Browsing: March

A Brief History On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan proposed the development and deployment of what he called The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which would become known as “Star Wars” and would cost around one trillion dollars!  Unfortunately, the commendable idea of making the US invulnerable to attack by Soviet ballistic missiles had 2 major problems, besides the economy ruining cost.  The first problem was that if it could work, the so called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) theory that kept either side from nuking the other because such an exchange would result in everybody gets blasted, a no-win scenario…

A Brief History On March 22, 1943, a battalion of military police fighting for Germany was attacked by Byelorussian partisans near the village of Khatyn. Digging Deeper The Nazi 118th Battalion was commanded by a German officer, but mostly manned by Ukrainians that hated the Soviet regime, criminals, and Soviet prisoners of war and deserters willing to oppose the Soviet Union. Suffering 4 men dead from the attack by partisans, including their commander, the enraged battalion went through the village of Khatyn and forced all the population into a barn. The Nazis, having committed similar atrocities throughout Belarus and other…

A Brief History This weekend, two epic films set during Greco-Roman history vie for box office dominance: 300: Rise of an Empire (total worldwide gross as of March 10, 2014: $132,850,000) set during the Greco-Persian Wars and Pompeii (total worldwide gross as of March 10, 2014: $78,168,000) set during the height of the Roman Empire, but how accurate are they historically speaking? Digging Deeper: 300: Rise of an Empire Quite a bit of well put together articles have addressed the factual accuracy and inaccuracy of 300 (see for example here and here), but less has been written about the prequel/sidequel/sequel…

A Brief History On March 7, 1274, Saint Thomas Aquinas died having not completed his masterpiece, the Summa Theologiæ, in which he defines evil as the absence or privation of good.  Tragically, numerous men and women have walked our Earth demonstrating few if any “good” qualities.  This article lists these most evil examples of humans in chronological order by their dates of birth. A few quick things to keep in mind before reading this list:  First, this article is a work in progress in that it only links to people featured in greater detail in existing articles on History and…

Dear readers, in March of 2014, we posted an article about Colt’s revolver, but what are some more famous pistols in history?  Read on to find out the top ten!  The order is not important, but their fame and renown is.  Television, movies, books and popularity use all factor into fame and notoriety with pistols.  What pistols and revolvers would come to your mind as famous?  (Or infamous, as the case may be?) 10. Smith & Wesson J-Frame (.38 S&W Special) The snub nosed .38 all the detectives used to carry in the movies from the 1940’s to the 1980’s…