A Brief History On June 22, 1918, a passenger train carrying US military troops plowed into the rear end of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus train that had stopped on the tracks for repairs.  Sadly, 86 of the over 250 circus people died and 127 were injured, making the Hammond Circus Train Wreck one of the worst in US railroad history. Digging Deeper The name of the wreck derives from the location, near Hammond, Indiana.  The driver of the troop train had fallen asleep and missed at least two warnings about the stopped train ahead.  Luckily, the relatively fragile wooden circus cars…

A Brief History This article presents a chronological list of notable events that happened on June 21st.  For each date below, please click on the date to be taken to an article covering that date’s event. Digging Deeper On June 21, 1734, a 29 year old African woman was executed for setting her slave master’s house on fire which spread through Montreal in New France, what is now Canada. On June 21, 1919, the reactionary establishment of the city of Winnipeg, the province of Manitoba, and the federal government of Canada overreacted to a peaceful labor strike and attacked striking workers (largely war…

A Brief History On June 21, 1973, the US Supreme Court handed down a decision in Miller v. California, establishing a way to determine if something is “free speech” guaranteed by the 1st Amendment or if it is obscene. Digging Deeper Referred to as the “Miller Test,” SCOTUS determined that three factors must be present for some sort of expression to be considered obscene and not covered under “free speech.”  These three factors are: “Whether ‘the average person, applying contemporary community standards’, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, Whether the work depicts…

A Brief History This article presents a chronological list of notable events that happened on June 20th.  For each date below, please click on the date to be taken to an article covering that date’s event. Digging Deeper On June 20, 1787, Connecticut attorney and a Founding Father of the United States, Oliver Ellsworth, made a motion at the Federal Convention to call the government of our new country, the United States of America. On June 20, 1890, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a philosophical novel by Oscar Wilde, was first published complete in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. On June…

A Brief History On June 20, 1787, Connecticut attorney and a Founding Father of the United States, Oliver Ellsworth, made a motion at the Federal Convention to call the government of our new country, the United States of America. Digging Deeper While not an everyday name taught to school children as a major “Founding Father,” Ellsworth is notable for serving as a Senator from Connecticut, being a framer of the Constitution, serving as the third chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and even winning 11 electoral votes in the presidential election of 1796. A patriot that…