Browsing: December

A Brief History On December 31, 1695, a tax on windows went into effect in England, which resulted in many people boarding up or bricking up their windows so that they would not be subject to the tax.    In a never-ending quest to take every penny, farthing, ruble, peseta, pfennig, shekel and sou from every last working person, governments all around the world show unlimited ingenuity when it comes to dreaming up things to tax, no matter how stupid. Digging Deeper Russia made a bid for a spot in this article by passing a tax on beards in 1698, which was an effort to force…

A Brief History On December 30, 1813, during the War of 1812, arson-happy British troops set the small city of Buffalo, New York ablaze as a means of punishing the upstart Americans.  Less than a year later, the British also ignited Washington D.C., the nation’s capital. Digging Deeper In fact, the British threated to burn towns down in an effort to extract ransoms from the townsfolk in exchange for not torching the buildings.  In this case, however, perhaps the British ire was somewhat justified because it was the U.S. that had declared war on Great Britain in the first place.  Of course, there…

A Brief History On December 29, Catholics and Lutherans celebrate the feast day of David, a man from the Bible perhaps most famous for slaying the giant Goliath.  Listed as 6 cubits tall (9 feet in today’s cubits, 6 feet according to some scholars), Goliath was the mightiest warrior of the Philistines, Israel’s go-to nemesis in those days.  David, as with other Biblical characters, is considered a “legendary” character by many historians and other people.  To believers, however, he is an historical figure that also happens to be a direct ancestor of Jesus Christ.  Digging Deeper With a rock that…

A Brief History On December 27, 1929, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin signed an order to “eliminate the Kulaks as a class,” resulting in a sort of genocide.  The Kulaks were not an ethnic group but rather a social class that in today’s United States would be the equivalent of the upper working class or the lower middle class.  In the Soviet Union, Kulaks were the upper class of peasants who had accumulated more property, wealth and power than the lower-class peasants. Digging Deeper Stalin sought to separate the Kulaks into 3 main groups, the first of which were those to be executed.  The second group…

A Brief History On December 26, 1919, the owner of the Boston Red Sox gave the owner of the New York Yankees probably the greatest Christmas gift in history when he sold Babe Ruth, the greatest baseball player of all time to him.  Red Sox owner Harry Frazee was said to have needed money to finance a play and so sold Ruth for only $100,000 in cash and a $350,000 loan. Digging Deeper The Red Sox had won the 1918 World Series and would not win another until 2004, often said to be because of “The Curse of the Bambino.”  With both his terrific…