1281 – The fleet of Kublai Khan is destroyed by a typhoon while approaching Japan. ‘Divine wind’ loosely translates in Japanese as “kamikaze”. Where will we hear that term again, class?

1480 – Battle of Otranto: Ottoman Muslim troops behead 800 Christians for refusing to convert to Islam; they are later honored in the Church. 2014 – ISIS beheads, rapes, tortures and slaughters thousands a day and the Leftist anti-Semitic media wants to whine about those pooooor ‘Palestinians’ who tried to do the same to Israel.

1492 – Christopher Columbus arrives in the Canary Islands on his first voyage to the New World. “Canary Islands”? No canaries at all. Virgin Islands? No canaries there either.

1658 – First US police force forms in New Amsterdam (later to become New York). Out of demand, the donut is invented shortly thereafter.

1851 – Isaac Singer is granted a patent for his sewing machine and his name becomes almost synonymous with home sewing machines.

1865 – Joseph Lister, British surgeon and scientist, performs 1st antiseptic surgery. Insurance declines to pay.

1908 – Ford builds the first Model T (without government subsidy).

1914 – World War I: the United Kingdom declares war on Austria-Hungary; the countries of the British Empire follow suit. And that’s why France isn’t speaking German today.

1944 – World War II: Alençon is liberated by General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, the first city in France to be liberated from the Nazis by French forces using American-supplied equipment. There’s a million or so American, Canadian and British troops backing him up, but this is a FRENCH victory. Later, France names a new tank after Leclerc. It is notable in that it has two forward and five reverse gears.

1952 – The Night of the Murdered Poets: 13 prominent Jewish intellectuals are murdered in Moscow. Stalin was a murderer a magnitude greater than Hitler, but he was on the winning side of WW II and was much enamored of the Left, so most people will NEVER hear about it. Read Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

1955 – President Eisenhower signs law raising minimum wage from 75 cents to $1 an hour. It was $1.25 when I got my first paying job in high school and back then no fool thought it was supposed to be a ‘living wage’.

1960 – Echo I, the first communications satellite, launched. It’s a big shiny metalized balloon so ground stations could bounce microwave signals off of it to other ground stations, and it was VERY visible in the night sky.

1964 – South Africa is banned from the Olympic Games due to the country’s racist policies. South African diamonds and gold, however, are just fine!

1981 – The IBM Personal Computer is released. The business world takes notice, because “IBM” already makes the REAL computers they use. Computer enthusiasts yawn. Nothing new here… At introduction a PC with 64 kB of RAM and a single 5 1/4 inch floppy drive and monitor sold for US $3,005, the price of a new compact car. Today you can buy a new laptop for the equivalent of fifty bucks in 1981 dollars and that IBM PC could be over eleven thousand dollars and I remember reading that it is no longer possible to buy a new car in the US for less than $20K.

1994 – Major League Baseball players go on strike. This will force the cancellation of the 1994 World Series. Yawn!

1755 – Charles Lawrence gives expulsion orders to remove the Acadians from Nova Scotia beginning the Great Upheaval (Le Grand Dérangement). Left France in the 1600’s. Thrown out of Canada. Bypassed New Orleans because it was too much of the French we left when we went to the New World. So here we are… Cajuns!

1896 – Harvey Hubbell patents electric light bulb socket with a pull chain. Today “Hubbell” is a big name in the American electrical market.

1898 – Spanish–American War: American troops enter the city of Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. Should’ve let Spain keep the place.

1909 – The Morse coded distress call “SOS” is first used by an American ship, Arapahoe, off Cape Hatteras, NC. Didididahdahdahdididit. That’s a lot easier to send and recognize than the old “CQD” – dahdidahdit dahdahdidah dahdidit.

1914 – France declares war on Austria-Hungary. In the precise language of international diplomacy, this is known as “biting off more than you can chew”. Had not Great Britain, and ultimately, the United States, come to France’s rescue, history would have been WAY different. Like with Germany taking France (again…) there would likely be no Adolf Hitler and no WW II.

1929 – Doped up with beer and hot dogs, Babe Ruth becomes the first baseball player to hit 500 home runs in his career with a home run at League Park in Cleveland, Ohio.

1960 – Chad declares independence, and like much of sub-Saharan Africa, if it weren’t for massive influx of foreign dollars and expertise, the place would be full of starving, diseased people. Wait! They’re GETTING the money and the help and they’re STILL starving and diseased. Their politicians, however, are in MUCH better shape with apartments in ritzy locales that are NOT the shitholes they ‘govern’..

1965 – Race riots (the Watts Riots) begin in the Watts area of Los Angeles, California.

1968 – The last steam hauled train runs on British railways. Steam was still being used in Germany in the Seventies. I rode into Grafenwoehr and Hohenfels and Baumholder to the sound of steam pistons, my tank loaded on a railcar behind me..

1972 – Vietnam War: the last United States ground combat unit departs South Vietnam. We’re giving peace a chance. Watch how many hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodians die from it, not to mention fifty-odd thousand Americans wasted on an ill-managed war.

1984 – “We begin bombing in five minutes” – United States President Ronald Reagan, while running for re-election, jokes while preparing to make his weekly Saturday address on National Public Radio. That’s what we remember from Reagan going off-mike. From Obama we got ‘We’ll be more flexible after the election’. But Trump’s the one that colluding with the Russians, right?!?

1519 – Ferdinand Magellan’s five ships and 237 men set sail from Seville to circumnavigate the globe. One ship and eighteen men complete the trip. Magellan isn’t among them.

1628 – The Swedish warship Vasa sinks in the Stockholm harbor after only about 20 minutes on her maiden voyage. Makes the Titanic look positively long-lived.

1675 – The foundation stone of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London is laid. This becomes the “Prime Meridian” from which time and location is referenced for most of the world, like me, at 90 degrees west of the prime meridian and my time is Zulu minus 5.

1755 – Under the orders of Charles Lawrence, the British Army begins to forcibly deport the Acadians from Nova Scotia to the Thirteen Colonies. We haven’t been ‘French’ longer than a lot of you haven’t been ‘English’ or whatever.

1776 – American Revolutionary War: word of the United States Declaration of Independence reaches London. Those cheeky colonials!

1787 – Mozart completes his “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”, a favorite of mine.

1792 – French Revolution: Storming of the Tuileries Palace – Louis XVI of France is arrested and taken into custody as his Swiss Guards are massacred by the Parisian mob. The French have done away with the monarchy, but don’t worry, they’ll bring it back in 1814.

1846 – The Smithsonian Institution is chartered by the United States Congress after James Smithson donates $500,000. Smithson is British. Today there’d be clamor among dimmocrats in Congress to spend the money on “the children” instead of wasting it on that silly “knowledge” stuff.

1856 – The Last Island hurricane strikes Louisiana, resulting in over 200 deaths. A bit over a century later, June of 1957, Audrey hits Cameron, Louisiana and kills five hundred. Hurricanes are tough on Louisiana.

1897 – German chemist Felix Hoffmann discovers an improved way of synthesizing acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin).

1944 – World War II: American forces defeat the last Japanese troops on Guam. Well, not ALL of ‘em. Sergeant Yokoi Shoichi is captured in 1972.

1953 – First Indochina War: The French Union withdraws its forces from Operation Camargue against the Viet Minh in central Vietnam. Flushed with the success of single-handedly driving the Germans from France, the French prepare to show the world their military prowess yet again.

2012 – The Marikana massacre begins near Rustenburg, South Africa, resulting in the deaths of 47 people. No longer under the control of the White minority, South Africa is able to demonstrate new levels of understanding, restraint and compassion.

1810 – Napoleon annexes Westphalia as part of the First French Empire. The Germans don’t forget this crap.

1854 – Proto-hippie Henry David Thoreau published Walden, a book about the wonders of the nobly simple life you can lead while leeching off people who actually WORK. It becomes a mainstay of American academe.

1936 – Summer Olympic Games: Games of the XI Olympiad – Jesse Owens wins his fourth gold medal at the games becoming the first American to win four medals in one Olympiad, or as Michael Phelps says, “A pretty good day’s work”.

1945 – World War II: Nagasaki is devastated when an atomic bomb, Fat Man, is dropped by the United States B-29 Bockscar. Thirty-five thousand people are killed outright, including 23,200–28,200 Japanese war workers, 2,000 Korean forced workers, and 150 Japanese soldiers. There’s your problem: Japanese named their weapons along the lines of “Cherry Blossom” and such. We called ours “Fat Man”.

1945 – The Red Army invades Japanese-occupied Manchuria. Of course they do. We made a deal with the OTHER devil to defeat Hitler, and now THAT devil gets his due. China goes communist, half of Korea comes out from under half a century of Japanese oppression and like Eastern Europe, goes communist under the pressures from Stalin, and decades later we’re still dealing with the fallout.

1965 – Singapore is expelled from Malaysia and becomes the only country to date to gain independence unwillingly. I can think of several states that would benefit from cutting loose major cities. Louisiana is one of them.

1969 – Tate–LaBianca murders: Followers of Charles Manson murder pregnant actress Sharon Tate (wife of Roman Polanski), coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Polish actor Wojciech Frykowski, men’s hairstylist Jay Sebring and recent high-school graduate Steven Parent.

1974 – As a direct result of the Watergate scandal, Richard Nixon becomes the first President of the United States to resign from office. His Vice President, Gerald Ford, becomes president. I was in a hospital in Germany. For years I had the copy of the Stars and Stripes with the the headline. The mainstream media has tried to gen up a similar run at every Republican president since then. Dimmocrats? You just as well wait for hell to freeze over before the mainstream press really comes down on a dimmocrat.

2013 – Gunmen open fire at a Sunni mosque in the city of Quetta killing at least ten people and injuring 30. Just a doctrinal discussion amongst members of the Religion of Peace™.

2014 – Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old African American male contemplating college a young black thug in Ferguson, Missouri, was shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer, sparking protests and unrest in the city.

1782 – George Washington orders the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle. It is later renamed to the more poetic Purple Heart.

1794 – The Whiskey Rebellion begins: farmers in the Monongahela Valley of Pennsylvania rebel against the federal tax on liquor and distilled drinks. Let’s see – YOU grow the grain. YOU process the grain. YOU turn the grain into something of greater value, making a profit with YOUR labor. And the government takes a chunk. No, just can’t understand why they got mad. Not at all. Taxation is theft.

1802 – Napoleon orders re-instatement of slavery on St Domingue (Haiti). Apparently all that “Enlightenment” crap only goes so far. At the end of the day, somebody still needs to cut the sugar cane.

1909 – US issues first Lincoln penny with ears of wheat on the reverse. In 1959 the new Lincoln penny is issued with the Lincoln Memorial on the back. In 2009, four designs for the reverse are issued commemorating the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, and in 2010, the shield reverse is the new design. In 1982, the Mint switched from a 95-5 copper/zinc alloy to a 97.5% zinc, copper-plated coin. The pre-’82 pennies are worth more than face value based on copper content. 182 pre-82 pennies yield a pound of copper. Copper spot price today is $6.60.

1930 – The last confirmed lynching of black people in the Northern United States occurs in Marion, Indiana; two men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, are killed. Note the word ‘black’. Lynching was also very commonly applied to white people when a portion of the local population saw the legal system failing to provide justice. Wait for it…

1933 – The Kingdom of Iraq slaughters over 3,000 Assyrians in the village of Simele. This date is recognized as Martyrs Day or National Day of Mourning by the Assyrian community in memory of the Simele massacre. Just the Religion of Peace™ doing a little proselytizing.

1940 – Churchill recognizes De Gaulle’s French government in exile. It’s easy because they’re ALL in London. De Gaulle does some ALL of his best governing while behind the skirts of Britain and America in WW II, later behind NATO…

1942 – World War II: the Battle of Guadalcanal begins – United States Marines initiate the first American offensive of the war with landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.

1947 – Thor Heyerdahl’s balsa wood raft the Kon-Tiki, smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day, 7000-km (4375-mile) journey across the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to prove that pre-historic peoples could have traveled from South America.

1955 – Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, the precursor to Sony, begins selling its first transistor radios in Japan.

1960 – Côte d’Ivoire becomes independent from France. Like the slow child of an inner city crack-whore, they never stood much of a chance.

1963 – Jacqueline Kennedy becomes first US First Lady to give birth (Patrick Kennedy) since Mrs Cleveland. We’re not sure that ‘First Lady’ Michael Michelle Obama even had a female reproductive tract.

1964 – Vietnam War: the U.S. Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving US President Lyndon B. Johnson broad war powers to deal with North Vietnamese attacks on American forces. The lyin’ dimmocrat ba*tard is going to show us how to manage a war.

1998 – Bombings at United States embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya kill approximately 212 people. Perpetrators are… guess the religion!

1806 – Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, abdicates, ending the Holy Roman Empire. It was neither holy NOR Roman for most of its history.

1890 – At Auburn Prison in New York murderer William Kemmler becomes the first person to be executed by electric chair. Ride the lightning!

1914 – World War I: First Battle of the Atlantic – two days after the United Kingdom had declared war on Germany over the German invasion of Belgium, ten German U-boats leave their base in Helgoland to attack Royal Navy warships in the North Sea.

1944 – The Warsaw Uprising occurs on August 1. It is brutally suppressed and all able-bodied men in Kraków are detained afterwards to prevent a similar uprising, the Kraków Uprising, that was planned but never carried out. The Poles foolishly thought that the Russians would press forward to help them defeat the Germans. Wrong! The Russians happily watched the Germans save them the trouble of having to kill off a lot of Poles who might’ve been troublemakers after the country was ‘liberated’.

1945 – World War II: Hiroshima is devastated when an atomic bomb, “Little Boy“, is dropped by the United States B-29 Enola Gay. Around 70,000 people are killed instantly, and some tens of thousands died in subsequent years due to burns and radiation poisoning. This and the next bomb precipitate the Japanese surrender, saving millions of lives on both sides had we been forced to invade Japan. One of those lives saved was my dad, destined to run a landing craft in the scheduled invasion.

1960 – Cuban Revolution: in response to a United States embargo, Cuba nationalizes American and foreign-owned property in the nation. Once the management of these resources is transferred to the care of the Cuban people, the little island nation leaps into a new era of prosperity, becoming the Switzerland of the Caribbean. Right? Now, since Cuba shows the same amount of ‘progress’ as American inner cities under dimmocrat control, Obama ‘normalizes’ relations with Cuba. Trump de-normalizes them a bit, later. And then we had Biden…

1965 – US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law, extending the franchise to the illiterate, stupid, and lazy, (largely dimmocrat) thereby accelerating the demise of America.

1991 – Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web. WWW debuts as a publicly available service on the Internet. He stole the idea from Al Gore.

2008 – A military junta led by Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz stages a coup d’état in Mauritania, overthrowing president Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi. Politics as usual in Africa.