10 Big Historical Anniversaries Coming in 2015

December 1, 2014 Topic: History Blog Brand: The Buzz

10 Big Historical Anniversaries Coming in 2015

And you thought 2014 marked some major anniversaries in history...

Anniversaries are how we mark the passage time of time, celebrate our triumphs, and honor our losses. Two thousand and fourteen witnessed several significant historical anniversaries: the centennial of the start of World War I, the bicentennial of the British sack of Washington, DC, and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, to name a few. Two thousand and fifteen will also see anniversaries of many significant events in world history. Here are ten of note:

Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Nelson Mandela’s Release from Prison, February 11, 1990:

Nelson Mandela’s journey to becoming the first black president of South Africa was a long one. Trained as a lawyer, he became a prominent anti-apartheid activist in the 1950s as a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and a founder of the ANC Youth League. When Pretoria banned the ANC in 1960, Mandela turned to armed resistance. In 1962, he was arrested and convicted of plotting to overthrow the government. He was sent to Robben Island prison, where he was forced to work at hard labor in a limestone quarry and allowed to receive one visitor and one letter every six months. Despite his imprisonment, Mandela’s fame as a symbol of the anti-apartheid struggle grew. After twenty-seven years behind bars, eighteen of which he spent at Robben Island, Mandela was finally released on February 11, 1990 by the new government of Frederik Willem de Klerk. Mandela then worked with De Klerk to dismantle the apartheid system. The two men were awarded the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize for their work. In 1994, South Africans elected Mandela president. He died in 2013, leaving behind a legacy that few others can match.

Fiftieth Anniversary of the Arrival of the First U.S. Combat Troops in South Vietnam, March 8, 1965.

In 1960, the United States had roughly 750 military advisors in South Vietnam; by 1964, the number had grown to 16,000. The increased effort did little, however, to stem to the Viet Cong insurgency. In August 1964, Congress authorized the use of force against North Vietnam in the wake of a purported attack on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. After deadly Viet Cong attacks on U.S. military facilities in South Vietnam in early February 1965, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the dispatch of the first U.S. combat troops to South Vietnam. On March 8, the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade arrived in South Vietnam to protect the U.S. airbase at Da Nang, which was instrumental in Operation Rolling Thunder, the large-scale bombing campaign against North Vietnam that the U.S. had launched just days earlier and which would last until November 1968. The decision to send the marines to Da Nang broke the taboo on combat troops. By the end of 1965, the United States had 184,300 troops in South Vietnam. The rapid U.S. military escalation came with a bitter historical irony. Five months before the marines hit the beaches of Da Nang, President Johnson had insisted: “We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”

Fortieth Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, April 30, 1975:

America’s involvement in Vietnam began with great optimism about what U.S. military power could achieve. It ended with the country deeply divided and doubting its place in the world. President Richard Nixon had attempted to bring “peace with honor” through a January 1973 peace deal with North Vietnam that (among other things) traded the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces for the release of American prisoners of war. The agreement did not, however, end the fighting between the North and South. In early 1975, North Vietnam launched a major military offensive. South Vietnamese forces quickly retreated. Many South Vietnamese civilians fled their homes as well, trying to find safety in what became known as the “convoy of tears.” By the end of April, the North Vietnamese had closed in on Saigon, South Vietnam’s capital. On April 29, the United States launched Operation Frequent Wind, a helicopter evacuation of the Americans remaining in the city. By the next day, all American military and diplomatic personnel had left Vietnam, taking many “at risk” South Vietnamese with them—and leaving many more behind. More than 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War. You can find all of their names inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC.

Centennial of the Sinking of the Lusitania, May 7, 1915:

The 1,959 passengers on board the RMS Lusitania were looking forward to the end of their week-long voyage from New York City as the luxurious British ocean liner rounded southern Ireland on its way to Liverpool early on the afternoon on May 7, 1915. But the ship never reached port. A dozen miles off Old Head of Kinsale, a German U-boat lay waiting. The submarine fired one of its two remaining torpedoes. It scored a direct hit. The Lusitania sank in just eighteen minutes; nearly 1,200 passengers, including 128 Americans, died. (Why the Lusitania sank so quickly is disputed.) The sinking created an international uproar. President Woodrow Wilson saw the attack as a barbarous violation of the freedom of the seas. But he was unwilling to abandon his policy of neutrality toward the war in Europe, and he knew that Congress would not vote for war in any event. So he contented himself by filing three protest notes with the German government. (Even that step was too much for Wilson’s pacifist secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan; he resigned in protest after the first note.) Berlin insisted that the Lusitania’s sinking was justified because Germany had published notices in the American press warning passengers that they traveled on allied ships “at their own risk” and because the Lusitania was carrying weapons. (The Lusitania’s precise cargo has been a matter of controversy; by one account it was carrying more than 170 tons of ammunition.) Berlin eventually agreed to suspend its attacks without warning on passenger ships. Although the sinking of the Lusitania did not prompt the United States to enter World War I—that would not happen for another two years and only after Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare—the incident convinced many Americans that Germany was the villain in the Great War.

Octocentennial of the Magna Carta, June 15, 1215:

Americans are proud of their constitution. And rightly so. But the U.S. Constitution owes a large debt to a document written more than five centuries earlier, England’s Magna Carta. The story of “the Great Charter” begins in feudal England with a tax hike. King John needed money to raise an army that could win back territory he had lost in France. His tax plan angered a group of forty barons already unhappy with his seizure of their lands and infringement on their feudal and judicial rights. They presented the king with their demands. He turned them down flat. The barons rebelled. They renounced their allegiance to the crown and seized the Tower of London. Faced with a budding insurrection that might topple his rule, King John opted to negotiate. The result was the Magna Carta, which he signed at Runnymede on June 15, 1215. In exchange for John’s concessions, the barons pledged their allegiance to him once more. Most of the specific provisions of the Magna Carta address feudal concerns of no interest today. But the Magna Carta’s contribution to the development of the concept of the rule of law remains unquestioned—it was the first document to limit the power of a monarch and make him subject to the law. The legacy of the Magna Carta lives today in the writ of habeas corpus, in the fifth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (The story of the Magna Carta didn’t end at Runnymede. In August 1215, Pope Innocent III issued a papal bull declaring the Magna Carta null and void. King John died the next year of dysentery while fighting against France. His son, King Henry III, issued a substantially revised version of the Magna Carta in 1225.)

Bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo, June 18, 1815:

Napoleon Bonaparte was perhaps the greatest military and political genius of all time. Yet his defeat in battle on June 18, 1815 gave the world the metaphor for ultimate failure: Waterloo. That Napoleon even met the combined forces of Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Prussia on the plains just south of Brussels was remarkable. A little more than a year earlier he had been deposed as emperor of France and sent into exile at Elba. But in February 1815, he slipped by his guards, evaded a British naval patrol, and landed in France. Within a month he returned to Paris in triumph, forcing the new French king to flee the country and ushering in the Hundred Days. When the Congress of Vienna declared him an outlaw and raised the so-called Seventh Coalition to drive him from power, Napoleon concluded that his only chance to defeat the much larger forces arrayed against him was to go on the attack. He met his adversaries at Waterloo. The result was a crushing defeat at the hands of armies led by Britain’s Duke of Wellington and Prussia’s General Gebhard von Blücher. After his surrender, Napoleon was exiled once again, this time to St. Helena, a remote island in the South Atlantic more than 1,200 miles off the coast of southern Africa. He died there in 1821. He was fifty-one.