TITLE: October 2: Conquests, Cannons, Comics, and Conscience
October 2 has been a busy day in history. On this date a medieval city changed hands, a revolution started over a cannon, a ship brought home the ideas that led to the theory of evolution, and a man who would change the course of an empire was born. Here are seven of the most interesting things that happened on October 2.
1. 1187 – Saladin Captures Jerusalem
On October 2, 1187, Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, known in the West as Saladin, took Jerusalem after a short siege. Three months earlier he had destroyed the main Crusader army at the Battle of Hattin, which left the city with very few soldiers to defend it. Balian of Ibelin led the defense. When it was clear the city couldn't hold, Balian negotiated a surrender, and Saladin entered Jerusalem on the anniversary of the Prophet Muhammad's Night Journey, a date with deep religious meaning for Muslims. What happened next is what people remember. When the First Crusade took Jerusalem in 1099, the Crusaders killed much of the population. Saladin instead let residents buy their freedom, and many who couldn't pay were released anyway. Christian writers in Europe ended up praising him as a model of chivalry, and he is still remembered that way in both East and West. Losing Jerusalem shocked Europe. Within two years the Third Crusade was underway, led by three powerful kings: Richard the Lionheart of England, Philip II of France and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. Its failure to retake the city shaped relations between Europe and the Middle East for generations.
2. 1835 – "Come and Take It": The Battle of Gonzales
In 1831 the Mexican government lent a small bronze cannon to the settlers of Gonzales, Texas, to help defend against raids. Four years later, relations between the Anglo settlers and the increasingly centralist government of Antonio López de Santa Anna had soured, and Mexican authorities wanted the cannon back. Lieutenant Francisco de Castañeda arrived with about 100 dragoons to collect it. The settlers had a different idea. They buried the cannon, called in volunteers from nearby towns, and sewed a flag showing the cannon, a single star and the words "COME AND TAKE IT." On the morning of October 2, about 150 Texians led by John Henry Moore crossed the Guadalupe River and attacked. The fight itself was small. Castañeda, under orders to avoid a full battle, pulled back. The Battle of Gonzales is called the "Lexington of Texas" because it was the first shot of the Texas Revolution. Within six months came the fall of the Alamo, the massacre at Goliad and the decisive Texian victory at San Jacinto. The "Come and Take It" slogan, which goes back to the ancient Spartans' "Molon labe," is still one of the best-known symbols in Texas.
3. 1836 – Darwin Comes Home on the Beagle
On October 2, 1836, HMS Beagle docked at Falmouth, England, after a voyage of four years and nine months. It had left in December 1831 to chart the coast of South America. Its unofficial naturalist was Charles Darwin, a 22-year-old who had once been expected to become a country clergyman. He came home as a serious scientist, with thousands of specimens and pages of notes. On the trip Darwin found fossils of giant extinct mammals in Argentina, felt an earthquake in Chile that raised the coastline, and visited the Galápagos Islands. There he noticed that mockingbirds, tortoises and other animals varied slightly from one island to the next. At the time these were puzzles. Once he was back in England, they became the evidence for a new idea. Darwin spent more than 20 years quietly building his case. He published On the Origin of Species in 1859, and its theory of evolution by natural selection changed biology for good. The voyage that ended in Falmouth that October is probably the most important scientific journey ever made.
4. 1869 – The Birth of Mahatma Gandhi
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, in the coastal town of Porbandar in western India. As a young man he was shy and an unremarkable student. He trained as a lawyer in London and then worked in South Africa, where being thrown off a first-class train because of his race changed his life. He spent the next two decades there fighting discrimination against Indians and developed the approach he called satyagraha, meaning "truth-force." When he returned to India, Gandhi used that approach against British rule. His campaigns included boycotts of British cloth, mass civil disobedience and the 1930 Salt March, a 240-mile walk to the sea to make salt in defiance of a British monopoly. His simple life and his insistence on nonviolence turned the independence movement into a mass movement that eventually brought India its independence in 1947. Gandhi's influence went far beyond India. Martin Luther King Jr. called him "the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change," and Nelson Mandela, Cesar Chavez and many others learned from him. Today his birthday is a national holiday in India, Gandhi Jayanti, and the United Nations marks it as the International Day of Non-Violence.
5. 1950 – Peanuts Makes Its Debut
On October 2, 1950, a modest new comic strip called Peanuts appeared in seven American newspapers. Its creator, Charles M. Schulz, was a Minnesota cartoonist who disliked the title the syndicate chose for it. The first strip shows two children watching Charlie Brown walk by. One of them says, "Good ol' Charlie Brown... How I hate him!" It set the strip's mix of sweetness and sadness from the first day. Over the following decades Peanuts grew into something no one expected. Schulz wrote and drew nearly 18,000 strips himself, with no assistants. At its peak the strip ran in more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries. Charlie Brown's endless failures, Lucy's psychiatric booth, Linus's security blanket and Snoopy's battles with the Red Baron turned a children's strip into quiet reflections on loneliness, faith, failure and hope. Schulz died on February 12, 2000. His last strip ran the next day. Animated specials like A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) still air every year, and generations of readers have seen themselves in a round-headed kid who keeps running at a football he knows Lucy will pull away.
6. 1959 – Entering The Twilight Zone
On the evening of October 2, 1959, CBS viewers heard a calm voice invite them into "a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind." The first episode of The Twilight Zone, "Where Is Everybody?", followed a man wandering alone through an empty town. It started one of the most influential series in television history. Rod Serling, the show's creator, had been one of the most respected writers of 1950s live TV drama, and also one of its most frustrated. Sponsors and networks regularly gutted his scripts. Most famously, they watered down his teleplay based on the murder of Emmett Till until almost nothing of the story was left. Serling found that if he set his stories on other planets or in strange alternate worlds, he could write about racism, mob paranoia, nuclear fear and conformity without the censors noticing. The approach worked. Episodes such as "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" and "Eye of the Beholder" are still classics, and the show's twist endings shaped much of the science fiction and horror that followed. "The Twilight Zone" has also become an everyday phrase for anything that feels unsettling and strange.
7. 1967 – Thurgood Marshall Joins the Supreme Court
On October 2, 1967, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the first African American to serve on it. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who nominated him, said it was "the right thing to do, the right time to do it, the right man and the right place." Marshall had already earned a place in history before joining the Court. As chief counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, he traveled the segregated South, often at real personal risk, to bring civil rights cases. He argued 32 cases before the Supreme Court and won 29. The most important was Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which struck down the "separate but equal" doctrine that had supported legal segregation for more than half a century. He served on the Court for 24 years and was known for strongly defending individual rights, equal protection and the rights of criminal defendants, often in forceful dissents. When he retired in 1991, he had helped change the Constitution's meaning first as an advocate and then as a justice.
Reflection: The Threads That Bind Us
These seven events cover more than 800 years and look unrelated at first. Several of them, though, are about people pushing back against what seemed inevitable. Gandhi faced an empire, Marshall faced segregation written into law, and the settlers at Gonzales faced an army. Others show the power of looking closely. Darwin studied finches and fossils, Serling held a mirror up to a nervous society, and Schulz found something profound in a boy who never got to kick the football. Saladin's mercy in 1187 also reminds us that how power is used matters as much as who wins. The best parts of history aren't fixed in the past. They are choices that people in every generation, including ours, get to make again.