Browsing: April

A Brief History On April 1, 1939, Phil Niekro, Hall of Fame pitcher and winner of 318 major league games, was born.  Together with his brother, Joe, these 2 Polish-American baseball players won more games than any other brother combination in major league history.  Many other Polish-Americans have also gone on to greatness in major league baseball, and here we list some of the best or most well known (no disrespect to all the others).   Digging Deeper 12. Richie Zisk, 1971 – 1983. A reliable 12-year player, Zisk once had 100 RBIs in a season and in another season had…

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A Brief History From 1945 to 1991, two superpowers (the capitalist United States of America versus the communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) challenged each other for dominance on the world stage.  This article presents a chronological timeline of some of the more bizarre events of the Cold War! Digging Deeper On March 5, 1946, while speaking at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, former British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, uttered the term “Iron Curtain” in reference to the divide between the Soviet led Communist Bloc and the democratic/capitalist Western group of nations led by the United States. On May 10,…

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A Brief History On April 30, 1993, Hungarian (by ancestry) tennis star, Monica Seles, was stabbed in the back by a fan obsessed with Steffi Graf, another well known female tennis star.  Seles was number one in the world for the previous 2 years, but unfortunately was absent from pro tennis for 2 years after the stabbing.  She had already won 8 Grand Slam titles had become the youngest ever French Open winner at age 16.  She was only 20 years old at the time of the attack and never regained her championship form, playing her last professional match in…

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A Brief History On April 25, 2014, The Quiet Ones will be released in American theaters.  The film purports to be inspired by actual events, but to what extent does the movie recreate these so-called “actual events”? Digging Deeper In the 1970s, real-life Dr. Alan Robert George Owen created the Toronto Society for Psychical Research.  According to journalists Ryan and Louise Hung, this group consisted of eight adult men and women who invented a fictional  aristocrat named Philip Aylesford.  This fake man lived centuries ago and achieved infamy for cheating on his wife with a Gypsy.  The angry wife then…

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A Brief History On April 23, 1910, former President Theodore Roosevelt (TR) gave one of his most famous speeches at the Sorbonne in Paris, France.  In what is known as the “Man In the Arena” speech, but actually titled “Citizenship in a Republic,” TR contrasted the bold man of action to the “timid souls that neither know victory or defeat.”  A man of action himself, and the youngest president, Teddy Roosevelt had numerous times been in the arena.  Here are 10 reasons why Theodore Roosevelt is one of the greatest of Americans. Digging Deeper 10. The Great White Fleet. Roosevelt…

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