1619
First Africans Arrive in Virginia
A Dutch warship sailing under English colors put in at Point Comfort with twenty and odd Africans taken from a Portuguese slaver bound for Veracruz. The governor traded provisions for the captives, who were set to work in the tobacco fields. English North American slavery had a beginning, one that would metastasize into the defining moral catastrophe of American history.
Kepler's Harmony of the World
Johannes Kepler published Harmonices Mundi, containing his third law: the square of a planet's orbital period is proportional to the cube of its distance from the Sun. He believed he was uncovering the music of the spheres. He was; it just played in mathematics, and Newton would soon prove why the harmony held with a single gravitational equation.
First Representative Assembly in America
In a small wooden church at Jamestown, twenty-two burgesses elected by the settlers sat down with the royal governor to make laws for the colony. The Virginia House of Burgesses was the first elected legislative body in the Americas, and the root of a long, contentious constitutional tradition that would eventually produce the Congress of the United States.
Oldenbarnevelt Executed
Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the seventy-two-year-old architect of Dutch independence, was beheaded in The Hague on spurious treason charges pushed by his rival Maurice of Orange. The execution shocked Europe and opened a permanent fault line in Dutch politics between the house of Orange and the Holland regents, a struggle between military monarchy and mercantile republicanism that would define Dutch history.