The Y in History

Japan occupies Vietnam temporarily, after defeating the French during WWII. After WWII, the French come back and Vietnam gets divided into North and South Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Ho Chi Minh becomes the leader in the North. The French support ex-Emperor Bao Dai in the South, but the US supports his Premier Ngo Dinh Diem. The conflict starts when the US refuses to hold elections in 1956 per the Geneva Accords of 1954.

The July 20 plot was intended to assassinate Hitler and invoke Operation Valkyrie in Germany, post the assassination. LBJ and Nixon got the CIA to snoop on US students under Operation CHAOS. The Union soldiers initiated the Great Locomotive Chase during the Civil War, to cut off the Confederacy's supply routes.

In 1891 the Edison Company successfully demonstrated a prototype of the Kinetoscope, which enabled one person at a time to view moving pictures. The first to present projected moving pictures to a paying audience were the Lumière brothers in December 1895 in Paris, France.

The first feature-length movie incorporating synchronized dialogue was The Jazz Singer in 1927.

A 20-year stretch, from 1927 to 1948, is considered the Golden Age in the history of Hollywood.

Dictatorships can be classified into Military, Hybrid, Dynastic Civilian and the Democratically elected dictatorships. Dictators aspire to stay in power for a long time and do so by instilling fear in their citizens. And once they've achieved this, some prefer to build a cult following. But under certain circumstances Dictatorships can be toppled and replaced by Democracy.

The British arrived in Singapore in January 1819 when Sir Stamford Raffles landed on the island, establishing it as a trading post for the British East India Company. Singapore declared independence from Britain in 1963 and became part of Malaysia. Due to political and cultural differences, Singapore separated from Malaysia and became independent in 1965. And that was the start of the economic miracle that saw its GDP multiply from $1 billion in 1960 to approximately $300 billion in 2014.

In 1975, the Allahabad High Court finds Prime Minister Indira Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractices during the 1971 election and rules that she needs to step down as Prime Minister. This triggers a series of events that culminate in the imposition of Emergency in India - a period when all civil liberties of common citizens, are taken away by the government.

Norway's Roald Amundsen was the first to reach the South Pole in Dec, 1911. Tenzing and Hillary became the first to scale Mt. Everest in May of 1953. Yuri Gagarin had the world spellbound as he became the first human in Space in April 1961.

After leading the United Kingdom during WWII, Churchill loses his re-election bid. Harry Truman surprises polls to defeat Republican Thomas Dewey in 1948. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev is ousted in a very democratic way in the Soviet Union, in 1964.

Modern medicine owes a lot of its development to the Ancient civilizations of Greece, India and China. Modern medicine took off after the Industrial Revolution because of faster spread of disease and infection within large industrial communities. The medical professionals were able to understand bacterial diseases way before they understood viruses. But the electron microscope took medical research to the next level.

Stalin micromanaged his daughter and she ended up defecting to the US. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. though won the Presidential Office his dictatorial father held, via a democratic election. Mao's children mostly died young.