A Brief History On July 20, 1906, Finland ratified a law guaranteeing equal rights to women to vote in political elections, the first European country to do so. Digging Deeper During the 19th Century, women in many countries mounted campaigns to gain the right to vote, a movement called “Women’s Suffrage.”  This movement gained its first success in New Zealand, which became the first self-governing colony to grant universal women’s suffrage in 1893, although women could not run for office. Other colonies, territories, and states had some sort of women’s suffrage, although usually not universal, with restrictions based on race,…

A Brief History On July 10, 2007, Turkish adventurer Erden Eruç, almost 46 years old at the time, set off on what may be the greatest feat of human endurance and physical performance in history, the solo, only human powered circumnavigation of the Earth.  As if this feat was not daunting enough, he threw in making it a point to climb the tallest mountain on each continent as part of his trip!  For financial reasons, he ended up journeying on a route that did not include all of the tallest mountains on each continent. Digging Deeper Eruç accomplished this feat…

A Brief History On February 24, 2022, days after recognizing Donetsk and Luhansk as independent states, Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered a full scale invasion of Ukraine. Digging Deeper Russia’s invasion has had five major phases thus far.  The first phase covers the period from February 24th, 2022, when Russia launched a military invasion of Ukraine, to April 7th, 2022 when fighting focused away from the northeast and Kyiv and towards the south and east of Ukraine.  The second phase covers the period from April 8th, 2022, when the area of heavy fighting shifted to the south and east of…

A Brief History On July 2, 1816, a French sailing ship, the Méduse, struck bottom off the coast of Mauritania, dooming the vessel. Digging Deeper A frigate repurposed as a transport, Méduse was abandoned, with about 250 people loading into the ship’s launches and 146 men and a single woman forced to climb aboard a makeshift raft, to be towed by the launches. The crowded and starving people on the raft were cut loose to fend for themselves, resulting in 13 days of terror, with some survivors murdered, others washed or thrown overboard, and some eaten by their raft mates! …

A Brief History On June 30, 1882, the assassin of President Garfield, Charles J. Guiteau, was executed by hanging in Washington, D.C.  Guiteau had surrendered at the scene of the crime. Today, we look at what happened to the assassins that killed four US Presidents. Digging Deeper John Wilkes Booth, Confederate sympathizer and assassin of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, was hunted down 12 days later and killed by a US Army soldier when Booth refused to surrender. Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist opposed to William Mckinley’s interventionist policies, shot McKinley in 1901.   Czolgosz was swarmed and beaten by bystanders after the…