1652 – At the Cape of Good Hope, Dutch sailor Jan van Riebeeck establishes a resupply camp that eventually becomes Cape Town. James Michner’s The Covenant tells the story quite well.

1722 – Tsar Peter the Great ends tax on men with beards. Dimmocrats think “Wow! We can tax beards?”

1793 – During the French Revolution, the Committee of Public Safety becomes the executive organ of the republic, and the period known as the Reign of Terror begins. Any time you see something named using “public safety” your antennae should be up and on full sensitivity. And check your combat load plan.

1814 – Nominal beginning of the Bourbon Restoration — anniversary date that Napoleon abdicates and is exiled to Elba. (Rule by the Bourbon’s was delayed a few weeks, though allies held most key locales of France.) So in twenty years, France went from a monarchy to a blood-bath to military expansionism to an ass-kicking that has given its name forever to ass-kickings (Waterloo) and now they’re back to making a king out of the brother of the guy they beheaded twenty years before, all because the allies who kicked French butt at Waterloo said “You folks ain’t doin’ really good with this ‘democracy’ thing, are you?”

1896 – In Athens, the opening of the first modern Olympic Games is celebrated, 1,500 years after the original games were banned by Roman Emperor Theodosius I.

1909 – Robert Peary and Matthew Henson become the first to reach the North Pole.

1917 – World War I: The United States declares war on Germany. If we’d have stayed out, there might not have been a WW II. Of course, France would likely be officially bi-lingual – German and French instead of what it is today – bilingual, French and Arabic.

1930 – Hostess Twinkies invented by bakery executive James Dewar.

1954 – TV Dinner was first put on sale by Swanson & Sons.

1965 – Launch of Early Bird, the first communications satellite to be placed in geosynchronous orbit.

1974 – The Swedish pop band ABBA wins the Eurovision Song Contest with the song “Waterloo“, launching their international career. Okay, like YOU don’t have any weaknesses you’d rather not announce to the world…

1994 – The Rwandan Genocide begins when the aircraft carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira is shot down. Then we sent UN forces from Belgium in to help. After all they left Congo a little corner of paradise, didn’t they? Belgians. Like the French, but with a worse military record…