A Brief History On September 12, 490 BC, an epic battle was fought between the Greeks (primarily Athenians) and the Persian Empire at the plains of Marathon, Greece, about 26 miles from Athens, with the result being a great victory for the outnumbered Greeks and giving rise to the legend of Pheidippides running the long distance to bring news of the victory to Athens, giving the happy word with his dying breaths. The battle marked a turning point in the power struggle between the Greeks and Persians and resulted in a period of Greek sovereignty over their own land. Digging…
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A Brief History On September 4, 1941, US Navy destroyer USS Greer was attacked by German submarine (U-boat) U-652, and returned the compliment by depth charging the German sub. Although the battle did not result in either ship being damaged, and no sailors were killed, the “Greer Incident” assumed enormous political proportions as the German and American governments scrambled to gain political advantage from the confrontation at sea. The incident could have easily resulted in outright hostilities and a declaration of war between the US and Germany, but as each country was not quite ready to take that final plunge,…
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 2, 1885, the Wyoming Territory was the scene of a terrible racially motivated riot that resulted in the deaths of a minimum of 28 Chinese immigrants, and possibly as many as 50. The aggressors in this case were also recent immigrants to the United States, coming from White, European countries. The rioting and killing was over the Union Pacific Coal Company paying Chinese miners less than White miners, undercutting the availability of jobs for White immigrants. Digging Deeper Not only did a couple to a few dozen Chinese immigrants lose their lives, additional people of…
A Brief History On August 29, 708 (AD), Japan minted copper coins for the first time in their history. As you may guess from the date, these were certainly not the first coins minted and not by a long stretch the first coins ever minted. The distinction of minting the first known coins goes back to the 7th and 6th Century BC in Anatolia (modern Turkey) by King Alyattes of Lydia (sometimes given a date of 610 BC). The earliest known coin is the Lydian Lion coin. The practice of making coins quickly spread throughout the Persian and Greek empires,…