1760 – Great Upheaval (Cajun French: Le Grande Derangement): New England planters arrive to claim land in Nova Scotia, Canada taken from the Acadians. Several of the people displaced by this move ended up in Louisiana as my ancestors, and they’d been in Acadia since the early 1600’s. Don’t call me French.

1783 – The Montgolfier brothers publicly demonstrate their hot air balloon, named, with typical French restraint, the “montgolfière“.

1876 – An express train called the Transcontinental Express arrives in San Francisco, California, via the First Transcontinental Railroad only 83 hours and 39 minutes after having left New York City. Only three and a half days…

1913 – Emily Davison, a suffragette, runs out in front of King George V’s horse, Anmer, at the Epsom Derby. She is trampled, never regains consciousness and dies a few days later. In pictures of the incident, the horse is the pretty one…

1940 – World War II: The Dunkirk evacuation ends – British forces complete evacuation of 300,000 troops from Dunkirk in France. Hitler thought that with France groveling at his feet, England would stop the war if he didn’t continue the pursuit. He allowed the 184,000 of the British Army to escape and 140,000 of the French. This would haunt him later, because the French become incredibly brave when hiding behind the skirts of the Brits and the Americans.

1940 – World War II: Nazi German forces enter the city of Paris for the second time in less than a hundred years. They finish taking control of the city 10 days later. (June 14, 1940) It took that long for Parisian restaurateurs to print menus in German and for cat-houses to locate German flags.

1942 – World War II: The Battle of Midway begins. Japanese Admiral Nagumo Chuichi orders and leads a strike on Midway Island by much of the Imperial Japanese navy, leading to what many regard as the turning point of the war in the Pacific.

1944 – World War II: A hunter-killer group of the United States Navy captures the German submarine U-505 – the first time a U.S. Navy vessel captured an enemy vessel at sea since the 19th century. The American group is commanded by one Captain Daniel V. Gallery, USN, later admiral, and the author of some hilarious books about navy life.

1944 – World War II: Rome falls to the Allies, the first Axis capital to fall. Italy held out under Allied invasion longer than France held out against the Germans.

1989 – Tiananmen Square protests are violently ended in Beijing by the same government that now controls America’s purse-strings.