History doesn’t really move in a straight line, does it? It’s more like a series of erratic jumps. Take April 11th, for instance. Looking at the records—compiled from Misryoum and various archives—you get this weird, jagged portrait of the past. It’s not just one thing. It’s the smell of ozone from a B-29 crash near Albuquerque in 1950, where a nuclear weapon’s explosives detonated on impact. Thank god there wasn’t a fissile core installed, or we’d be talking about something entirely different today.
Then you have the political theater. In 2011, Obama was at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, openly mocking Donald Trump about the whole birther thing. It feels like a lifetime ago. Or maybe not. It’s hard to tell. That same day in 1951, Truman finally decided he’d had enough of MacArthur’s insubordination and fired him. Massive ego clashes are basically the bedrock of the 20th century, I guess.
Some of these moments are just plain messy. In 1966, Charlie Company of the 2/16th Infantry was essentially used as bait at Xa Cam My. The relief plans? They went completely sideways, resulting in friendly fire. Thirty-six dead, seventy-one wounded. It’s a heavy reminder that war—well, it’s rarely as clean as the manuals suggest.
And the weird stuff? Like 1862, when an errant balloon floated General Fitz John Porter over Confederate lines during the Siege of Yorktown. He somehow drifted back to safety. You couldn’t write that in a script and expect people to believe it. Or 1955, when Chiang Kai-shek tried to blow up an airliner to kill Zhou Enlai, only to realize his target wasn’t even on the plane. Talk about a wasted effort.
1938—Richard Whitney, the NYSE president, gets five to 10 for larceny.
It makes you wonder about the pattern. 1913, Wilson forces segregation in federal agencies. 1985, Reagan tries to navigate the Bitburg wreath-laying mess, initially ignoring that the site was actually for Waffen SS members. It’s just layer after layer of bad decisions. We like to think we’re evolving, but then you look at the archives and realize it’s mostly just the same cycle of hubris and accidental survival. Or maybe just accidental. I’m not entirely sure where the line is anymore.