Browsing: Society

A Brief History The once wildly popular Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert airing at 11 PM and 11:30 PM (Eastern Time) on weeknights on Comedy Central have flopped miserably with the replacement hosts. Digging Deeper Trevor Noah took over the Daily Show from Jon Stewart on September 28, 2015 and Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show replaced The Colbert Report on January 19, 2015. Since losing Stephen Colbert to network television as the host of CBS’s The Late Show, Wilmore has seen ratings in that time frame drop by a whopping 55% (as of…

A Brief History On May 18, 1926, radio evangelist preacher Aimee Semple McPherson disappeared from Venice Beach in southern California. No witnesses came forward and her secretary with whom she had gone to the beach did not report any unusual events. She just was there, and then gone. Digging Deeper Believed to have drowned, her enormous following and celebrity created a stir. Her mother offered $25,000 (a lot in those days!) for information of her whereabouts. A diver and a swimmer both died trying to find her body in the surf, and police were without a clue. Shockingly, 5 weeks later…

A Brief History Named by President Obama as his nominee for Secretary of the Army in November 2015, Eric Fanning, a 47 year old graduate of Dartmouth and a Defense Department employee, was confirmed for the job by the US Senate on May 17, 2016, making him the first openly gay Secretary of a US Military branch. Digging Deeper A sexual identity activist, Fanning supports a policy of allowing transgender persons to serve in the Armed Forces and to prohibit any sort of discrimination based on a person’s sexuality or sexual identity. The US Military had only dropped its controversial…

A Brief History On May 17, 1943, RAF Squadron 617, later known as The Dambusters, embarked on Operation Chastise, a plan to bomb and destroy two dams to flood the Ruhr Valley in Germany. They were successful, largely because of the wacky weapon they used, a barrel like bomb that was rotated on a carriage under the bomber and then dropped to skip across the water to the dam, and then roll down the face of the dam to blow up right against the structure. Many times in wartime nations will stretch the limits of the imaginations of their inventors…

A Brief History On May 17, 1990, homosexual people around the world breathed a sigh of relief and vindication when the General Assembly of the World Health Organization ruled that homosexuality would no longer be considered a mental illness, paving the way for the culture shaking changes that have followed in the next 26 years. Digging Deeper One major change in American culture was marked when the first legal same sex marriages in the United States were performed on May 17, 2004 in Massachusetts.  The Netherlands had broken this taboo in 2001 and as of now a total of 15…