In 1865 the United States finally abolished slavery. It happened far too late and tragically it happened without abolishing bigotry or extending legal equality to the freed slaves and other blacks. Hatred is an amazingly, grimly persistent thing. As was underlined on February 8 of 1865.

Slavery was abolished according to the dictates of the United States Constitution, specifically through the 13^th Amendment, passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864 and the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865. Obviously it could not be enforced through the South until the Civil War was officially ended by the Confederate surrender. But it also could not take effect until it was ratified by three quarters of the states following appropriate formal procedures.

Well, sort of. The Union having won the Civil War, it was in a position forcibly to impose governments on the defeated Southern states that did things genuinely elected governments would not do, like ratify the 13th Amendment. (Even, in many states, if those governments resulted from elections in which federal troops forced local whites to let their black neighbours vote.)

Thus Georgia became the crucial 27th state to ratify the Amendment in on December 6, 1865, putting it over the required three-quarters of the 36 states then in the Union including those that had rebelled in 1860-61. The rest subsequently tagged along, though Mississippi unsurprisingly didn’t get to it until March 1995 and "forgot" to send the required notification to the U.S. Archivist for another 18 years until Mississippi resident Ranjan Batra watched the movie Lincoln and started asking awkward questions. But here’s something even worse.

In Delaware, voters rejected the 13th Amendment on February 8, 1865. Yes, rejected it. In Delaware, a state whose inhabitants had voted against secession on January 3, 1861 and supplied 9 infantry regiments to the Union Army. Another Union state, New Jersey, also rejected it in March 1865 but relented in early 1866. But Delaware only ratified it in 1901.

Are you kidding me? Even after the Civil War, which you helped win, you voted to keep slavery? Sadly, it is so.

P.S. Kentucky, formally a Union state but with divided loyalties and dozens of units fighting on both sides in the war, said nay in 1865 and did not repent formally until 1976.

"How small," Dr. Johnson rhymed, "of all that human hearts endure,/ That part which laws or kings can cause or cure." It’s a useful reminder, and one somebody ought perhaps to put to music, with a backbeat, in honour of February 7, 1964, when the Beatles arrived in the United States to spearhead the first really successful British invasion since the Seven Years’ War.

It was the eruption onto the main Western stage of an amazing array of musical talent and innovation that showed that Britain was far from exhausted as a cultural force. I do not think it is merely a reflection of my particular advancing age that I call The Beatles, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, David Bowie and you can pick many others from the Yardbirds to Herman’s Hermits an exceptional flowering of brilliance. And it is certainly not simply a reflection of my own preferences to say that when these acts showed up in an America whose youth were growing sick of sugary pop songs, it changed the world in ways Elvis Presley alone could not have done.

"The Sixties" had many causes beyond a group of talented Brits giving voice and legitimacy to sometimes juvenile frustration. But rock was the backdrop, and once the Beatles and others had touched down and lit things up, nothing could ever be the same.

I would go further and say the Beatles in particular smoothed the path of social change by being so earnest, so "with it" as one could once say without irony or corn, and yet so decent, blowing the whistle on angry radicalism and somehow placing a kindly, steadying hand on the whole counterculture. "You say you want a revolution? … when you talk about destruction/ Don’t you know that you can count me out".

One can point to laws, kings and wars contributing to the upheaval of the 1960s including obviously Vietnam, the "imperial president" Richard Nixon and the civil rights acts. But politicians jump out to lead parades that are already underway, they don’t create or steer them. It was the ambiance of the period that made the anti-war movement so important, not the other way around. And it was the final, long-overdue change of heart among many Americans including Southerners that finally made formal civil rights a social and political possibility.

There were other contributors to the wildness of that decade including darker forces like the Weathermen and of course pharmaceuticals. And here I think "the pill" mattered more than things like LSD or even marijuana. So the Beatles were far from alone. But they were both surfing on and helping shape a massive social movement that changed what politicians could do or duck.

When you saw the way young people reacted to their arrival in the United States, you knew the world was changing radically and laws and kings would have to scramble to keep up with fast-beating hearts.

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On February 6 in 1820 something really foolish happened. Which of course does not distinguish it from any other day on the calendar. But this one is a fairly trivial incident in itself that manages at the same time to be a historical whopper.

It is the departure from New York of the Elizabeth, bound for Liberia in West Africa with three white American Colonization Society members and 88 American blacks to solve the whole vexed slavery question by sending freed slaves back to West Africa to establish their own country.

It is hard to overestimate the foolishness of the venture. The fact that all the ACS members and a quarter of the blacks were dead within three weeks from yellow fever while the rest fled back to Sierre Leone to await reinforcements gives you some idea of the early difficulties although to be fair Jamestown was sort of like that too and it worked out eventually.

Liberia never could, in a very fundamental sense. The colony not only survived but prospered, and might have done better still if better-prepared settlers had succeeded in creating a genuine self-governing republic. And if so it might have done considerable good in demonstrating what American slaves could do, and be, once the shackles were struck off.

It failed even at that, as the descendants of the colonists formed a closed elite that subjugated the indigenous population; in rather ghastly typical African fashion it is not even certain when the latter got the vote. So it failed as an example. But Liberia was meant to do more than that.

It was meant to solve America’s slavery problem by exporting it. It was meant to permit emancipation by bigots and among bigots, by promising that once freed the blacks would be sent far away where Americans would not have to put up with them. It was always logistically impossible because there was obviously no way to transport millions of people across the Atlantic with tools and other necessities (there were then nearly 2 million American slaves and 200,000 free blacks) even if they could all have been freed. Dragging them to the New World as naked slaves, with high mortality rates on the dreadful "Middle Passage," was technically feasible if morally repellent. Doing the reverse was morally repellent and technically impossible.

The moral repellence was the worst thing of all. Some ACS members were genuinely unprejudiced but figured that until their countrymen and women had a change of heart the best bet for the freedman or woman was to get to a country not run by whites, as Liberia was not after 1847. Others were benevolent by the standards of the day in rejecting slavery but failed to embrace equality, while a few actually felt colonization was a deft trick for getting rid of troublemaking free blacks to help keep slaves more docile and thus preserve the "peculiar institution".

I know it is easy to say from this distance. But the only proper solution to slavery was to accept that all men are created equal, and to reject both the legal and the social subjugation of any race. If it had been necessary to proceed by abolishing the legal subjugation first and then moving on to the social, I think it would have been an acceptable second best. But nothing good was going to happen as long as people insisted that blacks were inferior and based their solutions on that premise, whether or not those solutions they were as technically absurd as sending them all to West Africa one shipload at a time. Even those genuinely unbigoted ACS members who bowed to their neighbours’ prejudice, though they come out of the story looking a lot better than anyone else, let pragmatism trump principle in ways that ultimately failed badly as they generally do.

Whatever the Liberian colonization experiment did, it utterly failed to solve the problem of American racial slavery that erupted into the internecine Civil War and even once it was done left a poisonous legacy of segregation, injustice and bitterness. As anyone capable of math, let alone moral reasoning, would have known would happen.

On February 5 of 1852 Russia’s New Hermitage Museum opened to the public. It was already impressive then, and despite or even because of the Bolshevik Revolution became more impressive still as items from around Russia were added. It remains one of the world’s great museums especially for its art. But its story is not altogether a happy one.

From its beginnings under Catherine the Great in 1754 it has held impressive pieces, a tribute to the power of autocrats and tyrants to extract wealth even from an impoverished populace and spend it on the trappings of culture. Catherine herself acquired literally thousands of old masters, along with engraved gems, drawings and so forth. But her people were starving. And as with the infamous Potemkin villages, such museums in the glittering if slave-labour-built Tsarist capital of St. Petersburg convinced not only foreigners but even its rulers that Russia was indeed keeping up with the West.

Unfortunately it was not. Within three years of the opening of the Hermitage, Russia would lose the Crimean war right in its front yard to Britain and France despite the glaring inadequacies of both their military efforts. And this evidence of insufficient or even failed modernization precipitated a half century of halting reform, inept reaction and upheaval that culminated in the disastrous collapse during World War I into communism during which the Tsars continued to pour out treasure on art and other artefacts.

The Bolsheviks in turn made the museum even more impressive, looting Tsarist and aristocratic palaces and adding their possessions to the now state facility. Stalin later secretly sold thousands of works to help finance his forced industrialization. And then the Soviets added art looted by the Red Army in the closing part of the Second World War, although they kept it hidden until after the fall of the USSR, a dubious contribution to culture. But they never gave it back, which is more than a bit uncultured, and even cancelled a planned 2013 visit by German Chancellor Angela Merkel because of the danger that she would mention this subject. Especially ironic in that the exhibit she was meant to visit along with Vladimir Putin had the friendly title "Bronze Age of Europe: Europe Without Borders".

Visiting the Hermitage at any point after 1852 one might have felt that was in an institution very similar to the British Museum right down to the impressive Egyptian antiquities. But it was not, right down to the fact that the British Museum was privately founded and has never been a mere branch of the government. And the impression to the contrary has been part of a far larger misconception about the extent to which forced cultural acquisition, like forced industrialization, is an adequate or even superior alternative to the real, spontaneous thing.

Apparently February 4 is a day to be proud of in Japan because 46 guys killed themselves as a reward for a good deed. I have to say it’s not my idea of a red-letter day.

The story is that in 1703 in what is now Tokyo and was then Edo, all but one of the "Forty-seven Ronin" committed seppuku not because they had failed to avenge their master’s death but because they had succeeded. The "Akō incident" became a "national legend" in Japan, even the national legend, a shining example of the samurai code of honour. And yes, I do have to explain it if you’re not Japanese. Or rather describe it. I do not think it can be explained in the sense of being defended.

We’re not sure the details as it was not written up in reliable detail for nearly a hundred years thanks to censorship laws. But the basic story is as follows: These samurai were left leaderless, or "ronin," after their lord Asano Naganori was forced to kill himself for attacking a wretched court official named Kira Yoshinaka. So the ronin spent a year working out a plot to kill Kira, after which they had to kill themselves because of the shame of committing murder.

As you already sense, I find the whole thing unspeakably weird. It begins with the key fact that Kira was abusive and corrupt. Two hapless local officials, Lord Kamei and Asano himself, were ordered to prepare a reception for the Emperor’s envoys and were given etiquette lessons by Kira. But they didn’t give him sufficient bribes so he abused them so badly that while Asano kept his cool Kamei lost his and was going to do Kira in.

To save Kamei’s life, his own advisors quickly hustled up a major bribe for Kira who then began treating their master better. But he kept taunting Asano and when he ridiculed him as an ill-mannered rustic, Asano snapped and went after him with a dagger, giving him a minor scratch on his face. (Not exactly what one would hope from a samurai, I note in passing; I thought these guys could kill you with a greeting card.)

Despite the feeble nature of the attack, the very fact of drawing a weapon within Edo Castle was fatal and Asano had to kill himself, his family lost his possessions and lands, and his followers were made outcasts. And so everybody went along with it because I mean what’s blatant injustice when honor is involved or something.

Except there was this group of 47 who took a secret oath to get revenge even though they’d been ordered not to. They went underground as traders, laborers or drunken debauchees. And after several years they managed to infiltrate and storm Kira’s home, overcome his retainers abetted by the silence of his neighbours who all hated him, caught him and respectfully besought him to kill himself like a true samurai.

He chickened out, wuk wuk, betrayer of the code, so the ringleader sawed off his head with a dagger. Then the ronin carefully extinguished all lamps and fires so the neighbours’ houses were not in danger from a general conflagration, and left with the head.

One of the ronin was either sent to report the success of their mission to Asano’s old domain of Akō or else ran away. Either way he apparently came back much later, was pardoned, and lived to a ripe old age before being buried with the others. The rest went to the temple where their master was buried, washed the head carefully, then put it and the dagger on his grave, offered prayers, left the abbot money for their own funerals, and turned themselves in.

The situation was awkward for the shogun, given general approval of their deed plus its fairly obvious justification under almost any meaningful moral code. So he couldn’t just execute them. Instead he ordered them to execute themselves and they did.

So popular is this tale in Japan that the temple where the ronin’s remains are interred holds a festival every December 14, the successful attack having occurred on the 14^th day of the 12th month in the old Japanese calendar. But it was on the 4th day of the 2nd month that they all cut out their guts and had a second behead them, the final and apparently crowning act of the drama. And one I flatly admit I cannot sympathize with or support.

Were the ronin right or wrong to kill Kira? And if they were right, why celebrate their being put to death for it? Surely they should have gone down fighting. It is simply not possible to imagine the surviving Magnificent Seven ending the film by simultaneously raising their revolvers to their heads and blowing their brains out in unison and making the classic American film in the process.

"The 47 Ronin" a beautiful and picturesque story, to be sure. And apparently Asano’s brother did get his title and a bit of his land back. But it’s also very disturbing. And not least because ordering them to commit suicide, when they apparently had or felt they had no choice, is not an alternative to executing them. It’s just a hypocritical fiction, a way for the shogun to be, as Orwell put it, somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.

Even more baffling to me, in a moral sense, is the lack of concern with right and wrong, indeed the failure to see them as necessarily separate and opposite qualities. The whole story seems to hinge on the ronin’s actions being simultaneously both right and wrong.

I think they were just right. The guy who taunted their lord was no paragon of virtue attacked by mistake. He was a crooked wretch who deserved to be horsewhipped on the steps of his club or gunned down by John Wayne in a classic Western quick-draw showdown. And there’s no suggestion in the story of a kind of Shakespearean scenario in which Asano had a better course of action. Kamei’s men you recall had simply bribed Kira. The emperor or shogun was not, one feels, likely to render justice.

So where’s the vindication of right conduct? Instead there’s something fatalistic, even fey, about a group of such dedicated men bent on making a ritually beautiful bad end for doing a good deed.

To me this story makes no sense. If a particular act of revenge is wrong, don’t do it. And don’t later celebrate those who did. But if it is right, stand by it. There is a weird excluded middle here, where an act is simultaneously right and wrong and ritual rather than moral judgement determines action.

It is not a direct line from the "Akō incident" to Pearl Harbor. But the two are connected by a peculiar, ornate, gorgeously perverse refusal to put individual conscience ahead of "the code", a determination to reject principle on principle.

Happy Birthday Vendsyssel-Thy Island. Formerly part of the Jutland peninsula, it achieved geographic independence thanks to a flood on February 3, 1825 that washed away its connection to the mainland. Yes folks, it is more extreme weather. How dare it?

A fair question. Evidently Vendsyssel-Thy, or the storm, didn’t know that only with man-made emissions of CO2 rising fast have we had fires, floods, windstorms and all that jazz. The Danes are still trying to cope even though it’s their second-largest island after Zealand (no, it’s nothing to do with New Zealand, named for a Dutch province with the equally boring name of "Sea Land"). It wasn’t thought of as one place before it got cut off and old habits die hard. But I digress.

The point here is that it actually was an island before about 1200, when some sort of weather event created a sand "tombolo". (I didn’t know either but I Googled and it’s an Italian word for a sandbar or sandspit that links an island to the mainland at which point the island becomes a "tied island".)

What does it all mean? Arguably not much. Except in this regard: Every time a storm does something dramatic today, and with so many more people living in coastal areas storms tend to have a more dramatic impact, a bunch of people who should know better start running around flapping their hands and saying it’s global warming or "climate change" and TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It). But it’s not.

It’s just more weather. Some is good, much is bad. But it’s been happening for a long long time and will probably keep doing so.

On February 2, 1653, New Amsterdam was incorporated. What a great story.

Huh? Does it lack the steamy drama we have come to demand? Even if we know, from the song Istanbul or elsewhere, that New Amsterdam was later renamed New York City which, if you like big cities, remains one of civilization’s jewels? Well, let me try to defend this admittedly un-bodice-ripper-like choice of theme.

I have commented before on the stunning military, economic and cultural imbalance between Western Europe and the rest of the world by 1500 that led a speck of land like the Netherlands become a global empire. (No offense to the Dutch; I actually mean it as a compliment. But nobody looking at the Netherlands and India in 1450 would have thought the former would start picking off bits of the latter within two centuries including fighting Portugal for them.) But there’s more, or rather, there’s a side to the story that helps explain why the imbalance was so enormous. And it’s precisely the incorporation of municipalities with genuine legal rights and "liberties" in places like England and the Netherlands.

New Amsterdam itself was founded as a political entity, unsurprisingly, in 1625. It was the seat of the colonial government of New Netherland. But the "factorij" outside the fort, though protected by and closely associated with it, was a private venture. As were earlier Dutch ventures including in what would later be Albany and, not coincidentally, the various early English colonies from Massachusetts Bay to Jamestown. Indeed, New Netherland itself was originally a private venture of a sort Emperors and Tsars would not tolerate or keep their plundering hands off if they prospered.

By the way, you’ve all heard of the infamous purchase of Manhattan for 60 guilders or 24 Spanish dollars from a Lenape Indian chief who supposedly did not know what the cunning Europeans were up to. It casts a rather different light on that hackneyed tale of naivety and perfidy to learn that at the time the island was apparently mostly in the hands of a rival band. So chief Seyseys shrewdly swindled the Dutch by selling them someone else’s land.)

It was still a small settlement, under 300 people in the 1640s. Life was hard and survival uncertain. But people do things the way they think proper even in adversity, and hence in 1653 New Amsterdam became a city with, crucially, municipal rights. Not just duties. Not paper promises. Real genuine legal guarantees of their right to make decisions and live with the consequences without sudden arbitrary deprivation. (Not entirely coincidentally, the first Jews seem to have arrived in 1654.) Two years later, on September 15, 1655, a massive Indian attack destroyed farms and killed around 100 people while carrying off another 150. But the colony rebounded.

After a bunch of rhubarb New Amsterdam of course wound up in the hands of the English and later the Americans. But in the big picture there is far more similarity than difference in how the Dutch and English treated their citizens and their political and economic rights, namely with respect. And it gave their nations, and their settlements, a dynamism not found elsewhere.

Had New Amsterdam been New Moscow, New Teheran or New Beijing we would not be having this discussion. Which is a major reason it wasn’t.

On this date in history, Feb. 1 Taiwan was conquered by China. Which is worth noting because the current regime in Beijing dreams of a replay.

It’s also therefore worth noting that it happened as recently, historically speaking, as 1662. And that it required a nine-month siege and was followed by a far from smooth process of filling the island with mainlanders and driving the original inhabitants into the hills or assimilating them.

Some Chinese might nevertheless take pride in the successful 1662 invasion since it took Taiwan back from the Dutch East India Company which could hardly claim to be indigenous and which was unpopular in part at least for suppressing local traditions like head-hunting. But it does not establish as an incontrovertible tenet of international law or morality that China and Taiwan must always be one country.

Now it is also true that since the Chinese conquest, the island was essentially taken over by mainlanders, the aboriginals now being about 2% of the population. But the key point is that the claim that Taiwan has always been part of China is untrue.

It was not part of China before 1662, nor after 1895 when Japan took it. Which I’m not excusing, especially given the aggressive intolerance of Imperial Japan. But I am pointing out that only for 333 years from the 17^th to the 19th centuries, and a further four between the defeat of Japan in the Second World War and the ousting of the Chinese Nationalists from the mainland in 1949, was Taiwan part of China.

If you take the semi-Wilsonian view that nations must be ethnically pure to avoid war, and that all members of a given ethnicity ought to be members of a single nation, then it makes sense that Taiwan and China should be reunited. Ideally, I would say, under the democratic free enterprise government of the former rather than the Communist tyrants in Beijing. And they might legitimately be unified it if is the will of the inhabitants of both established in successful referendums. But otherwise the desire of one big country to swallow another smaller one is aggression even if the people of the bigger country are generally for it. And if you do not subscribe to the ethnic purity theory of nationhood, there is no real logic to the argument that Taiwan and China must be one country so it’s OK to do it by force.

That Communists falsify history to justify military adventurism does not qualify as such logic should go without saying. These days apparently it has to be said anyway.