Browsing: Society

A Brief History On August 4, 1920, in Winchester, Kentucky, Helen Amelia Thomas was born, a woman that would go on to the top of her profession as a White House journalist for UPI and then Hearst Newspapers. Highly esteemed, Thomas made remarks in 2010 pilloried in the press as being anti-Semitic. Her long and illustrious career now in tatters, Thomas retired from Hearst and died in 2013 at the age of 92, no longer famous as a journalist, but instead infamous as an anti-Semite. Numerous public persons have ruined their standing with the public by making seemingly racist comments,…

A Brief History On August 2, 1916, Austrian saboteurs managed to sink the Italian battleship, Leonardo da Vinci as the great ship lay in Taranto harbor. Was the magazine explosion an accident, or did the Austrians use some sort of novel booby trap to sink the mighty vessel? Either way, World War I, like other wars, saw the imagination of arms designers and military engineers run wild. Previously we have discussed 10 Weird Weapons of World War I, and today we expand our list by another 5 goofy gadgets both sides came up with to pursue victory in this terrible…

A Brief History On July 27, 1189, Friedrich Barbarossa (also known as Frederick), the Holy Roman Emperor, arrived at the capital of the Serbian King Stefan Nemanja, a city called Nis. King of Germany, King of Italy, and King of Burgundy, Barbarossa was a medieval force to be reckoned with, crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1155. His undoing was his ill-considered foray into the Third Crusade, a venture that cost the Holy Roman Emperor his life. Digging Deeper Perhaps you are familiar with the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, a plan the Germans called “Operation Barbarossa” in…

A Brief History On July 26, 1953, the Arizona Department of Public Safety and Arizona National Guard conducted a raid on an enclave of fundamentalist Mormons at Short Creek, Arizona, an enormous law enforcement effort that netted about 400 people taken into custody, including men, women, and children. Their alleged crime? Polygamy, also known as “plural marriage,” which had ended as a part of mainstream Mormonism as manifested by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly referred to as the LDS and comprise more than 95% of all “Mormons.” Digging Deeper On July 26, 1953, the Arizona Department…

A Brief History On July 25, 1609, the excellently named British ship, Sea Venture, encountered serious storms while crossing the Atlantic Ocean en route to Virginia, and was purposely run ashore to prevent loss of the ship and passengers. These would be colonists of the Virginia Colony instead found themselves on the uninhabited Island of Bermuda, establishing a European presence that continues to this day. Digging Deeper About 665 miles East-Southeast of North Carolina, Bermuda is in the Atlantic Ocean, unlike the other European settled islands in the New World, most of which are either adjacent to North or South…