1785 – The dollar is unanimously chosen as the monetary unit for the United States. It’ll probably be the Chinese yuan before the end of the next decade.

1885 – Louis Pasteur successfully tests his vaccine against rabies. The patient is Joseph Meister, a boy who was bitten by Nancy Pelosi before her first facelift a rabid dog.

1919 – The British dirigible R34 lands in New York, completing the first crossing of the Atlantic Ocean by an airship. Took 108 hours.

1944 – French General De Gaulle arrives in Washington, DC and General Patton lands in France. In the precise terminology of international relations, this is called “America getting the shitty end of the stick”. We had men bleeding and dying in France, and we had a notorious French fop prancing in fancy uniforms on our shores.

1947 – The AK-47 goes into production in the Soviet Union.

1988 – The Piper Alpha drilling platform in the North Sea is destroyed by explosions and fires. 167 oil workers are killed, making it the world’s worst offshore oil disaster in terms of lives lost.

1989 – The Israeli 405 Bus slaughter in which 14 bus passengers are killed when a brave, peaceful Arab assaulted the bus driver as the bus is driving by the edge of a cliff.

1995 – In the Bosnian War, under the command of General Ratko Mladic, Serbia begins its attack on the Bosnian town of Srebrenica, and kills more than 8000 Bosniaks, in what then- UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali called “the worst crime on European soil since the Second World War”, or as otherwise noted, a slow week for ISIS.

2013 – A 73-car oil train derails in the town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec and explodes into flames, killing at least 47 people and destroying more than 30 buildings in the town’s central area. At least they don’t have pipelines!