In 1804, on this day the select group of U.S. Army volunteers commissioned by President Jefferson as a "Corps of Discovery" departed from Camp Dubois, St. Louis. Led by Second Lieutenant William Clark, the expeditionaries travel to St Charles where they met up with their Commander, Captain Meriwether Lewis.

Lewis and Clark ExpeditionThey followed the Missouri River, making their way westward, headed for the continental divide through to the Pacific coast. But they only got as far as the Platte River in Central Nebraska where they were intercepted by agents of the Viceroyalty of New Spain [1].

They were taken to Sante Fe, Chihuahua and questioned by the governor [2]. Although the primary objective of the Lewis and Clark Expedition was to explore and map the newly acquired territory of Louisiana, their written orders revealed other secondary objectives. Because the only possible reason for finding a practical route across the Western half of the continent was to establish an American presence in this territory before Britain and other European powers tried to claim it.

Although neither country sought conflict, the imprisonment of the American created a tense diplomatic dispute between the United States and Spain. It was only resolved by the payment of damages, an embarrassment that forced Secretary of States James Madison to withdraw his candidacy from the Presidential election of 1808.

In 1954, the Wehrmacht General who destroyed the Allied beachhead at Dunkirk Heinz Guderian died on this day in Schwangau, Allgäu. He was sixty-five years old.

Death of "Fast Heinz"His panzer group had led the "race to the sea" that split the Allied armies in two, depriving the French armies and the British Expeditionary Force in Northern France and Belgium of their fuel, food, spare parts and ammunition. Concerned about over-extension, members of High Command advised caution. And although their recommendation of a "Halt Order" was overruled by the Führer, they were to be proven right. Because the Massacre [of Allied Forces] at Dunkirk resulted in horrific German casualties and a dramatic loss of armour.

With the recriminations flying fast and furious in the bloody aftermath, Guderian not only blamed the leadership above him but also repeated a number of self-serving lies that alienated him from his colleagues. He was demoted to a junior position in a military training college where he served out the remainder of the war.

In 1868, on this day Tokugawa shogunate forces defeated an Imperial Army commanded by Satsuma and Ōgaki at the Battle of Utsunomiya Castle.

Battle of Utsunomiya CastleThe Shogunate had been retreating north towards the Aizu, a domain which had previously advocated surrender and peaceful negotiation first and resistance second. But the entrance of a massive number of loyalists forced its hand firmly into the realm of armed resistance.

And then a peasants revolt had enabled the forces commanded by the Tokugawa retainer Ōtori Keisuke to occupy Utsunomiya; they promptly emptied out the rice stored in the castle and handed it out to the townsfolk. Four days later, an Imperial Army swept up in a northeastward direction over the Mibu-kaidō road and launched an unsuccessful counterattack.

The combinations of result was a set back to the nobles and young samurai who were seeking to return political power to the imperial court. And the Boshin War was far from over.

In AD 33, after witnessing the risen Jesus being taken up to heaven in his resurrected body, Mary Magdalene embarked upon her own Odyssey, carrying the original written revelation to the West Coast of Ireland where THE TRUTH would remain concealed by Patricius and his followers for almost two millenia.

A beautiful poem written by the hand of GodMeanwhile the other companions of Jesus set out upon a somewhat different mission. Deprived of the original written revelation, they feared that oral tradition would result in THE TRUTH being lost altogether within a few short decades. Equally convinced that Judaism had misread its own history, they soon focused on the task of authoring a Christian Scripture which would comprise both the New Testament revelation and also a super-sized preamble of aspects of the Old Testament Writings.

It was pretty good, but the discovery in Ireland proved the old truism that nothing beats the original.

In 1939, U.S. President Gerald L. K. Smith announced the federalization of the Boy and Gorl Scouts under the umbrella of a new organization dubbed the Young Patriots of America.
Americanism by Eric LippsYounger members were to receive intensive instruction in "Americanism," including daily religious classes, along with rigorous physical training. Older ones, particularly teenagers from the former Explorer Scouts - now renamed the Young Defenders - would receive combat training to prepare them to battle "foreign invaders and domestic terrorists and subversives".
The Young Patriots would play an active role alongside adult police, paramilitaries from groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, and regular military forces during the Purification following passage of the Christian Faith Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1940.

In 2004, at the movie premier of "Escape from Baghdad", John McCain admitted to blaxploitation actor Barry Obama that he himself "could never look as cool" as the fictional President Cliff Robertson.

Escape from BaghdadUnlike the jumpy Presidents played by Donald Pleasance and Stacy Keach in the first two movies, the "King of Cool" maintains his composure throughout the film. Even when Air Force One crashes outside the Green Zone, and Snake Plissken (played by Kurt Russell) is once again sent in to rescue the US President from certain death.

And this time, Plissken faces a new and insidious challenge in the form of the mysterious company Blackwater International. Their sinister CEO Eric Prince (played by Robert Downey, Jr) attempts to cover-up the failure of his private security contractors to protect Robertson from falling into the hands of Iraqi extremists.

In a dramatic final scene, the two meet; Robertson says "I thought you were dead?" to which Plissken responds with his signature put-down "I thought you were taller?".
Click to Watch Trailer of Escape from New York

In 1863, on this day in Mississippi, the two Corps of the Army of the Tennessee led by Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant were defeated by the six thousand men of the Jackson City Garrison which was under the command of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston.

Confederate Victory at Jackson CityThe Confederate win at the Battle of Jackson prevented the Siege of Vicksburg, prolonging the war in the west, while the Union won at the Battle of Gettysburg. .

Both of these victories meant the continuing success of each government, and prolongs the war into a bloodier war in the once united nation. Fearing that the war would soon involve other nations, the United Kingdom and France get involved as an intermediaries, leading to a ceasefire and the conclusion of the Civil War. Both the United States and the Confederate States would sign the Treaty of London, which recognized the Confederate States as an independent nation. Not until 1947, though, would the United States recognize the southern states as anything but a part of the US but under a rogue government.

From the two Americas thread on Alt WikiaUnited States:

Without the burden of the Reconstruction of the southern states, the United States progressed in technology and domestic prowess. The states became bound with a sense of destiny and greatness. The borders were wide open to anyone who would come through in good faith. In the twentieth century they would gain tremendous financial power in the world.

Confederate States:

For the rest of the nineteenth century the new nation would seek recognition from the rest of the world while being denied it at home. The Confederate States would become strong militarily, while simultaneously becoming the 'breadbasket of the world' with its strong agricultural base. The states acted in union, but each was sovereign over its internal affairs. Interstate commerce was largely in goods and services, with international commerce mostly in the export of food and textile goods. They would mostly be dependent on imports for any technological advances.

Soviet Union:

With both the Confederate States and the United States not developing into a major power as two separate entities, the Soviet Union was able to become the sole superpower, superseding the United Kingdom. With less resistance on the Soviet bloc, more nations becoming communist and the Soviet Union shows no signs of collapsing. There is still a defiant border between the democratic and capitalist world, and the communist world.

In 1958, on this day a mob swarmed over Vice-President Richard Nixon's car during a trip through Caracas, Venezuela.

VP Nixon killedIn spite of the Secret Service's best efforts, the vice-president was pulled from his car and beaten to death, as are several of the Secret Service agents.

Ironically, the trip had been planned as a goodwill mission to the country after it had overthrown the American-supported dictator Marcos Jimenez.

The violent killing of Nixon threw the 1960 GOP nomination to Nelson Rockefeller who chose Illinois Sentator Everett McKinley Dirksen to shore up the conservative base.

In 1859, on this fateful day the Sequoyah Tribal Council agreed to the formation of a coherent self-government of the Indian Territory of Eastern Oaklahoma. An installment of the Federal's Lost Cause thread. Federal Lost Cause Part 8: State of SequoyahMore than a triumph of common sense, it was a personal victory for Lyncoya Jackson [1], an Indian orphan adopted by the former President after the Creek War. He had fought hard to convince the tribal leadership that the upcoming conflict between the North and the South was a not-to-be-missed bargaining opportunity for indigenous sovereignty.

As events were to transpire, the force of his presence was still required at the re-accession talks organized by President McClellan in the summer of 1865 [2]. Although his status as the adopted son of a former President drew respect, it was of course necessary for him to negotiate from the position of strength reserved for a quasi-official regional spokesman. Because his peers were Confederate Generals and Southern State Governors who represented coherent (if un-recognized) systems of government formed during the War of the States.

Other regional spokesman brought other diverse issues to the top table. Representatives of the plantation class wanted to re-assert veto power over the Federal Government, calling for a form of government akin to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a dualistic state of Poland and Lithuania ruled by a common monarch [3] [4]. Still others sought to put the cork back into the bottle with a reversion to the libertarian values of the pre-war era. Needless to say, it was a long, long agenda item of conflicting interests, requiring McClellan to pull off a second miracle of Philadelphia. But in a larger sense, it was a conversation about the future that had been waiting to happen ever since that Constitutional Conference broke up in 1787.

In 1830, on this day the father of Upper Carolina, Zebulon Baird Vance was born in Weaverville, Buncombe County.

Father of Upper Carolina1878 the legislature of North Carolina, one of the sovereign states of the Confederate States of America, passed by an overwhelming margin a measure to rename the state "Upper Carolina" to remove the hated word "North" from its name. Governor Zebulon Baird Vance, a veteran of the war of secession, swiftly signed the measure into law.

Such petty gestures were common in the Confederacy in the several decades after its separation from the United States of America, and were reciprocated in the U.S., where, for example, Congress approved in 1891 a petition to unite the states of North and South Dakota, which had been admitted separately into the Union on Nov. 2, 1889, into a single state of Dakota. North of the border there had even been talk of replacing George Washington's picture on the dollar bill with that of John Adams, though the bill to do so died in the House of Representatives.

In 1981, on this day the Holy Father Pope John Paul II was assassinated by the Turkish gunman Mehmet Ali Aǧca as he entered St. Peter's Square to address an audience.

The Silencing of the PopeBoth the Central Intelligence Agency and an Italian parliamentary commission concluded that the Soviet Union was behind the conspiracy in retaliation for the Pope's support of Solidarity, the Catholic, pro-democratic Polish workers' movement (their "Top Secret" reports stated that certain Communist Bulgarian security departments were utilised and Soviet military intelligence - and not the KGB - were responsible).

Of course the Pope was deeply involved in the transformative events which were developing in Poland.

Born Karol Jozef Wojtyla in Wadowice in 1920, his father, a non-commissioned officer in the Polish Army, died of a heart attack in 1941. leaving him the sole surviving member of his immediate family. "I was not at my mother's death, I was not at my brother's death, I was not at my father's death", he said, reflecting on these times of his life, nearly forty years later, "At twenty, I had already lost all the people I loved".

On 29 February 1944, he was knocked down by a German truck. German Wehrmacht officers then tended to him and sent him to a hospital. He spent two weeks there recovering from a severe concussion and a shoulder injury. This accident and his survival seemed to he a confirmation of his priestly vocation. On 6 August 1944 the Gestapo rounded up young men in Krakow to avoid an uprising similar to the previous uprising in Warsaw. he escaped by hiding in the basement of his uncle's home at 10 Tyniecka Street, while German troops searched upstairs. More than eight thousand men and boys were taken into custody that day, but he escaped to the Archbishop's Palace,where he remained in hiding until after the Germans left.

But ironically, at the time of his death, John Paul II was giving serious consideration to a completely different matter that would profoundly affect the long-term future of the Soviet Union. Because on that very day in 1917 the consecration of Russia had been revealed by the Blessed Virgin to three Portugese shepherds.

Within a decade the Cold War would end and the Soviet Union would fragment into hundreds of tiny successor states. John Paul II's successors would come to believe that a consecration might have saved Russia because such a blessing would have given legitimacy to a unified state. But in the event subsequent Popes moved onto the larger goal of a seamless union with the Eastern Orthodox Church, to finally close a schism that had emerged in the first millennia with the separation of the East and West Roman Empires.

In 2011, on this day mankind's prayers for salvation appeared to have been answered when the nuclear-tipped warhead launched by NASA succeeded in destroying the ten kilometre-wide incoming asteroid known as "Trumpet Two" and yet the profound theological consequences of this reprieve from divine justice would lead to a devastating new fracture in the Roman Catholic Church.
Click to Watch World's Last Chance

Trumpet 2Interpreting the Trumpet as mankind's final wake-up call, the schismatic popes appointed in Madrid and Zagreb embraced God's probation arguing that the tribulation had now started and the rapture had merely been postponed. Their breakaway followers were encouraged to seek salvation through repentance instead of grasping for the false hope that technology could defeat the remaining Trumpets.

Meanwhile the reanimation of Pope John Paul II continued to cause bewilderment and confusion in the Vatican.

In 1862, on this day the Union Army invaded Upper Canada and eliminated that smarmy nest of rebel sympathizers for all time.

Nest of RebelsDespite the blatant fact that Confederate agents really were being harboured in British North America, in reality the bulk of the rebels were based in the Southern States which were even now threatening to secede from the Union. And surely they would have done so already had Lincoln, rather than Seward, received the Republican nomination in 1860. But due to the chance presentation of an undescribably ugly woodcut of his opponent at the "Wigwam" in Chicago, Seward had somehow prevailed and his strategem for recreating a sense of Union identity was a war of northern aggression with the old enemy - Great Britain. Rather than wait for another negative catalyst (like the Harper`s Ferry Raid) to split the Union, he hoped that a positive catalyst might reverse the forces of disintegration.

Co-written with Stan Brin and Scott PalterThe timing was auspicious, being almost fifty years to the day when President Madison had ordered the annexation of Canada, a task underestimated as "a mere matter of marching". Had he succeeded the expansion of territory would have exceeded that achieved by his predecessor under the Louisiana Purchase. And perhaps a bigger question might well be what would have been the state of such a larger Union by 1862.

However Seward, like Madison, would also fail. And the reversal would become even more catastrophic when the Southern States decided to seize their moment to secede when the Royal Navy bombarded the helpless northern cities on the Eastern Seaboard.

And so history would ridiculed the invasion as "Seward's Folly", yet recognise that the fateful act somehow exemplified his own character. His contemporary Carl Schurz described Seward as "one of those spirits who sometimes will go ahead of public opinion instead of tamely following its footprints".

In 1940, on this day Germany's cultural conquest of France began in earnest when Adolf Hitler crossed the bridge over the Meuse River on his BMW R75 motorcycle; his long-term partner Eva Braun was pleased to accompany him, relaxing in "the Leader's" attached sidecar.

Hitler Conquers FranceThe journey from Bavaria had been delightful in the balmy late spring weather - and upon their late arrival in Paris, the crowd warmly welcomed Walt Disney's favourite cartoonist.

Yet Adolf would face stiff competition from an unexpected rival. In England, the post-modernist painter Winston Churchill was putting the final touches to his dramatic masterpiece "blood, toil, tears, and sweat". During the long hot summer of 1940, this beautiful canvass would hang in the Louvre, drawing audiences away from the cinema.

To be upstaged by such a retrograde rival was really quite frustrating. Hitler began seriously considering an invasion of Britain, although he feared that the voyage would be rather an unpleasant experience - perhaps a focus on the east would be more productive.

In 1967, on this day the General Secretary of the Australian Communist Party and de facto Head of State Lawrence (Lance) Louis Sharkey died of a heart attack in Sidney, New South Wales. O Tempora, O Mores Part 3 - The Death of Lance Sharkey
His successor would be Laurence 'Laurie' Aarons (pictured) who by coincidence was himself born in Sydney, the son of Sam Aarons, a leading member of the Communist Party and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War. The Aarons family was of German-Jewish origin; Brian Aarons, who was also later prominent in the Communist Party, Mark Aarons, a well-known broadcaster, journalist and author, and John Aarons.
During the Sino-Soviet Split of the early 1960s the CPA suffered a split, and Aarons led the majority pro-Soviet and anti-Chinese faction. He was a strong supporter of Nikita Khrushchev's liberalisation in the Soviet Union, and after Khrushchev's fall he became increasingly critical of the Soviet leadership's policies, re-evaulating his earlier antaganoism towards China.
A fair summary would be that Aarons was an internationalist with a new, compelling vision for the nation. In office, Aarons would seek to re-position Australia as a multi-ethnic Pacific Rim nation, refocusing the economy in the Far East.
During August, Aarons would visit North Vietnam to offer the support of Australian workers to Ho Chi Minh in his struggles against imperialism. Referring to the shipment of convicts from Britain in the eighteenth century, Aarons put together a convincing case that Australians themselves were dehumanised by the same forces threatening the Republic of Vietnam.
So in Harold Holt, Aarons saw an unreconstructed symbol of Australia's colonial past. A link to the hated British monarchy and the white supremacist views of the Australian capitalist. In short, an embarassment to the incoming administration. And since Holt's return from a tour of America and Europe, a rallying point for reactionary politicians who sought to overthrow the 1948 revolution.

In 1967, it was discovered that the notorious 'Einstein papers' purporting to prove that German physicist Albert Einstein was not Jewish were in fact forgeries; the papers had been doctored by the SS in an attempt to trick Einstein into assisting the Nazi atomic weapons program. [continued from Part 2]. Manhattan Project Part 3 - Legacy by Chris Oakley
The revelation was a surprise to both pro-Jewish and anti-Jewish organizations and provoked a dramatic reassessment of Einstein's legacy. In particular, German Jews who had for years reviled him as a traitor gradually began coming to view him in a more favorable light.