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.

1825 – The Erie Canal opens, allowing direct passage from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. Waterways were the arteries of American commerce and industry back then. Still are, but a lot of people don’t know that.

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. Equally intense is the feeling that passes over you when the first button is pushed and ALL the lights in the plant go out. Gladly, that one was NOT within MY area of responsibility but I walked right to the utility substation knowing what the problem was.

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.

1943 – World War II: First flight of the Dornier Do 335 “Pfeil”. Off the factory floor, it would do 474 MPH, the fastest piston-engined fighter to go into service, another miracle of German engineering, and like much of German technology in WW II, a case of too little, too late.

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.

1956 – Hungarian Revolution: In the towns of Mosonmagyaróvár and Esztergom, Antifa Hungarian secret police forces massacre civilians who protest the ‘correct’ political party. As rebel strongholds in Budapest hold, fighting spreads throughout the country.

1958 – Pan American Airways makes the first commercial flight of the Boeing 707 from New York City to Paris, France.

1967 – Mohammad Reza Pahlavi crowns himself Emperor of Iran and then crowns his wife Farah as Empress of Iran. He’ll run the country until sterling diplomacy at the hands of the current second-worst president in American history pulls the rug out from under him in favor of the Religion of Peace as defined by Ayatollah Khomeini.

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 achieved similar success with the ObamaCare rollout software.

1995 – Israeli–Palestinian conflict: Mossad agents assassinate Islamic Jihad leader Fathi Shaqaqi in his hotel in Malta. This is ever so much more savage and barbaric than exploding a bomb in a pizza parlor at lunchtime.

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.