The history of December 28 includes the beginnings of quite a few political entities. It was 1768 that King Taksin the Great was crowned the first (and only) king of Thonburi, in southeast Asia. Thonburi is still there, but before Taksin it was called Siam and in the present day it’s Thailand. Taksin took the country (Siam) back by leading a rebellion against the Burmese, and established a new capital in the town of Thonburi, where he was crowned on this day in 1768.

Taksin’s reign lasted about thirteen years. During that brief time he led his army in nine different campaigns against Burma. Despite all that combat, he also managed to rebuild the economy of his country at first, which had been devastated by the invasion of the Burmese. The story goes, though, that the strain took a toll on him over the years and he began to behave strangely, thinking himself a future Buddha and expecting his blood to change from red to white. The ongoing wars eventually began to debilitate Thonburi’s economy again, and on April 6, 1782 Taksin was removed from the throne in a coup d’état. What happened next is a bit of a mystery. Some accounts say that he was executed, either by beheading or by being sealed into a sack and beaten with a club — a traditional Siamese method of execution. Another story, though, claims that he wasn’t the one in the sack; he was secretly exiled to a remote mountain fortress where he lived until 1825. Either way, his influence in the history of Thailand is still recognized; today is King Taksin Memorial Day there.

Roughly fifty years after Taksin’s reign, significant events transpired in Australia on December 28, 1836, where South Australia officially became a Province and its capital city, Adelaide, was founded. South Australia is the only Australian state that was never a British penal colony. In fact it was expected to be a kind of social experiment attempting to address what were seen as the faults in British society. It guaranteed religious freedom and civil liberties, and was freely settled by willing colonists. The assumption was that free settlers wouldn’t engage in crime, so nobody planned for a jail. That idea lasted until early 1838, when a murder, two attempted murders, and a robbery changed everybody’s mind. Before long, the jail appeared.

Adelaide settlers were bound by law — supposedly — to observe the rights of the natives already living there, including Aboriginal ownership of land. In actuality, unfortunately, this turned out about the same as the “we won’t need a jail” scheme. Respect for the natives was largely ignored in what’s been termed the Australian Frontier Wars.

Part of the plan for the experiment of South Australia was the establishment of the city of Adelaide. It’s a planned city, laid out in a grid with wide avenues, large public squares, and surrounding parks. Since its founding the city has thrived, and at present three out of every four of the inhabitants of the entire state live in that once city, Adelaide.

Most of the land was purchased from Native Americans.

On the very same day that Adelaide became a state in Australia, Mexico was recognized as an independent nation by Spain. Mexico had been fighting Spain for independence for eleven years, and although some nations had recognized Mexican independence already, Spain continued to try to recapture the country. The pivotal event was the signing of the Santa María-Calatrava Treaty in Madrid on December 28, 1836. It was the first time Spain recognized the independence of one of its former colonies.

Exactly ten years later, Iowa became the 29th State in the United States on December 28, 1846. Iowa was part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, and as settlers moved into the area, it was declared a US Territory in 1838. Transitioning to statehood took only 6 years because the growing population of settlers raised an increasing clamor. One issue was ownership of the land in the new territory, and to their credit, most of the land was purchased from Native Americans rather than simply taken.

Imagining the world of 1846 evokes an environment pretty alien to us here in the 21st Century. Hardly anything we take for granted existed in those days. But at least one thing arrived before too long: it was December 28 1895 that the Lumiére brothers showed the first movie to a paying audience. The brothers were early innovators in motion pictures, and held several patents. One fundamental innovation was perforating the margins of the film so it could be automatically advanced through the camera and, later, the projector. Or if you used the Lumiéres’ patented version of the “cinématographe,” you only needed the one device. The cinématographe,” you see, could photograph moving pictures, develop the film, and project the finished product all in one appliance.

The world’s first commercial cinema event took place at “Salon Indien du Grand Café” in Paris, and wasn’t just a single film. It wasn’t just a double feature. It featured a grand total of ten films. But before you recoil in jealous rage about the relative impoverishment of our modern cinematic experiences, make note of one detail: each one of the ten films lasted less than a minute. It was a technical limitation; the length of each strip of film was about 17 meters, and that only took about 50 seconds to crank through the projector, which was done by hand. Nevertheless, that initial 10-film presentation led, perhaps not entirely directly, to the most recent Marvel superhero feature you watched.

Speaking of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, by the way, none of it would exist except for an event on December 28, 1922 in New York City. That was the day Stanley Martin Lieber was born. You may have known of him as Stan Lee, the creative lead for Marvel Comics for decades. He started at “Timely Publications,” a comic publisher founded in 1939 by Martin Goodman. Goodman’s plan was to get in on the enormous popularity of a brand-new medium: comic books. The very first comic book from Timely Publications was “Marvel Comics #1,” which included some super heroes that stayed around for decades, including The Human Torch and The Sub-Mariner. The first printing of 80,000 copies sold out. So Goodman commissioned a second printing, and sold 800,000 more. That success led to the first name change of “Timely Publications.” It became “Timely Comics.” By the 1960s the name had evolved to “Marvel Comics,” and Stanley Lieber — who had been writing comics using the pen name “Stan Lee” (“Stanley”, get it?) had legally changed his name to match his pseudonym. Lee became the publisher in 1972, and in 1981 started working on developing TV and movie version of Marvel Comics. That work seems to have been pretty successful.

It’s called “von Neumann architecture.”

December 28 plays a double role in another major innovation that’s also been pretty successful. It was December 28, 1903 that John von Neumann was born. Von Neumann was a mathematical genius, with a list achievements far too lengthy to recount here. But there’s one in particular I’m thinking of: a 1945 paper he wrote that laid out the architecture of a general-purpose computer in which a stored program and the data it reads and writes both reside in the computer’s memory. This is the basis of nearly all modern computers, and because of that one paper, it’s called “von Neumann architecture.” To be fair, maybe it should be called “Eckert/Mauchly architecture, because von Neumann based the architecture on the ENIAC computer they built. But then, history is not always fair. (In fact, an interesting question to ponder is whether history is ever fair. But never mind that; there’s another December 28 to address.)

The next December 28 event builds on von Neumann’s work. Well, indirectly, anyway. This December 28 happened in 1969, when Linus Torvalds was born in Helsinki, Finland. Torvalds is the creator and technical leader of the Linux kernel, the core of the Linux operating system used in (at least) millions of computers and servers throughout the world. If you include the version of Linux that’s the basis of the Android mobile operating system, Linux may be the most widely used computer operating system in the world.

Of course, if you’re thinking about computers in this day and age, the name William Gates probably comes to mind. And it was December 28, 1971 that William Gates was born! Oh, wait though. It, um, wasn’t that William Gates. Not the Microsoft founder. The William Gates born in 1971 is a former basketball player who was featured in the 1994 documentary film Hoop Dreams — which, although indirectly related to the Lumiére brothers’ December 28 premiere, runs longer than 50 seconds and is really worth watching if you haven’t seen it.

Sorry about mixing up William Gates with, um, William Gates. But everybody makes mistakes. Take, for example, December 28, 1795. That was the day, probably not seeming particularly significant to anyone involved at the time, that construction was begun on Yonge Street in what is now Toronto. Yonge Street, once completed, went on to be mentioned in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest street in the world, at 1,896 kilometers. But that was a mistake. Yonge Street is only 86 kilometers long. The rest of the distance belongs to Ontario Highway 11, which connects with Yonge Street, but is a different road. So you see? Even the Guinness Book of World Records isn’t always right. Of course, if they decide to list Happened as the world’s leading newsletter detailing the most interesting (or sometimes screwiest) historical events of each day on the calendar, who’s going to argue with that?