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…
Browsing: November 29
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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…
A Brief History On November 29, 2009, career criminal Maurice Clemmons killed four Lakewood, Washington police officers with shots to the head while they were sitting in a coffee shop. Clemmons was a career criminal and apparently some kind of nut who that had been released early from prison in 2000 by then Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee in what turned out to be a blunder of epic proportions. (Thanks a lot, Governor.) Digging Deeper Returning to a life of crime upon release, Clemmons racked up numerous felony charges in Arkansas and then Washington State where he had moved to in 2004. …
A Brief History Hardly able to pass up the rare opportunity to use such bizarre names in the same article, this date in history gives us two wacked stories! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find the slave ship Zong engaged in the evil business of slavery, and the Atari game Pong making its debut as the first successful video game. The Zong, an English slave ship formerly owned by the Dutch, made infamous, even sickening history in 1781 when the crew threw 142 African slaves overboard to their deaths because the ship had run low on provisions due to misnavigation. The…