A Brief History On April 27, 1992, Betty Boothroyd made Women’s History by becoming the first woman elected as Speaker of the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, ending a 700 year run of a Men’s only club. Merry Olde England (and the rest of the United Kingdom) beat Nancy Pelosi and the United States House of Representatives by a whopping 15 years in electing a woman to its top legislative post. (Nancy Pelosi, the current Speaker of the US House of Representatives, was the first and only female ever elected to that post when she took control of…
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A Brief History On April 26, 2002, Erfurt, Germany, was the scene of a horrific mass murder when a 19 year old student that had been expelled from a high school shot and killed 16 people. Killed in the massacre were 13 faculty and staff members, 2 students, and 1 police officer. As we have said, the common refrain that “only in America” do school shootings (or other school related murders) or mass shootings occur is entirely false, as such incidents keep happening in other countries where “gun control” is far more strict than in the United States. Digging Deeper…
A Brief History On April 25, 2019, the national basketball league and basketball fans everywhere, especially in Boston, were saddened by the death of legendary Boston Celtic John Havlicek. An inducted member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Havlicek played on 8 NBA Championship Boston Celtics teams, one of 4 NBA players that played on that many Championship teams, along with the 2 players that played on even more top teams. Guess who is not on the list? Michael Jordan! While His Airness was certainly one of the greatest players of all time, worthy of consideration as the…
A Brief History On April 24, 1918, at the Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux in Northern France, 3 British tanks met 3 German tanks in the first known instance of tank vs. tank combat in military history. The battle raged from April 24 to April 27, 1918, as part of the German Spring Offensive (alternately known as the Ludendorff Offensive), a desperate attempt to snatch victory before the Americans could bring overwhelming reinforcements to the fight. Of course, tanks had already seen battle in World War I, just not against each other. Digging Deeper One of the enduring innovations of World…
A Brief History On April 23, 2005, the video world was treated to the first ever YouTube video, a video created by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, under the screen name of “jawed.” The 18 second video was of the Elephant exhibit at the San Diego Zoo, and was so brief we can include the entire script here: “All right, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants, and the cool thing about these guys is that, is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks, and that’s, that’s cool, and that’s pretty much all there is to…