1521 – Tenochtitlán (present day Mexico City) falls to conquistador Hernán Cortés ending the quaint cultural practice of ripping the beating hearts out of prisoners and slaves for the propitiation of Aztec gods. Anyone besides me ever notice how many proponents of the “Aztlan” movement affect Aztec motifs in their dress and literature?

1889 – German Ferdinand von Zeppelin patents his “Navigable Balloon”

1918 – Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW) established as a public company in Germany. What’s the difference between a BMW and a porcupine? On a porcupine, the pricks are on the outside…

1940 – World War II: Battle of Britain begins – the Luftwaffe launches Adlertag, (Eagle Day) a series of attacks on British fighter bases and radar installations. It was an “iffy” thing, too, but Hitler shifted to civilian targets, allowing the RAF to regroup, and he held back resources to prepare for the invasion of the USSR. (and we can argue about what date the Battle of Britain actually begins, too…)

1960 – The Central African Republic declares independence from France. Definitely ‘central’ and definitely ‘African’, but if they’re a ‘republic’ then I’m an Olympic gymnast.

1961 – The German Democratic Republic closes the border between the eastern and western sectors of Berlin to thwart its inhabitants’ attempts to escape to the West. Making it difficult for people to leave is not the same as making them want to stay…

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 want to do the same to Israel.

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

1812 – Dr. Joseph Lister is first surgeon to use disinfectant during surgery. Hey, guys! We can bill extra for this!

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

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 – Alençon is liberated by General Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, the first city in France to be liberated from the Nazis by French forces. There’s a million or so American, Canadian and British troops backing him up, but this is a FRENCH victory.

1952 – The Night of the Murdered Poets: 13 prominent Jewish intellectuals are murdered in Moscow. Stalin was a murderer on the order of 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.

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

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.

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 French. 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.

1909 – The Morse coded distress call “SOS” is first used by an American ship, Arapahoe, off Cape Hatteras, NC.

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.

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.

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 get ‘We’ll be more flexible after the election’.

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.

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 in Congress to spend the money on “the children” instead of wasting it on that silly “knowledge” stuff.

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.

1854 – 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.

1945 – World War II: Nagasaki is devastated when an atomic bomb, “Fat Man”, is dropped by the United States B-29 Bockscar. 39,000 people are killed outright. There’s your problem: Japanese named their weapons along the lines of “Cherry Blossom” and such. We called ours “Fat Man”.

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.

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

1588 – Anglo-Spanish War: Battle of Gravelines – The naval engagement ends, ending the Spanish Armada’s attempt to invade England.

1876 – Thomas Edison receives a patent for his mimeograph. I used to be quite the mimeograph jockey in days gone by.

1910 – The US Army installs the first tricycle landing gear on the Army’s Wright Flyer. It’s a lot easier to land than tail-dragger gear.

1929 – The German airship Graf Zeppelin begins a round-the-world flight. The entire circumnavigation (including stops) took 21 days, 5 hours and 31 minutes and covered 33,234 km (20,651 mi).

1945 – World War II: the Soviet Union declares war on Japan and begins the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation. I think they’re being opportunistic, but that’s just my crappy attitude.

1974 – President Richard Nixon, in a nationwide television address, announces his resignation from the office of the President of the United States effective noon the next day. The mainstream media (the ONLY kind in those days) is so full of their success that they try the same trick on EVERY subsequent elected Republican president. Curiously, dimmocrats are given a free pass.

1988 – The “8888 Uprising” occurs in Burma. Before it’s over, unofficial counts have thousands dead at the hands of the Burmese dictatorship. Sort of puts that “Four dead in Ohio” hippie anthem into perspective.