It was a January day of infamy that marked a turning point in American history, some said.

In a Boston Herald editorial titled “A Revolution Begins,” that day’s political events were compared to the 1775 “shot heard ‘round the world,” the opening salvo to the American Revolution. “And like that battle in Concord more than two centuries ago, this is only the opening round,” the Herald editors wrote somberly. Others chose a later but no less dramatic historic comparison: the war between the Union and Confederacy. Author Lee Harris’s book The Next American Civil War argued that “the populist revolt against the liberal elite” was on the brink of descending into a bloody armed conflict. For Harris, that January day looked like a tragic prelude to war, the equivalent of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry for the twenty-first century.

The aforementioned date isn’t January 6, 2021, it’s eleven years prior: January 19, 2010. Then, Scott Brown’s victory in a special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s former Senate seat was expected to spark a call to arms. You might ask yourself, “Who?” Brown was the empty suit (once Cosmopolitan‘s “America’s Sexiest Man”) turned lugheaded Republican who upset Martha Coakley in the true-blue state of Massachusetts.