Boy: Grandpa, did they have the fourth of July in Italy when you were growing up?

Old Man: Yes. In fact, they did. They have the fourth of July everywhere!

Ok, it’s an old joke. But actually, they do have a fourth of July, or more accurately a Fourth of July, or most accurately an Independence Day everywhere. No matter where you are reading this, sometime in the past, sometimes a quite distant past where you are isn’t what it used to be. Every nation on Earth at some time wasn’t. And a surprising number of when they became what they are happened in July.

There is our American Independence Day tomorrow on that at least here famous Fourth of July, commemorating when we told the English Crown that we would rather suffer through a couple hundred years of taxation with poor representation than another day of it without any representation.  The actual independence came five years, three months, and 15 days later when the British forces officially surrendered. All those Americans reading this, you knew that, right?

A couple of days ago, July 1 actually, our neighbors to the north celebrated Canada Day.When I was going to school it was known as Dominion Day (and probably was to a lot of Canadians back then also) and we were told it was the Canadian Independence Day. What did we know? We’re Americans. I later learned that it actually commemorated the combining of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Ontario into the Dominion of Canada, presenting a stronger unified border against the United States just in case the politicos in Washington having just reunited the states after the American Civil War might have designs on taking those Canadian provinces for their own. Our own. Somebody’s own. I found that out when the British Parliament declared Canada to be an independent nation 115 years later.

Another thing I learned in my American schooling was that July 14 was France’s Independence Day on what we were told they call Bastille Day. And in fact July 14 does commemorate the storming of the Bastille and the uniting of the French people against the monarchy in 1789. The French Republic was actually established on September 22, 1792 which like our October 19, 1781 doesn’t seem to be celebrated. Now you could say that all that isn’t really independence as much as a changing of the guard. For the real French Independence you have to go back to 481, give or take a couple of years, when the Kingdom of the Franks was founded by Clovis I with land taken from the Roman Empire.

Whatever misconceptions I had of these days they were still momentous days in the formation of what nations share our terrestrial home today. But there are a lot more nations celebrating freedom this month. Twenty-one other nations from Algeria to Venezuela. (I was hoping when I did my research that I find Zimbabwe gained their independence from Great Britain in July but alas, it was actually on April 18.  But it would have made such a great sentence!)

So wherever you are, chances are pretty good that you or a nearby neighbor is celebrating something this month that made somewhere literally somewhere.

Happy Blank of July!