Browsing: Places

A Brief History On June 21, 1734, a 29 year old African woman was executed for setting her slave master’s house on fire which spread through Montreal in New France, what is now Canada. Digging Deeper Born a slave in Madeira around 1705 and named Marie-Joseph Angélique by a Flemish man that bought her and sold her to a Frenchman in Montreal around 1725, Marie was not submissive and tried to escape with a White indentured servant she had taken as a lover in 1733. The White servant was jailed, and Marie was returned to domestic duties, although her sale…

A Brief History On June 18, 2023, the deep-sea submarine Titan imploded 3,500 meters beneath the surface of the Atlantic, killing the crewman and the four tourists aboard.  The Titan was a commercial sub designed to take tourists to visit the resting place of the RMS Titanic, which sank in 1912 Digging Deeper If you think ticket prices at Disney World are expensive, try the regular price of a seat in the Titan at $250,000, or the discount price of $150,000! Regardless of price, sometimes tourism goes bad, such as when a tourist airliner or helicopter crashes, a cruise ship…

A Brief History On June 16, 2019, over 2 million people in Hong Kong protested the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance, an extradition law enacted by the Chinese communist government of Hong Kong as well as alleged police brutality.  The protests had started over a variety of reasons months earlier and continued until disrupted by the pandemic of 2020. Digging Deeper Ever since Hong Kong reverted to Chinese control in 1997, protests have been a frequent event on that fabled island and its associated territory.  Some other massive protests vying for the “largest” in history include: The Baltic Way human chain across…

A Brief History On June 4, 1989, an estimated tens of thousands Chinese military troops opened fire on perhaps a million Chinese protestors at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the capital of China.  While numbers of troops, protestors, and casualties are only estimates, because historically, governments cannot be counted on to provide accurate accounts of embarrassing events, as many as 10,000 or more of the peaceful protestors may have died in the massacre. Digging Deeper Not only were hundreds or thousands of people shot, but many others were also trampled in the rush to avoid the gunfire or crushed under the…

A Brief History On May 19, 1959, the North Vietnamese Army formed Group 559 and gave the group the job of establishing a reliable supply route for NVA and Viet Cong forces in South Vietnam.  The result became the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of roads and footpaths used by the communist North to funnel people and supplies to the South, via Laos and Cambodia. Digging Deeper Called by the American spy group the NSA “one of the great achievements of military engineering of the 20th century,” the Ho Chi Minh trail was a constant target of US bombing…