Browsing: November 29

A Brief History On November 29, 1729, the Native American Natchez people who had been living peacefully with their French colonist neighbors in the area of what is now Natchez, Mississippi rose up and attacked the French, killing 138 men, 56 children, and 35 women at the French Fort Rosalie. Digging Deeper New France had extended in North America well beyond Canada and Northern part of what is now the United States, with a large Southern and Western territory claimed by France, much of which later became the property of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.  French…

A Brief History On November 29, 1987, Korean Air Lines Flight 858 exploded over the Andaman Sea, downing the jet liner and killing all 115 people aboard the plane, mostly people from South Korea.  The cause of the deadly blast was a bomb planted by North Korean “agents,” basically state sponsored terrorists, at the behest of the son of North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung and future dictator of North Korea himself, Kim Jong-il.  Normally, such a state sponsored act of terrorism could easily be the casus belli for declaring war against the country that perpetrated such an outrage against humanity,…

A Brief History On November 29, 1963, in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon B. Johnson formed a committee under the direction of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States Earl Warren to investigate the assassination and related events.  Johnson used Executive Order 11130 to form the commission and Congress had passed Senate  Joint Resolution 137 authorizing the President to form such a commission.  The name, Warren Commission, has stood for controversy and distrust of government ever since! Digging Deeper The idea behind the formation of an investigative commission of prominent…

A Brief History On November 29, 1961, the US space agency, NASA, launched Mercury-Atlas 5, the first mission to send an American into orbit around the Earth in space. Russian Yuri Gagarin had already orbited the Earth, and 2 American astronauts had made sub-orbital space flights, but the time was right for the US to make the big step into orbital flight. Digging Deeper The specially trained “astronaut” chosen for this historic flight was Enos, a chimpanzee that had been bought by NASA from the Miami Rare Bird Farm in 1960. Enos had been subjected to over 1250 hours of…

A Brief History On November 29, 800, the Frankish King Charlemagne (aka, Charles I) traveled to Rome and The Vatican to investigate charges of adultery and perjury against Pope Leo III, another soap opera in the long saga of the papacy. Digging Deeper Charlemagne as King of the Franks (France), was seen as the leading Catholic monarch of the time, and as such, the protector of the faith and the Pope.  Leo had been unanimously elected Pope on the death of Pope Adrian I, but the friends and relatives of Adrian apparently resented Leo and undertook to discredit the reigning…