A Brief History On April 21, 1802, a band of Wahhabis from Najd in central Saudi Arabia attacked the central Iraqi city of Karbala, with the purpose of punishing those Iraqi Muslims for failing to follow the ultra-conservative religious teachings of Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328), a Sunni Muslim scholar who had taught a “renewal” of the Islamic faith apparently at odds with the brand of Islam practiced in Karbala, which was of the Shia variety. Karbala at the time was part of the Ottoman Empire. Digging Deeper The Wahhabi army numbered around 12,000 soldiers, and easily overwhelmed whatever defense Karbala put…
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A Brief History On April 20, 1657, a fleet of 23 British Royal Navy warships sailed boldly into the defended harbor at Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, to attack a Spanish treasure fleet anchored there. Braving fire from the anchored ships and the shore batteries, the British fleet sank 12 of the Spanish ships and captured the other 5, suffering only serious damage to one of their own ships. Digging Deeper The Spanish suffered 300 men killed, while the British lost 48 killed and 120 wounded. While England of course had warships for many, many years, the Royal Navy…
A Brief History On April 19, 1989, one of those naval oops moments we keep writing about occurred, and this particular one had catastrophic consequences for the history of the battleship. The Iowa class battleships (Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin and New Jersey) produced by the US during World War II were the epitome of the type, combining the most effective combination of firepower, armor protection, speed and endurance of any of the ships of their kind. Digging Deeper The Iowa, lead ship of the greatest class of battleship ever produced, suffered an enormous explosion in the Number 2 turret when the…
A Brief History On April 18, 1996, the village of Qana in Southern Lebanon was shelled by artillery fire from the Israeli Defense Force, the official Israeli military organization. Unfortunately, Qana was the location of a United Nations compound manned by members of the Fijian United Nations Interim Force and had been providing haven to about 800 Lebanese civilian refugees. The attack left 4 of the Fijian soldiers wounded and killed 106 of the Lebanese civilians, injuring another 116 civilians. The bombardment was part of an Israeli offensive operation from April 11-April 27, 1996, known as Operation Grapes of Wrath,…
A Brief History On April 17, 2014, the Kepler space telescope operated by NASA confirmed the existence of Kepler-186f, the first discovery of a planet of equivalent size to Earth within the “habitable zone” of another solar system. The newly discovered planet is in the solar system of a red dwarf star called Kepler-186, only about 582 light years away! (A light year is roughly 6 trillion miles.) Digging Deeper We know that at some point the Earth will become uninhabitable for human civilization. This eventuality may take hundreds of millions of years, or even billions of years, when our…