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That prospectively apocalyptic year of 1666 saw the onset of the Scottish Covenanters‘ mass martyr-making under the English gallows. Three dozen or so were put to death in the aftermath of the Battle of Rullion Green. Among them, nine men — seven in Ayr, two in Edinburgh — paid with their necks on this date. The Covenanter tragedy stretches back to the first English Civil War, when English parliamentarians enlisted the aid of Scottish Presbyterians by agreeing to a covenant guaranteeing presbyterian church governance in Scotland and England. Essentially, that meant representative ecclesiastical authority, rather than top-down power from the...

And what a very neat number it is too. Don't worry folks. This is the kind of thing that almost never happens, but it keeps happening every week. I'm sure it won't happen when there's a national election at stake and the party that habitually commits voter fraud is desperate to take the White House by any means from burning down cities to engaging in ballot harvesting. Nothing to worry about or see here. Officials have counted more than 1,600 ballots from New Jersey's July primary that were found last week in a “mislabeled” bin. The 1,666 ballots from Sussex...

A lot of English people believed 1666 would be the year of the apocalypse. You can’t really blame them. In late spring 1665, bubonic plague began to eat away at London’s population. By fall, roughly 7,000 people were dying every week in the city. The plague lasted through most of 1666, ultimately killing about 100,000 people in London alone — and possibly as many as three-quarters of a million in England as a whole. Perhaps the greatest chronicler of the Great Plague was Samuel Pepys, a well-connected English administrator and politician who kept a detailed personal diary during London’s darkest...

This is the story of a city on knife's edge, riven by religious and political tensions, made vulnerable to disaster by its own neglect and avarice. It is a story of official blunders which turned a minor, commonplace accident into an all-consuming conflagration. It's a story of chaos, mass hysteria, profiteering and racist violence – but it is also a story of some heroism and charity, from royal and commoner alike. It unfolds over 72 hours, beginning at midnight on September 2, 1666, and ending at the climax of the fire's worse day. Of course, in an era without reliable...

Drudge headline: THICK BLACK SMOKE OVER LONDON.... DEVELOPING... Fox News reports a giant blaze in an East London building. The TV image shows a huge plume of smoke reminiscent of the WTC on 9/11. The trailer at the bottom of the screen says, "Terrorism not suspected."