Yesterday was my wedding anniversary. That great thunking sound you hear is my husband keeling over in shock. I never remember our anniversary.

This is even more pathetic than it seems, as I am the unofficial keeper of anniversaries for the peace movement. Want to know when to commemorate the day Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay taxes to support the Mexican-American War? Just ask me. (August 14, 1847, for the curious.) Need a list of every fast undertaken by Mahatma Gandhi? (There were 30 of them.) When was the first draft card burned? (12 February, 1947) When and where was the first Indian Reservation established? (New Jersey, August 8, 1783.) It's all in my handy little database.

You'd think I'd remember my wedding anniversary, wouldn't you? All I'd have to do is associate it with the things I do remember.

On August 6 in 1804 the Holy Roman Empire (described by Voltaire as neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire) was formally dissolved when Emperor Francis I of Austria abdicated; in the 1855 Bloody Monday Riot, a Louisville mob attacked the Irish quarter, burning down houses and killing at least 20; in 1890 at Auburn Prison in New York, William Kemmler became the first person to be executed in the electric chair, for chopping his wife to bits with an axe.

Also on August 6, in 1945 the U.S. dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima, killing more than 100,000 civilians; in 1965 the Voting Rights Act was signed by President Johnson; and in 1990 the U.S. imposed sanctions on Iraq.

I look at my list first thing each morning and reflect on the day's anniversaries, a word that has its origins in the Latin annus (year) and versus (past participle of vertere to turn.) Today my thoughts will turn to empires and mobs.

My database is rife with historical examples of Protestant mobs attacking Catholic homes and churches: three this week alone. Such ignorant animosity seems unthinkable in the 21st Century, until I talk to my Muslim friends and they remind me that they often live under a similar threat.

I ponder the death penalty when I read about that first electric chair. My notes say that the executioner held the switch for 17 seconds, but Kemmler was still twitching and moaning. The strapped him in again, upped the current to 2,000 volts and plugged him in for 70 seconds more. They cooked his head - a grotesque scene, observers said -- and started a nationwide debate about capital punishment.

The arguments began even before the electrocution. His lawyers appealed, claiming that this new-fangled electric chair was cruel and unusual punishment. The defense was supported by George Westinghouse, who was a backer of Alternating Current and opposed by Thomas Edison, a Direct Current investor who thought that electrocution with AC current would prove it was dangerous and his DC would capture the market. Capital punishment doubling as a product demo. Sick.

The news this week is filled with two of today's events, the bombing of Hiroshima and the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

As welook back on the carnage in Hiroshima 60 years ago, Iran announced plans to activate a uranium enrichment plant; analysts predict that they could have nuclear weapons within ten years, joining the U.S., Russia, the United Kingdom France and the People's Republic of China and, perhaps, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. Hiroshima is an eternal reminder of the horror of nuclear weapons.

Portions of the Voting Rights Act expire in 2007, and although Congress is expected to reauthorize them, they will inevitably be subject to judicial review. Judge John Roberts, the Supreme Court nominee, was active as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration in mounting opposition to Section 2 of the Act (which is not up for review) on the basis that it infringed on state's rights. The most important provision up for renewal this go-round, Section 5, requires jurisdictions with a history of racial discrimination to get pre-clearance from the Department of Justice before changing voting procedures. The same state's rights arguments could apply. Would he make those arguments as a justice? I wonder, and worry.

Before we can move forward, we must look backward, a constant turning, turning of the year. The magic of the anniversary.

And don't worry: I figured out how to remember my anniversary. It will fit into the database, right between the Voting Rights Act and the sanction on Iraq, but nowhere near the guy who hacked his wife to bits with an axe.

Susan Ives can be reached at suives@texas.net.