758 AD – Guangzhou is sacked by Arab and Persian pirates. They were at it back then, too…

1503 – Queen Isabella of Spain bans violence against Indians. This royal edict is totally ignored as conquistadores run through the New World.

1534 – English Parliament passes Act of Supremacy, making King Henry VIII head of the English church – a role formerly held by the Pope.

1938 – Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, causing anxiety in some of the audience in the United States. Today it’d cause pants-shi**ing hysteria and we’d have to call out the National Guard. Lawyers would profit greatly.

1960 – Michael Woodruff performs the first successful kidney transplant in the United Kingdom at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. On the day before, a guy woke up in a cheap hotel sitting in a bathtub of ice with a huge incision in his side…

1961 – Because of “violations of Lenin’s precepts”, it is decreed that Joseph Stalin’s body be removed from its place of honor inside Lenin’s tomb and buried near the Kremlin wall with a plain granite marker instead. The soviets aren’t the only ones who will rewrite history to fit an agenda. On the same day, Tsar Bomba, the largest man-made explosion ever made, equivalent to 58 MILLION tons of TNT, was conducted by the USSR.

1983 – The first democratic elections in Argentina after seven years of military rule (and a royal ass-kicking by Britain over the Falkland Islands) are held.

1988 – Philip Morris buys Kraft Foods for U.S. $13.1 billion. Now one of their product lines consists of questionable products known to cause cancer, sold under heavy advertising. The rest is cigarettes.

1995 – Quebec sovereignists narrowly lose a referendum for a mandate to negotiate independence from Canada (vote was 50.6% to 49.4%).