01011003 This Day In History, October 3

52 BC: During the Gallic Wars, a series of military campaigns by the Roman proconsul (see The Politics Of Rome) Julius Caesar against several Gallic tribes in what is today France and Belgium, the Battle of Alesia ended when Vercingetorix, leader of the Gauls, surrendered to the Romans under Julius Caesar.

42 BC: The First Battle of Philippi. Mark Antony (see also The Cleopatra Connection) and Octavian won a decisive battle over Julius Caesar's assassins, Brutus and Cassius. Octavian later became Caesar Augustus, the first Roman Emperor, who declared the famous census that resulted in the prophecy of the Messiah being born in Bethlehem being fulfilled (see A History Of Jerusalem: Pompey And The Caesars; also Does Rome Have Christ's Birth Certificate?).

1656: Miles Standish died. As an English military officer, Standish was hired by the "Pilgrims" to be a military advisor (he served as the commander of the Pilgrim Militia at Plymouth) for defending their colony in New England (for the actual Biblical meaning of "pilgrim," see The Pilgrims). He was made famous by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem The Courtship of Miles Standish.

1691: The Treaty of Limerick was signed, ending the Irish Rebellion against British rule.

1739: Russia signed a treaty with the Turks (i.e. the Ottoman Empire; listen to our Sermon The Ottoman Empire), ending a three-year conflict between the two countries.

1838: Black Hawk died at age 71. He was the "Indian" (an erroneous term applied to the native people of North and South America by European explorers who thought that they had landed in India) leader of the Sauk and Fox tribes in Illinois; the Black Hawk War of 1832 is named after him.

1863: U.S. President Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday in November to be the U.S. Thanksgiving Day. The observance of Thanksgiving itself originated long before it began to be observed in the colonies of continental North America (see Thanksgiving).

1866: Italy and Austria signed the Treaty of Vienna, ending the Seven Weeks War.

1906: At the Berlin Radio Conference in Germany, SOS was established as the international distress signal, replacing the call sign CDQ.

1914: At the start of the First World War (1914-1918), the first brigades of Canadian volunteers sailed from Gaspe, Quebec. The more than 31,000 men, 144 artillery guns and 7,000 horses, escorted by 10 British battleships, arrived in Britain 11 days later. They formed the First Canadian Division, the largest fully-equipped military convoy to cross the Atlantic up to that date.

1929: King Alexander I changed the name of his Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes to Yugoslavia.

1940: In response to Germany's first-ever use of "paratroopers" (i.e. parachute troopers) in war (i.e. Germany's invasion of Denmark with their Fallschirmjager, in English parachute infantry - but contemptuously known to the people that they invaded as the green devils), the U.S. Army began to establish "airborne" troops.

1932: Iraq became an independent nation upon the ending of the British UN mandate there (a military coup in the 1960s brought in the regime that later was ruled by Saddam Hussein - who at first was an obedient puppet of the CIA, as was the neighboring Shah of Iran). After the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War (listen to our Sermon The European World Wars), Britain administered the vast area of the Middle East from Egypt to Iraq that had been under Ottoman control for centuries. Thereafter, while under British military protection, those Arab nations became free and independent (listen to our Sermons The Ottoman Empire), as well as did the land of Israel (listen to our Sermon The Balfour Declaration).

1941: During the Second World War, Adolf Hitler declared that "Russia is defeated and will never rise again" (see also Presidential Quotes On War, Terrorism, Religion). The German march toward Moscow was subsequently thwarted by the Russian winter.

1942: During the Second World War (1939-1945), the first successful launch of a German V-2 rocket was completed, from a Nazi launch facility at Peenemunde, Germany. The V-2 rocket became the first man-made object to reach space. After the war, many of Hitler's Nazi rocket scientists, including Wernher von Braun, were welcomed into the U.S. where they worked on U.S. military and NASA rockets (some remember Wernher von Braun as "the NASA Nazi").

1952: Britain detonated its first atomic bomb. The test was done at the Monte Bello Islands off the northwest coast of Australia.

1963: A military coup in Honduras overthrew President Ramon Villeda Morales.

1981: A hunger strike at the Maze prison in Belfast ended after 7 months and 10 deaths.

1990: The official political re-unification of East and West Germany after 45 years of Cold War Division (see Ein Volk! Ein Reich! Ein Euro!).

1995: O. J. Simpson was acquitted of his murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.

2009: The Presidents of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkey signed the Nakhchivan Agreement on the Establishment of Turkic Council.