Browsing: May 14

A Brief History On May 14, 1955, eight communist nations in the orbit of the Soviet Union (USSR) signed a mutual defense pact military alliance, known as The Warsaw Pact.  This gang of communist countries aligned with the USSR was organized as a counter to the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) mutual defense pact aligned with the United States and its Western allies in response to communist aggression and the stated goal of the USSR and other communist countries to forcibly convert the rest of the world to communism by any means possible.  Today we take note of 10 times…

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A Brief History On May 14, 2019, a mere five days away from the HBO mega-hit television series, Game of Thrones series finale, we at History and Headlines are all too willing to provide our readers inclined to desperately want to know things ahead of time with SPOILERS!  Who will live and who will die, who will occupy the Iron Throne?  Many pundits have speculated, and supposedly alternate endings have been filmed to avoid cast members from spilling the beans, but only we have the soi-disant (self-described) clairvoyant, who will now boldly share his visions of the coming final episode…

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A Brief History On May 14, 1816, romantically linked English authors Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley arrived at Geneva, Switzerland.  The poet Lord Byron (pictured on the right in the image above with Godwin in the middle and Shelley on the left) joined the young lovers on May 25th, with his young physician, John William Polidori.  Eventually, the friends decided to have a competition to see who could write the best horror story.  After thinking for days, Godwin, who would later that year marry Shelley, dreamt about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made; her dream…

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A Brief History On May 14, 2018, we celebrate another one of those goofy pseudo-holidays, this time National Dance Like a Chicken Day, a day in which we acknowledge the superiority of that wedding reception standby (along with the Hokey Pokey), the Chicken Dance. Of course, we must also delve into what chickens are and how they are important to us. Digging Deeper Long before there was a Chicken Dance, people kept Chickens not for food, but for entertainment. About 5000 years ago in Asia people started keeping the Red Junglefowl (perhaps crossbred with the Grey Junglefowl), the bird that…

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A Brief History On May 14, 1878, the town of Salem, Massachusetts, was fittingly (in a way) the scene of the last known trial for the crime of witchcraft in the United States. Had people gone mad? Was there some sort of time warp? Were there ghosts from 1692 at work here? Digging Deeper Goofy as it sounds to us today, there are still plenty of people who believe in witches and witchcraft, and even the former Republican Vice Presidential nominee and erstwhile Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin can be seen on video being cleansed and protected from witchcraft by…

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