On June 2, 1774, the British Parliament passed the fourth of the Intolerable Acts, the Quartering Act. No wonder the American colonists objected… being English.

It was in fact the second Quartering Act, the first being given Royal Assent on May 15 of 1765. And colonists found that one passing strange, and ominous, noting that there had been no standing army in the colonies for protection against the French before the Seven Years’ War broke their power in North America. So who, exactly, was the enemy the British government regarded as even more dangerous and against whom they needed to have a non-citizen armed force ready and on the spot?

The updated 1774 version, pretty clearly, was aimed specifically against citizens who, in keeping with their ancient rights tracing back to Magna Carta and beyond, were objecting to being taxed without representation. It was not the most hated of the “Intolerable Acts,” which would have taken some doing given that the others were the Boston Port Act, Massachusetts Government Act and Administration of Justice Act. But it certainly seemed to fit a pattern denounced by the most radical or, from an Establishment point of view, paranoid.

It’s important to grasp here that the British Bill of Rights of 1689 specifically denounced James II for “raising and keeping a standing army within this kingdom in time of peace without consent of Parliament, and quartering soldiers contrary to law”. And the struggles with the Stuarts both before and after the Civil War, execution of Charles I, Commonwealth and Restoration had as a vital component a bitter tussle over whether armed force should remain in the hands of the people or be concentrated in those of the state.

In asserting the former the “American” colonists were not breaking with British tradition but standing on it. The same tradition on which Canada was founded in a period, following the American Revolution, when the British government abandoned such irregular actions and the philosophy of state supremacy over citizens that did indeed lie behind them.

From the many vicissitudes that have come to mankind on June 1, consider that Roman emperor Didius Julianus was assassinated, executed, or both on this date in 193. And that a monk named John Cor recorded the first known batch of Scotch whisky on June 1 1495. And now contemplate Samuel Johnson’s couplet “How small, of all that human hearts endure,/ That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.”

I have no pity for Julianus. Apparently he rushed from the banquet table to bid for the Imperial purple, at the urging of his wife and daughter, when the Praetorian guard brazenly auctioned it off after assassinating Pertinax (which is not only a cool name but he actually tried to do to good things as emperor and paid with his life, first contestant in the “Year of Five Emperors” which was as bad as it sounded).

Julianus won the auction, debauched the currency, incurred the wrath of the populace, faced revolt, fought ineffectively, bargained pitifully, was ousted and did not survive an encounter with a soldier. Phooey.

As for Scotch, well, at the risk of incurring the wrath of the populace, I don’t actually like it. But before you revolt, let me hasten to say that I’m not criticizing it. I don’t suggest that those who do like it, who savour the subtleties and enjoy discussing the merits and particular qualities of endless varieties, are in error or making it all up. (I even believe when wine critics say things like “tight” or “structured” or “long” it means something that matters and actually relates to a liquid. That’s how almost cultured I am.)

The actual record says “To Brother John Cor, by order of the King, to make aqua vitae VIII bolls of malt.” The king in question is James IV of Scotland, who was less useless than a lot of kings though his reign ended very badly. But Scotch continued to bring great joy to the human race over many centuries and will continue to do so long after Didius Julianus is forgotten.

Oh wait. He already was.

Long live Ramesses II. And he did. Taking the Egyptian throne on May 31 of 1279 BC, he reigned until 1213, dying somewhere around the age of 90, the greatest of all Pharaohs, his queen the famous Nefertari whose tomb contains spectacular paintings including from the Book of the Dead. Look on his works, ye mighty…

I will. Because Ancient Egypt fascinates me. It was so, well, monumental, so strangely serene, so long-lasting. The Great Pyramid at Giza, for instance, was the tallest building in the world at 481 feet for nearly 4,000 years from roughly 2560 BC until it was topped by Lincoln Cathedral (525) in 1311 AD. And is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World still largely intact.

That’s how long things lasted in Egypt. Remember, while we may casually associate pyramids and Pharaohs, when Ramesses II acceded the Great Pyramid was already 500 years older than Lincoln Cathedral is today. When we were in England last year, and nearly visited Lincoln, we joked that the difference between North America and Britain is that we think 200 miles isn’t far and they think 200 years isn’t old. In Egypt 2000 years isn’t old.

As for Ramesses, he didn’t build pyramids. They were excessively obvious tomb-robber beacons. But he did build, on a massive scale. Temples, monuments, an entire new capital of Pi-Ramesses (dangerous vainglory there) and the famous temple complex at Abu Simba relocated by Nasser so it wouldn’t be flooded when the Aswan Dam created Lake Nasser (speaking of vainglory, but of a cheesy and derivative sort).

The Egypt of the pharaohs continues to fascinate me, and writers of historical fiction, because its message is so massive, confident and utterly inscrutable. Nobody remembers Ptah or Sekhmet today (I was going to say Isis but regrettably it has been appropriated by people all too typical of our times). Yet there it sits, immutable even in ancient ruin, staring calmly like a Sphinx while we rush frantically about.

Indeed, nowadays even the title of tallest building changes hands every few years or, at best, decades. One succeeds another. It was the Empire State Building back in King Kong’s day. Then it was… you don’t know, do you? Apparently for eight years it was the Ostankino Tower in Moscow, which caught fire in 2000. Then came the CN Tower, world-famous in Canada, for 32 years. Then… Go on. Tell me. I defy you. (It’s OK. I didn’t know either. It’s Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. 2722 feet. Who cares?

None of these have the dignity of Giza or Lincoln. Our own civilization risks being as mute as Egypt’s without the fascination. So it’s worth remembering that Ramesses, in addition to be sometimes nominated as the Pharaoh of Exodus, really was the Greeks’ Ozymandias. Hence the formerly famous Shelley sonnet about the broken statue or Ramesses that is almost all that remains above ground of his grant new capital in the Nile Delta.

“I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Incidentally Shelley wrote the poem in competition with his friend Horace Smith, today roughly as famous as Seankhibtawy Seankhibra, whose sonnet ends more pointedly for us moderns with:

“We wonder,—and some Hunter may express

Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness

Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,

He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess

What powerful but unrecorded race

Once dwelt in that annihilated place.”

If someday someone does gaze upon the ruins of our “Yale box” glass and steel towers and ugly modern sculpture, I very much doubt it will be with the kind of awe that Ancient Egypt’s mute remains still inspire.

The peasants are revolting. Yes. It’s an old joke. But it wasn’t all that funny on May 30, 1381, the beginning of the Peasant’s Revolt, a.k.a. Wat Tyler’s Uprising, a.k.a. the Great Rising in England. It’s sort of a Massachusetts thing.

What? There was no Massachusetts. They didn’t go in for peasant revolts. Whereof doth he blither? you ask. Of this. There is a remarkably stable pattern of regionally differentiated attitudes in Britain on everything from cooking to clothing to political and theological views, described in fascinating if sometimes excessive detail in David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed about the persistence of these folkways in America. I heartily recommend it for understanding important aspects of American history including the stuff happening now.

On that basis, it’s not at all surprising that a major “left-wing” revolt like Tyler’s against the high and mighty in favour of equality would happen not in “England” as an undifferentiated entity but in the southeast, from which the majority of early settlers to New England came. Nor that the same part of England would be the hotbed of Puritanism and support for Cromwell-style radicalism in the English Civil War. Or, indeed, opposition to King John over Magna Carta.

My own feelings on the matter are mixed. You couldn’t find a stronger supporter of Magna Carta outside Stephen Langton’s tomb. But the leveling impulse rapidly gets out of hand and sweeps away much that is vital along with much that is obnoxious. I’m no fan of Cromwell, and might have been persuaded in 1660 to dig him up, behead him and put the rest of his corpse in chains (they actually did that). But I’d also have voted to execute Charles I. I like my constitutions balanced.

Interestingly, that’s more or less what came of the Tyler revolt. Initially successful, and spreading to the frequently turbulent cities of the North, it prompted a rare display of courageous statesmanship on the part of the young king Richard II including several meetings with the rebels one of which turned so ugly that Wat Tyler wound up dead and, as the cliché has it, with his head on a post.

The revolt was soon suppressed. But then Parliament met, affirmed most existing laws, agreed that the king’s counsellors were a vile and worthless lot and needed changing, pardons were issued to almost everyone on all sides, the hated poll tax that triggered the revolt was abandoned, the expensive continental war was scaled back and landlords mostly avoided taking revenge on peasants except to a limited extent through the courts. In short, legitimate grievances were taken into account, severe reaction was avoided, and liberty under law was restored. (As for Richard, 18 years later he was deposed as a tyrant, and rightly so.) Even serfdom, a major sticking point for the rebels, quietly vanished in the next century.

By the way, it’s not really clear that England had “peasants” in the standard sense. The common people were far richer even than their continental counterparts, and had far more legal rights. And while lots of nations have “peasants’ revolts” only England’s ends with a constitutional settlement.

Oh happy land, whose colonies developed the same sorts of habits by getting people from all over the British Isles to balance their approach. Including the curious fact that the “radicals” in Watt Tyler’s revolt, and later in Massachusetts, hated high taxes. So did the conservatives. Another thing they found it easy to make peace by agreeing on, and another thing I love about Britain in its days of glory.

My first year of It Happened Today features for the month of June is now available as an ebook on Kindle. Only $2.99.

Of course, monthly subscribers get a free copy. Subscriptions start at $1/month (please note these are US dollars).

On May 29, 1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks and turned into Istanbul. It was in some sense a formality; the Byzantine Empire wasn’t what it once had been, and hadn’t been for centuries. But it was also a landmark event in what might have been, had been, and would be.

The Byzantine Empire, né the Eastern Roman Empire, had been on the skids since at least 1071 when it lost Anatolia to the Turks. A legitimate world power that even reconquered Italy and parts of Spain under Justinian the Great in the 6^th century, it was a remnant by the 12^th. And while the Crusades were meant to buy it some time, the shocking decision of the Fourth Crusaders in 1204 to um sack Christian Constantinople instead of those tough guy infidels over that way, looting churches and raping nuns left it even more fatally weakened. (That the Orthodox population of Constantinople had massacred tens of thousands of their Roman Catholic fellows and enslaved or driven out most of the rest helped provoke it. But still.)

That there was still a Constantinople to fall in 1453 is thus a tribute to the tenacity of its later rulers apart from the bit where they fought two significant civil wars in the 14^th century, since nothing else important was happening or something. But by 1450 the Byzantine “Empire” was smaller than the Karamanid Emirate and about as mighty as the Knights of St. John. And three years later fall it did.

In one sense it was a dramatic victory for Islam, which had been rampaging since the mid-7^th century and now seemed poised to squeeze Christendom from both ends. But while the Sultans advanced in small incremental steps through the Balkans, only finally being driven back from Vienna in 1683, the various Muslim powers in Spain were conquered one by one culminating in the fall of Granada in 1492, yes, the same year Columbus sailed the ocean blue. So the fall of Constantinople, sometimes pegged as the end of the Middle Ages, is also the year in which the West turned West, and became an Atlantic more than a Mediterranean civilization.

So which would prevail? The Islamic triumph leaving Europe’s back door open, or the European surge onto the world stage. Plot spoiler. You know the answer. But here’s something you may not know. Even in its death agonies, Byzantium might have held out at least for a while had the underestimated Sultan Mehmed II not managed to employ a disgruntled master founder, a shadowy probably Hungarian figure named Orban, to make him a giant cannon and a number of other guns with which to batter down the walls.

Thus in a very real sense, including in its final days, Byzantium’s fall was due to internal Western weakness not Muslim strength. The technological gap between the West was already significant and growing fast. Indeed it is worth noting that while Constantinople was going under, Gutenberg was at work on his famous Bible produced with movable type, which appeared in 1455. By 1500 books were everywhere in Europe, some six million of them, around 40,000 separate editions, stimulating controversy, provoking thought and spreading ideas. But in 1485 Sultan Bayezid II banned printing in the Ottoman Empire, a decree that more or less held into the 18^th century. And as Bernard Lewis points out in The Middle East: 2000 Years of History from the Rise of Christianity to the Present Day, already “By the end of the eighteenth century, when a Turk or Arab drank a cup of coffee, both the coffee and the sugar had been grown in the European colonies and imported by Europeans. Only the hot water was of local provenance. During the 19^th century, even that became doubtful, as European companies developed the new utilities in Middle Eastern cities.”

Thus it was that the conquest of Constantinople, however portentous for its inhabitants and later those of the Balkans, was a fleeting triumph of the old over the new. It was not the fall of Byzantium leading to a universal caliphate, but the fall of Granada and the rise of Atlantic exploration from Europe, that heralded the world that would succeed the Middle Ages.

P.S. If you’re wondering why Constantinople became Istanbul, even if the song says it’s nobody’s business but the Turks, it turns out that the Turks called it “Kostantiniyye” or “İstanbul” more or less interchangeably. And before the PC types insist on the culturally sensitive “Istanbul,” it’s not an Arabic or Turkish word but a contraction of the Greek phrase “εἰς τὴν Πόλιν” or “iss tim Polin” meaning “to the city”. But the fact that old New York was once New Amsterdam had a much bigger impact on history.

A big shout-out to Bluebottle, Mad Dan Eccles, Henry, Min, Grytpype, Dennis Blodnok and the whole crew on the anniversary of the May 28, 1951 launch of the BBC radio comedy The Goon Show featuring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. And the impeccable upper-crust accent of announcer Wallace Greenslade, trying to keep his poise amid the lunacy.

If you’re familiar with the Goon Show, nothing more need be said. But it will be anyway, including the fact that the legendary “Fifth Beatle,” producer George Michaels, was involved in recording Goon Show records before meeting the Fab Four who were, as boys, all devotees of the show. In fact, he introduced Sellers and the Beatles which is why, among many other things, you can laugh so hard you cry watching Sellers do the lyrics to “A Hard Day’s Night” in overwrought 1950s BBC Shakespeare style.

If you’re not familiar with the Goon Show, you really need to listen to it. For nine brilliant years it ruled the airwaves, making household names of the stars, and also of Greenslade (who only got the job because a more senior announcer, Andrew Timothy, felt it would impair his dignity) and musician Ray Ellington, who turned out to have considerable comic genius. And musician Max Geldray who, well, didn’t.

My own parents listened to it while studying in Britain in the 1950s. And when it was brought to Toronto radio in 1972, they started playing it for us, and I was astounded and hooked instantly.

It had the same effect in its original run on the future Monty Python troupe. But IMHO the Goon Show holds up much better than Monty Python despite being decades older.

It’s a technologically different world, of course, where there were no computers and no smart phones and TV was a novelty. But Milligan’s genius as the main writer, and that of all three and the bit players as radio actors, is genuinely immortal, from Sellers’ lecherous and cowardly Major Bloodnok to Milligan’s idiot Eccles to Secombe’s hapless protagonist Ned Seagoon. Sellers could even turn the arch-villain Grytpype’s dry “Please… don’t do that” into a catchphrase, while only Milligan could have created such a name as “Hercules Grytpype-Thynne” and made it work.

The good men do is oft interred with their bones. But in the case of these three, all now passed on to that great studio in the sky, the frequently astonished laughter has never stopped.

If you haven’t listened to the madcap brilliance that invariably followed Greenslade’s staid straight-man “This is the BBC”, you absolutely owe it to yourself. If you have, listen again.

May 27 is an odd date in the history of the modern world. It’s the day they stopped making the Model T. It was hugely successful so… it had to go. As Marx and Engels complained in the Communist Manifesto, under capitalism, as they mislabeled modernity, “all that is solid melts into air.” Here today, gone tomorrow.

The Model T was certainly here today. First produced on Oct. 1, 1908, it was the first affordable car, the one that put the middle class on wheels in the United States which is, despite what some commentary would lead you to believe, the most modern nation in the world, as well as the most conservative in a constructive sense.

Incredibly, the Model T was still 8^th in all time car sales as of 2012, with 16.5 million units sold. And of course if you rank it by percentage of all cars sold during its production run, it’s headlights, bumper and hood ahead of everything else; 57% of all cars made worldwide in 1927 were Model Ts. And incidentally in 1925 Americans owned over 17 million cars; Britain, France, Italy and Germany combined had just 1.6 car owners, and Japan a mere 25,000.

Henry Ford did a lot of things right, including the moving assembly line. The Model T cost $825 in 1908, $290 in 1927. But of course it was imitated, design advanced, and the Model T had to go.

It’s tempting to call the end of that amazing run a harbinger of the end of the boom times of the 1920s and a warning about the Great Depression to come. And it’s disconcerting to learn that the industrial production index did dip that year, primarily because… Ford shut down production for six months to start making the Model A. But then the party resumed.

By 1929 half of American families owned a car, a thing essentially unheard of 30 years earlier. Britain didn’t reach that figure until, believe it or not, the Thatcher years. 1980. And don’t overlook the fact that especially as roads improved, automobiles reduced the isolation of rural life and the backbreaking nature of farm work; surprisingly often farmers would put the thing up on blocks, put a belt on the axle and use it to pump water, drive a grinding wheel, run a saw and otherwise get jobs done in a hurry.

The Model A went on sale on December 2 1927, and by February 1929 a million had been sold. By late July, two million. By March 1930, three million. And when it was discontinued in March 1932, very nearly five million. In four colours, with nine body styles. BTW the famous story that you could have a Model T in any colour you liked, as long as it was black, is only partly true; it was originally available in several hues not including black, but in 1913 as part of his cost-cutting Ford went to monochrome. But modernity requires change, and so the Model A had varieties. Then came the Model B and the Model 18 with new and better engines.

The Model T continued to inspire affection. It may not have been elegant or powerful or even especially reliable by later standards. But it was a breakthrough machine. And you could tinker with it, unlike modern cars.

In fact, it may have disappeared from showrooms and by and large from highways as time went by. But you could still find it in Riverdale.

Yes, that’s right. Archie Andrews’ jalopy was a Model T, despite at one point being called a Model A in Archie double digest #192. Don’t worry. I did have to look that up. I didn’t know it.

Of course kids today probably have no more idea about his jalopy than an actual Model T. Wikipedia says in issue #238 of Life With Archie, published in 1983, the jalopy was destroyed and he switched to a mid-1960s Ford Mustang.

All that is solid indeed.