A Brief History On September 3, 1976, an American Viking 2 spacecraft landed on the surface of Mars. People have always dreamed of a Mars space expedition, and although this effort did not land any humans on the Red Planet, the fact that the US was able to successfully land a spacecraft on Mars certainly made the prospect of someday landing people on Mars more likely. Digging Deeper Viking 2 landed in an area called Utopia Planitia and was actually the second American spacecraft to land on Mars, the first being Viking 1, on July 20, 1976. The first Earth…
Browsing: September 3
A Brief History On September 3, 1943, the Allies (mainly the United States and the United Kingdom) invaded mainland Europe, thus living up to the promise to Soviet Premier Josef Stalin to invade mainland Europe in 1943. Of course, Stalin was not satisfied with the choice of Italy as the target of the Western Allies, and despite the assurance of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that attacking the “soft underbelly of the Axis” would yield good results, the invasion of Italy proved to be an agonizingly difficult endeavor. The main Allied attack was at Salerno, called Operation Avalanche, while secondary,…
A Brief History On September 3, 1838, Frederick Douglass, an African American slave in Maryland, finally made good on an escape attempt, using trains, ferry boats, and steam boats to find his way to Pennsylvania, a “free” state. Douglass became famous as a spokesman for the abolition of slavery and when slaves were freed in the United States, he became a spokesman and author for African American rights. The escape engineered by Douglass and a free Black woman he had become friends with was not a spur of the moment running away, but a carefully orchestrated operation. Here we list…
A Brief History On September 3, 2004, the 3 day long nightmare at Beslan School Number 1 in Beslan, Russia finally came to an end. The long hostage crisis and eventual shootout and massacre left 385 people dead, nearly 10 times more than the second deadliest school massacre in history! (Not counting wartime activities.) Digging Deeper The horrible event was engineered by Islamic separatists from Chechnya and Ingushetia, 32 terrorist by government accounts, but the actual number of terrorists is debatable. Over 1100 hostages were taken, almost ¾ children under 18 years old. The terrorists were from the Chechnyan based…
A Brief History On September 3, 1941, the first experiments using an insecticide which had been adapted to kill people were conducted at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Soviet prisoners of war were gassed to death with a cyanide-based insecticide in a dress rehearsal for the mass extermination of Jews and others known as the Holocaust. Digging Deeper Zyklon B was a product made by the giant German chemical company IG Farben. Developed from an earlier version known as Zyklon A, it was originally intended to be used as an insecticide and delousing agent. In its insecticide form, it had a special odorant added for safety reasons so that the smell…
