A Brief History On February 20, 1905, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that states have the authority to require mandatory vaccinations against disease, well over a century before the controversy over the Covid vaccine in 2020 and 2021. Digging Deeper In the case of Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the court ruled that Massachusetts and other states had the right to enforce compulsory vaccination laws and that individual liberty is not absolute. In this case, the disease involved was smallpox, and the law in the Bay State required people over 21 to be vaccinated or face a $5 fine. …
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A Brief History On February 14, 2000, the American spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker orbited asteroid 433 Eros, the first spacecraft from Earth to orbit an asteroid. Digging Deeper NEAR Shoemaker had been designed for NASA by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and was launched in 1996. Not only did the spacecraft make history with its orbit, a year later it made space history again by being the first spacecraft to touch down on an asteroid, the same 433 Eros. The spacecraft was named after Eugene Shoemaker, an American geologist that studied impact craters on the Earth, but also studied…
A Brief History On February 12, 1733, James Oglethorpe founded the English Province of Georgia, later to become the Colony of Georgia in 1752, the Southernmost and last of the 13 Colonies that would later become the United States of America. Digging Deeper Georgia was named after King George II, who had issued the charter allowing for its colonization. The first settlement was at Savannah, and Georgia was the 4th state admitted to the Union in 1788. Known as The Peach State, Georgia’s capital is Atlanta, a city of a half million, although its metropolitan area is over 6 million,…
A Brief History On February 7, 1984, two astronauts from the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-41-B made space exploration history by taking the first untethered space walk outside of their space ship. Digging Deeper Not being attached by any sort of lifeline had to be a terrifying prospect, but astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart, both on their first space flight, operated outside the Challenger free of any safety line for over 5 hours. In 1972, President Richard Nixon announced the NASA Space Shuttle program, an ambitious program sadly remembered for the Challenger and Columbia disasters, but…
A Brief History On February 5, 1852, the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, was opened to the public. The largest art museum in the world, by floor space, the Hermitage was established in 1764 by Empress Catherine the Great to house her massive art collection. Digging Deeper The Hermitage ranks 6th in the world by number of annual visitors, and most lists of “Greatest Museums” include it on their honor roll. Other worthy contenders for the title of Greatest Museum would include the Louvre, in Paris, the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C., the British Museum, in London, and the…
