312 AD – Constantine the Great is said to have received his famous Vision of the Cross. This moves him to declare the entire Roman Empire to be Christian. Nothing like a politician using religion to further his goals.

1806 – The French Army enters in Berlin. This pi**es off the Germans. The Germans say “Oh, that’s how you wanna play” and they return the favor several times in the next century and a half. Like in 1870, when Marshal François Achille Bazaine surrenders to Prussian forces at Metz along with 140,000 French soldiers in one of the biggest French defeats of the Franco-Prussian War.

1810 – United States annexes the former Spanish colony of West Florida. That gives us the little dangly bits of Alabama and Mississippi as well as the Louisiana parishes east of the Mississippi River. Today we call those “the Florida parishes”.

1838 – Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issues the Extermination Order, which orders all Mormons to leave the state or be exterminated. Today’s ‘leadership’ welcomes the Religion of Peace with open arms.

1962 – Major Rudolf Anderson of the United States Air Force becomes the only direct human casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis when his U-2 reconnaissance airplane is shot down over Cuba by a Soviet-supplied SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile. Of course it’s Soviet-supplied. The best the Cubans could have done on their own is fling a banana at him as he flew over.

1964 – Ronald Reagan delivers a speech on behalf of Republican candidate for president, Barry Goldwater. The speech launched his political career and came to be known as “A Time for Choosing”. Today’s republican ‘party’ revels in its ‘Never Trump’ faction. It’s time for the party to die.

1971 – Democratic Republic of the Congo is renamed Zaire. “Yeah, we’re a basket case of corruption but if we change the name it’ll confuse people for a while and we can get MORE money…