A Brief History On April 16, 2018, the World continues to watch events in Syria unfold two days after the United States, the United Kingdom, and France bombed Syrian sites deemed part of their infrastructure required to produce and store chemical weapons in response to Syrian use of chlorine and sarin poison gases against Syrian rebels, killing dozens. The Russians had tersely warned against the Western Allies taking such retaliatory action and hinted at retaliation against the West. Digging Deeper As the rhetoric continued back and forth between the US, its allies, and Russia, one is forced to wonder whether…
Browsing: April 16
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A Brief History On April 16, 1881, Legend of the Old West and buddy of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, fought his last gun fight in Dodge City, Kansas. This archetypical macho man of the Wild West was a renowned gunfighter, lawman, scout, Indian fighter, and buffalo hunter, yet he is best remembered for wearing a suit jacket and a Derby hat! Digging Deeper Born in 1853 in Quebec, Canada, you may be surprised to know Bat was not even a native born American. Of Irish stock, the Masterson family were farmers in Canada, New York, and Illinois before ending up…
A Brief History On April 16, 1457 BC, a battle was fought between the forces of the Egyptian Pharaoh and Canaanite states that chafed under Egyptian rule. Pharaoh Thutmose III strove to put down a rebellion led by the King of Kadesh to continue Egyptian hegemony over the region. Digging Deeper The significance of this battle does not lie in the implications of its effect on the ancient world, but in the wealth of historical documentation available. Megiddo is the first battle known to History to be well documented, and is the first documented incidence of the use of composite…
A Brief History On April 16, 2007, a mentally ill college student conducted a planned slaughter of classmates and faculty members before finally taking his own life. With good reason, the man would be ranked among “The Most Evil People in History”. Digging Deeper Seung-Hui Cho, age 23, a senior at Virginia Tech, was a South Korean who had emigrated to the US and was in the country legally. His middle school and high school years marked him as having mental problems, but privacy laws prevented the state or the university from being aware of his problems. Cho’s problems continued…
A Brief History On April 16, 1945, a Soviet submarine sunk a transport ship filled with civilians and wounded soldiers, one of the great tragedies in a war filled with great tragedies. Digging Deeper The Soviet submarine L-3, while on a mission of laying mines around German held ports in the Baltic Sea, spotted a large easy target. MV Goya, a freighter stolen from Norway by the Germans and converted to a transport ship for people, was about 475 feet long, 57 feet wide, and displaced about 5230 tons, an average sized ship of its day, about the size of…
