John Charles DeClercq (died 1995)

In 1828, on September 17th, a typhoon - called the Siebold Typhoon because German physician Philipp Franz von Siebold was there and took measurements during the storm - killed over 14,000 people in Kyūshū, Japan. It was the greatest number of deaths in any storm in Japan.

In 1858, on January 14th, Felice Orsini and others tried - but failed - to assassinate Napoleon III of France. The bombs they set off did kill 8 people - and wounded 142 others. Some of the conspirators were French émigrés who lived in Britain, setting off a short anti-British feeling in France. But the emperor refused to support the sentiment and it died out. Orsini was executed by guillotine on March 13th.

In 1890, on June 1st, the U.S. Census Bureau started tabulating census returns with punch cards. Herman Hollerith's "tabulating machine" used punch cards to more quickly compute census information, taking the time to get census results from 8 years in 1880 to 6 years for the 1890 census. Hollerith's company eventually became IBM.

In 1904, the United States acquired the Panama Canal Zone. Now an unincorporated territory of the U.S., the Canal Zone had been previously held by the French, who were constructing a canal. The U.S. took over the construction of the Panama Canal and it was finally finished in 1914, when it was opened to commercial shipping. The United States held the Canal Zone until 1979.

In 1995, in the year of John Charles DeClercq's passing, on May 19th, the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil - before 9/11 - took place in Oklahoma City. A truck bomb went off outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown - killing 68 people, injuring more than 680 others, and destroying one-third of the building. The most disturbing images were of children - a daycare center was hit by the bomb. The deadliest incident of domestic terrorism ever, Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier were convicted of the bombing.