On this day back in 1774 the British Parliament finished digging itself a nice deep hole in North America by passing the “Quartering Act,” the final measure in the sequence known as the “Coercive Acts” or “Intolerable Acts” that systematically dismantled the liberties of British subjects in the New World and provoked the American Revolution.

In these acts they closed the port of Boston, drastically curtailed the powers of the Massachusetts Assembly, sharply infringed the right to trial by a local jury in key cases and put soldiers right in people’s houses, at their expense and inconvenience, to enforce the first three. All, be it noted, in response to a series of protests over taxation without representation.

What exactly possessed Parliament to tear up Magna Carta and blow it in the colonists’ faces has never been entirely clear. Obviously George III had excessive ambitions for the executive branch; he found clever ways of suborning parliamentarians; there was no shortage of ambitious men willing to trample ancient rights to curry favour. But why they thought it would work is a great puzzle and it didn’t. Indeed Massachusetts generally, and Boston in particular, had been regarded with distaste by other colonists until these acts, at which point a massive outpouring of sympathy and political organization led more or less directly to a revolt throughout the colonies. The Declaration of Independence was more than two years off, but the eruption of open war at Lexington and Concord was now only eight months away.

It reminds me of political scientist and Sovietologist Robert Conquest’s “Third Law of Politics”, namely that “The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” It’s funny how often I find myself citing that one when confronted by the PR antics of, say, FIFA. And it applies here.

The crisis leading to the Quartering Act also reminds me of an observation by John Dickinson in 1768. Dickinson is an interesting character, a key figure in the development and self-identification of a distinctive American identity (especially with his Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania in 1767-68) and the early organization of the Revolution who nevertheless could not bring himself to endorse Independence, yet served in the Revolutionary War and then became a pioneering abolitionist in the most important sense of freeing his own slaves before helping write the U.S. Constitution (he’s the only Founding Father to free his slaves between 1776 and 1786).

In 1768, observing the trend of British policy in its colonies, Dickinson wrote presciently that the key question in colonists’ minds was “not, what evil has actually attended particular measures – but, what even, in the nature of things, is likely to attend them.” Nations, he added “are not apt to think until they feel,... Therefore nations in general have lost their liberty…” Plenty of people didn’t want to believe that the halting, uncertain but dubious direction of British colonial revenue policy in the 1760s would actually lead to repression. But plenty were at least watchful lest it should, and as the cabal of its enemies apparently controlling British colonial policy dug ever deeper and faster, they drew the appropriate conclusion and pushed back before it was too late.

Nowadays I fear that we are sunk in hedonistic slumber that renders Dickinson’s warning as outdated as his language. The executive branch promises us money and tells us not to worry about the financial, constitutional or moral bill and it feels good so we vote for boodle and mosey on to some other pleasure without pondering where it all might lead. Fortunately the tendency of bureaucratic organizations to be their own worst enemy continues to set off periodic alarm bells. But not, I worry, enough of them.

On June 1, 1941, the German Blitzkrieg enjoyed its last great success on the Western front, completing the conquest of Greece by driving the British from Crete. But at too high a price.

From the end of the Sitzkrieg or “Phoney war” in April 1940, the Nazi war machine had enjoyed a series of stunning triumphs, over Denmark, Norway and France. It seemed that their dynamic tactical doctrines, new technology, and the aggressive spirit inherent in Hitler’s philosophy had given them the terrifying military capability to overwhelm any adversary so rapidly that there was no time to adapt, that the democracies had squandered the 1930s on pacifist dreams and internal problems and could not now recover.

To be sure, the British had somehow survived the Battle of Britain with substantial help from French, Polish, Czech, Canadian and other pilots. But the U-boats, another sinister new high-tech weapon swarming over the oceans, threatened to bring Britain down. And whenever the Allies took a stand, Stukas swooped down from on high, tanks crashed through the defences, and paratroops materialized over key command and control positions, including 20,000 landing across Crete over just a few days. The end seemed nigh.

It was bad. But not quite that bad. The Allies sustained heavy losses in the Crete campaign. But so did the Germans; in their first mass attack of the war their vaunted paratroops took such enormous casualties, including stiff resistance from the civilian population, that they would never again play a significant role in the war. And the Blitzkrieg itself, launched east against Hitler’s Bolshevik ally three weeks later, would founder in the bitter Russian winter though only after reaching the gates of Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad.

Now it can be argued that better decisions in the fall of 1941 might have let the Nazis break the USSR. World War Two remains a story of highly improbable victory against long odds following debacles like the fall of Greece.

In that story, the successful evacuation of some 20,000 British troops as Crete fell was not even the end of the beginning. That, as Churchill famously said, came a year later, when in the two battles of El Alamein the British, Indians, New Zealanders, Australians and others including Greeks stopped Rommel just short of the Suez Canal then drove him from Egypt. But the Axis conquest of Crete looked like one more in an unstoppable string of victories when in fact it was close to the high water mark of a doctrine that, dramatically successful in the short run, was soon to be defeated by more adaptable Western armies, navies and air forces.

On May 31, 1962, the Israeli government hanged Adolf Eichmann. Which I’ve always found very revealing.

You see, Israel does not have the death penalty. It was renounced there as part of a profound moral commitment to the sanctity of life born of the experience of the Holocaust. Though I support capital punishment myself I respect that decision. But once in a while, even they saw, someone just needs killing, not for deterrence or safety but as a matter of justice so fundamental everybody knows it.

Eichmann was an incredibly sinister character, the very embodiment of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”; hence her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. A petty, rule-bound, rigid, cold, small-minded genocidal maniac, he looked and acted like the boring colorless forgettable relative you’d avoid at a family gathering lest be bore you to tears describing his minor functionary job, even while directing the death of millions of innocents.

Peter Z. Malkin and Harry Stein’s gripping Eichmann In My Hands, about the successful Mossad mission to capture Eichmann in Argentina, includes the telling detail that as a prisoner he not only asked his captors for permission to go to the toilet but, once seated on it, asked again for permission to defecate. And yet he turned his obsession with detail and routine to the task of organizing the extermination the Jews of occupied Europe on behalf of Hitler with horrifying efficiency.

Having captured him, given him the first televised trial in history, convicted him despite his claim that he was just following orders, and hanged him, the Israelis burned his body and dumped the ashes in the Mediterranean so there’d be no chance of their becoming a neo-Nazi shrine. Mind you, if you spit in the Mediterranean you might hit a few of his charred molecules. It’s worth a try.

I thoroughly approve of the decision about the ashes. But the main thing is the hanging. Israel, being a society devoted to the rule of law, brought in the death penalty just long enough to kill Eichmann, then abolished it again. And while I think there’s plenty of room to debate how often it should be used, what sort of procedural safeguards you need and what crimes should carry that penalty, I think the Eichmann case proves what the bottom line is.

Sometimes justice demands just one thing: “Get a rope.”

It’s always puzzled me what to make of Joan of Arc. Brave, patriotic, inspired, ultimately canonized. But I can’t admire her. She was apparently unbalanced, she overreached badly and she went up in predictable flames. At the very least she is, I must say, a characteristically French rather than English hero, a fit inspiration for Napoleon rather than Wellington.

It’s really neither here nor there that I’m glad she helped the French kings drive the English out of France. Which I am, because I believe their continental ambitions threatened English liberty. I would also note sardonically that the Hundred Years War is the last time France won a major war as the dominant power on its side. Richard Nixon got off an uncharacteristic “bon mot” when he said that French president Charles de Gaulle had a vision that spanned centuries but unfortunately he was looking the wrong way. But you needed keen vision to look back past 500 years during which French greatness and glory was a snare rather than an asset.

As for Joan herself (OK, Jeanne), well, contrary to those kids-fractured-history Internet things, she wasn’t Noah’s wife. She was a patriot and an inspiring leader including to women and that’s good. But she was also badly out of control. According to her own testimony, she was on a highly improbable mission from God to make the hapless Dauphin king. And she did succeed. But then she couldn’t stop.

On July 17 Charles VII was crowned and became, by French standards, a pretty good king. Which isn’t saying much. Joan was delighted. But she couldn’t declare her mission accomplished, go back to her village and become someone ordinary. Instead she made herself so obnoxious and troublesome to everyone, predictably if not actually deliberately, that the French may well have been relieved to see the English burn her for heresy in 1431.

I don’t defend her execution. I don’t believe in killing people for being wrong about things. But she was a heretic, fighting for a Catholic monarch whose rule depended upon coronation by Church authorities whose authority she rejected.

Many years later, in 1920, the Church decided it was safe to make her a saint. But I still can’t say I actually admire her. She lacked common sense and her example was dangerous rather than inspiring.

On May 29, in 1953, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay topped out on Everest and man had climbed as high as he could go without a ladder. They may not have been the first; it is possible that George Leigh “Because it is there” Mallory and Andrew Irvine reached the summit before dying on their fatal 1924 expedition. But Hillary and Tenzing are definitely the first to get there and back down again alive. And it was worth doing.

If you’ve ever been on an airplane you’ve sort of been there. Except for the bit where you have oxygen and powerful jet engines and cabin service. That’s how high Everest is. It’s also as close to the summit as I’ll ever get, or ever want to. Climbing Everest is something I admire from a distance.

In fact I have a bit of a thing about all the people now climbing Everest out of vanity, in expeditions that have more in common with intercontinental flight than Hillary and Norgay’s pre-velcro feat, let alone Mallory and Irvine’s classic British amateur hobnail boots and stout sticks. I argued years ago in a column that if you can’t lead an expedition up Everest you have no business being on one. And I think with all the other wild, challenging peaks, there’s no need to clutter up this particular peak just because it is the highest. I myself have no business there and never did and wouldn’t go.

Still, I confess that every time I see a mountain, and I have seen some Himalayan peaks from the hills of Nepal some years back, I do feel a wild urge toward adventure. I know there’s nothing on top of a mountain you’d want, and if you don’t get back down fast you never will. Still, I wish, even yearn, for a different and better world in which we could soar safely in such regions without artificial assistance that amounts to cheating.

So I applaud those who really do manage to do it, to satisfy that craving of the spirit and strive to fulfil that impulse I feel but can never satisfy. It really is a good idea for someone to climb them because they are there.

If Dracula gives you the willies (see “It Happened Today” for May 26, the Virginian might help calm you down. It was on May 28 of 1902 that Owen Wister, a sickly Easterner with poetic and musical talents and summa cum laude Harvard degree, created another iconic figure in modern culture, the cowboy.

Of course there were other cowboy stories, of varying degrees of mediocrity or worse, before Wister’s book appeared. But it had an immediate transformative effect on the popular understanding of this figure, creating the brave, courteous, lighting-fast, tall, laconic lone hero represented by Hollywood greats from Gary Cooper to John Wayne and, in a more sinister vein, Clint Eastwood. Also Ronald Reagan, if the words “Hollywood great” make you smile when you say it.

Actually in the book the Virginian’s line is “When you call me that, smile!” But sometimes it’s what you should have said that makes you famous. And again it underlines the iconic power of certain cultural creations that they overshadow not only their creators but even their own actual selves.

Wister himself, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt who recuperated from a mysterious illness out West, did intend to influence the culture, to preserve the world of the cowboy even as progress was eliminating it (see Kid Shelleen’s lament about turning the OK Corral into a roller skating rink in Cat Ballou, one of literally hundreds, probably thousands, of films that would not exist without Wister’s achievement, including the parody genre).

Wister’s book was an immediate success, selling over a million copies by the time he died in 1938 (having decided, perhaps wisely, never to write another Western).

There are things to lament in Westerns, including offensive racial attitudes that, it must be said, were reflected rather than created in the genre. And of course a vast flood of derivative work that ought never to have seen the light of screen. Something like a third of American movies in the 1920s were westerns and in 1959 an incredible 28 western series were running on television in the U.S. And yet the Western also gave the United States, and by extension the West, a kind of native aristocracy of merit, an admirable model of a hero who does not look for trouble but meets it bravely when it comes, defends the vulnerable, and gets off great lines while doing it.

Smile when you read that, pardner.

It is exactly 74 years since the Royal Navy sank the mighty battleship Bismarck in one of those improbable upset victories without which World War II would go by a German name through much of the world and liberty would be largely unspoken. And yet the underlying power of liberty is such that, even with their backs to the wall, free societies possess such resilience that like cartoon superheroes, just when they are about to be flattened and the villain is delivering a triumphant monologue, they suddenly summon hidden reserves of strength and triumph.

For that reason it’s worth noting that May 27^th is also the anniversary of a court challenge to President Abraham Lincoln’s wartime suspension of the ancient writ of habeas corpus. Lincoln had suspended it between Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. to allow military authorities to detain, and thus silence, Confederate sympathizers. And yet with the Civil War hanging in the balance, before the crucial Union victory at Gettysburg, the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, riding circuit and sitting as a federal court judge, could not only hear a case challenging the policy but could rule that only Congress and not the President could suspend habeas corpus.

I do not wish to overstate the impact of the ruling. Lincoln himself officially ignored it, though in July in a message to Congress he did feel obliged to argue, implausibly, that Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution did give him that power. In fact the language of Section 9 is passive and thus vague (“The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it”). But as Article I deals with Congress not the Executive it’s clear that in this case at least Taney had the better argument. And in practice the policy of arresting suspected Southern sympathizers was pursued less vigorously; John Merryman himself, though charged with treason for an act he committed as a member of the pro-southern Maryland state militia, was allowed to post bail and was never tried.

Still, it is remarkable that such a case could be heard, and such a ruling issued, in the middle of a great national emergency. Especially as Taney himself had as Chief Justice in 1857 issued the disgraceful Dred Scott ruling that effectively extended slavery throughout the United States and precipitated the Civil War. And yet, with its very survival at stake, the American body politic allowed him to retain his office and issue rulings that altered the manner in which the Commander in Chief prosecuted the war.

Such conduct in free societies, debating key policies and following often cumbersome rules even in national security crises, looks like weakness. But it is in fact strength.

On May 26, back in 1897, Dracula first came to death. The most famous vampire in literature, linked more or less randomly to the historical Vlad Tepes, flapped, glided and crept into popular culture and never left.

Dracula was not the first vampire in fiction, let alone folklore. And he was certainly not the last. Arguably we have seen too many vampires including the Twilight (The Twilight Saga) series and even worse. But I defy all but the most hardened aficionado even to name Stoker’s predecessors without Googling (if you do, you’ll find “Sheridan Le Fanu's 1871 Carmilla", about a lesbian vampire” and “Varney the Vampire, a lengthy penny dreadful serial from the mid-Victorian period by James Malcolm Rymer”) and none would have inspired the flood of blood-suckers good, bad and ugly we have seen since, from Legosi’s Dracula to Tom Cruise’s Lestat to William Marshall’s Blacula to Buffy and Lincoln slaying… no. I can’t go on. Even though I actually watched Blacula in a drive-in theatre on a double bill with Thing With Two Heads. We all have our shameful secrets. But I digress.

What is remarkable is that Stoker was able to create such an iconic figure. As with Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons, the scale of his achievement is such that his novel launched not just imitators but a whole genre. In fact the novel Dracula sold decently but was not a cultural event during Stoker’s lifetime; his 1912 obituaries didn’t even mention it by name. But it really caught on with a 1920s Broadway adaptation (one shudders to imagine it) and then of course with Lugosi’s adaptation which, curiously, is almost as unwatchable today as Nosferatu whereas the novel holds up well, being close to a masterpiece in execution and definitely a masterpiece in conception. Unlike Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, which started strong but fizzled. There is something so compelling in the central vision that it has survived everything in including the endless parodies (think Leslie Nielson in Dracula - Dead and Loving It) that a true classic inspires.

Would it matter if Stoker had originally given the main character the intended and distinctly campy name “Count Wampyr” before stumbling across “Dracula” in a now long forgotten book on Wallachia and Moldavia at a book in a public library? It is difficult to say; so many things have to go right to create a genuine cultural icon and in Dracula they did. Our view of vampires is, forever, Stoker’s view, even if Dracula is killed in the novel using metal rather than the standard wooden stake (shades of “Garlic doesn’t work!” from The Lost Boys?) Or what if he had given up on the project, or died as a child?

Clearly vampires speak to something deep inside us, some instinctive dread coupled with unclean fascination. But they would not speak nearly as loudly or often as they do were it not for Stoker.