Cinco de Mayo marks the Mexican army victory over the larger, better trained and better equipped French forces at the Batalla de Puebla in 1862.
The holiday is often mistaken for Mexican Independence Day which actually falls on September 16 and celebrates Mexico’s independence from colonial Spain. In fact, Cinco de Mayo is more popular and widely celebrated in the United States than in Mexico.
The History Channel updates visitors on historic events throughout world history with “This Day in History.” There were a number of notables for April 30:
1789: President George Washington was sworn in as the first President of the United States in New York City and delivered the nation’s first inaugural address.
1803: The land deal between the United States and Napoleonic France known as the “Louisiana Purchase” was concluded. The purchase doubled the size of the U.S. at the cost of $15 million. The Louisiana Territory “comprised most of modern-day United States between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, with the exceptions of Texas, parts of New Mexico, and other pockets of land already controlled by the United States.”
1945: Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his underground bunker in Berlin days before Nazi Germany’s formal surrender to Allied forces. Hitler’s Third Reich was proclaimed to last 1,000 years but collapsed after a dozen under Nazi rule.
1948: Organization of American States (OAS) was officially established with the United States and twenty Latin America nations signed on.
1975: South Vietnam surrendered to communist forces.
Think Progress posted the findings of a recent Brookings Institution survey on Arab attitudes towards the United States. The results showed 80 percent of those survey cited American foreign policy as the root of their criticisms of the United States. Only 12 percent cited “American values” as the primary reason.
These findings contradict the central thesis of the craptacular Dinesh D’Souza book blaming anti-Americanism and the September 11 terrorist attacks on liberals and popular culture. (And, of course, liberals are responsible for popular culture because conservatives are major tools and produce lame programming like this.)
D’Souza wrote in his Washington Post op-ed that he has faced an “onslaught” of criticism because his book “argue[s] that the American left bears a measure of responsibility for the volcano of anger from the Muslim world that produced the 9/11 attacks.” In his January 25 op-ed in The Christian Science Monitor, D’Souza asserted that Muslim distaste for the “popular culture” of “blue” America “can blossom into the kind of anti-American pathology that partly fueled the 9/11 attacks.” Yet in the book itself, D’Souza does not argue that the cultural left “bears a measure of responsibility” for provoking the anger of the 9-11 hijackers or that it “partly fueled” 9-11. Rather, he asserts that the “cultural left” is the “primary cause” of the “visceral rage” that produced the terrorists who attacked America, and that “without the cultural left, 9/11 would not have happened.” [emphasis added]