Blogs, essays, updates, and occasional notes that sit alongside The Butterfly Effect.
On 26 April 1564, William Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon. His birth date is unknown. For some people, this uncertainty is enough to convince them that a glover's son could not possibly have written Hamlet.
On 25 April 404 BC, Athens surrendered to Sparta, ending the Peloponnesian War. Twenty-seven years of plague, naval catastrophe, and Persian gold had turned Greece's golden age into rubble — and left a warning nobody has quite managed to heed.
On 24 April 1479 BC, Thutmose III became Pharaoh of Egypt. For the next 22 years, his stepmother Hatshepsut ran the kingdom. When he finally ruled alone, he built the largest empire in Egyptian history — then spent years trying to erase her from it.
On 23 April 1521, royalist forces crushed the Comuneros on a muddy field at Villalar. The revolt had almost ended the Spanish reign of Charles V before it properly began - a teenage Habsburg who spoke no Castilian, travelled with a Flemish court, and treated Spain as a bank to finance his Imperial ambitions elsewhere.
On 22 April 1500, Pedro Álvares Cabral sighted a mountain on the Brazilian coast and claimed it for Portugal. The territory had already been assigned to his king six years earlier, by a line drawn through an ocean that no one could accurately locate.
On 21 April 753 BC, according to tradition, Romulus founded Rome. The date is a fiction a Roman scholar calculated seven centuries later. The city it commemorates outlived every peer it ever had, and most of its successors.
On 20 April 1653, Oliver Cromwell walked into the Commons with a file of musketeers, pointed at the Speaker's mace, called it 'a bauble,' and dissolved the Rump Parliament. He had no constitution to replace it with. Seven years later, the same Rump voted to bring back the king.
On 19 April 1529, the Diet of Speyer voted to ban Lutheranism and reinstate the Edict of Worms. Six princes and fourteen cities filed a legal protest. That document coined the word 'Protestant.' Ten years later to the day, Charles V made peace with them. He never managed more than that.
On 18 April 1912, the Carpathia arrived in New York with 712 Titanic survivors. The disaster is remembered as a tragedy of fate. It was not. It was a sequence of human decisions, most of them wrong - and one of them spectacularly right.
On 17 April 1895, China signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki and surrendered Korea, Taiwan, and 200 million taels of silver to Japan. Eight months of unbroken defeats confirmed what the Self-Strengthening Movement had spent thirty years denying: Japan had transformed itself. China had not.