underlying estimate was off by 11 minutes and 14
seconds. It was longer than the natural solar year. The extra minutes
accumulated to one whole day. By 325 AD, the Spring Equinox was
arriving on March 21st on the Julian Calendar - instead of March 25.
The First Ecumenical Council met in Nicea in 325 and determined that
the date to celebrate Pascha was on the first Sunday, after the first full
moon, after the Spring Equinox on March 21st. In other words, it
enshrined the Julian calendar's aberration.
Thus, by 1582, the Spring Equinox was arriving on March 11.
Half-hearted measures by Popes Paul III and Pius V failed to restore
the essential correspondence between the calendar and the seasons.
Pope Gregory XIII decided - in his tenth year in office - to drop 3 leap
years every 400 years by specifying that any year whose number ended
with 00 must also be evenly divisible by 400 in order to have a 29-day
February.
This would have the effect of bringing the Julian calendar closer to the
natural length of the solar year - though an error of 26 seconds per year
would still remain.
To calibrate the Julian calendar with the Gregorian one and to move the
Spring Equinox back to March 21, 10 days were dropped from the civil
calendar in October 1582. Thursday, October 4 was followed by Friday,
October 15. People rioted in the streets throughout Europe, convinced
that they have been robbed of 10 days.
But this was merely a convenient fiction. The Spring Equinox in the
Gregorian calendar was, indeed, celebrated on March 21 in perpetuity.
But, according to the Julian calendar, in the 17th century it arrived on
March 11th, in the 18th century on March 10th, in the 19th century on
March 9th, and in the 20th century on March 8th - 13 days earlier that
even the erroneous date adopted by the Nicea Council.
The Gregorian calendar was controversial in Protestant countries.
Britain and its colonies adopted it only in 1752. They had to drop 11
days from the civil calendar and move the official new year from
March 25 to January 1. For centuries, dates followed by OS ("Old
Style") were according to the Julian calendar and dates followed by NS
("New Style") according to the Gregorian one. Sweden adopted the
Gregorian Calendar in 1753, Japan in 1873, Egypt in 1875, Eastern
Europe between 1912 to 1919 and Turkey in 1927. In Russia it was
decreed by the (bourgeois) revolutionaries that thirteen days would be
omitted from the calendar, the day following January 31, 1918
becoming February 14, 1918.
It was Pope Pius X who, in 1910, changed the beginning of the
ecclesiastical year from Christmas Day to January 1, effective from
1911 onwards.
All that time, the Christian Orthodox continued to observe the Julian
calendar. In 1923, a Conference of Orthodox Churches in
Constantinople reduced the number of leap years every 900 years and
attained a discrepancy between the calendar and the natural solar year
of merely 2.2 seconds per year.
According to this calendar, the Spring Equinox will regress by one day
every 40,000 years.
They, too, had to drop 13 days to bring the Spring Equinox back to
March 21st. Hence the gap between December 25 (Gregorian calendar)
and January 7 (revised Julian-Orthodox calendar).
http://serendipity.magnet.ch/hermetic/cal_stud/cal_art.htm
http://www.greenheart.com/billh/julian.html
Canada
Following a series of rebellions, the British North American colonies
achieved self-government in 1848. But the economic situation was dire.
The colonies, immersed as they were in the 1847 global depression,
could no longer rely on protective tariffs once the British repealed the
Corn Laws. Famished and disease-stricken Irish immigrants flooded
the new state. Young men in Canada West left in droves for the United
States due to a shortage of agricultural land.
The 1849 Gold Rush brought tens of thousands of gold diggers from
the USA to Canada. Riots erupted in Montreal. A Rebellion Losses Bill,
intended to compensate some of the victims of the 1837-38 rebellion,
further drained the country's dilapidated resources.
By 1849, many Canadians were clamoring to join the United states. An
Annexation Association was founded to promote unification with the
prospering southern neighbor. The two versions of an Annexation
Manifesto were signed by the entire business community in Montreal
and Quebec and by the nationalists, who, contrary to their name, were
republicans who preferred the USA to the British crown.
http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/2/18/h18-2005-e.html
http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm?PgNm=TCE&Art
icleId=A0 000230
Canada, Invasion of
The U.S. military developed a "Joint Army and Navy Basic War
Plan--Red" in the 1920s. The detailed Plan was augmented and
amended in the 1930s. It envisioned the invasion of Canada by the
United States to hurt the interests of the United Kingdom. Later, the
Plan called for the US military to invade Bermuda and Britain's
Caribbean assets. Australia and
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