Feb 24 in History
1607 — Claudio Monteverdi’s “L’Orfeo”, the first fully-developed opera, premieres at the Court Theatre in Mantua. It attracts limited interest beyond the Mantuan court. In 1904 Vincent d’Indy produces an edition in French for the first public performance of the work in two-and-a-half centuries in Paris on February 25.
1616 — Qualifiers of the Holy Office deliver their report in response to Galileo Galilei’s promotion of Nicolaus Copernicus’s heliocentric theory: The proposition that the sun is stationary at the centre of the universe is “foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical, inasmuch as it expressly contradicts the teachings of many passages of Holy scriptures” ... as is the proposition that the earth moves and is not at the centre of the universe. Aristarchus of Samos proposed that the earth revolves around the sun as early as the third century BC, but it attracted little attention. Copernicus presented a mathematical model of a heliocentric system in the 16th century. In the 17th century, it was supported by Johannes Kepler’s elliptical orbits and Galilei’s observations made by telescope.
1821 — Mexican revolutionaries proclaim the “Plan de Iguala”, their declaration of independence from Spain. 1825 — Thomas Bowdler, 70, English self-appointed Shakespearean censor, dies in Swansea, Wales. “The Family Shakspeare (sic)”, his expurgated version of William Shakespeare’s plays intended to be more suitable for “family reading”, was published in 1818. His last work, published posthumously in 1826, is a bowdlerised (a verb still used for the censorship or omission of elements deemed inappropriate for children in all art forms) version of Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”.
1876 — Henrik Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt”, one of the most widely performed Norwegian plays, premieres in Oslo. 1920 — The National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party, led by Anton Drexler, holds its founding meeting at Hofbrauhaus in Munich.
1949 — The first US rocket (a modified German V-2 ballistic missile) to reach “outer space” is launched from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and reaches the unprecedented altitude of 400km. 1955 — Steven Paul Jobs, co-founder of Apple Inc, is born in San Francisco, US.
1968 — The Randse Afrikaanse Universiteit opens with a campus situated in a brewery in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, Dr Nico Diederichs as chancellor and Prof Gerrit Viljoen as rector.
2001 — The Indigenous Games are launched to promote the national growth of games indigenous to SA (dibeke, diketo, drie stokkies, iintonga, jukskei, kgati, kho-kho, morabaraba and nvuva).