Historical Events

End of the Shang dynasty in China and beginning of the reign of King Wu of the Zhou dynasty.

David becomes King of Judah

The united Kingdom of Israel splits apart. Solomon's son, Rehoboam becomes the king of Judah, and Jeroboam becomes the first king of the northern Kingdom of Israel (Samaria)

The prophet Elijah is born

Beginning of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta

Herodotus finishes The Histories

Athens surrenders to Sparta, ending the Peloponnesian War

End of the Warring States period in China when King Zheng of Qin unifies the seven states of China and establishes the Qin dynasty.

Chinese writing is standardized into the "small seal script" style of caligraphy which serves as a basis for modern Chinese and still has use in the present day.

Founding of the Han dynasty in China after the end of the Qin Empire.

Julius Caesar decrees that years will follow the Julian calendar (which we basically use today)

The Roman Sentate gives Octavian the title of "Augustus" and he begins his reign as the first emperor of Rome

The Holy Family returns from Egypt

Ovid publishes Metamorphoses

Roman law Lex Papia et Poppaea is introduced in Italy with penalties for childless or celibate adults.

Tiberius becomes emperor

Pontius Pilate becomes governer of the Roman province of Judaea

Pontius Pilate is removed from being governer of Judaea

Caligula becomes emperor

Emperor Caligula is assassinated by his Praetorian Guards.

Claudius becomes emperor

Emperor Claudius dies

Nero is proclaimed emperor at the age of 17

Romans learn about the use of soap from the Gauls

Beginning of the Jewish Revolt against the Romans

Saint Linus becomes the 2nd Bishop of Rome

Emperor Nero dies after he orders his secretary to kill him

Saint Anacletus becomes the 3rd Bishop of Rome

Saint Clement I becomes the 4th Bishop of Rome

Saint Evaristus becomes the 5th Bishop of Rome

Saint Ignatius of Antioch writes a letter to Christians in Smyrna, using the term Catholic Church. This is the earliest surviving witness to the use of the term "Catholic Church".

Saint Alexander I becomes the 6th Bishop of Rome

Justin Martyr writes his First Apology

Edict of Milan establishes tolerance for Christians in the Roman empire

Saint Athanasius writes Against the Pagans

Saint Athanasius writes On the Incarnation of the Word of God

Saint Athanasius writes Discourses against the Arians

Volcanic eruptions fill the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere with ash and a mysterious fog plunges Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months:

"For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year"

The “Justinian” bubonic plague begins to spread through the Mediterranean. Over the course of two years it will kill nearly half of the population.

The Great Schism of 1054, formal break between the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox church

Death of Duke William IX of Aquitane, the earliest trobadour with work surviving to the present day.

The Pope reads portions of Scivias and gives Saint Hildegard of Bingen his blessing

Beginning of the Albigensian Crusade in the south of France against the Cathars

Founding of the Franciscan Order

End of the Albigensian Crusade

Saint Bonaventure enters the Franciscan Order and studies at the University of Paris

William of Moerbeke is the first to translate Aristotle's Politics.

With the encouragement of Thomas Aquinas he will translate the complete works of Aristotle into Latin from the original Greek during his life.

Dante finishes writing the Divine Comedy

Beginning of the "100 Year War" between England and France

"Wars of the Roses" civil war begins in England

End of "Wars of the Roses"

Saint Thomas More publishes Utopia

Albert of Brandenberg declares Prussia a secular kingdom.

King Henry VIII declares himself "the only Supreme Head on Earth of the Church of England" in the "Act of Supremacy"

Saint Teresa of Avila writes The Interior Castle

Queen Elizabeth I of England grants a charter allowing the formation of The East India Trading Company

Death of Queen Elizabeth I of England

Jeronimo de Ayanz y Beaumont patents his invention of the first steam-powered water pump for draining mines.

Beginning of the Thirty Years' War

End of the Thirty Years' War

Oliver Cromwell begins ruling England as "Lord Protector"

Christiaan Huygens invents the pendulum clock

Oliver Cromwell dies

Charles II returns from exile in Europe and is crowned the king of England

The Mystical City of God: Life of the Virgin Mother of God by Mary of Agreda is first published

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke is published

Thomas Newcomen invents the first commercially successful steam engine that can transmit continuous power to a machine.

Peter the Great renames the Tsardom of Russia as the Russian Empire and becomes the first Emperor of Russia

Julien Offray de La Mettrie flees the Netherlands to Prussia

Prussia requires women to register the monthly onset of their menstrual cycle with the police

Bavaria forbids Freemasonry as a danger to the state.

Andrew Bell publishes an account of his application of the Hindu caste schooling system in an orphanage as an effective way of impeding the learning of reading and writing.

Jospeh Lancaster, a Quaker, decides he will apply this method to 'awaken intellect' in impoverished London children.

First full-scale working steam locomotive is built by Richard Trevithick

The first New York City "Lancaster School" is opened

King John VI of Portugal prohibits Freemasonry.

The Anglican Church sets up it's own set of "factory schools" for poor children modelled on Andrew Bell's

Compulsion schooling is established in Prussia

Alexander I banishes Freemasonry from the whole Russian empire

Dr John Elliotson founds the British Phrenological Society

Founding of the "Anti-Masonic Party", the first "third party" in American politics

David Bernard publishes "Light on Masonry" which describes the details of the first 48 degrees of masonry.

Required oaths include:

I will promote a companion Royal Arch Mason’s political preferment in preference to another of equal qualifications.

Furthermore, do I promise and swear, that a companion Royal Arch Mason’s secrets, given me in charge as such, and I knowing them to be such, shall remain as secure and inviolable in my breast as in his own, murder and treason not excepted.

When an initiate reaches the 28th degree they are told:

Behold this monster which you must conquer – a serpent which we detest as an idol, that is adored by the idiot and the vulgar under the name of RELIGION!!!

Avery Allyn, a regular Knight Templar, publishes a book, called the “Ritual of Freemasonry,” in which the ceremonies of initiation, the lectures oaths and mummeries of thirty-one degrees are fully described.

William A. Palmer is elected governor of Vermont on an Anti-Masonic ticket

Joseph Ritner is elected governor of Pennsylvania on an Anti-Masonic ticket

A revived interest in mesmerism reaches Britain

The first steam ship crosses the Atlantic

In the court case "Mercein v. People" Connecticut’s Justice Paige states:

The moment a child is born it owes allegiance to the government of the country of its birth, and is entitled to the protection of the government.

As the opinion unrolled, Paige further explained "with the coming of civil society the father’s sovereign power passed to the chief or government of the nation."

A part of this power was then transferred back to both parents for the convenience of the State. But their guardianship was limited to the legal duty of maintenance and education, while absolute sovereignty remained with the State.

Orestes Brownson writes an article, "The Laboring Classes," for The Boston Quarterly Review.

In it he charges that Horace Mann is trying to establish a state church in America like the one in England and to impose a merchant/industrialist worldview as its gospel:

"A system of education [so constituted] may as well be a religion established by law"

He thought Mann’s business backers were trying to set up a new division of labor giving licensed professional specialists a monopoly to teach, weakening people’s capacity to educate themselves and making them childlike.

Teaching in a democracy belongs to the whole community, not to any centralized monopoly, said Brownson, and children were far better educated by "the general pursuits, habits, and moral tone of the community" than by a privileged class.

Bavaria again forbids Freemasonry as a danger to the state.

Moby Dick is published

American physician Samuel Cartwright proposes that southern slaves attempting to escape slavery be diagnosed with the mental illness of "Drapetomania" or "runaway slave syndrome"

Massachusetts passes first compulsory schooling laws in the U.S.

Bessemer process is discovered that allows producing steel directly from pig iron.

Beginning of American Civil War

Public Document 20 for the state of Massachusetts is written, which notes:

"We have felt it to be our duty generally to decline giving them up to their parents and have placed as many of them as we could with farmers and mechanics,"

(regarding the frequency with which parents coming to retrieve their own children from reform school were met by news their children had been given away to others, through the state’s parens patriae power.)

Siemens-Martin open hearth technique is discovered that allows making even more uniform quality steel than the Bessemer process

End of the American Civil War

The Masonic orders release "Duncan’s Masonic Ritual and Monitor." It publically reveals the first seven degrees in detail – including illustrations of the gestures and handshakes.

It does not include the required oaths that were documented in 1830 to suppport other masons politically and to keep all fellow mason's secrets, including murder and treason.

American physician and academic Vincent Youmans lectures the London College of Preceptors about the school institution just coming into being:

School produces mental perversion and absolute stupidity. It produces bodily disease. It produces these things by measures which operate to the prejudice of the growing brain. It is not to be doubted that dullness, indocility, and viciousness are frequently aggravated by the lessons of school.

Japan adopts large parts of the Prussian constitution together with the Prussian style of schooling.

The first transcontinental railroad is completed in the United States

Jules Verne publishes "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea"

Thomas and Gilchrist discover how to use formerly unsuitable phosphoric iron ore (more common than nonphosphoric) in steelmaking, yielding as its byproduct artificial fertilizer for agriculture.

School is made compulsory in Britain

Report for the Senate Committee on Education states:

We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes.

Eastman Kodak company files a patent for celluloid film.

The National Education Association announces that school science courses should be reorganized to teach evolution not as theory but as fact. Biology textbooks begin to present evolution to secondary schools and colleges aggressively:

There is no rival hypothesis to evolution, except the out-worn and completely refuted one of special creation, now retained only by the ignorant, dogmatic, and the prejudiced. (Macmillan Publishers, 1895)

Saint Therese of Lisieux's autobiography The Story of a Soul is first published.

Saint Gemma Galgani receives the stigmata

In Corporations and the Public Welfare, a collection of addresses given at the American Academy of Political and Social Science, James Dill warns that the most critical social question of the day was figuring out how to get rid of the small entrepreneur, yet at the same time retain his loyalty "to a system based on private enterprise."

The school training habits which led directly to small entrepreneurship had to be eliminated.

Saint Gemma Galgani experiences the scourging and receives the Crown of Thorns for the first time

G. Stanley Hall publishes his book "Adolescence"

Immigrant public schools in Manhattan begin performing tonsillectomies and adenoidectomies in school without notifying parents. The New York Times (June 29, 1906) reports that "Frantic Italians" "stormed" three schools, attacking teachers and dragging their children out of schools.

Rockefeller's "General Education Board" publishes a document called "Occasional Letter Number One" which includes their mission statement that:

In our dreams. ..people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple. ..we will organize children. ..and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.

The 16th Amendment is ratified by 3/4 of U.S. states and the Revenue Act of 1913 establishes a permanent federal income tax.

Minnesota’s legislature approved the world’s first secret adoption law, sealing original birth records forever

48th US state (Mississippi) passes compulsory schooling laws, 66 years after Massachusetts became the first state to enforce compulsory schooling.

Alexander Inglis publishes his book "Principles of Secondary Education".

According to Inglis, the first function of schooling is adjustive, establishing fixed habits of reaction to authority. This prepares the young to accept whatever management dictates when they are grown.

Second is the diagnostic function. School determines each student’s "proper" social role, logging it mathematically on cumulative records to justify the next function, sorting. Individuals are to be trained only so far as their likely destination in the social machine, not one step beyond.

Conformity is the next function. Kids are to be made alike, not from any passion for egalitarianism, but so future behavior will be predictable, in service to market and political research.

Next is the hygienic function. This has nothing to do with individual health, only the health of the "race." This is polite code for saying that school should accelerate Darwinian natural selection by tagging the unfit so clearly they drop from the reproduction sweepstakes.

And last is the propaedutic function, a fancy word meaning that a small fraction of kids will slowly be trained to take over management of the system, guardians of a population deliberately dumbed down and rendered childlike in order that government and economic life can be managed with a minimum of hassle.

John Dewey with Rockefeller funding founds the Progressive Education Association

Arthur Calhoun publishes his "Social History of the Family"

In it he describes how the child was passing from its family "into the custody of community experts." He also predicted that in time we could expect to see public education "designed to check the mating of the unfit."

Saint Therese of Lisieux is canonized by Pope Pius XI

Nylon is invented and patented by DuPont

The Hitler government presents Henry Ford with the Grand Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle. Only three other non-Germans ever received that honor, one of whom was Benito Mussolini.

Gemma Galgani is canonized as a Saint by Pope Pius XII

Illiteracy rate of the population of men joining the US army is 4%

The article "Baby in a Box" is published in Ladies Home Journal, which describes B.F. Skinner's experiments with using a heated and humidified "air crib" for his daughter to sleep in, similar to an aquarium

President Truman creates the Central Intelligence Agency

Invention of the transistor

Everson v. Board Of Education (1947)

Walden Two by B.F. Skinner is published

"The Proper Study of Mankind" is published, paid for by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Russell Sage Foundation. It states:

"A society could be completely made over in something like 15 years, the time it takes to inculcate a new culture into a rising group of youngsters."

DuPont begins to manufacture polyester.

Illiteracy rate of the population of men joining the US army is 19%

First edition of "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM-I) is published by the American Psychiatric Association.

It is 130 pages long and lists 106 mental disorders.

CIA begins Project MK-Ultra which will continue until 1973. The CIA hires the vivisectionists and torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found so that they can build on their research.

Experiments include administering LSD to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and prostitutes – "people who could not fight back," as one agency officer put it. In one case, they administer LSD to a mental patient in Kentucky for 174 days. They also administer LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, and members of the general public to study their reactions.

The aim was to find drugs that would bring out deep confessions or wipe a subject's mind clean and program them as "a robot agent."

Military personnel who received the mind-altering drugs were threatened with court-martials if they told anyone about the experiments.

The Soviet Union launches the first artificial satellite into space, Sputnik 1

President Eisenhower signs the "National Aeronautics and Space Act" which establishes NASA.

Eisenhower also creates ARPA. The purpose of ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) is to develop space related technology for the military.

COBOL is designed for use by the U.S. Department of Defense

James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard from 1933 to 1953, publishes his book "The American High School Today." The book strongly influenced pushing secondary schools to gigantic size in the 1960s and forcing consolidation of many small school districts into larger ones.

In his book Conant acknowledges that conversion of old-style American education into Prussian-style schooling was done as a coup de main, but his greater motive is to speak directly to men and women of his own class who were beginning to believe the new school procedure might be unsuited to human needs, that experience dictated a return to older ways:

"Clearly, the total process is irreversible ... A successful counterrevolution...would require reorientation of a complex social pattern. Only a person bereft of reason would undertake [it]."

To Conant, school was a triumph of Anglo/Germanic pragmatism. One task it performed with brilliance was to sharply curtail the American entrepreneurial spirit.

As long as capital investments were at the mercy of millions of self-reliant, resourceful young entrepreneurs, who would commit the huge flows of capital needed to continually tool and retool the commercial/industrial/financial machine? As long as the entire population could become producers, young people were loose cannons.

How to mute competition in the generation of tomorrow? Conant tells us candidly the answer "was in the process of formulation" as early as the 1890s. By 1905 the nation obeyed this clarion call coast to coast: "Keep all youth in school full time through grade twelve."

Beginning of the Apollo program at NASA.

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) publishes a report entitled "The Role of Schools in Mental Health" (which is featured in the 1962 Governer's Conference). It explains:

Education does not mean teaching people to know ... It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave

"The President's Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy" publishes The Warren Report, an 888 page document detailing the findings of their investigation into Kennedy's assassination.

During the course of the year the New York Times publishes five stories that use the term "conspiracy theory".

In the CIA's own "Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report" they state:

Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organisation, for example, by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is passed. The Act allocates substantial federal funds to psychological and psychiatric programs in school, opening the door to a full palette of "interventions" by psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, agencies, and various specialists

CIA Dispatch 1035-960 instructs CIA agents to contact journalists and opinion leaders in their locales about critics of the Warren Commission [the official commission on the murder of JFK]; ask for their assistance in countering the influence of "conspiracy theorists" who were publishing "conspiracy theories" that blamed top leaders in the U.S. for Kennedy's death; and urge their media contacts to criticize such theories and those who embrace them for aiding communists in the Cold War, trying to get attention, seeking to profit financially from the Kennedy tragedy, and refusing to consider all the facts.

This dispatch is obtained through a Freedom of Information request in 1976 and is published in the New York Times.

Between 1967 and 1974 teacher reforms in the United States begin to be put into place to implement "Designing Education" and "Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project" (OEC-0-9-320424-4042 (BIO)), both produced by the Education Department.

"Designing Education" redefined the term "education" as "a means to achieve important economic and social goals of a national character." Each state education department was assigned the task of becoming "an agent of change" and advised to "lose its independent identity as well as its authority," in order to "form a partnership with the federal government."

"Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project" sets out clearly the intentions of its creators - "impersonal manipulation" through schooling of a future America in which "few will be able to maintain control over their opinions," an America in which "each individual receives at birth a multi-purpose identification number" which enables employers and other controllers to keep track of underlings and to expose them to direct or subliminal influence when necessary.

Readers learned that "chemical experimentation" on minors would be normal procedure in this post-1967 world.

The Behavioral Science Teacher Education Project identified the future as one "in which a small elite" will control all important matters. Children are made to see, through school experiences, that their classmates are so cruel and irresponsible, so inadequate to the task of self-discipline, and so ignorant they need to be controlled and regulated for society’s good.

Post-modern schooling is to focus on "pleasure cultivation" and on "other attitudes and skills compatible with a non-work world."

Second edition of "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM-II) is published.

It is 134 pages long and lists 182 mental disorders.

ARPANET sends first message between two computers at different locations in California

Illiteracy rate of the population of men joining the US army is 27%

Amid a government-wide panic caused by Watergate, CIA Director Richard Helms orders all MK-Ultra files to be destroyed.

A cache of some 20,000 documents survives Helms's purge, as they had been incorrectly stored in a financial records building and are discovered following a FOIA request in 1977

Third edition of "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM-III) is published.

It is 494 pages long and lists 265 mental disorders.

First version of MS-DOS is released

Fourth edition of "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM-IV) is published.

It is 886 pages long and lists 410 mental disorders.

Brendan Eich writes the first version of Javascript in 10 days

Saint Faustina is canonized by Pope John Paul II

D. Richard Hipp releases the first version of SQLite

Padre Pio is canonized as a saint by Pope John Paul II

Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little release first version of WordPress by forking b2/cafelog

First release of Ruby on Rails

Death of Saint John Paul II

Amazon launches S3 cloud storage and EC2

First iPhone is released

Launch of GitHub.com, it's written using Ruby on Rails

First release of Node.js

First release of React programming library

Fifth edition of "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (DSM-V) is published.

It is 947 pages long.

Google releases the first version of Kubernetes which is inspired by their own internal "Borg" cluster manager.

Microsoft buys GitHub

Microsoft buys npm