A Brief History On March 30, 1296, King Edward I of England, often better known as Edward Longshanks, sacked the Scottish town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, part of the ongoing war of England trying to maintain suzerainty over Scotland. (Which means control of the direction and foreign policy of another nation without total ceding of local control. Or something like that.) As Scotland chafed under the English thumb, patriots such as William Wallace, a knight of murky origins, arose to fight the English during the struggle for total independence for Scotland. Digging Deeper Why “Longshanks?” Meaning “Long Legs,” Edward was quite tall…
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A Brief History On March 24, 1199, while fighting in France at Limousin, an administrative region in the South-Central part of France that is now Nouvelle-Aquitaine, the King of England known as Richard I, the Lionheart, was struck in the shoulder by a bolt launched by a crossbow, leading to the King’s death on April 6, 1199. Bearing a famous name among English Kings and the subject of numerous (usually fictional) stories, movies and the like, Richard was famous as a Crusader King and curiously, hardly spent any time at all in England! Today we take a look at the…
A Brief History On March 23, 2018, the latest in a line of politicians forced from office across South America was Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, the President of Peru. Not so original himself, Kuczynski was preceded in the presidency by Alan Gabriel Ludwig García Pérez (president 2006-2011) who had also been forced to resign due to corruption, and then by President Ollanta Humala (president 2011-2016) who was also implicated in the same massive anti-corruption investigation, called Operation Carwash, or alternately by a sub-investigation called the Odebrecht Scandal. Operation Carwash, initiated in Brazil 2014, is far from over, but has already reached…
A Brief History On March 22, 1621, the European (basically British) colonists of Plymouth Colony, a “Pilgrim” venture for displaced religious zealots to find a place to practice their religion in peace, signed a peace treaty with Chief (or “Sachem”) Massasoit of the Wampanoag Native American coalition of tribes that had occupied what is now Massachusetts. Only a year later, at Jamestown, Virginia, the European (mostly British) colonists suffered a catastrophic attack from Algonquian Native Americans, resulting in the deaths of about a third of the entire population of colonists at and around Jamestown, leaving 347 White colonists dead, part…
A Brief History On March 16, 2001, Jin Ruchao, a Chinese citizen of Hubei Province in China proved once again that a deranged person does not need guns to kill a LOT of people, when he set off a series of bombs in the provincial capital of Shijiazhuang that killed 108 people and injured 38 more. His reason for his wanton murder? He hated his ex-wife and her mother! Digging Deeper As is often the case with people that go off on murderous rampages, Jin had previously threatened to blow up the buildings his ex-wife and her mother lived in. …