Browsing: November 9

A Brief History On November 9, 1918, in the face of catastrophic defeat after four years of debilitating war, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany abdicated his throne and went into exile in the Netherlands.  Throughout history, leaders have been forced by political or personal circumstances to give up power and leave office, sometimes of their own free will and other times because of outside influence.  Here we list 10 of those leaders that left their position of leadership before their time was due.  (Resigning to assume a higher post does not count.) Digging Deeper 1. Kaiser Wilhelm, Germany, 1918. Kaiser Bill…

A Brief History What a year! Cleveland gets a major sports championship (Cavaliers in the NBA), the Chicago Cubs end the Curse of the Goat and win the World Series, and Donald J. Trump wins the Presidential election! Digging Deeper Either way, this was going to be an historic Presidential election, with Hillary Clinton becoming the first female major party nominee, and had she won, the first US female President. On the other hand, Donald Trump will become the oldest man elected to his first term as President and will be our first President that has absolutely no prior government…

A Brief History On November 9, 694, the Seventeenth Council of Toledo opened, a third round ordered by Egica, King of the Visigoths (Spain), a council of Bishops of the Christian Church. Not surprisingly for any such council before the Renaissance, the main topic was just how bad the Jews are and what should be done about them. Digging Deeper A profoundly anti-Jewish King, Egica claimed that he had “heard” that Jews outside of Iberia were plotting to overthrow their Christian masters, and that Jews in Iberia were somehow being contaminated by those plots. Thus, the main point of the…

A Brief History On November 9, 1965, 22 year old American Roger Allen LaPorte, a former Catholic seminarian, sat down calmly, poured gasoline over himself, and burned himself to death in front of the United Nations in New York in a protest of the Viet Nam War. Digging Deeper LaPorte had dropped out of the seminary, but graduated from Holy Ghost Academy (Tupper Lake, New York) in 1961 and was active in the Catholic Worker Movement.  Although fatally burned (he died the next day), LaPorte was able to talk before dying and said he performed his act of protest against…

A Brief History On November 9, 1979, the computers that served the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the American and Canadian anti-nuclear defense agency, wrongly reported that a massive Soviet nuclear strike was on the way, triggering an alert that nearly caused the U.S. to launch its own massive retaliatory nuclear strike. Digging Deeper Luckily for the citizens of the Northern Hemisphere, and perhaps the entire earth, a frantic manual check of satellite data and early warning radars showed the alarm to be false, and NORAD cancelled the alert, narrowly averting the accidental start of a massive nuclear war. At that point in…