It is May 17, 1954. Eighteen months previously, a Kansas chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Persons had recruited 13 black parents in that city, with a railroad welder leading them, to sue the local board of education on the grounds that the 1879 state law allowing schools to be segregated was unconstitutional.

He and the other 12 black Kansans sit before the Supreme Court as NAACP lawyers argue the case for desegregation — and, by proxy, the cases of three other states and the District of Columbia, each with the same mission: providing equal education opportunities for children.

The court's old chief justice had died in September 1953. The new one, a former California attorney general, and who had previously approved of the internment of the Japanese during World War II, takes his place and unites the court in a unanimous decision, with only one opinion written.

The case will come to be known popularly by just the last name of that welder and his family: Brown. Brown works in Topeka, and the case declares that separate but equal is separate, but not equal.

I have been a fairly run-of-the-mill critic of the Bush administration and bad U.S. policy in general for much of my time as a Kossack. I think the hiring of former FEMA Director Michael Brown was idiotic, and I think Paul Wolfowitz's Medal of Freedom cheapens the honor associated with other winners, who manage to gain their respectability in this country by means other than planning the invasions of other countries.

I would love very dearly to see jailed those who signed off on torture. I would love to see abstinence-only education dropped and banned like the idiocy it is and the school of "thought" behind it exposed for the theosophy, not science, it stems from.

I hate where this country has been going, but I am even less fond of where it will yet go before the American people are allowed to take the wheel back from a reckless teenager who just wanted to know how many fire hydrants and schoolchildren he could run over before someone stopped him.

And it's a good thing the Sedition Act of 1918, passed on this date by Congress, was repealed in 1921, or my ass would in the slammer faster than you could say "Me too!"

It is the 13th century. The Catholic Church is almost 1,000 years removed from Constantine's legalizing Christianity. He did NOT make Christianity Rome's official religion. He "merely" spared fellow followers from being treated as they would come to treat others.

The church has come into great opulence, but some Christians, such as the Cathars and the Waldensians, believe that the materialism of the church is a bad thing. (The Cathars also believe in two Gods, suicide, flings and that Jesus wasn't son of God, but that's trivial compared to the threat to the church's wealth.)

When the Dominicans' effort at nonviolent conversion fails, the church has a problem: If people continue siding with the idea that the church should not collect material wealth, they are less likely to tithe, thus robbing the church of some of its ability to maintain a certain lifestyle. Equally usefully, the church gets a portion of heretics' possessions. Cha-ching!

So on this day in 1252, Pope Innocent IV issues a papal bull approving torture for rooting up, or Ad Extirpanda, heretics, and delineated rules for confiscating those heretics' estates.

Life ends in death. (Should I have included a spoiler warning for that?) So it's entirely appropriate that the first two of today's significant events deal with new life and protecting it. And it is a fitting tribute to the natural order of things that the third event deals with hardship and the fourth event deals with death.

This date in 1796 is commonly given to the first smallpox vaccination, though inoculations against the disease date back to the 2nd century BCE.

On this date in 1939, a 5-year-old woman gave birth.

On this date in 1961, Freedom Riders in Anniston, Ala., were viciously attacked by people apparently not yet sold on the idea of equal rights for equal people, and especially not sold on the idea of whites helping those people achieve that equality.

And on this date in 1970, 10 days after Kent State shocked the nation, police fired an FBI-estimated 460 shots at an unruly crowd of students at historically black Jackson State College, killing one university student and one high school student and injuring several others.

Today in 1857, a son is born in Almora, India, to a military family. (No, not John McCain.) After completing his schooling in England, which in 1857 is operating India as a sort of colony, the boy who has become a man and then a doctor takes a job in India in a hospital.

Once in India again, the good doctor gets busy on a disease that so thoroughly wiped out Native American populations in 17th century Virginia and North Carolina that they couldn't maintain sufficient numbers for slave purposes. It is only a matter of time before he figures out that disease or it figures out him.

And in 1902, five years after contracting malaria, Dr. Sir Ronald Ross receives the Nobel Prize for his work on the deadly disease.

I knew it would happen.

I knew that at some point, one Today in History would be more than the flap of a butterfly's wings in creating another Today in History.

But my God did I ever hope it wouldn't be like how today's entry was born.

On this date in 1945, a horse bearing a Jewish Russian army officer comes to a German factory in Brněnec, Czechoslovakia. Almost 1,100 prisoners, all but two of them Jews, have been there for seven months and are now liberated by the officer's presence. They greet him, asking where they should go, as the director of the camp, a Nazi industrialist/businessman born in what was then Austria-Hungary, fled earlier that week with the other six Jews from his factory, his work done.

On this date in 1993, a different director’s work is coming to an end, as he is 71 days into what will become 92 days in Poland, filming his account of those workers and their move from a former Jewish factory in Kraków to another former Jewish factory, this the one in Brněnec.

The Nazi businessman is Oskar Schindler, the director is Steven Spielberg, and the account is Schindler’s List.

Your mother, that is. Or the person or people who mothered you, if that's the path your life has taken.

My mother doesn't do Mother's Day, so I have no interesting Mother's Day stories to tell. But as I'll detail in the body of this diary, this is, after a fashion, very much a tribute to my mother. And I invite you to respond to it with a tribute to your mother figure(s) in whatever fashion you see fit.

It is May 9, 1955. A studio arts major at UMCP interning at a local TV station has been asked to develop a short show based on contemporary versions of 4,000-year-old toys, no doubt partly because of his experience watching such shows and his work for the station when he was in high school.

On May 9, Sam and Friends debuts, and already viewers can see a difference between this college student's new vision of the craft and that of most in the field. Where the standard figures use wooden figures and strings, this 19-year-old trailblazer has attached wires to his foam rubber creations as he and his assistant, fellow UMCP student Jane Nebel, act out short scenes on television with their inanimate (yet very animated) characters.

Technically, these figures cannot be called puppets. They cannot be called marionettes. The term used to describe them, muppets, becomes synonymous with their creator, Jim Henson. (Oh, and Henson will marry that assistant four years later.)

(Sorry if you were expecting a Today in History. The next one will be on May 9.)

Of late in articles on the election, a new talking point has emerged:

"Well, everyone picked the 18-0 New England Patriots to win the Super Bowl, and along came the upstart New York Giants in the last moments of the game."

In this diary, I will detail why they should stop using that analogy and claim they never said anything of the sort.

It is May 6, 1882. The U.S.'s first Transcontinental Railroad has been in place for almost 13 years to the day. The 19th century gold rush, which saw San Francisco's population boom, is kind of gone. The economy is in the shitter, and politicians are railing against yellow people as being the source of this malaise, since they'll work themselves to death. (Union what?) The Statue of Liberty, meant as a centennial gift but delivered 10 years late, is still being financed.

With the U.S.'s no longer needing cheap labor to risk life, limb and bucket blowing holes in mountains, the Burlingame Treaty, a piece of goodwill legislation enacted in 1868 with China, is essentially tossed aside. (Apparently Chinese ambassadors didn't ask the pre-Euro invasion inhabitants of this land about our history of honoring treaties.) Initially this is done by suspending Chinese immigration — but assuring the Chinese people in America, however long they have been here, that their rights will be recognized.

On May 6, 1882, the U.S. drops any pretense of honor, passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, and screws the Chinese in America until 1965.

It is 1970, near the end of the youth movement that started in the 1950s and boomed in the 1960s. High school and college students are protesting civil rights violations, inequality, the draft, bombing of foreign countries and U.S. government indifference toward the will of the people.

Frustration and anger filled the air at many a university and in many a home occupied by a teenager. Richard Nixon's election by and subsequent betrayal of the American people only fuel the fire.

A week after Nixon announces plans to bomb Cambodia, students around the country protest. At Kent State University, the protests reach a fevered pitch when the ROTC building catches fire and students gather around to cheer its symbolic destruction. The National Guard is called in, and arrests students who threw rocks at police officers or damaged fire department equipment.

The next day, amid more protests, the National Guard fires into a crowd of student protesters and hits 13.

Four are dead in Ohio.

The first 50 years of professional baseball are awash with leagues and teams that folded after one season, if that. But in 1903, the first-ever World Series secures the stability of the National and American leagues.

Thirteen years before, those leagues had barred blacks from their squads. Between 1890 and 1947, no player known to be black will play for a National or American league team. Some will play as Indian, Mexican or something else, but for 57 years, not a single NL or AL player will stand up and say he is black. (Hall of Fame first baseman/bigot Cap Anson will play a nontrivial role in this abomination.)

Three years before this ban, the first Negro League will form. It and subsequent such leagues will be temporary opportunities for black ballplayers denied jobs because of race.

Then comes a league that lasts 11 years. On May 2, 1920, the Negro National League plays its first game, with the Indianapolis ABCs hosting.

It is 1667. England is 16 years past its civil war, in which Charles I was executed. Shakespeare has been dead 50 years, and no Englishman thinks anyone but him wrote those plays. (And nobody cares. Who wrote a play in England mattered none. Who had the manuscript mattered, and what mattered far more was who could see the play. But that is another diary entry.)

In 1664, a poet blinded by time (and possibly glaucoma) will realize the fruits of many nights writing by candlelight, then dictating to anyone who would listen once he could not see the words coming out of the pen. His blindness has probably saved his life, as he'd championed the execution of the previous king, justified divorce and argued for freedom of the press — any one of them a cardinal sin. As a university professor will put things 343 years later, "Oh, let us not execute [this author]; God has punished him by making him blind." But his blindness and his devotion to the losing side in the civil war have made his literary success rather ... difficult.

So today in history, poet John Milton sells Paradise Lost for 10 pounds.

Today, across the country, more than 500,000 students will participate in the Day of Silence to "encourage schools and classmates to address the problem of anti-LGBT behavior."

Yes, that's right. In response to bullying, harassment, taunting, threats and homicide, half a million students will ... not speak.

I am a member of the gay community, and I think this is the stupidest possible course of action.

On April 23, 1984, Margaret Heckler, the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary, announces to the world the result of almost three years of careful study of a health crisis originating as the appearance of Kaposi's Sarcoma and a rare form of pneumonia.

That health crisis has grown from eight sarcoma patients in New York City and five Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia patients in Los Angeles to 4,177 reported cases in America and 1,807 deaths.

But there is hope, Heckler asserts. That hope is in the form of information. Heckler informs the public and the world that the virus that causes sarcoma, PCP and such early and devastating death has been identified. Better, people will soon be able to test themselves for the virus. And even better yet, "We hope to have a vaccine ready for testing in about two years."

The virus is HIV, the test has been in use for decades, and there is still no cure.

It is 1976. The United States of America is celebrating its bicentennial year. The first stations of the Metro open, after seven years of construction. Patty Hearst is convicted of armed robbery. Olympic athletes head to Innsbruck, Austria, where the Soviet Union will dominate, winning 27 medals, 13 of them Gold — higher than the medal count of all but one other participating nation.

In the world of technology, personal computers are still nascent, and e-mail even more so. Steves Jobs and Wozniak found Apple, ironically on April Fools' Day.

In among the rest of the news is President Gerald R. Ford's rescinding of Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Executive Order 9066 resulted in the internment of 120,000 people during World War II.

It is spring 2007, and I am in my final year of college. I live in Blacksburg, Va., but I attend Radford University.

At 9:15 a.m., I am out the door for my 10 a.m. class. On the way to school, a 30-minute drive, I pass a half-dozen police cars and ambulances. This is slightly unusual; every week, I see at least one police car on my way to school, and occasionally I see three. But they are never in this number, and they are never followed by more than one ambulance.

Within the next few hours, as I go to my classes and then head over to the student media office (I am the head copy editor of three student media publications), I and the rest of the RU campus will sit weeping and wondering, appalled and abjectly confused, as our sister school suffers the worst school shooting in this country's history.

It is April 16, 2007, and a lone student gunman will shoot and kill 27 students and five teachers before he takes his life.