History Day By Day - Peter Furtado

For each day of the year, Furtado selects a quote, speech, written statement, etc., related to some particular historical event, big or small. Then he includes a paragraph or two explaining the event or its significance.

In practice, the book is extremely West-centric. The first date devoted to anything from China doesn't come until June 4th (the 1989 Tianamen Square protests). By that point, Furtado's already spent three days on the executions of various English monarchs. China, which, you know, has a pretty lengthy and important history, gets 4 days out of 366, total. Japan gets 2. He even wasted the 20th of January on Trump's inauguration speech.

The problem, is there are probably too many options for each day, and things are going to fall through the cracks, depending on whatever biases are inherent in whatever criteria Furtado's using. Sometimes he goes with big, obvious things (FDR's "day of infamy" speech for Dec. 7th), and other times it's smaller things like Enrico Caruso's description of being in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake, or the mass release of toxic gas from a Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India in 1984. Those were the entries I was more interested in, because I didn't know much about the events. I don't need to read yet another thing about the importance of Dunkirk, especially not when Furtado is trying to cram his explanation into a half-page or less.

'Now we have them in the mousetrap.'

- Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke

'We are in the chamber pot and are about to be shat upon.'

- French General Auguste-Alexandre Ducrot

(September 1, 1870, The Battle of Sedan)