SortStack #2235 — 2032-07-22

By year · Order from earliest to most recent.

1. The last Western Roman emperor is deposed, ending the empire in the west 476

   The final emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was a teenager. The Germanic general Odoacer didn't execute him — he pensioned him off to a villa.

2. King John seals the Magna Carta at Runnymede 1215

   John never intended to honor it — the Pope annulled the charter within ten weeks — yet it became a foundation stone of constitutional law anyway.

3. The Wall Street Crash wipes out the stock market boom 1929

   The market didn't permanently regain its pre-crash peak until 1954, a quarter of a century later.

4. The Second World War ends with the surrender of Japan 1945

   The same year saw the first atomic bombs, the founding of the United Nations, and the deaths of Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mussolini within three weeks of each other.

5. IBM's Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov 1997

   Kasparov was reportedly unnerved by one inexplicable move — which some engineers later suggested may have been the result of a software bug.

6. The Bitcoin network launches with its first block 2009

   Satoshi Nakamoto embedded a newspaper headline about bank bailouts into the very first block — a permanent timestamp and a pointed message.

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