On this date in 1781, the last name in Incan rebellion met a horrible end in the ancient Incan capital of Cusco. José Gabriel Condorcanqui — rechristened Tupac Amaru II, as he was a distant descendant of the last Incan king — was a member of the privileged indigenous population depended upon by the Spanish to administer the forced and extorted labor that made its New World empire worth having. Condorcanqui evidently had an epiphany. In November 1780, he launched a well-planned rebellion by engineering the public execution of a hated corregidor Antonio de Arriaga at the hands of his...