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.

1802 – Napoleon orders re-instatement of slavery on St Domingue (Haiti). Apparently all that “Enlightenment” crap only goes so far. 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.

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 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 the last ‘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.