16-20 July in modern history: A week of truly auspicious shit

iliana

iliana

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16 July: Trinity atomic bomb test (1945), US foreshadows upcoming mass death at Hiroshima/Nagasaki and heralds age of fear and global imperial hegemony

17 July: the end of Tsar Nicholas/Romanov family (1918); RMS Carpathia (rescued Titanic six years earlier) sunk by German u-boat (1918, same day as Romanovs); Francisco Franco starts Spanish Civil War and leads outbreak of counterrevolutionary/fascist coup (1936), eventually culminating in decades of Falangist rule of Spain (lasting into the 1970s); Churchill, Truman, Stalin meet at Potsdam (1945, one day after Truman's people tested the bomb); Walt Disney opens Disneyland at Anaheim (1955), his first major theme park, heralding another kind of ascendant, decades-long cultural/corporate hegemony

18 July: Hitler publishes Mein Kampf (1925)

19 July: France declares war on Prussia and the Franco-Prussian War begins (1870), with France eventually surrendering six months later when Prussia invaded Paris, announced the throne of Kaiser Wilhelm and the unification of German states, and founded the German Empire, from which inter-imperial rivalries on the continent stoked European anxieties culminating in the First World War; Lakota leader Sitting Bull surrenders to US Army (1881) after being hunted in the aftermath of the Battle of Little Bighorn, signalling intensifying US suppression of Indigenous resistance (Sitting Bull was eventually killed by US police/Indian Agents on 15 December 1890, two weeks before the US Army killed 200-300 or more people at the Wounded Knee Massacre at nearby Pine Ridge on 29 December 1890, "closing the frontier" and signalling that the US had allegedly won "the Indian Wars" and conquered the continent)

20 July: arch-industrialist Henry Ford reaches milestone in shipping of Ford Motor Company's first production-plant automobile (1903), dispatched from the plant in Detroit, heralding the rise of the model of mass production, instantiating yet another kind of long-lasting cultural/corporate hegemony, and eventually contributing to the rise of US automobile cultures and the remaking of transportation networks, urban landscapes, and environmental space broadly; the US lands on the moon (1969)

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