1587 – Francis Drake sinks the Spanish fleet in Cádiz harbor. Captured six ships and sunk 31. England had some gutsy and very capable admirals over the centuries. Unfortunately, as a people, they seem to have lost their way today.

1775 – American Revolutionary War: The Battle of Lexington and Concord which began the American Revolutionary War. The government (Britain) was coming to get the guns. All you little Tide-pod munching bastards ought to consider that.

1810 – Venezuela achieves home rule: Vicente Emparan, Governor of the Captaincy General is removed by the people of Caracas and a Junta is installed. Today they’ve achieved “Whacko Rule” as a deeply disturbed successor to a deeply disturbed tinpot dictator squanders his country’s wealth on socialist schemes while begging leftovers from other failed socialist nations.

1839 – The Treaty of London establishes Belgium as a kingdom and guaranteeing its neutrality. “Belgium” derives from an old German word meaning “Gateway to France“.

1903 – The Kishinev pogrom in Kishinev (Bessarabia) begins, forcing tens of thousands of Jews to later seek refuge in Palestine and the Western world. What?!? You thought that the Germans and muslims had this to themselves?

1919 – Leslie Irvin of the United States makes the first successful voluntary free-fall parachute jump using a new kind of self-contained parachute.

1943 – World War II: In Poland, German troops enter the Warsaw ghetto to round up the remaining Jews, beginning the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Sometimes you have to fight. Even though you’re going to lose, you have to fight.

1955 – The German automaker Volkswagen, after six years of selling cars in the United States, founds Volkswagen of America in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey to standardize its dealer and service network. The VW Beetle and Microbus become icons. I’ve owned several of both.

1985 – Two hundred ATF and FBI agents lay siege to the compound of the white supremacist survivalist group The Covenant, The Sword, and the Arm of the Lord in Arkansas; the CSA surrenders two days later.

1987 – The Simpsons premieres as a short cartoon on The Tracey Ullman Show.

1993 – The 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian building outside Waco, Texas, USA, ends when a fire breaks out. Eighty-one people die. “We had to burn children alive in order to save them.” Plus, the ATF needed to renew the publicity boost they’d gotten in 1985, above.

1995 – Oklahoma City bombing: The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, is bombed, killing 168, or as ISIS used to say, ‘a slow day’.

2013 – Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev is killed in a shootout with police. His brother Dzhokhar is later captured hiding in a boat inside a backyard in the suburb of Watertown. Both are members of a radical Episcopalian movement.