A Timeline of Western Civilization (History 113)

A Brief History

This article presents a timeline of Western Civilization for History 113 at Ashland University.  For each date below, please click on the date to be taken to an article covering that date’s event.

Digging Deeper

I. Introduction

1. On April 26, 1336, famed Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarca (better known as Petrarch) ascended Mont Ventoux, a mountain in the Provence region of southern France.
2. On October 8, 1480, Ivan III, Grand Prince of Moscow, stood up to the Tatars led by Akhmat Khan of the Great Horde, the successor to the “Golden Horde,” in an epic stand known as the “Great Stand on the Ugra River,” one of the high points of Russian military history.
3. On June 26, 1483, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, proclaimed himself King Richard III of England!
4. On August 22, 1485, King Richard III of England died from wounds received in the Battle of Bosworth Field, the last English King to die in battle.
5. On August 17, 1498, Cesare Borgia, the son of reigning Pope Alexander VI, resigned his office as Cardinal of the Catholic Church, becoming  the first cardinal to do so.
6. On October 30, 1501, the long history of sordid affairs involving popes and goings on in the Vatican reached a bizarre new level when Cesare Borgia, a cardinal in the Catholic Church and son of Pope Alexander VI, hosted “The Ballet of Chestnuts” at his father’s residence, the Papal Palace.
7. On December 28, 1503, the exiled Gran Maestro of Florence, Piero di Lorenzo de Medici, known as Piero the Unfortunate, drowned in the Garigliano River while trying to escape the advancing French and Spanish armies that had just defeated the Italians in a battle over the control of Naples.
8. On April 23, 1516, the region of Bavaria, a region world famous for their wonderful beer, signed on to the Reinheitsgebot, the laws in German and former Holy Roman Empire districts that regulate the ingredients and purity of beer.
9. On January 16, 1547, Ivan Vasilyevich IV was crowned Czar of All The Russias.
10. In the early 20th century, the term “Renaissance man” was first recorded in written English.
11. On June 16, 2012, Forgotten Books published The English Madrigal Composers.

II. The Spanish Golden Age

1. On June 24,1398, the Hongwu Emperor of China died.
2. On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus, the Italian adventurer sailing into the unknown in the name of the Spanish Crown, landed in the Bahamas, the landing that became known as the “discovery” of America (or, “The New World” if you prefer).
3. On March 15, 1493, Christopher Columbus made his triumphant return from his first voyage to the New World, a momentous occasion in human history and especially noteworthy for the Spanish Crown that he sailed for.
4. On March 5, 1496, in the wake of the tremendous news about the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World, King Henry VII of England granted “letters patent” to John Cabot, an Italian sailor and adventurer, along with his sons, to explore the world on behalf of the English Crown.
5. On February 3, 1509, the Arabian Sea portion of the Indian Ocean witnessed a naval battle that had centuries of effects on the global balance of power when a Portuguese fleet defeated a combined fleet of Asian warships at the Battle of Diu, India.
6. On December 27, 1512, the King and Queen of Spain issued the Laws of Burgos, a set of rules for how Spaniards were to treat Native Americans in the Caribbean islands colonized by Spain.
7. On April 30, 1517, oddly enough the day before May Day, riots in London, England broke out known as Evil May Day (alternately, Ill May Day).
8. Religious reformer Martin Luther refused to recant during his trial for heresy on April 18, 1521, but what might you not know about him?
9. On May 20, 1521, the man that would become Saint Ignatius of Loyola was seriously wounded at Pamplona in a battle between the Spanish and the French supported Navarrese during the Spanish Conquest of Navarre, the region of land on the Iberian Peninsula between France and Spain.
10. In 1529, an ecclesiastical, legatine court, presided over by a representative of the Pope, had been created to try the validity of the marriage between Henry VIII and his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
11. On November 5, 1530,  The St. Felix’s Flood destroyed the city of Reimerswaal in the Netherlands and killed over 100,000 people, making it the fifth deadliest flood in human history.
12. On September 7, 1533, in what had to ironically have been one of the most disappointing births in history, the future Queen Elizabeth I of England made her grand entrance onto the world and political stage.
13. On January 21, 1535, in the aftermath of “The Affair of the Placards,” French Protestants were burned at the stake in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.
14. On January 16, 1537, an armed insurrection took place in England, specifically in Cumberland and Westmorland, pitting unhappy Roman Catholics against the blasphemous King Henry VIII.
15. On October 24th, 1537, in a cruel twist of fate, Queen Jane Seymour died of complications following childbirth after having just 12 days earlier provided Henry VIII with his much longed-for son and heir.
16. On July 9, 1540, the marriage between Henry VIII and his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, was annulled.
17. On January 28, 1547, the 9-year-old son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, Edward VI, became King of England.
18. On June 20, 1559, King Henry II of France engaged in a jousting tournament when his opponent’s lance pierced the face guard of Henry’s helmet, sending splinters into his face, eye, and brain.
19. On July 29, 1565, Mary, Queen of Scots, married her first cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley.
20. On January 23, 1570, history of the infamous type was made when James Stewart, the Earl of Moray, was murdered by an assassin using a firearm.
21. On October 10, 1580, after a three-day siege, an English army beheaded over 600 Papal soldiers and civilians in Ireland.
22. On January 25, 1585, Walter Raleigh, an English explorer and adventurer, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I of England, perhaps because he named a region of North America “Virginia” in honor of the Virgin Queen.
23. On July 22, 1587, a detachment of English settlers landed at Roanoke Island, in what is now North Carolina, with the intention of establishing a colony.
24. On August 18, 1587, Virginia Dare was born in the Roanoke Colony in what is now North Carolina.
25. On July 19, 1588, during the Anglo-Spanish War’s Battle of Gravelines, the ultimately doomed Spanish Armada was sighted in the English Channel.
26. On July 25, 1593, Henry IV, King of France, converted from Calvanist Protestant back to the Catholicism of his birth.
27. On July 25, 1609, the excellently named British ship, Sea Venture, encountered serious storms while crossing the Atlantic Ocean en route to Virginia, and was purposely run ashore to prevent loss of the ship and passengers.
28. On March 16, 1621, only about 4 months after landing at Plymouth Rock and setting up their new colony in what was then called Plymouth Colony (Now Massachusetts and Maine) the Pilgrims that had traveled across the Atlantic on the Mayflower had their first friendly contact with a Native person, and that contact came as quite a shock!

III. The Experiences of Life in Early modern Europe and North America

1. On August 18, 1612, the trials of the “Pendle Witches” began in England.
2. On August 19, 1612, three women from Samlesbury in Lancashire, England were put on trial for witchcraft.
3. On June 2, 1692, the trial of Bridget Bishop began, starting a reign of terror in Salem, Massachusetts known as The Salem Witch Trials.
4. On September 19, 1692, Giles Corey, age 81, became a footnote in the history of America by becoming the first and only man to be “pressed” to death during legal proceedings.
5. On September 22, 1692, 8 people convicted of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials were executed by hanging.

IV. The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century

1. On January 21, 1535, in the aftermath of “The Affair of the Placards,” French Protestants were burned at the stake in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.
2. On July 29, 1565, Mary, Queen of Scots, married her first cousin Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. In her case, the only thing advantageous about this marriage, was that it ensured that the Scottish throne stay under the control of the House of Stuart by keeping it in the family so to say.
3. On October 10, 1580, after a three-day siege, an English army beheaded over 600 Papal soldiers and civilians in Ireland.
4. On August 18, 1587, Virginia Dare was born in the Roanoke Colony in what is now North Carolina.
5. On July 25, 1593, Henry IV, King of France, converted from Calvanist Protestant back to the Catholicism of  his birth.
6. On July 25, 1609, the excellently named British ship, Sea Venture, encountered serious storms while crossing the Atlantic Ocean en route to Virginia, and was purposely run ashore to prevent loss of the ship and passengers.
7. On November 6, 1632 at the Battle of Lützen during the Thirty Years’ War, the Swedes won, but their King, Gustavus Adolphus, died in the battle.
8. On September 23, 1641, off the coast of Cornwall, England, a British merchant ship named the Merchant Royal sank with her cargo of Spanish treasure.
9. On May 20, 1645, the forces of Prince Dodo (we do not make this stuff up!) of the Qing Dynasty conquered the city of Yangzhou, China, from the forces of the Southern Ming of the Hongguang Emperor.
10. On June 28, 1651, and lasting through June 30, 1651, the Battle of Berestechko was fought in the area between what is now modern Poland, modern Belarus and the modern Ukraine, between the army of Poland and the upstart Ukrainian Cossacks and Tatars.
11. On October 12, 1654, the Dutch city of Delft was the scene of a spectacular tragedy when a large gunpowder storehouse exploded, destroying much of the city and killing over 100 people.
12. On March 2, 1657, the city of Tokyo, Japan, then known as Edo, suffered a catastrophic fire that lasted 3 days and killed 100,000 Japanese people, a death toll greater than either of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
13. On April 20, 1657, a fleet of 23 British Royal Navy warships sailed boldly into the defended harbor at Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, to attack a Spanish treasure fleet anchored there.
14. On August 12, 1676, John Alderman, known as a “Praying Indian” because he was a Native American converted to Christianity, shot and killed Chief Metacomet of the Wampanoag people, thus ending the conflict known as King Phillip’s War.

V. Constitutionalism versus Absolutism

1. On January 16, 1547, Ivan Vasilyevich IV was crowned Czar of All The Russias.
2. On January 11, 1569, the first documented example of a lottery in England took place.
3. On August 1, 1620, the British ship, Speedwell, sailed from Delfshaven along with the Mayflower to bring separatists known as Pilgrims to the New World.
4. On April 5, 1614, a milestone in European and Native American relations was reached when John Rolfe, English colonist, married Pocahontas, Native American princess!
5. On December 4, 1619, 38 British settlers landed from the ship, Margaret (out of Bristol, England) along the North shore of the James River in Virginia in order to found a new town in the Virginia Colony called Berkeley Hundred.
6. On August 5, 1620, 2 small English sailing ships left Southampton Water in England on a trip to the New World, carrying a group of Puritans seeking a land where they could practice their brand of religion without interference.
7. On November 11, 1620, while anchored in Provincetown Harbor (off Cape Cod), the male passengers of the Mayflower wrote and signed a document known as The Mayflower Compact.
8. On March 22, 1621, the European (basically British) colonists of Plymouth Colony, a “Pilgrim” venture for displaced religious zealots to find a place to practice their religion in peace, signed a peace treaty with Chief (or “Sachem”) Massasoit of the Wampanoag Native American coalition of tribes that had occupied what is now Massachusetts.
9. On January 30, 1661, Oliver Cromwell, former Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, was removed from his grave and “executed” 2 years after his death!
10. On April 25, 1644, the last of the Ming Dynasty Emperors, Zhu Youjian, known as The Chongzhen Emperor, committed suicide when his armies were unable to contain a peasant rebellion of the Manchus.
11. On May 7, 1664, King Louis XIV of France began construction on the Palace of Versailles, one of the most iconic structures in the world and the symbol of the throne of France.
12. On September 2, 1666, one of history’s most memorable fires occurred in the English capital of London.
13. On August 7, 1679, a small ship named Le Griffon (The Griffon) that had been built under the direction of famous explorer of the New World René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, was towed to a point on the Niagara River from which it became the first European sailing vessel worthy of the designation “ship” to ever sail the Great Lakes.
14. On July 27, 1689, the Battle of Killiecrankie was fought between Scots and Irish Jacobites against the forces of the Williamite Government of Scotland.
15. On September 5, 1698, Czar Peter I of Russia (Peter the Great) enacted a tax on beards.
16. On November 19, 1703, one of History’s most celebrated prisoners died while still in prison, an unidentified man known to us as “The Man in the Iron Mask.”
17. On August 1, 1714, the British people dug deep, really deep, in order to select their next King when Queen Anne died.
18. On November 30, 1718, while manning a front line trench in a battle in Norway, the King of Sweden, Charles XII, was killed by either a musket ball or a grape shop ball right through his head.
19. On July 20, 1779, Tekle Giyorgis I (meaning “The Plant of Saint George”) became Emperor of Ethiopia, a member of the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia.

VI. The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment

1. St. Albertus Magnus died on November 15, 1280, after having reportedly built an android and discovered the philosopher’s stone, but according to the faithful his body did not deteriorate and according to Mary Shelley, his writings influenced mad scientist Victor Frankenstein!
2. On June 17, 1462, Vlad Tepes, also known as Vlad III The Impaler, or simply Dracula, conducted a night raid against his Turkish enemy, Mehmed II who had invaded Vlad’s land of Wallachia (Romania).
3. Ok, so we know Abraham Lincoln created the Thanksgiving holiday on this date in 1863, but what do Wallachians have to be thankful for?
4. On October 27, 1553, a Spanish scientist versed in many disciplines, Michael Servetus, was burned at the stake for heresy.
5. On February 13, 1633, Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome to stand trial before the Catholic Inquisition for heresy.
6. In 1638, the Great Council of Venice established the first known European gambling house, the Ridotto, which was not called a casino although it meets the modern definition.
7. On September 17, 1683, Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek presented a paper to the Royal Society (The President, Council and Fellows of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge) containing a description of the first scientific recognition of microbes/protozoa, a living thing he referred to as “animalcules” (single celled organisms).
8. On December 27, 1771, French engineer, Henri Pitot, died at the age of 76.
9. On April 14, 1775, Benjamin Franklin along with Benjamin Rush founded the first abolitionist society in the US, The Society For the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. 
10. On May 1, 1776, an organization known as The Order of the Illuminati was established in Ingolstadt, Upper Bavaria, founded by German philosopher Johann Adam Weishaupt (1748-1830).
11. On July 12, 1776, famous explorer English Captain James Cook set sail from Plymouth on what was to be his final voyage.
12. On December 4, 1791, the first edition of The Observer, the world’s first Sunday newspaper, was published.
13. The Scientific Revolution: The World Will Never Be Seen the Same Again!

VII. The Atlantic Revolutions

1. On July 7, 1550, chocolate is thought to have been introduced to Europe from the Americas.
2. On December 31, 1695, a tax on windows went into effect in England, which resulted in many people boarding up or bricking up their windows so that they would not be subject to the tax.
3. On July 25, 1722, a war started in Maine later referred to as “Dummer’s War,” among other names.
4. On August 29, 1728, the city of Nuuk, Greenland, was founded.
5. On November 29, 1729, the Native American Natchez people who had been living peacefully with their French colonist neighbors in the area of what is now Natchez, Mississippi rose up and attacked the French, killing 138 men, 56 children and 35 women at the French Fort Rosalie.
6. On May 29, 1733, the colonial government of New France located in Quebec City reaffirmed the right of Canadians (meaning European Canadians, citizens of New France) to own and keep slaves.
7. On January 1, 1735, Paul Revere, silversmith and patriot, was born, starting a long line of famous Americans born on the first of the year.
8. On October 23, 1739, the War of Jenkins’ Ear began when British Prime Minister Robert Walpole declared war on Spain following the exhibition in Parliament of the severed ear of a British captain allegedly maimed by Spaniards.
9. On October 9, 1740, Dutch colonial overlords on the Island of Java (now a main island in Indonesia) in the port city of Batavia (now Jakarta, capital of Indonesia) went on a mad killing spree of ethnic cleansing and murdered about 10,000 ethnic Chinese.
10. On August 24, 1743, the army of Sweden surrendered to the Russians at Helsinki, effectively ending The War of the Hats.  
11. On February 22, 1744, the British Royal Navy began an engagement with Spanish and French naval ships in a sea battle off the coast of Toulon, France in the Mediterranean Sea, a battle that was a defeat for the British and one of the most humiliating fiascos in Royal Navy history, The Battle of Toulon.
12. On September 21, 1745, the Battle of Prestonpans was fought in the  East Lothian council area of Scotland between a British army under the command of Sir John Cope and an upstart rebel army of Jacobites under the command of Charles Edward Stuart, the grandson of King James II and VII of Scotland and England.
13. On May 7, 1763, the Indian versus Colonist conflict known as Pontiac’s War in a nod to the Native American chief that had put together a confederation of Native people in an attempt to oust British colonists from the Great Lakes region, including Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois.
14. On December 1, 1768, the Danish ship Fredensborg sank in a storm off the coast of Norway on her return trip from a death filled delivery of slaves to St. Croix in the Caribbean.
15. On May 16, 1770, the 14 year old Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna of the House Habsburg-Lorraine married Louis-Auguste, Dauphin (heir to the throne) of France, House of Bourbon.
16. On June 12, 1775, British General Thomas Gage declared martial law in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
17. On October 13, 1775, an order of the Continental Congress established the Continental Navy, later better known as the United States Navy, the greatest maritime fighting force the world has ever seen.
18. On December 3, 1775, the Alfred, a merchant ship purchased by the Continental Congress was commissioned under Captain Dudley Saltonstall and became the first to fly what would become the American Flag.
19. On March 3, 1776, the Continental Navy and Continental Marines, the forces that would become the United States Navy and United States Marine Corps, conducted the first amphibious operation in US military history when a raid on Nassau in the Bahamas was conducted, known as The Raid on Nassau or sometimes called The Battle of Nassau.
20. On July 2, 1776, The Thirteen British Colonies voted to declare themselves independent from the crown.
21. On July 4, 1776, The United States Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress.
22. On October 11, 1779, Polish cavalry officer and American Brigadier General, Casimir Pulaski, died of wounds incurred during the Battle of Savannah (Georgia) during the American Revolutionary War.
23. On March 8, 1782, people once again proved how hate can lead to innocent lives began violently taken when Ninety-six Native Americans were massacred at Gnadenhutten, Ohio, the first European settlement in Ohio.
24. On October 2, 1789, President George Washington sent to the States for ratification a list of Amendments to the Constitution, a list we now refer to as “The Bill of Rights.”
25. On January 2, 1791, Lenape and Wyandot Native Americans massacred 12 to 14 White settlers near what is now Stockport, Morgan County, Ohio.
26. On April 25, 1792, a major step in the history of execution devices was made when a “highwayman” (robber) became the first victim of the Guillotine.
27. On September 11, 1792, in the midst of the confusion of the French Revolution, the crown jewels, which included the fabulous Hope Diamond (Le Bleu de France), were stolen.
28. On January 21, 1793, King Louis XVI of France was convicted of treason and taken to the guillotine where he was promptly beheaded, just one of the many instances of famous beheadings in a long history of human violence, both intentional and accidental, both by the state as an execution or by criminal action, and even by our animal “friends.”
29. On October 5, 1793, Christian Europe was rocked by the Revolutionary Government of France declaring the disestablishment (or dechristianization) of France, a move specifically intended to remove the influence of the Catholic Church upon France and the French people.
30. On November 10, 1793, the government of revolutionary France celebrated the “Festival of Reason”as it rejected traditional religion (mostly Catholicism in France) and inserted a philosophy known as the “Cult of Reason” as the national “religion.”
31. On June 26, 1794, the army of the First Republic of France (the result of the French Revolution) made the first use of balloons in combat at the Battle of Fleurus against the forces of the First Coalition.
32. On July 27, 1794, Maximilien Robespierre, a leader of the French Revolution was arrested, later to be denounced and executed by a Revolutionary Tribunal.

VIII. Napoleon

1. On August 30, 1792, Napoleon Bonaparte was appointed a captain in the French Army, a major stepping stone on the path that eventually resulted in his becoming Emperor of the French.
2. On October 5, 1795, the man that would be the subject of more books than any other human being in history (except Jesus Christ), Napoleon Bonaparte, made his entrance on the French political stage and into prominence when he put down a rebellion against the National Convention in Paris with what he called “a whiff of grapeshot.”
3. On January 7, 1797, the first use of the Red White and Green tricolor Italian flag was seen in use by the Cisalpine Republic (formerly Milan) after Napoleon Bonaparte’s conquering of that region in 1796.
4. On August 2, 1798, during the French Revolutionary Wars, the French fleet supporting then General Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt was defeated soundly by the British at the Battle of the Nile.
5. On July 15, 1799, French soldiers in Egypt discovered The Rosetta Stone, which is inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy V Epiphanes.
6. On December 24, 1800, The “Plot of the rue Saint-Nicaise”, also known as the “Machine Infernale Plot, ” failed to kill Napoleon Bonaparte, then the First Consul of France, the de facto dictator of the French Republic.
7. On April 21, 1802, a band of Wahhabis from Najd in central Saudi Arabia attacked the central Iraqi city of Karbala, with the purpose of punishing those Iraqi Muslims for failing to follow the ultra-conservative religious teachings of Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328), a Sunni Muslim scholar who had taught a “renewal” of the Islamic faith apparently at odds with the brand of Islam practiced in Karbala, which was of the Shia variety.
8. On April 26, 1802, Napoleon Bonaparte signed a general amnesty for those members of the émigrés of the French Revolution, those royalists and others opposed to the French Revolution that had fled France.
9. On May 28, 1802, 400 former slaves revolting against the reinstatement of slavery by the French under Napoleon Bonaparte in the Caribbean department of Guadalupe blew themselves up rather than surrender to the French.
10. Contrary to Pat Robertson’s beliefs, on November 18, 1803, Haitians won their independence, not with the Devil’s assistance, but with their victory at The Battle of Vertières, the last major battle of the Haitian Revolution.
11. On February 16, 1804, the U.S. Navy conducted a stunningly audacious raid to deny the enemy the use of an American warship by concocting a ruse that allowed American sailors into the jaws of the enemy harbor to sink a captured American frigate.
12. On March 21, 1804, the Code Napoleon became the law of France, and went on to influence legal reforms in many other countries.
13. On July 18, 1806, a powder magazine exploded accidentally at Birgu, Malta, creating massive damage to the military and civilian infrastructure nearby and killing at least 200 people.
14. On September 2, 1807, the British Royal Navy and Army bombarded the port city of Copenhagen, Denmark, using fire bombs and phosphorus incendiary rockets in order to prevent neutral Denmark from deciding to align with Napoleonic France and turn over the use of its war fleet to the French and their allies.
15. On July 5, 1809, the forces of the French Empire (and her allies) fought the forces of the Austrian Empire (and her allies) at Wagram, Austria, an enormous battle that cost both sides a combined 80,000 casualties and was fought between over 300,000 soldiers fielding over 1000 pieces of artillery, making it perhaps the largest battle in European history up to its time and also the bloodiest military engagement of the entire Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars thus far.
16. On January 10, 1810, Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France, divorced Josephine, Empress of France, the only woman Napoleon ever really loved.
17. On October 23, 1812, the mad General Malet seized control of the police of Paris and attempted a coup d’état against Napoleon‘s Empire.
18. From August 29-30, 1813, The Battle of Kulm was fought near the town Kulm (Chlumec) and the village Přestanov in northern Bohemia, during the War of the Sixth Coalition, part of the Napoleonic Wars.
19. On December 30, 1813, during the War of 1812, arson-happy British troops set the small city of Buffalo, New York ablaze as a means of punishing the upstart Americans.
20. On February 26, 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte, aka Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, escaped from his forced exile on the island of Elba and made his way back to France, seeking to regain his throne.

IX. Imperialism versus Nationalism

1. On June 4, 1784, Élisabeth Thible became the first woman to fly in an untethered hot air balloon, soaring for a 4 kilometer trip that took 45 minutes and reached perhaps 5000 feet above the ground, making her the world’s first female aviatrix.
2. On March 14, 1794, American inventor Eli Whitney patented his greatest invention.
3. On May 14, 1816, romantically linked English authors Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley arrived at Geneva, Switzerland.
4. On December 24, 1818, the day Christians celebrate as “Christmas Eve,” the first ever performance of the carol, “Silent Night,” was presented in Oberndorf, Austria at the church of St. Nikolaus.
5. On February 6, 1820, The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America (better known as the American Colonization Society) sent the first 86 African Americans back to Africa to form a new country of freed slaves and free born African Americans, Liberia.
6. On March 6, 1836, the most celebrated defeat in American history ended in a massacre!
7. On August 19, 1839, the government of France announced that the “Daguerreotype process,” an invention of Louis Daguerre as an early form of photography, would be available for free to the entire world.
8. On January 29, 1845, Edgar Allan Poe, the Baltimore writer of such classics as “The Telltale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Goldbug,” published his famous poem, “The Raven,” certainly one of if not the most renowned poem in American literature, and ranks among the most famous of poems.
9. On October 25, 1854, the United Kingdom, the Ottoman Empire, and the French Empire fought against Russia in the Battle of Balaclava, which included the famous (and disastrous) “Charge of the Light Brigade”.
10. On August 20, 1858, naturalist Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, the change of organisms over time through mutation and natural selection, in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London.
11. On January 9, 1861, the State of Mississippi seceded from the United States of America, the second of the slave holding states to do so.
12. On May 5, 1862, the Mexican Army defeated the French Army at the Battle of the Puebla (Puebla City) during the Second French Intervention in Mexico, a marvelous victory for the Mexicans over a superior French force, a victory celebrated each year on May 5th, or in Español, Cinco de Mayo.
13. On October 15, 1863, The H. L. Hunley, a Confederate (the South!) submarine, sank during a test, killing its inventor and namesake, Horace L. Hunley.
14. On February 17, 1864, the CSS H.L. Hunley became the first submarine to sink an enemy warship, even though it had itself sunk twice before!
15. On May 9, 1865, the American Civil War ended, or did it?
16. On November 10, 1865, the long sad saga of the Camp Sumter prisoner of war camp located in Andersonville, Georgia finally came to a conclusion of sorts when the Camp Commandant, Confederate Major Henry Wirz was hanged for the crimes of conspiracy and murder for his terrible treatment of Union soldiers held captive at the camp popularly known as “Andersonville.”
17. On July 28, 1866, Helen Beatrix Potter was born in London, England, to a moderately well to do family of Unitarians.
18. On November 10, 1871, Welsh-American journalist Henry Morton Stanley finally met the man he had come so far to see, the missionary Rev. David Livingstone, prompting Stanley to blandly state, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
19. On December 26, 1871, the famous opera writing duo of Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated on Thespis, the first of many operas the much beloved pair worked together on.
20. On March 5, 1872, George Westinghouse patented the air brake, a system for use with railroad trains.
21. On March 7, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for his invention he called the “telephone.”
22. On January 23, 1879, the British Army in South Africa ended its second major battle in as many days against Zulu warriors known as Impis in the British  war to seize Zululand.
23. On June 1, 1879, the so-called “Napoleon IV” died in the unlikely service of the British Army fighting Zulu warriors in what is now South Africa.
24. On January 27, 1880, Thomas Edison patented the incandescent light bulb, the first truly commercially viable electric light bulb, but certainly not the first light bulb!
25. On January 25, 1881, 2 of the great names in the annals of inventions teamed up to form the Oriental Telephone Company.
26. On April 28, 1881, the notorious outlaw and gunman known as Billy the Kid escaped from his jail cell where he was being held after he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
27. On January 29, 1886, Karl Benz, a German engineer, became the first person to patent a successful gasoline powered automobile.
28. On November 5, 1895, an unlikely candidate from Rochester, New York, became the first American to patent an automobile.
29. On August 21, 1897, Ransom Eli Olds founded the car company that bore his name, Oldsmobile.
30. On February 15, 1898, at 9:40 p.m., the US Navy had one of its darkest and yet most memorable days when the armored cruiser USS Maine ACR-1 blew up and sank while docked in Havana Harbor, Cuba.
31. On February 1, 1901, Clark Gable was born in Cadiz, Ohio, and would go on to movie greatness earning the nickname, “The King of Hollywood.”
32. On July 25, 1909, French pilot Louis Bleriot made the first ever heavier than air powered flight across the English Channel in his Type XI monoplane, beating out several rival aviators that were competing for their place in history and also a nice prize of £1000 offered by The Daily Mail, a British newspaper.
33. On September 20, 1911, the RMS Olympic, the first of three enormous British luxury liners of the Olympic-class, collided with the British cruiser HMS Hawke.
34. On January 25, 1915, telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call spanning the continental United States, placing a call from New York to his assistant, Thomas Watson in San Francisco.

X. World War I

1. On August 22, 1864, the first of 4 treaties governing the conduct of war was signed in Geneva, Switzerland, a pact called “The First Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field.”
2. On September 24, 1884, Hugo Schmeisser was born in Jena, in what was then the German Empire.
3. On March 17, 1891, a civilian ocean liner, the steamship SS Utopia of the Anchor Line ran into the moored battleship, HMS Anson in Gibraltar Bay, causing the ill-fated steamer to sink taking 562 of the 880 passengers to Davy Jones Locker!
4. On November 1, 1893, a small force of British soldiers defeated a much larger force of African warriors at the Battle of Bembezi in the South of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the First Matabele War.
5. On November 28, 1893, the women of New Zealand became the first women in the world to vote in a national election.
6. On June 14, 1900, the United States expanded by officially adding the territory of Hawaii to is growing empire.
7. On October 11, 1910, with aviation still in its infancy, President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt took a flight in a Wright Brothers airplane piloted by Archibald Hoxsey, a former auto mechanic from Illinois.
8. On October 15, 1910, the non-rigid airship, America, set off from Atlantic City, New Jersey on the first attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean by humans in a powered aircraft.
9. On October 23, 1911, during the Italo-Turkish War, history saw the first use of airplanes for warfare purposes when an Italian airplane flew over Turkish positions as the first aerial reconnaissance mission in history.
10. On September 23, 1913, future fighter pilot combat hero Eugène Adrien Roland Georges Garros of France made an aviation historic first by becoming the first pilot to fly all the way across the Mediterranean Sea, flying from St. Raphael, France, to Bizerte, Tunisia.
11. On August 12, 1914, World War I was merely 2 weeks old and apparently the German and Belgian armies did not yet realize the futility of using mounted cavalry in an age of rapid firing repeating rifles and automatic machine guns.
12. On August 17, 1914, the World War I Battle of Stallupönen was fought between the Imperial German army and the Imperial Russian army near Nesterov, Russia.
13. On August 25, 1914, during the opening stages of World War I German soldiers burned the Library of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, destroying a treasure of ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance works.
14. On December 24, 1914, exactly 100 years ago today, British and German soldiers facing each other across No Man’s Land in the trenches of World War I confounded their superiors by leaving their trenches and walking out to meet and greet their enemies in the spirit of Christmas brotherhood.
15. On January 24, 1915, the British Royal Navy Grand Fleet fought a sizable naval engagement against elements of the German Imperial High Seas Fleet in the North Sea at an area called Dogger Bank.
16. On January 31, 1915, the German Army, in violation of the 1899 Hague Declaration Concerning Asphyxiating Gases, launched 18,000 artillery shells containing xylyl bromide tear gas against Russian positions, the first truly large scale use of poison gas in combat.
17. On March 18, 1915, the Allied naval operation at the Dardanelles, the straits that provide entry to the Black Sea from the Mediterranean, ended in one of the worst defeats of the British Royal Navy when 3 battleships were lost and another 4 capital ships were seriously damaged.
18. On April 22, 1915, the Imperial German Army used chlorine gas in large quantities for the first time at Ypres, in Belgium, targeting French colonial troops.
19. On July 25, 1915, the somewhat appropriately named Lanoe Hawker became the first British aviator to shoot down 3 enemy planes in 1 day, earning himself the Victoria Cross.
20. August 12, 1915 marks the date of a story – which is not actually just a simple story – which tells of the vanishing of a group of British soldiers during the now infamous Gallipoli campaign, World War One.
21. On September 30, 1915, the aviation world achieved a milestone of sorts when the first incident of a combat airplane being shot down by ground fire took place over Serbia.
22. On July 1, 1916, the five month Battle of the Somme began with horrific results for the British Army, leaving 19,240 men dead on the battlefield and another 36, 230 wounded on lonely the first day!
23. On October 16, 1916, Margaret Sanger (nee Higgins), nurse, writer, and sexual educator opened the first family planning (birth control) clinic in the United States.
24. On November 21, 1916, the new and improved version of the Titanic became the largest ship sunk during World War I!
25. On September 23, 1917, Imperial Germany lost one of its greatest flying aces when Leutnant Werner Voss was shot down and killed over West Flanders, outnumbered 8 to 1 and refusing to run!
26. On October 26, 1917, a force of only 100 German Army soldiers led by Oberleutnant (First Lieutenant in American talk) Erwin Rommel took Mt. Matajur from an Italian defensive force of 7000 men, a key part of the German/Austro-Hungarian victory at the Battle of Caporetto (aka The 12^th Battle of the Isonzo).
27. On October 31, 1917, during World War I, the war that brought the mass use of machine guns, armored vehicles, airplanes and poison gas into warfare, a singular battle stands out as an anachronism when the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force sent infantry and cavalry units against the Yildirim Army Group (Ottoman Turks and Germans) defending the town of Beersheba in the Negev region of what is now Israel.
28. On January 9, 1918, in Southern Arizona near the border with Mexico at a place called Bear Valley, one of the last battles of the American Indian Wars (1540-1924) was fought.
29. On January 31, 1918, Britain’s Royal Navy “fought” a battle with itself in the Scottish Firth of Forth near the Isle of May, a series of naval accidents in the dark and the mist that led to the loss of 104 British sailors killed.
30. On April 20, 1918, Baron Manfred von Richtofen shot down the last enemy airplanes of his short but spectacular career.
31. On April 24, 1918, at the Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux in Northern France, 3 British tanks met 3 German tanks in the first known instance of tank vs. tank combat in military history.
32. On October 8, 1918, United States Corporal Alvin C. York killed 28 German soldiers and captured 132 in France’s Argonne Forest during World War I making York one of America’s most decorated soldiers of the war.
33. On October 8, 1918, 2^nd Lt. Ralph Talbot of Massachusetts earned the coveted Medal of Honor, the highest American military honor.
34. On November 11, 1918, Germany signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car in the forest of Compiègne, France, officially ending fighting at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day in the eleventh month, but fighting did not actually end at that exact time and nor did the war!
35. On October 7, 1925, baseball great and Hall of Fame pitcher Christy Mathewson died of tuberculosis brought on by a weakening of his respiratory system due to accidental exposure to poison gas during World War I.

XI. The Fall of the Russian Empire and the Rise of the Soviet Union

1. On May 11, 1891, while paying a State visit to Lake Biwa, Otsu, Japan, heir to the throne of the Russian Empire Tsesarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich (the future Czar Nicholas II, Emperor of Russia) was attacked with a sword by one of the Japanese policemen escorting him, wounding the Tsesarevich.
2. On February 8, 1904, the Japanese Navy started the Russo-Japanese War by conducting a sneak attack against the Russian naval fleet at anchor at Port Arthur, Manchuria, a key strategic Pacific port then under the administration of Imperial Russia.
3. On December 29, 1916, the Russian known as “Rasputin,” or “The Mad Monk,” was murdered by a group of Russian noblemen, finally dying the next day after surviving being poisoned with cyanide and shot three times, and ultimately having to be drowned.
4. On December 28, 1918, Constance Markievicz, while an inmate in Holloway prison, London, England, made history as the first woman elected to British House of Commons as a Member of Parliament (MP).
5. On June 21, 1919, the reactionary establishment of the city of Winnipeg, the province of Manitoba, and the federal government of Canada overreacted to a peaceful labor strike and attacked striking workers (largely war veterans) with the Royal Northwest Mounted Police.
6. On October 2, 1919, First Lady of the United States, Edith Wilson, the wife of President Woodrow Wilson, unofficially ran the U.S. government following her husband’s (then President Woodrow Wilson’s) life-changing stroke.
7. On August 25, 1920, the Polish army prevailed over the Russian-Soviet army at The Battle of Warsaw, actually a series of battles that the Poles would later call their victory “a miracle.”
8. On August 28, 1921, the Red Army disbanded the Ukrainian Makhnovshchina, an anarchist free Ukrainian territory in the Ukraine.
9. “Winter Dreams” is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald that first appeared in Metropolitan Magazine in December 1922, and was collected in All the Sad Young Men in 1926.
10. On June 18, 1923, an American legend was born when the first Checker Taxi Cab hit the street in Chicago, the product of a Russian American Jewish immigrant named Morris Markin.
11. On April 19, 1927, vaudevillian and stage actress Mae West was sentenced to 10 days in jail for “corrupting the morals of youth!”
12. On September 5, 1927, long before he became famous for his feature film cartoons and amusement parks, Walt Disney’s production of Trolley Troubles, an animated cartoon featuring the character Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, was released by Universal Pictures.
13. On August 23, 2007, the bodies of the remaining Romanov family members were found near Yekaterinburg, Russia, the remains being mere skeletons.

XII. Fascism and Nazism

1. On November 8, 1923, a World War I decorated disaffected and discontent German veteran led his Nazi Party followers in an unsuccessful coup against the German Wiemar government, an event known to history as The Munich Beer Hall Putsch.
2. On January 25, 1924, Chamonix in the Southeastern part of France hosted the first iteration of the modern Olympic Winter Games.
3. On January 10, 1927, Fritz Lang’s classic film Metropolis was released in Germany.
4. On October 24, 1929, the New York Stock Exchange suffered the catastrophic day of losses known as Black Thursday, the day that for all intents and purposes started the Great Depression.
5. On February 25, 1932, Adolf Hitler applied for German citizenship.
6. On February 26, 1935, British scientist Dr. Robert Watson-Watt performed a demonstration that was to lead directly to the development of radar by the British, a concept long anticipated by previous scientists and first demonstrated by German inventor Christian Hülsmeyer in 1904.
7. On April 8, 1935, the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 went into effect, and as a byproduct created the Works Progress Administration (later renamed the Work Projects Administration).
8. On July 24, 1935, the heat wave aspect of the Great Dust Bowl hit its high point, with temperatures soaring in the Midwest and on the Plains, cities such as Chicago reaching 109 °F and Milwaukee hitting 104 °F.

XIII. World War II and the Holocaust

1. On August 3, 1936, James Cleveland “Jesse” Owens  won the 100-meter dash at the Berlin Olympics and blazed into the record books.
2. On December 21, 1936, the German concept of a “schnellbomber” that could outrun most fighter planes took to the air when the prototype Junkers Ju-88 made its first flight, achieving a speed of 360 mph.
3. On May 7, 1937, while Europe watched the prelude to World War II develop during the Spanish Civil War, the German “volunteer” Condor Legion was deployed with the Heinkel He-51 biplane fighter, an anachronism already obsolete when it was built.
4. On December 12, 1937, the USS Panay, a gunboat afloat on the Yangtze River near the city of Nanking (now called Nanjing) was attacked by Japanese military aircraft and sunk, with the loss of 3 American lives.
5. On June 11, 1939, a picnic at which hot dogs were served helped re-establish the political closeness between the United States and Great Britain and introduced the traditionally American food to an international public.
6. On August 25, 1939, in a move meant to dissuade Germany from attacking Poland, the United Kingdom (Britain) signed a military alliance treaty with Poland which promised that if either were attacked, the other would come to their assistance.
7. On September 1, 1939, US Army General George C. Marshall, Jr., was appointed as the Chief of Staff of the United States Army.
8. On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland under false pretenses, staging a phony border “incident” that gave them a claim of legitimacy.
9. On May 10, 1040, the United Kingdom invaded Iceland without the permission of the government of Iceland. With World War II in a dire phase for the British, German occupation of Iceland would have been catastrophic to cross Atlantic shipping, the lifeblood of Britain so despite Iceland’s neutrality, the British occupied the small country as a preventative measure.
10. On August 16, 1940, Flight Lieutenant Nicolson of the British Royal Air Force flew his Hawker Hurricane fighter into history during combat over England against the German Luftwaffe when he continued to fight an aerial battle despite his plane being on fire from 4 cannon shells and multiple machine gun bullets striking it from an enemy Me-110.
11. On August 19, 1940, the B-25 Mitchell was flown for the first time.
12. On August 20, 1940, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the war-torn United Kingdom, delivered one of his most stirring wartime speeches, one that hailed the efforts of the Royal Air Force (RAF), known from then on and forever after as “The Few.”
13. On October 7, 1940, the Director of the Far East Section of the Office of Naval Intelligence, Lt. Cmdr. Arthur McCollum, sent an infamous memo up his chain of command that seems to recommend the United States provoke Japan into attacking US forces, thus allowing the US an excuse to enter World War II (WWII) in spite of President Roosevelt’s promise to stay out of the war.
14. On November 5, 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to his third term as US President, and would win yet another presidential election in 1944, ending up serving a record 12+ years as US President.
15. On December 14, 1940, at the University of California at Berkeley, atomic scientists first isolated the element Plutonium, a radioactive element with a designation of Pu-238 on the atomic chart of the elements (also known as the Periodic Chart), Element #94 for those keeping track.
16. On January 6, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) delivered perhaps his greatest speech, known as the “Four Freedoms Speech.”
17. On March 25, 1941, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia joined the Axis Powers when they signed the Tripartite Pact, siding with the Germans, Italians and Japanese against most of the rest of the world in World War II.
18. On September 4, 1941, US Navy destroyer USS Greer was attacked by German submarine (U-boat) U-652, and returned the compliment by depth charging the German sub.
19. On November 14, 1941, British Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal sunk after being torpedoed by a German U-boat (submarine) the day before.
20. Most Americans know that on December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a massive aerial surprise attack against U.S. military forces on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, mainly at Pearl Harbor.
21. On December 7, 1941, a date that US President Franklin Roosevelt said “would live in infamy,” the Japanese navy attacked the naval and air bases on Oahu, Hawaii, most notably at Pearl Harbor, in a surprise attack (sneak attack in the vernacular of the time) that devastated the American Pacific Fleet.
22. On December 10, 1941, Colin Purdie Kelly, Jr. became the first in a long line of American heroes that flew the great Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, a pairing of the greatest bomber of World War II and the greatest bomber pilots.
23. On December 20, 1941, the American Volunteer Group, better known by its nickname, the Flying Tigers, engaged in its first air-to-air combat when its fighters encountered 10 Japanese “Sally” bombers.
24. On February 24, 1942, the government passed a law under the “War Measures Act” allowing the government to relocate and intern citizens of Japanese origin.
25. On May 12, 1942, the German Kriegsmarine submarine, U-507, a Type IXC boat, sank an American tanker, the SS Virginia, with one of its deadly torpedoes while the tanker was in the mouth of the Mississippi River, an affront to the United States bringing deadly danger to shipping right to America’s doorstep.
26. On May 31, 1942, the Japanese Imperial Navy commenced an attack on the harbor (harbour for you British types) at Sydney, Australia, using 3 Ko-hyoteki-class midget submarines.
27. On June 4, 1942, the Battle of Midway began with Admiral Nagumo of the Imperial Japanese Navy ordering an airstrike on the US held island of Midway in the Central Pacific.
28. On August 7, 1942, U.S. Marines landed on an island few Americans had ever heard of, Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.
29. On August 7, 1942, U.S. Marines landed on the island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands chain, initiating the first US ground offensive of World War II.
30. On August 16, 1942, while on routine anti-submarine patrol, the 2 man crew of US Navy Blimp L-8 disappeared without a trace.
31. On September 9, 1942, the mainland of the United States was bombed by a Japanese military aircraft when a float plane dropped incendiary bombs on Oregon near Brookings.
32. On November 27, 1942, the French Navy under the direction of Admiral Auphan scuttled a large part of the French ships and submarines in port at Toulon, France, in order to keep these valuable assets out of the hands of the German Kriegsmarine (navy).
33. On January 14, 1943, the Japanese Navy successfully evacuated the remaining Japanese land forces from the Island of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands of the Pacific Ocean.
34. On February 19, 1943, the Battle of Kasserine Pass started, the first major American engagement of ground forces with the Axis forces in the Western Theater of World War II.
35. On February 27, 1943, a most unusual event took place in Berlin, Germany, the capital city of the Third Reich, a government possibly remembered more for its virulent anti-Semitism than any other trait.
36. On August 2, 1943, the US Navy patrol torpedo boat, PT-109, commanded by Lieutenant John F. Kennedy, was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer in the Solomon Islands.
37. On August 31, 1943, the Buckley Class destroyer, USS Harmon DE-678 was commissioned, the first American Navy ship named after an African-American person.
38. On September 3, 1943, the Allies (mainly the United States and the United Kingdom) invaded mainland Europe, thus living up to the promise to Soviet Premier Josef Stalin to invade mainland Europe in 1943.
39. On October 14, 1943, the United States Army Air Force conducted one of the most catastrophic bombing raids in history, catastrophic for the bombers, that is!
40. On October 22, 1943, 569 bombers of the Royal Air Force dropped firebombs on the German city of Kassel, population around 240,000, killing 10,000 and making another 150,000 homeless.
41. On October 26, 1943, the aptly named Dornier Do 335 Pfeil, or Arrow, made its first flight.
42. On January 3, 1944, America’s leading fighter Ace of that time, Marine Major Pappy Boyington, was shot down and taken captive by the Japanese.
43. On June 16, 1944 (exact date is unknown, said to be sometime in the Spring of 1944, so we chose this date), American Army Air Force pilot William Overstreet, Jr. was flying his North American P-51 Mustang in pursuit of a German Messerschmitt Bf-109 when the 2 fighter planes amazed onlookers on the ground by flying right under the lower arches of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France.
44. On September 4, 1944, the British 11th Armoured Division, part of the larger armies on the European continent commanded by Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery, liberated the Belgian city of Antwerp, one more city liberated of the German oppressors by the victorious Allies, many of whom were ably led by the dashing Monty.
45. On October 20, 1944, Army and Naval forces of the United States landed on the Philippine island of Leyte in an amphibious assault to reclaim the islands from the Japanese who had taken the Philippines from the US and Philippine forces led by General Douglas MacArthur in 1942.
46. On October 21, 1944, Japan began their notorious kamikaze attacks during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, first striking HMAS Australia.
47. On November 1, 1944, the first of what would end up to be thousands of missions by the famous Boeing B-29 Superfortress flew over Tokyo, Japan on a reconnaissance mission, the first allied aircraft over Tokyo since the 1942 Doolittle Raid.
48. On January 26, 1945, the heroic tale of America’s bravest soldier (according to me) reached its zenith when Audie Murphy performed the incredible feats of military courage and effectiveness that earned him the Medal of Honor.
49. On February 13, 1945, bombers from the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the American Air Force (USAAF)struck the eastern German city of Dresden, a city so beautiful it was once known as the “Florence on the Elbe,” incinerating tens of thousands of people.
50. On February 19, 1945, the most cracked battle in history of the United States Marine Corp (USMC) began with 30,000 Marines hitting a beach.
51. On February 19, 1945, 30,000 US Marines landed on the Japanese held island of Iwo Jima, part of the Volcano Islands chain.
52. On February 21, 1945, while supporting the US invasion of Iwo Jima in the Pacific, the US aircraft carrier USS Saratoga CV-3 was struck by 3 Japanese suicide planes known as Kamikaze.
53. On March 19, 1945, the Essex class aircraft carrier USS Franklin while on station off the coast of Japan, was struck by a Japanese dive bomber flying  virtually suicidal mission through intense defenses, causing massive damage, but not sinking the ship.
54. On April 29, 1945, deep below the streets of Berlin in his “Führerbunker,” German Führer Adolf Hitler, beleaguered and possibly the most despised man in the world, married his long time mistress Eva Braun and designated Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor to lead the Third Reich, what Germany had labeled its current government.
55. On May 2, 1945, an American Artillery Battalion intercepted a death march of concentration camp inmates being taken from the Dachau concentration camp to the Austrian border, in turn saving the lives of hundreds of the starving inmates.
56. On August 9, 1945, a Boeing B-29 bomber named “Bockscar” dropped the second atomic bomb on Japan, incinerating 39,000 people within seconds.

XIV. Consequences of World War II

1. On December 13, 1937, Japanese blood-lust reached unprecedented proportions when they massacred over 250,000 Chinese in Nanking!
2. On March 22, 1943, a battalion of military police fighting for Germany was attacked by Byelorussian partisans near the village of Khatyn.
3. On December 28, 1943, the Soviet secret police, NKVD, under the direction of its commander Lavrentiy Beria, began a 3 day operation called Operation Ulusy to forcibly remove 93,139 people of the Kalmyk nationality to forced labor camps in the remote areas of Siberia.
4. On April 10, 1944, 2 Jewish inmates of the German concentration camp at Auschwitz, in Poland, escaped.
5. On August 12, 1944, German Nazi troops finished off a massacre of between 40,000 and 50,000 Poles, many of them Jewish.
6. On October 21, 1944, the Soviet Red Army was steamrolling the German army on the Eastern Front, reaching the town of Nemmersdorf, where the heartless Soviets massacred at least 74 ethnic Germans, and for good measure slaughtered another 50 French and Belgians being held by the Germans as POW’s.
7. On May 23, 1945, notorious head of the dreaded German SS (Schutzstaffel), Heinrich Himmler, committed suicide by taking poison rather than face execution by hanging.
8. On December 13, 1945, Irma Ida Ilse Grese, age 22, was executed in accordance with her sentence of death for the crime of committing War Crimes  (Crimes Against Humanity) for her service as a concentration camp guard at Ravensbruck and Auschwitz Nazi death camps during World War II.
9. On May 10, 1946, at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico the US Army made the first successful launch of a German designed V-2 rocket, the same sort of weapon the Germans had used to terrorize England and Holland during World War II.
10. On this date, December 9, 1946, the “Subsequent Nuremberg Trials” began with the “Doctors’ Trial”, prosecuting doctors alleged to be involved in human experimentation.
11. On July 6, 1947, the Avtomat Kalashnikova went into production by the Soviet Union, hence the name AK-47.
12. On January 7, 1948, a Kentucky National Guard pilot, a World War II veteran, attempted to intercept a UFO along with 3 other US F-51 Mustang fighters.
13. On April 3, 1948, President Harry S Truman (there is no period after the “S” because it was just an initial, not standing for a name!) signed legislation authorizing $5 billion for the Marshall Plan, a foreign aid bill championed by former five star general George C. Marshall who was Secretary of State at the time.
14. On April 9, 1948, events in Palestine brought to the forefront the adage that “One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist.”
15. On September 15, 1948, a North American F-86 Sabre flew at a world record 671 miles per hour.
16. On March 8, 1949, the long and convoluted journey of Mildred Gillars temporarily came to an end.
17. On August 29, 1949, nuclear scientists in the Soviet Union (USSR) successfully tested their first atomic bomb, an implosion type device they called “First Lightning.”
18. On June 25, 1950, over 75,000 North Korean soldiers flooded into the Republic of Korea, on the southern end of the Korean peninsula.
19. On November 8, 1950, early in the Korean War, a U.S. Lockheed F-80 Shooting Star, America’s first operational jet fighter, flown by U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Russell Brown, shot down a Soviet-built MiG-15 piloted by a North Korean pilot, in the first air-to-air combat between jet planes in aviation history.
20. On November 1, 1951, the US Army conducted nuclear tests in the Nevada desert that included a diabolical exercise in which 6500 US Army troops were exposed to the effects of a nearby nuclear detonation and its associated radiation.
21. On May 25, 1953, the United States Army conducted a live nuclear artillery test shot, the only time the US ever conducted such a test.
22. On September 30, 1954, the American submarine, USS Nautilus, was commissioned for service as the first ever nuclear powered warship.
23. On December 2, 1954, the United States and the Republic of China, known to us today more familiarly as “Taiwan,” signed a mutual defense treaty that was really just the US promising to ensure the integrity of the island of Taiwan which claimed to be the “legitimate” government of China against any invasion or aggression from mainland/Communist China or perhaps the USSR.
24. On October 29, 1955, the Soviet Navy of the USSR suffered yet another in a long line of what we call “Naval Oops Moments” when the battleship Novorossiysk struck a World War II era naval mine and sank.
25. On May 1, 1960, CIA employee Gary Powers was flying a reconnaissance mission over the Soviet Union when his high flying top secret U-2 spyplane was shot down by an SA-2 surface to air missile.
26. On January 17, 1961, outgoing President Dwight David Eisenhower (better known as “Ike”) made his farewell address to the nation, a tradition of outgoing Presidents since George Washington left office.
27. On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut (their version of astronaut) was sent into orbit around the Earth aboard Vostok 1, becoming the first human being to “slip the surly bonds of Earth” and voyage where no man had gone before, Outer Space.
28. On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the hydrogen bomb Tsar Bomba over an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean in the North of Russia; at 50 megatons of yield, it is still the largest explosive device ever detonated, nuclear or otherwise by humankind!
29. On November 29, 1961, the US space agency, NASA, launched Mercury Atlas 5, the first mission to send an American into orbit around the Earth in space.
30. On May 31, 1962, the nation of Israel hanged Nazi Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann, one of history’s most evil people, for war crimes.
31. On August 22, 1962, the French ultra-nationalist terror group known as the OAS (Organisation armée secrete, which means “Secret Army Organization”) made a famous attempt on the life of Charles de Gaulle, president of France.
32. On November 4, 1962, the US conducted the last event of Operation Fishbowl, a series of nuclear blasts conducted at high altitude.
33. On May 2, 1964, before even the Gulf of Tonkin Incident that heralded major US involvement in the Vietnam War, a Viet Cong or North Vietnamese frogman placed an explosive charge against the hull of the USS Card (USNS Card at the time of sinking), blowing a hole in the ship and sinking 48 feet as she lay berthed at the dock at Saigon.
34. On January 26, 1965, the Constitution of India was amended to make Hindi the official language of Government in India, with English relegated to a “subsidiary official language.”
35. On September 30, 1966, Bechuanaland in Southern Africa declared its independence from the United Kingdom, and became the Republic of Botswana.
36. On October 31, 1968, in a political move intended to help Hubert Humphrey win the Presidential election, President Lyndon Johnson made an announcement that became known as “The October Surprise,” in which he stated that all bombardment of North Viet Nam would be halted.
37. On July 3, 1969, the Soviet Union’s dreams of a moon rocket went up on the launch pad as the largest explosion of any rocket in history.
38. On September 3, 1976, an American Viking 2 spacecraft landed on the surface of Mars.
39. On April 27, 1987, the United States declared Austrian President Kurt Waldheim to be persona non grata, meaning that although Waldheim was the head of state of a free nation he would not be allowed entry to the United States.
40. On March 17, 1970, the US Army charged 14 officers with suppressing information about the My Lai Massacre that took place in South Vietnam in 1968, a horrible atrocity in which between 347 and 504 Vietnamese civilians, including women, children and babies, were slaughtered by C Company, 1st Bn 20th Regt of the 11th Brigade of the 23rd Infantry Division of the US Army.
41. On November 16, 1974, a radio signal was sent from Earth to the star cluster known as M13 in an attempt to communicate with whatever intelligent life forms may exist in that area of the Universe.
42. On June 6, 1985, authorities in Embu, Brazil opened the grave of a person purported to be “Wolfgang Gerhard,” in order to determine the true identity of the person buried under that name.
43. On July 4, 1987, justice came late, but better than never, when Nazi German war criminal, Klaus Barbie, known as the “Butcher of Lyon” was sentenced to life in prison for his crimes.

XV. Conclusion

1. On January 30, 1925, Douglas Engelbart was born in Portland, Oregon.
2. On September 8, 1930, 3M, the better known name of what was the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, began selling their Scotch brand of household and office pressure sensitive tape, the transparent stuff no self-respecting school kid, office worker, or housewife would do without!
3. On October 19, 1943, the antibiotic drug, Streptomycin, was isolated by researchers at the esteemed Rutgers University.
4. On July 5, 1946, the bikini swimsuit went on sale after being debuted at the Molitor Pool of Paris, France.
5. On May 3, 1952, the Kentucky Derby, probably the most famous and prestigious horse racing event in the United States, was first broadcast on television.
6. On February 23, 1954, the first mass inoculation of children against the Polio virus took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
7. On September 25, 1961, the State of Wisconsin first required any new automobile made starting in 1962 to be equipped with front seat safety belts.
8. On April 4, 1969, Dr. Denton Cooley performed surgery to implant the first artificial (temporary) heart in history!
9. On January 5, 1972, President Richard M. Nixon announced the Space Shuttle program, an American space exploration system that would go on to make 135 trips to space over 3 decades, carrying astronauts from 16 different countries.
10. On April 3, 1981, the Osborne Computer Corporation unveiled it latest creation, the Osborne 1, the first portable computer to be commercially viable.
11. On December 22, 1984, the tables got turned on criminals when their victim shot them!
12. On October 30, 1985, the American Space Shuttle Challenger lifted off on its 9^th mission, a successful flight that lasted over 7 days and was notable for having taken the first Dutch astronaut into space.
13. On June 28, 1987, Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Air Force became the first military force in history to purposely target civilians with chemical weapons when they attacked the town of Sardasht, Iran with “mustard” gas.
14. On September 18, 1990, the tiny European Principality of Liechtenstein was admitted to the United Nations.
15. On January 22, 1992, NASA launched mission STS-42, the space shuttle Discovery, into space with a crew that included Ukrainian Canadian Dr. Roberta Bondar, a neurologist.
16. On February 7, 1992, signatories from the 12 member states of the European Economic Community signed the Maastricht Treaty, so named after the city in which it was signed, Maastricht, The Netherlands, which more or less created a modern United States of Europe, though it is actually called The European Union.
17. On September 25, 1992, NASA launched a probe known as the Mars Observer, alternately known as Mars Geoscience/Climatology Orbiter, an unmanned spacecraft sent to study the surface, atmosphere, climate, and magnetic field on Mars.
18. On February 26, 1993, New Yorkers were shaken during their lunch break by the explosion of a giant bomb!
19. On November 18, 1993, the US House of Representatives passes the North American Free Trade Agreement that had been negotiated by President George HW Bush in 1992.
20. On September 4, 1998, a pair of Stanford University students founded what has become the premier internet search engine, Google, although Google is also heavily involved in other areas, such as software, AI, electronics, advertising, and cloud computing.
21. On August 8, 2000, the remains of Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley were raised to the surface 136 years after this pioneering vessel was sunk, probably by itself during the US Civil War.
22. On January 29, 2002, US President George W. Bush coined a new phrase in his State of the Union Address to Congress, labeling Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the “Axis of Evil.”
23. On June 11, 2002, the House of Representatives of the United States Congress officially recognized Italian American inventor Antonio Meucci as the inventor of the telephone.
24. On July 30, 2003, the last of the “old style” Volkswagen Beetles rolled off the assembly line in Puebla, Mexico, ending the longest and most prolific manufacturing streak of any car platform ever made.
25. On July 14, 2004, Robert Novak of the Washington Post exercised irresponsible journalistic ethics by publishing an article outing Valerie Plame as a CIA operative.
26. On May 7, 2004, American inventor and businessman Nicholas Berg, only 26 years old, was beheaded by Islamic terrorists in Iraq.
27. On January 12, 2005, the American space exploration agency known as NASA launched a mission called Deep Impact, a probe designed to violently impact the comet Tempel 1.
28. On January 18, 2005, Airbus, the European maker of jetliners, unveiled its flagship jetliner, the A380, the largest passenger plane ever built.
29. On August 31, 2006, the Norwegian police announced the recovery of Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream, which had been stolen in 2004.
30. On January 19, 2007, 3 intrepid Britons and their equally intrepid Canadian comrade made an incredible journey across Antarctica, using only leg power driving skis and the assistance of kites, to reach a point known as the Antarctic pole of inaccessibility.
31. On February 24, 2007, Japan launched a spy satellite into orbit, presumably to help keep track of threats to Japan from their neighbors China and North Korea.
32. On September 28, 2008, the history of space exploration reached a new milestone when SpaceX, a private company, launched their Falcon 1 unmanned spacecraft, the first private spacecraft launched into orbit.
33. On January 26, 2009, a single California woman gave birth to 8 babies at one time, becoming the first mother of octuplets that survived infancy.
34. On December 25, 2009, one of the most bizarre terrorist plots to destroy an airliner and its passengers failed when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was unable to get his bomb hidden in his underwear to explode.
35. On September 12, 2013, the American space agency, NASA, reported that its spacecraft, Voyager 1, had become the first ever man-made object to leave our solar system.
36. On April 17, 2014, the Kepler space telescope operated by NASA confirmed the existence of Kepler-186f, the first discovery of a planet of equivalent size to Earth within the “habitable zone” of another solar system.
37. On October 31, 2017, an Uzbek immigrant to the United States deliberately drove a rented truck into a New York City bicycle and jogging path, killing 8 people and injuring another 11 in a terrorist mass killing that proves bad people do not need guns to commit terrible crimes.
38. On January 31, 2020, European Union member the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will no longer be a member of what amounted to a “United States of Europe.”
39. On August 30, 2021, the United States of America suffered one of its all-time worst humiliations when the last of the American forces were flown out of Afghanistan, a country the US had invaded in 2001 and was the scene of the longest armed conflict in American history.
40. On January 2, 2022, the Omicron variant of the Covid virus was on the rise, but that was minor news compared to the top stories of 2022.
41. On January 13, 2022, the National Shooting Sports Foundation warned American firearms enthusiasts of an online scam targeting those looking to buy a new firearm.
42. On August 26, 2022, we all celebrate National Dog Day, a day invented by Colleen Paige in 2004.
43. NASA’s planned launch of a new gigantic rocket called Artemis scheduled for August 29, 2022 has been scrubbed due to a problem with an engine, with a new launch date scheduled for September 2, 2022.
44. On September 6, 2022, we celebrate National Read a Book Day, one of the truly worthwhile “days” of the year, when we are all reminded that there is more to life than television and the internet.
45. On September 8, 2022, the longest reigning monarch in British history, and the second longest reigning European monarch, Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom has died at the age of 96.
46. On September 9, 2022, King Charles III of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland gave his first speech as king.
47. On September 19, 2022, the United Kingdom and all of the Commonwealth will pay tribute to Queen Elizabeth II by conducting her Royal funeral.
48. On January 18, 2023, Americans celebrate another National Thesaurus Day, a day to be thankful for that reference book that helps us find other ways to say the same thing.
49. On January 24, 2023, Americans celebrate National Peanut Butter Day, a day when we can savor the flavor of our favorite bread spread that lends itself to making cookies, pies, candies, and other foodstuffs.
50. On January 24, 2023, the nominations for the Academy Awards, better known as the “Oscars,” had been released!
51. On January 24, 2023, the dreaded Doomsday Clock that charts the danger of nuclear war was moved to within 90 seconds of “Midnight,” the ominous harbinger of nuclear disaster.
52. February 1^st, 2023 is the anniversary of the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.
53. On February 3, 2023, we asked some questions about notable news stories from this first week of February 2023.

Questions for students: What was the most interesting event in Western Civilization and why?  Please let us know in the comments section below this article.

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Historical Evidence

For more information, please see…

Markham, J. David and Matthew Zarzeczny.  Simply Napoleon.  Simply Charly, 2017.

Zarzeczny, Matthew D.  Meteors That Enlighten the Earth: Napoleon and the Cult of Great Men.  Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

The featured image in this article, a detail from the oil painting (1806–7) titled Sacre de l’empereur Napoléon Ier et couronnement de l’impératrice Joséphine dans la cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, le 2 décembre 1804 (Coronation of Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of the Empress Josephine in Notre-Dame de Paris, December 2, 1804) by Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) and Georges Rouget (1783–1869) of Joséphine kneeling before Napoleon during his coronation at Notre Dame, is in the public domain in its country of origin and other countries and areas where the copyright term is the author’s life plus 100 years or less.  The work of art depicted in this image and the reproduction thereof are in the public domain worldwide. The reproduction is part of a collection of reproductions compiled by The Yorck Project.  The compilation copyright is held by Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.