OTD in History...

This American Week

I’ve been thinking about condensing these, just so I’m not blowing up your inboxes five times a week. Let’s do that for a minute and see how it goes. All of these events happened between October 21 and 25 in their respective years:

1836: Sam Houston for President

…of the Republic of Texas, that is. Sammy becomes the first president of the short-lived Republic, which would be annexed and achieve statehood within a decade. He was President twice, but like Cleveland and Trump, his terms were non-consecutive.

1879: Tommy Boy has a bright idea

Thomas Edison successfully demonstrated the incandescent light bulb at his lab in Menlo Park. It took thousands of iterations but once the formula was concrete, industrialization took a huge leap forward.

1929: Black Thursday

Industrialization then got its huevos stomped on 50 years later when the stock market crashed, hurling America into the Great Depression, which would last all throughout the 1930s. Fortunately FDR had a rock-solid plan for curing America’s 25% unemployment rate: the draft.

1983: Beirut Barracks Attack

Reagan sent Marines to Lebanon in 1983 to uh, help out with their civil war…this was a multinational effort, and I get the sentiment behind it, but that multinational coalition took a right cross to the jaw when suicide bombers crashed a truck with six tons of explosives into the Marine barracks, killing over 200 of them. Reagan would withdraw the Marines a few months later.

2001: Do you feel old yet?

Apple released the first iPod 24 years ago. Nobody noticed because we were still bombing the piss out of Afghanistan and trying to close in on Bin Laden. The first iPod had 5GB of memory, a 10 hour battery, and cost $400. The first iPhone wouldn’t launch for another six years.