Browsing: Society

A Brief History On May 3, 1921, the state legislature of West Virginia enacted the first Sales Tax in the United States, although problems in creating the mechanism to administer the tax precluded enforcement for several years.  In 1930, Kentucky and Mississippi followed suit, enacting broad based sales tax, although Kentucky repealed the legislation in 1936, possibly due to the effects of the Great Depression.  During the 1930’s many states jumped on the sales tax bandwagon. Digging Deeper While broad based sales tax is now common in the US and in Canada, the original application of sales tax pertained to…

A Brief History On May 2, 1945, an American Artillery Battalion intercepted a death march of concentration camp inmates being taken from the Dachau concentration camp to the Austrian border, in turn saving the lives of hundreds of the starving inmates.  The rescuers must have seemed like angels sent directly from heaven to the doomed inmates,  and even more surprising to those lucky survivors, the Americans that saved them were all of Japanese ancestry, part of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, a subunit of the 442nd Infantry Regiment that was composed of Nisei, second generation Japanese Americans. Digging Deeper While…

A Brief History On May 1, 305, the Co-Emperors of the Roman Empire, Diocletian and Maximian, teamed up to become the first Roman Emperors to ever resign voluntarily.  As incredibly difficult as it is to have two leaders of the same empire, it is all the more remarkable that both would agree to retire on the same day.  One of their successors, Constantius I, also known as Constantius Chlorus, served only a year before dying and leaving the throne open to whomever could win the ensuing battles. Digging Deeper Diocletian was born in 244 in the Roman Province of Dalmatia,…

A Brief History On June 25, 1950, over 75,000 North Korean soldiers flooded into the Republic of Korea, on the southern end of the Korean peninsula. This invasion was the beginning of the Korean War, which raged from 1950 until 1953. Digging Deeper The Outbreak of the Korean War Within a week, the United Nations called for military aid for South Korea. The United States and Turkey were the first to answer the call. By July, U.S. and Turkish forces were fighting on the side of South Korea. The Turkish Army Infantry Brigade that was sent to fight in South…

A Brief History On April 29, 1483, the Kingdom of Castile captured the main island of the Canary Islands, Gran Canaria, leading to Spanish ownership of the islands to this day.  Consisting of many smaller islands as well as the 7 “main” islands, the largest island is Tenerife, and Gran Canaria is the third largest island with an area of 600 square miles.  (For comparison, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, home to Cleveland, has an land area of 457 square miles, and Cook County, Illinois, home to Chicago, has a land area of 945 square miles.  With 596.7 square miles of land,…