A Brief History On July 22, 1587, a detachment of English settlers landed at Roanoke Island, in what is now North Carolina, with the intention of establishing a colony. This group of colonists became famous as the mysterious “Lost Colony” of Roanoke, but prior to this infamous colonial failure, Sir Walter Raleigh and the English had made a previous unsuccessful attempt at establishing a colony at Roanoke, one that also resulted in the disappearance of the last English detachment at the colony. Digging Deeper After the voyages of Christopher Columbus, the Spanish had made numerous voyages of exploration and conquest…
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A Brief History On July 20, 1779, Tekle Giyorgis I (meaning “The Plant of Saint George”) became Emperor of Ethiopia, a member of the Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia. Between ascending to the throne on this day, and June of 1800, he would 5 more times be named Emperor, having lost his status each time previously for a total of 6 stints as Emperor, probably a World Record for times any person became Emperor! Digging Deeper As you probably guessed already from the name of the dynasty the Ethiopian Emperors supposedly descended from, it is the same Solomon one finds in…
A Brief History In 326 BC, Alexander III of Macedon, known more familiarly as Alexander the Great, having conquered the Achaemenid Empire of Persia, the largest empire within the ken of the Greeks of the time, turned his attention to the next great conquest, that of the fabled but little known land of India. What exotic people and riches awaited the greatest conqueror of ancient times? With only one way to find out, Alexander once more mounted his armies and stepped forward to the Indian sub-continent, transiting the famous Khyber Pass. Digging Deeper Alexander the Great was the premier conqueror…
A Brief History On June 18, 2020, American movie fans will get to see the new major motion picture, 7500, a film set aboard a German jet airliner that is attacked by passengers seeking to take over the airplane for terrorist purposes. The tension as gut-wrenching life and death decisions are made are sure to cause inner turmoil as movie watchers carry on inner debates with themselves as to what they would do in the various impossible situations that develop. Digging Deeper With a modest running time of 92 minutes, the film starts out routinely enough, taking a few minutes…
A Brief History On May 14, 1955, eight communist nations in the orbit of the Soviet Union (USSR) signed a mutual defense pact military alliance, known as The Warsaw Pact. This gang of communist countries aligned with the USSR was organized as a counter to the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) mutual defense pact aligned with the United States and its Western allies in response to communist aggression and the stated goal of the USSR and other communist countries to forcibly convert the rest of the world to communism by any means possible. Today we take note of 10 times…