1775 – King George III goes before Parliament to declare the American colonies in rebellion, and authorized a military response to quell the American Revolution.
1776 – Benjamin Franklin departed from America for France on a mission to seek French support for the American Revolution. The French DID help. This was before their own revolution and was pretty much the last decent act they performed as a nation.
1861 – The Pony Express officially ceased operations, put out of business by the modern technology. Today they’d lobby a few congressmen and get a stimulus package for the Pony Express and have them put a federal tax on each mile of telegraph lines, a per-message tax on each message, and EPA would be filing a restraining order preventing telegraph operation until a study was completed on the effects of the telegraph line’s magnetic field on the western short-snouted warble toad.
1881 – The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral takes place at Tombstone, Arizona. 30 shots in thirty seconds? You can see worse than that in just about any major city on a given Saturday night nowadays. That wouldn’t make a decent drive-by on a Chicago Saturday night.
1917 – World War I: Battle of Caporetto; Italy suffers a catastrophic defeat at the forces of Austria-Hungary and Germany. The young unknown Oberleutnant Erwin Rommel captures Mount Matajur with only 100 Germans against a force of over 7000 Italians.
1936 – The first electric generator at Hoover Dam went into full operation. The first run of major electrical equipment is one FINE feeling. I have the privilege of having been in on several.
1940 – The P-51 Mustang makes its maiden flight. It goes on to become arguably the finest piston-engine fighter ever. Of course, making that statement in the presence of aviation enthusiasts will start fistfights.
1944 – World War II: The Battle of Leyte Gulf ends, and with it, the Japanese navy as a viable force. They’ll still be worrisome, but never again will they be a real fleet.
1949 – President Truman signs a bill increasing minimum wage from 40 cents to 75 cents an hour. When I went to work in 1966, it was a buck and a quarter.
1958 – Pan American Airways makes the first commercial flight of the Boeing 707 from New York City to Paris, France.
1992 – The London Ambulance Service is thrown into chaos after the implementation of a new CAD, or Computer Aided Dispatch, system which failed. The Obama regime is achieving similar success with the ObamaCare rollout software.
2002 – Moscow theater hostage crisis: Approximately 50 Radical Russian Orthodox Christians Muslim Chechen terrorists and 150 hostages die when Russian Spetsnaz storm a theater building in Moscow, which had been occupied by the terrorists during a musical performance three days before.
1940: The P-51 was, without argument, the best looking and sexiest piston-engined fighter of all time. It went from merely so-so to become almost the best when the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine replaced the original Packard engine. Still, far and away the overall best fighter aircraft of WWII was the P-47 Thunderbolt. Ground attack – nothing even close; diving attack, again, no one even close. High altitude escort – the P-51 wins by a nose, but the Jug hangs in there. Big, ugly, strong like Ox – the P-47 was the A-10 of its day. If you wanted to look cool, you had your portrait next to a P-51. If you wanted to be a bad-ass fighter pilot, you flew the P-51.
Uh, that last P-51 should have read “…a bad-ass fighter pilot, you flew the P-47”.