For starters, the spectral classes O through M, as well as other more specialized classes, outline the heat, where 0 denotes the hottest stars of a given class. For example, A0 denotes the hottest stars in class A and A9 denotes the coolest ones. Fractional numbers are allowed; for example, the star Mu Normae is classified as O9.7. Our Sun is classified as G2.

O-stars are white or blue, because they’re extremely hot and luminous. B-stars are similar, but mostly different in that they are 1 in every 800 stars, while O-stars are 1 in 3 million. The closest B-type star is Regulus, at around 80 light years. Vega, a commonly known star to even amateur gazers, is an A-type, while F-type stars are those beginning to consist of ionized metals like iron. G-type stars will have the same or similar characteristics of mass, age, and helium conversion to our sun, and K-type stars are identified as having, unlike the kinds already mentioned, virtually no hydrogen. Lastly, M-type stars are the most common and tend to be red dwarf stars, and therefore some of the vast number of M-stars can’t be seen because they’re too dim.

Those are the basics, and we have Cannon to thank for it, even though she was derided often for not being a housewife, or at least an assistant. For those who want to try and remember this system, there’s “Oh Be A Fine Guy/Gal, Kiss Me” which is something astronomers allegedly memorize. (1922)

And, Happy 78th Birthday to actress Candice Bergen, perhaps best known as TV’s Murphy Brown, a comedic role for which she won five Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards over ten seasons. At 75, she continues to shine—in recent films with blockbuster women co-stars in Book Club (with Keaton and Fonda in 2018) and Let Them All Talk (with Streep in a fully-improvised 2020 Soderbergh com-drama shot in 10 days for HBO).

She was also nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Jessica in Starting Over, and the BAFTA Award for Gandhi. Other popular roles include her work in the films Miss Congeniality and Sweet Home Alabama, and television’s Boston Legal. Her 2016 autobiography, A Fine Romance details her marriage to film director Louis Malle and giving birth to a daughter at age 39. WATCH the new trailer for Let Them All Talk… (1946)

On this day 74 years ago, Robert Schuman, the reformist French Prime Minister presented his proposal to create an organized Europe, which according to him was indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations.

This proposal, known as the ‘Schuman Declaration’, is considered by some people to be the beginning of the creation of what is now the European Union. (1950)

27 years ago today, a former prisoner of war became the first American ambassador to communist Vietnam—when former Florida Congressman Pete Peterson presented his credentials to Communist authorities in Hanoi, 22 years after the US evacuated Saigon.

He had served as a US Air Force captain during the Vietnam War, and was held as a prisoner of war for six-and-a-half years after his bomber was shot down near Hanoi in 1966. Thirty-one years later, as the US began normalizing relations with their old enemy, Peterson returned on a mission of diplomacy. Peterson also became the chairman of The Alliance for Safe Children, a non-profit organization he founded that works for child safety in Vietnam and the Asia Pacific Region helping reduce the accidents that injure children there. (1997)

Happy Birthday to Billy Joel who turns 75 years old today. After dropping out of high school on Long Island, he started a music career and by age 24 released his second solo album, Piano Man, with the single that would become his signature song. He went on to produce 33 Top-40 hits in the US, all of which he wrote himself. His fifth LP was a critical and commercial breakthrough in 1977—The Stranger—Columbia’s best-selling release, which included Just the Way You Are, Only the Good Die Young, and She’s Always a Woman. The following year, the album 52nd Street was his first to peak at #1 on the Billboard 200 chart. His seventh studio album, Glass Houses, featured It’s Still Rock & Roll to Me, Joel’s first No.1 single. In 1983, he released Uptown Girl and The Longest Time, two of his most popular songs—and in 1987, he became one of the first rock artists ever to tour the Soviet Union.

A six-time Grammy Award winner who has been nominated 23 times, Joel has sold over 150 million records worldwide as one of the best-selling artists of all time—and he’s the third best-selling solo artist in America. WATCH Tony Bennett join him onstage last month for the ultimate Joel masterpiece, ‘New York State of Mind’… (1949)

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