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.

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 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.

1865 – Joseph Lister, British surgeon and scientist, performs 1st antiseptic surgery.

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 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 gears and five reverse.

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.

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. Dididit Dahdahdah dididit.

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 London and Switzerland.

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.

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.

too good to leave in comments, reader and friend “UChuck” elaborates on the atomic bombs for Japan:

As Germany was ground between Allied armies, command in the Pacific was reorganized for the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. Douglas MacArthur was put in command of all ground forces, including the Marines, while Chester Nimitz took control of all Allied naval forces. Carl Spaatz took over 20th Air Force. Japan would be taken in two operations. OLYMPIC aimed to take the southernmost of the big islands, Kyushu, with a quarter-million men staging from Okinawa. This operation was scheduled to commence in early November 1945. Southern Kyushu in turn would serve as the staging ground for CORONET, an invasion of Honshu aimed ultimately at Tokyo with 300,000 men. It was projected to start about 1 March 1946. Additional men would be pumped into Japan until Japanese resistance ended, possibly as late as 1947. All of these plans were rendered moot when an ultra-secret research project bore fruit in the summer of 1945.

The Manhattan Project originated when a group of physicists approached the government in late 1939 regarding the military potential of the newly-discovered principles of atomic fission. A $6,000 research appropriation in February 1940 grew into a massive research project after American entry into the war. Research labs, pilot production facilities, and finally large-scale processing and manufacturing plants were constructed as the project evolved. Two different bomb designs based off two different fissionable materials evolved simultaneously. Uranium- 235 was processed at a vast new plant built in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, while plutonium-239 was manufactured in a newly-built breeder reactor at the Hanford Engineer Works on the Columbia River in Washington state. All of these facilities were beyond the cutting edge of science and technology. By Summer 1945 Hanford had produced enough plutonium to construct a test weapon to see if all the theoretical work actually worked, and Oak Ridge had processed enough U-235 for a single prototype. The Manhattan Project at this point had consumed over $2 billion. “Gadget,” a plutonium test-bomb, was placed on a steel tower bristling with scientific equipment in a remote corner of Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico.

Scientists and a few government officials watched from concrete bunkers 10,000 yards away from Ground Zero as the firing switch was closed at 5:30 a.m. on 16 July 1945. A sun-bright flash followed by a wave of heat preceded the roar of the shockwave thundering past the bunker. The tower was vaporized and the sand of the desert was fused into glass to a radius of 800 yards by the fireball as the bomb exploded with the force equivalent to 15,000 to 20,000 tons of trinitrotoluene (TNT) conventional explosive. With the theory confirmed, final assembly on two working aerial bombs was possible. “Little Boy” used a gun design to fire one subcritical mass of uranium-235 into another, while “Fat Man” used a spherical shaped charge to crush a core of plutonium-239 into critical mass to initiate fission. These weapons used up all the available fissionable materials.

American President Franklin Roosevelt died of natural causes on 12 April 1945. The Manhattan Project was so secret that his Vice President, Harry S Truman, had no idea it even existed until he was sworn in as president. Now Truman faced the decision of how to employ the new weapon. Some advised him to detonate a bomb as a demonstration, inviting Japanese observers to witness its destructive power. But if the bomb failed to detonate, or fizzled in a partial explosion, it would be an international embarrassment and stiffen Japanese resolve to fight on. It would also halve the American atomic inventory, and it had taken months of intense effort to produce the fissionable elements in these bombs. Truman weighed all of the factors carefully before deciding the bombs would be dropped in anger. If they prompted a Japanese surrender without an invasion of the Home Islands, American and Japanese lives would be spared. It held the political advantage of ending the war quickly, sure to please American voters weary of rationing, increasing national debt…and sending sons off to fight. It satisfied a national desire for revenge and retaliation against the country responsible for the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that dragged the United States into this war. It provided a diplomatic advantage in negotiations with a Soviet Union that grew less cooperative once the common Nazi foe collapsed.

The Japanese city of Hiroshima in southern Honshu remained untouched by Curtis LeMay’s 20th Air Force, despite being headquarters of the army defending Kyushu and home to several war industries. It was a compact city of about 290,000 people built on the delta of the Ota River. These factors combined to make it a prime target for the first atomic air raid. With a garrison of 43,000 troops and a number of military factories, it was a viable military target. It had suffered no previous bomb damage, which served a two-fold purpose: it allowed an accurate assessment of the weapon’s destructive capacity, and prevented the Japanese government dismissing the power of the weapon through attributing much of the damage to earlier conventional bombing. American strategists hoped its utter and instantaneous destruction by a single bomb, delivered by a single aircraft, would horrify the Japanese government and prompt a rapid surrender.

Air raid sirens howled across Hiroshima early on the morning of Monday 6 August, but this was not unusual; 20th Air Force carried out daily weather reconnaissance flights over Japan. They sounded again shortly after 8:00 a.m. as a flight of three B-29s of the 509th Composite Group approached the city at 31,000 feet. The Enola Gay, loaded with the 10,000-lb “Little Boy” uranium bomb was flanked at 5 miles distance on either side by The Great Artiste and Necessary Evil, acting as observers to take photographs and record scientific data. The 509th had been practicing precision bombing with heavy ordnance, dropping “pumpkin bombs” – conventional high explosive bombs that mimicked the size, weight, an aerodynamics of the atomic weapons – on Japanese targets in July.

Enola Gay dropped the bomb at approximately 8:14 a.m. Saipan time. “Little Boy” detonated at 1,900 feet over city center with an estimated yield of 15 kilotons. The blast killed about 70,000 people outright from immediate effects, and another 70,000 died of injuries or radiation poisoning by the end of the year. It burned out over four square miles of the city completely. This was not an uncommon casualty figure for a major air raid in Japan – the conventional incendiary raid on Tokyo in March killed over 80,000 and injured another 40,000 – but this had been dealt by a single plane with a single bomb.

Initially, all the Tokyo government knew was that all radio and telegraph communication with Hiroshima abruptly ceased at 8:15. They were perplexed as reports of a massive explosion and widespread destruction began to filter in, as they knew there had been no large scale air raid in southern Japan that morning. A staff officer dispatched to perform an aerial reconnaissance of the city reported a pall of smoke over Hiroshima visible from almost 100 miles away. When the United States officially announced the atomic bombing of the city around midnight Tokyo time, some officers dismissed it as pure propaganda, that such a weapon was impossible. Once better reports of the events of 6 August and the extent of the damage reached Tokyo on 7 August, these officers claimed the enemy could not possibly have more of these weapons. The Japanese government remained officially silent on the development while bitter disagreements raged behind closed doors. There was no Japanese request to negotiate surrender.

The blast did spur the Soviet government into action, however. Stalin had dragged his heels on the promise to make war on Japan once Germany fell. Now the Soviets rushed to declare war on 8 August, to secure a position in post-war settlement in East Asia before they lost the opportunity. Red Army units in Siberia rolled across the border of Manchukuo on the morning of 9 August. (According to Soviet histories of the “Great Patriotic War,” as the USSR called World War II, this Russian declaration of war was the real reason Japan surrendered.)

The United States dropped its sole remaining weapon, the “Fat Man” plutonium-based bomb that same day. The Bockscar found the primary target, Kokura, obscured by clouds, so the aircraft preceded to its secondary target, Nagasaki. The bomb detonated at 1,650 feet at 11:02 a.m. with a yield of 21 kilotons. The hilly geography of Nagasaki put part of the city in the “blast shadow” of a mountain, reducing damage and loss of life. The result was nonetheless devastating, with some 40,000 killed outright, a similar number injured, and two square miles of the city obliterated. The second blast also destroyed the argument that the Americans had but one such weapon.

The Japanese government communicated its willingness to entertain surrender term to the Allies through the neutral Swiss embassy on 10 August. They agreed to a “conditional unconditional” surrender: 1) the person and dignity of the Emperor Hirohito, the Son of Heaven, would remain inviolate, and 2) the Empire would retain the Home Islands intact. Despite an attempted assassination of Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro by a clique of diehard military officers, the arrangements for a cease fire under these provisions were finalized on 14 August 1945. A somber emperor Hirohito addressed his subjects by radio, announcing

“We have ordered our government to communicate to the governments of the United States, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union that our empire accepts the provisions of their Joint Declaration. …it is according to the dictate of time and fate that we have resolved to pave the way for a grand peace for all the generations to come by enduring the unendurable and suffering what is insufferable.”

Their formal surrender was accepted by Douglas MacArthur on the deck of the USS Missouri, anchored with much of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Tokyo Bay, on 2 September. This was followed with a formal surrender to China in Nanking, on 9 September 1945. The most destructive, most expensive, and deadliest war in human history was over.

(And I extend my thanks to UCHuck for taking the time to post!)

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

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, 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. 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”.

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.

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 Stripeswith 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.

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.

1946 – First flight of the Convair B-36, the world’s first mass-produced nuclear weapon delivery vehicle, the heaviest mass-produced piston-engined aircraft, with the longest wingspan of any military aircraft, and the first bomber with intercontinental range.

1963 – The Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), the current ruling party of Zimbabwe, is formed by a split from the Zimbabwe African People’s Union. Under the sterling rule of this party, Zimbabwe goes from Rhodesia, Africa’s Breadbasket, to Zimbabwe, Africa’s Basket Case. The population struggles against starvation while the ‘leadership’ parades around in Savile Row suits.

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 but the media is NOT biased, okay?

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.

1988 – Rap group N.W.A (Niggaz Wit Attitudes) release their debut studio album Straight Outta Compton. Its thoughtful melodies and and insightful lyrics go on to reinforce and uplift the growing Golden Age of black culture.

2000 – Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley is raised to the surface after 136 years on the ocean floor and 30 years after its discovery by undersea explorer E. Lee Spence.

2016 – Terrorists attack a government hospital in Quetta, Pakistan with a suicide blast and shooting, killing between 70 and 94 people, and injuring around 130 others. Fifty-four of the dead are lawyers.