1608 – John Smith is elected council president of Jamestown, Virginia. The loser starts a “Not my president” movement.

1776 – American Revolutionary War: Nathan Hale volunteers to spy for the Continental Army. It costs him is life. Today his identity would immediately be published by the New York Times and if that didn’t get him killed in the field, he’d be subject to congressional hearings with dimmocrat congressmen siding with the British.

1813 – The U.S. defeats the British Fleet at the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812. “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” which was the “all your base are belong to us” of its day.

1846 – Elias Howe gets a patent for the sewing machine. Imagine the clothes you wear every day, with each stitch done by hand…

1872 – Karl Marx speaks in Amsterdam. Today he’d have department chair at Berkeley, a weekly column in the New York Times and a seat on the National Dimmocratic Committee as the token ‘moderate’.

1913 – Lincoln Highway opens as first paved coast-to-coast highway. The next day a lane is closed and a dozen state workers stand around behind orange cones watching as one of them ‘works’. They leave the cones and nobody shows up for another four months except the cop monitoring the “speeding fines doubled” sign.

1926 – Germany joins League of Nations. Membership in an international organization will quiet the dreams of world domination, huh?

1931 – Lord Cecil of the British Government says war was never so improbable. We have politicians just this wise today. They’re all over in the shadow government.

1939 – World War II: The submarine HMS Oxley is mistakenly sunk by the submarine HMS Triton near Norway and becomes the Royal Navy’s first loss of a submarine in the war. Friendly fire – isn’t.

1942 – World War II: The British Army carries out an amphibious landing on Madagascar to re-launch Allied offensive operations in the Madagascar Campaign. Madagascar was held by the French in full ‘collaborate’ mode and was going to be used as a Japanese submarine base in the Indian Ocean. The French, having surrendered to the Germans and the Japanese, needed one more surrender to complete the set.

1943 – World War II: German forces begin their occupation of Rome. Their former ally, Italy, had just surrendered, although Italy lasted longer after being invaded than France did in 1939. What did you THINK they’d do?

1946 – While riding a train to Darjeeling, Sister Teresa Bojaxhiu of the Loreto Sisters’ Convent claimed to have heard the call of God, directing her “to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them”. She would become known as Mother Teresa. If only she’d had Twitter, she could have just held up a sign to show that she cared.

1953 – Swanson sells its first “TV dinner”. Cuisine in America falls a little bit lower…

1963 – Twenty Negro colored black African-American Black students enter public schools in Alabama. Brave kids, taking a big risk to get opportunity for blacks to get education. Today these kids would be accused of “acting white” and encouraged towards careers in sports, rap and the distribution of undocumented pharmaceuticals by their “peers”. “It’s alllll free! Jus’ swipe yo’ EBT!”

1964 – Palestinian Liberation Army (PLA) forms. Because it sounds more impressive than “Stone-age cult-following, murderous, baby-killing thugs”.

1966 – Neil Diamond’s first chart song (Cherry Cherry). I happen to LIKE Neil Diamond…

1993 – 1,000th Boeing 747 jumbo jet produced. Every one of them kills a polar bear, right? That is, unless there’s an Important Person™ on board who couldn’t take a private jet to a Global Warming symposium.

2002 – Switzerland, traditionally a neutral country, becomes a full member of the United Nations. The leaders of most of the UN have cash stashed in Swiss bank accounts.