1774 – American Revolutionary War: The Kingdom of Great Britain orders the port of Boston, Massachusetts closed in the Boston Port Act. That whole “Tea Party” thing really upset them.

1854 – Commodore Matthew Perry signs the Treaty of Kanagawa with the Japanese government, opening the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American trade. Nothing like armed naval vessels showing up on your doorstep to get the ol’ diplomacy going.

1889 – The Eiffel Tower is inaugurated. Built to commemorate the French national bloodbath Revolution, it is very French in that it is eminently elegant and does absolutely noting except give the Germans something to march under…

1933 – The Civilian Conservation Corps is established with the mission to relieve rampant unemployment. It wouldn’t work today because back then, people actually wanted to work. Today it’d just upset the dimoocrats’ biggest voting bloc.

1992 – An era ends as the USS Missouri (BB-63), the last active United States Navy Battleship, is decommissioned in Long Beach, California.

1998 – Netscape releases the code base of its browser under an open-source license agreement; the project is given the code name Mozilla and would eventually be spun off into the non-profit Mozilla Foundation. If you’re still running MS Internet Exploder, you should change to FireFox. Really.