Browsing: Society

A Brief History On July 15, 1954, the first prototype of what became the Boeing 707 and US Air Force C-135 family of airplanes made its first flight.  Many airplanes have served a dual role well, moving cargo and people for civilian purposes or the same for the military.  Sometimes a military airplane might be an ideal test aircraft for scientific purposes, or as a weather observing plane.  Here we list 10 of these airplanes that have done double duty, and of course there are many more.   Digging Deeper 10. Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny.” The most widely produced North American airplane…

A Brief History The media, reinforced by politicians on both sides has given the public the impression that there is some sort of war on Black males going on in the United States, especially by White police officers.  Is this perception a case of “Dog Bites Man” (police doing their job) or a manufactured case of “Man Bites Dog” geared to arouse public passion and sell air time? As an important note, before reading onward, please keep in mind that the statistics discussed in this article are about recent history, i.e. from the 1990s to the present.  In the centuries before…

A Brief History This article present a chronological history of Jerusalem! Digging Deeper On Good Friday, somewhere around 33 A.D., Jesus of Nazareth, prophet to Islam and Judaism, the Christ and Savior to Christians, was crucified by the Romans in Jerusalem. Crucifixion was a particularly brutal and drawn out process of execution often reserved for “dangerous” criminals, ones that threatened the status quo.   On July 12, AD 70, the army of Titus Caesar Vespasianus, a Roman general that would later become Roman Emperor, finally attacked the walls of the city of Jerusalem after a 6 month siege, succeeding in taking the city…

A Brief History On July 15, 1838, while delivering a speech at Harvard Divinity School, Ralph Waldo Emerson described Jesus as a “great man,” but not “God.”  He further caused a furor by discounting the miracles attributed to Jesus in the Bible as not true. Digging Deeper One of the guiding lights of the 19th Century philosophical Transcendentalist Movement, Emerson was a prolific writer of essays and a speech maker, and was a friend and mentor to Henry David Thoreau. In 1836, his essay, Nature, became the foundation of Transcendentalism, and his 1837 speech he called The American Scholar was called by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.…

A Brief History On July 15, 1815, Emperor Napoleon I of the French surrendered to the British aboard the HMS Bellerophon.  If you are unfamiliar with the name of the ship, it comes from the greatest Greek hero of ancient times (until Hercules).  Naming a ship after a mighty hero sure sounds better than naming one after some pencil necked politician.  The British have always found some pretty nifty names for their warships and so have the US Navy, at least sometimes.  Here we list 10 of the impressive, intimidating, just plain cool names for ships, and for each we…