A Brief History On April 29, 2017, at the iconic Wembley Stadium in London, Anthony Joshua set a post-war crowd attendance record for boxing when becoming the unified heavyweight champion of the world. An eleventh-round stoppage of the much older Wladimir Klitschko saw British boxer Joshua unify the WBA super and IBO belts, which were both vacant, with the IBF strap. Ukrainian legend Klitschko had previously lost the first two titles to Tyson Fury. Digging Deeper The journey from amateur super-heavyweight to holding these and later the WBO championship saw Joshua take a well-trodden path using the Olympics as a…
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A Brief History On May 5, 1994, American teenager Michael Fay made international news when he was punished in Singapore for theft and vandalism by the local custom of “caning.” The case caused outrage in the United States that one of our own 18 year old citizens could be treated with corporal punishment for a youthful prank, but the rest of the world saw the offenses of Fay as an egregious affront on the hospitality of another country. A protest by the United States got Fay’s sentence reduced from 6 strokes of the cane to only 4 strokes. Digging Deeper…
A Brief History On May 3, 1921, the state legislature of West Virginia enacted the first Sales Tax in the United States, although problems in creating the mechanism to administer the tax precluded enforcement for several years. In 1930, Kentucky and Mississippi followed suit, enacting broad based sales tax, although Kentucky repealed the legislation in 1936, possibly due to the effects of the Great Depression. During the 1930’s many states jumped on the sales tax bandwagon. Digging Deeper While broad based sales tax is now common in the US and in Canada, the original application of sales tax pertained to…
A Brief History On May 2, 1945, an American Artillery Battalion intercepted a death march of concentration camp inmates being taken from the Dachau concentration camp to the Austrian border, in turn saving the lives of hundreds of the starving inmates. The rescuers must have seemed like angels sent directly from heaven to the doomed inmates, and even more surprising to those lucky survivors, the Americans that saved them were all of Japanese ancestry, part of the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, a subunit of the 442nd Infantry Regiment that was composed of Nisei, second generation Japanese Americans. Digging Deeper While…
A Brief History On May 1, 305, the Co-Emperors of the Roman Empire, Diocletian and Maximian, teamed up to become the first Roman Emperors to ever resign voluntarily. As incredibly difficult as it is to have two leaders of the same empire, it is all the more remarkable that both would agree to retire on the same day. One of their successors, Constantius I, also known as Constantius Chlorus, served only a year before dying and leaving the throne open to whomever could win the ensuing battles. Digging Deeper Diocletian was born in 244 in the Roman Province of Dalmatia,…