Speaking of places everybody’s watching, this is the anniversary of the 1st edition of the Times of India on November 3, 1838. And no, I don’t mean everybody was or is watching India. Back then it was Britain. And if Britain had quality newspapers, the inevitable question was why you didn’t.

You could answer that newspapers were Western and imperialist and you didn’t want one. Before sneaking off to read a British one in private even if it was months old and tattered. Or you could say yours was as good. Or that you were planning one. Or that the government should do something. But you just couldn’t ignore the question.

Now the Times of India, which began life as The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, has generally aspired to give the second answer and done very well. It is the third-largest newspaper in India by circulation and the largest-selling English-language daily in the world. (And no, practically nobody cares what the largest-selling paper is in any other language; you see how this works.) And while it too may succumb to this dang Internet thing, it has consistently had a high reputation for quality.

It is an important Indian institution. And yet it is, of course, utterly foreign in origin and conception. Its original publisher was Raobahadur Narayan Dinanath Velkar, who you don’t get points for guessing was Indian. But its first editor was one J.E. Brennan and it published news from Britain as well as India and the world.

As of course it would because the “newspaper” is an entirely western idea, and moreover Anglosphere journalism has a tone not found even elsewhere in the West. And the “World Revolution of Westernization” so brilliantly discussed by Theodore von Laue in his book of the same name has swept over the world to the point that the only places that don’t have newspapers are either total backwaters or places that used to have them before the smartphone came along.

It’s now the United States. But for a long time, including the 19th century, it was Britain (and what could be a more British name than The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce?). And you can curse imperialism until your teeth ache, and write endless stinging editorials against it. But you’ll still be writing them in a newspaper that you would not begin to have without imperialism, any more than you’d have editorials.

The world is a big place. And yet in most eras including our own, all eyes are on one particular spot much of the time. There is one country to which people in all others compare themselves, and their own nation, with varying degrees of admiration, complacency, bitterness or other emotions. Which is my segue to the invention of cheerleading.

Yes, cheerleading. On Nov. 2 1898. And it could only be in… you know it. The United States. Specifically the University of Minnesota.

The latter was not a foregone conclusion. And the “sport” or activity or excrescence or whatever you consider it has of course historical roots, from British sports crowds chanting various things in unison, some more edifying than others, to the U.S. college scene. Including a “Princeton Cheer” documented from the late 1870s on that went “Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! Tiger! S-s-s-t! Boom! A-h-h-h!” and more or less still does and accounts for the otherwise baffling “Sis Boom Bah” I first encountered in Pogo. If you care.

The point here isn’t the comics I read as a kid and still consider brilliant. Nor is it people in the stands yelling even with “cheer leaders” designated to trigger these arguably inane outbursts at key moments. It’s the point at which a “cheerleading squad” appeared to help focus the crowd’s enthusiasm, followed by a cheerleading fraternity in 1903 and then the invention of girls in revealing clothing.

Well, not exactly. But just as World War II opened up a great many other jobs for women as men went overseas, so it let them into cheerleading. From which they have never been dislodged, making up over 95% of all participants though in a nod to political correctness American colleges keep the ratio pretty even. And you just know this sort of thing would arise in the United States and everyone else would know about it.

Nowadays the United States apparently has around 1.5 million cheerleaders at all levels, against perhaps 100,000 in the whole rest of the world. And of course being American they have continually made it bigger, glitzier and more dramatic, from the aforementioned clothing to increasingly amazing athletics, organized competitions and so on.

Meanwhile the rest of the world gapes in amusement, delight or horror. But gape they do. Whereas what anyone does at sporting events in 98% of the world’s countries is known only there.

The United States does give some alarming signs of being in decline. And perhaps it is no longer inventing such iconically weird things the way it did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But I wouldn’t count on it.

Not even as part of a crowd being directed by preppie guys wit megaphones while girls in spangles form a pyramid.

This is a hot one. On October 31 the town of Marble Bar, Australia started a record streak never surpassed, of 160 straight days of temperatures of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. (I know we’re supposed to use metric and say 37.8 degrees Centigrade but it doesn’t sound as significant or scary and this is Halloween.) That people could have withstood it, even a fairly small number, is a tribute to the odd ruggedness of mankind in general and Australiankind in particular especially as it was before residential air conditioning.

Eh? Before air conditioning? The streak lasted from October 31 1923 to April 7 1924? How can this be? Isn’t global warming the ominous everybody-knows-but-idiots crisis of our times, in which every year is hotter than the hottest year in recorded history and mankind are great sinners needing salvation from government?

Well, no. Not really. Especially as “recorded history” when it comes to temperature dates back only to the mid-19th-century end stages of the “Little Ice Age” that began around 1300 and was not, surely, caused by man. I stress that point because if we did not cause it to start, it is a bit presumptuous, and contrary to sound scientific method, to insist that we caused it to end. (One of the fundamental laws of science, as opposed to politics, is that the nature of causation does not change over time; if it did, there would be no fundamental laws.)

I’m no fan of pollution or of arrogance. It is arrogant to think we can do whatever we like to the planet and nothing bad will happen. But it is also arrogant to think the entire universe including the climate revolves around us.

If it did, Marble Bar would have set that record recently.

On October 29 back in 1618 Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded on largely trumped-up charges (as noted in this series this Oct. 10). I’ve never been quite sure what to make of Raleigh.

He is larger than life in a very Renaissance kind of way, a writer, adventurer and courtier who I expect was also more annoying than life and not just for the daunting example he set. Today I suppose he’s a villain for having made tobacco popular in England, one of many things for which James I hated him and for once not without reason. (If you wonder why James regarded himself as a highly intelligent man and a skilled controversialist, you should read his “Counterblaste to Tobacco” which shows him at his best; a man who could write “A custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse” cannot have been entirely without virtues.)

As for Raleigh, he was brave, gallant and dashing. But also I think somewhat slippery, not a man on whose word it might be safe to rely. His career had many ups and downs and not everything bad that happened to him was undeserved. But on balance there are two things for which I cherish his memory, along with a throwaway line in a book I read in my teens saying when Raleigh was sent with troops to Ireland to deal with a revolt there were already British soldiers stationed there to tell the newcomers there was “no bread, no beer, no money and the butter was hairy”.

One was his insistence during his treason trial on the right to summon witnesses, not then a feature of English law. It failed, but his words still ring: “[Let] my accuser come face to face, and be deposed. Were the case but for a small copyhold, you would have witnesses or good proof to lead the jury to a verdict; and I am here for my life!" The other was his principled stand in debate on a harsh bill aimed at Protestant dissenters, informed perhaps in part by his own experience of persecution under the Catholic Bloody Mary. As Catherine Drinker Bowen describes it in her wonderful biography of Edward Coke, The Lion and the Throne, “Laws that punished the fact, he [Raleigh] could approve. But laws which punished a man’s intention he considered hard. Were juries henceforth to be ‘judges of men’s intentions, judges of what another means?’ And on such judgement, were they to take life and send into banishment?”

His own career ended badly and I’ll bet being one-upped by him at court was as much fun as Edward Blackadder made it sound (see the second series episode “The Potato”). But he was a true Englishman and never more than in his spirited defence of liberty sheltered by just law.

On October 28 back in 1886 President Grover Cleveland dedicated the famous Statue of… Well, you know, of course. The Statue of Liberty. It’s a lot more famous than, say, Grover Cleveland, except to nerds who relish his being the only man to serve non-consecutive presidential terms. (And don’t give Bill Clinton any ideas.)

It is easy to despair over, or despise, the United States. People have been doing it since before the Revolution. And Donald Trump isn’t making it harder. Nor is Hillary Clinton. Nor is the fact that the American government today is so large, aggressive, arrogant and inept that it’s hard to remember that it is a nation founded in liberty and long faithful to that founding. But those symbols do keep trying to remind us, and them.

Of course virtually every nation imagines itself to love “liberty”. But too often in bombastic patriotic odes, anthems and speeches the word means political independence of our tribe, which then denies freedom to its own members and the very humanity of everyone else. In America it meant something so different that the whole world knows the Statue of Liberty and she shows up at protests on the other side of the world.

No Chinese symbol could resonate in American politics in anything like the same way the “Goddess of Liberty” did in Tienanmen Square in 1989. Not even in the negative way that, say, Mao Zedong once did including in the Beatles song “Revolution”. And that gives some grounds for hope. Freedom is so deep in the political DNA of the United States that in a crisis citizens might yet turn to it both instinctively and passionately.

For that matter, some of us nerds also cherish Grover Cleveland because, as a Democratic president, he once vetoed a bill to relieve drought-stricken Texas farmers on the grounds that the Constitution did not empower the federal government to appropriate money from the people generally for the benefit of some particular group.

The sum was just $10,000, perhaps equivalent to a quarter of a million dollars today (and today it is hard to imagine Congress giving so little to anyone). But in vetoing it, one of 584 vetoes he cast in defence of limited government, Cleveland said “I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.”

He also challenged the people calling on the government to act, especially those working for newspapers, to campaign instead for private donations. And the result was some $100,000 from citizens’ own pockets. Truly a response worthy of a free nation.

The United States, to say nothing of the Democratic Party, has moved an enormous distance away from such politics and from its foundations. But the statue still stands proudly off the southern tip of Manhattan, reminding Americans that if they are not free they are not American. It is not true of the most famous symbols of any other nation, not even Britain. And perhaps the Star Spangled Banner does still wave over the land of the free.

On this date in history, or possibly legend, October 27 312 AD, the Emperor Constantine had a vision of the Cross and the words "Εν Τούτῳ Νίκα" which, being hard to pronounce or understand, we now render as “in hoc signo vinces” which alas is also today hard to pronounce or understand. But it means “Through this sign you shall conquer” and as the Emperor did win the subsequent battle of the Milvian Bridge. And convert to Christianity along with the Empire of which he became sole ruler partly due to this battle.

Nowadays such stories are dismissed as the sort of silly superstition typical of the dumb people who populated the past. If you’re very lucky someone will try to discern a “genuine” scientific event, like a solar halo, that might have misled the Emperor into thinking he’d seen a cross, or perhaps think he’d been blessed by some solar deity and later muddled himself into believing it had been Christ. More likely they will argue that he wasn’t really a Christian because the sun god appeared on his monuments or coins.

It’s odd to think how rapidly the idea that he might have had a genuine vision has been banished. I don’t say disproved. It’s not even obvious to me how you would disprove it. Not that one should accept every claim to have seen a vision. And certainly nobody in the 4th century AD did so. Not even the deeply credulous. Definitely not the sophisticated, educated, intelligent and tough-minded sorts who fought and won battles for control of the greatest empire the world had ever known.

On the other hand, Constantine went from being not officially Christian to being officially Christian because, as far as we can tell, he himself recounted the story of the omen to Eusebius, who in his Life of Constantine says he heard it from the Emperor personally. Certainly something happened. And the odd thing about all the debunking of things that were widely believed for many centuries is that they tend to explain why history didn’t happen the way it did.

I don’t know if Constantine saw a vision or just found the story good propaganda. I don’t know whether he was long secretly a Christian due to his mother’s influence or whether he convinced her to convert. But I do know he decreed official toleration for Christians and when he knew he was dying urgently sought baptism, trying to reach the river Jordan but not making it.

So obviously he thought it was very important for some reason scholarship strives mightily to prove was not merely wrong but preposterous and probably insincere. Just as an enormous number of people from the early Apostles onward became Christians despite the manifest dangers of doing so and surface absurdity of the whole story. But apparently all of them were ignorant, deluded or weird.

Unlike we moderns, with our calm, rational, well-informed approach to everything.

Yes, today is still the anniversary of the Charlottetown Accord’s referendum defeat, and a jolly good reminder of why we should get to vote on fundamental changes to our Constitutional order. But since we did that last year, I want to celebrate a grim deed for which a guy actually got his comeuppance.

On Oct. 26, 1689, an Austrian General named Enea Silvio Piccolomini, leading an army counterattacking following the repulse of the Turks from the gates of Vienna, ordered the town of Skopje, the current capital of Macedonia, burned to the ground. Supposedly he did it to prevent the spread of cholera of which it was a hotbed, though there is some suspicion that it was partly retaliation for the siege of Vienna.

Either way it was an awful thing to do. One of very many that happen in history including war, to be sure. How many towns and cities have been sacked, their inhabitants massacred, ravished or both, I do not care to consider. And it’s especially bitter because the perpetrators, in a great many cases, got away with it or suffered some subsequent fate that was about equally likely to befall someone who had not taken part in such an event. Certainly the burning demolished much of Skopje and killed or drove out most of its inhabitants (the latter maybe not the best way not to spread cholera) and it never really rebounded.

In this case, not only was his army subsequently defeated. Piccolomini himself died soon afterward. Of cholera. And yes, it served him right.

Yes, Oct. 25 is St. Crispin’s Day, as we all know from Shakespeare’s Henry V and that wonderful speech the playwright had the king give before a famous if pointless victory (see It Happened Today, Oct. 25, 2015). But I always wondered if the king had problems with his pronunciation.

As you doubtless recall, Henry initially says “This day is call’d the feast of Crispian” but later speaks of “Crispin’s day” then stammers “Crispin Crispian” before winding up magnificently with “Saint Crispin’s day”. But it turns out there were two of him. Not in the usual a bit confused folklore sense. They were twins. Or at least brothers.

Born to a noble Roman family, they fled to Soissons and preached by day while cobbling by night, which is why they are the patron saints of cobblers, curriers, tanners and leather workers. (Curriers, in case you're curious, took the tanned hide and further treated it to be strong, supple and waterproof before handing it to the guys with scissors, needles, hammers etc.) They so annoyed the local governor by being so pious, upstanding and do-goody that he had millstones tied round their necks and thrown in a river and, after that failed to do them in, the Emperor had them beheaded. Which I guess constitutes failing upward.

Unless they were born in Canterbury and fled to Faversham after their father was beheaded, where they took up cobbling and in some unspecified way later died. At any event they wound up with a plaque there and a pub in nearby Strood.

They were booted out of the universal liturgical calendar following Vatican II, still tied together. But at least they still apparently existed unlike Saint Valentine who might be another guy with the same name.

Anyway, nobody can boot them out of Shakespeare. And now I know why Henry says it two different ways.

I also like the very British name Strood, for what that’s worth.