Browsing: Society

A Brief History On the evening of November 13, 2015, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks occurred in Paris, France and its northern suburb Saint-Denis.  The attacks consisted of mass shootings, suicide bombings, bombings, and hostage taking, including bombings near the Stade de France in Saint-Denis.  The deadliest attack was at the Bataclan theatre where attackers took hostages and engaged in a standoff with police until it was ended on November 14, 2015. Digging Deeper At least 129 people were killed, 89 of them at the Bataclan theatre.  More than 350 people were injured by the attacks, including 99 people described as…

A Brief History On November 11, 1673, General Jan Sobieski of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth successfully used military rockets designed by Kazimierz Siemienowicz in the Second Battle of Khotyn in the Ukraine, helping to defeat Ottoman forces.  Siemienowicz was the greatest artillery officer of his day, perhaps in history, and yet much about him is unknown. Digging Deeper Historians argue over whether Siemienowicz was of Lithuanian, Polish, or Belarusian ethnicity, as the borders and identities of countries and alliances in those days was murky and changing all the time.  Ambiguity in the personal accounts of Siemienowicz does not clarify the issue,…

A Brief History On November 10, 1775, the finest fighting force in the history of the world was born when the United States Marine Corps was established in a Philadelphia tavern by Samuel Nicholas. Digging Deeper Even back in 1775 Tun Tavern was already an old established meeting place, having been built way back in 1686, making it almost 90 years old.  Located near the Philadelphia waterfront, Tun Tavern was a meeting place for the St. George Society, the first Masonic lodge in America (St. Johns Masonic Lodge #1), the St. Andrews Society,  served as a recruiting place for the…

A Brief History On November 9, 1965, 22 year old American Roger Allen LaPorte, a former Catholic seminarian, sat down calmly, poured gasoline over himself, and burned himself to death in front of the United Nations in New York in a protest of the Viet Nam War. Digging Deeper LaPorte had dropped out of the seminary, but graduated from Holy Ghost Academy (Tupper Lake, New York) in 1961 and was active in the Catholic Worker Movement.  Although fatally burned (he died the next day), LaPorte was able to talk before dying and said he performed his act of protest against…

A Brief History On November 7, 2000, the US DEA made a drug bust of one of the largest illegal LSD labs in the United States.  What made this bust significant was that it was located in a retired ICBM missile silo in Kansas. Digging Deeper During the 1960’s the US, Russia, and eventually other countries constructed mass numbers of underground missile launch facilities to protect their nuclear armed ICBM’s (InterContinental Ballistic Missile) from enemy nuclear weapons in order to insure the ability to conduct a counter strike if the enemy struck first.  Such was the nature of the Cold…