A Brief History On December 24, 1800, The “Plot of the rue Saint-Nicaise,” also known as the “Machine Infernale Plot,” failed to kill Napoleon Bonaparte, then the First Consul of France, the de facto dictator of the French Republic. Not the first attempt to kill Bonaparte, on October 10, 1800, another assassination plot against Napoleon called “Conspiration des Poignards” had also failed, nor would it be the last. A man of great personal will and great charisma, Napoleon nonetheless evinced great animosity on the part of those that had previously held much of the power in France, including the Catholic…
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A Brief History On December 22, 1984, the tables got turned on criminals when their victim shot them! Bernhard Goetz, a 37-year-old man, riding a New York subway believed himself threatened when approached by four men ages 18 and 19, each of whom previously had been arrested and convicted at least once. In an instant after initial contact, five shots rang out in rapid succession and all four young men were shot. This famous incident of vigilante “justice” became a cause célèbre in the United States which has a staggering private gun ownership of well over one gun for every…
A Brief History On December 15, 1890, legendary Hunkpapa Lakota (aka, Teton Sioux) leader and holy man, Sitting Bull, was killed by Indian Agency Police at Standing Rock Indian Reservation in the Grand River area of South Dakota. Indian Agents feared Sitting Bull would be leaving the reservation in order to supervise a “Ghost Dance” ritual that agents feared could result in unrest and rebellion among the Native American tribes already on reservations. An early morning arrest had been ordered to surprise Sitting Bull and his followers, and a total of 39 Indian Agency Police officers and 4 additional volunteers…
A Brief History On December 13, 1971, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) heard arguments in a lawsuit by Norma McCorvey (known as “Jane Roe” for the purposes of the lawsuit) against the Dallas County (Texas) Attorney Henry Wade in the landmark American court case about the subject of a woman’s right to seek an abortion, ending an unwanted pregnancy. The case is formally knowns as Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) and ever since the decision was handed down in January of 1973 the case has been a topic of heated debate between “Pro-Life” (aka, anti-abortion)…
A Brief History On December 11, 2017, New York City once again became the target of an Islamic radical terrorist, this time an immigrant from Bangladesh. Luckily, the pipe bomb used in the attack did not explode properly, leaving the suspect with minor injuries (burns) and 3 innocent people with “headaches and ringing in the ears.” It could have been so much worse! President Trump acknowledged the incident as justification for his anti-immigration platform, saying, “There have now been two terrorist attacks in New York City in recent weeks carried out by foreign nationals here on green cards. The first…