A Brief History On June 8, 1949, the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four by English writer Eric Blair, writing as George Orwell, was published, telling a story of a dystopian future where an intrusive government controls all, sees all, and wages never ending war. Digging Deeper Modeled after the regimes of the USSR under Stalin and Germany under Adolf Hitler, the novel terrified a generation about the dangers of big government and what the future might hold.  Politicians and others often referred to the work in an effort to prevent the creep of government power. Some other novels that have shaped public…

A Brief History On June 7, 1975, Sony unleashed a new level of home entertainment on the world when they marketed their Betamax format of videocassette recorders and players.  Despite being a superior system, Betamax was quickly eclipsed by the VHS format. Digging Deeper Despite having a pretty good run, videocassette technology is now obsolete, replaced by DVDs and various digital systems and streaming services.  Technology that seems innovative and remarkable has a way of fading into the sunset, such as the laserdisc movies that became available in the late 1970s and also faded away. When musical CDs became available…

A Brief History On June 6, 2023, the Russian army blew up the Ukrainian Kakhovka Dam on the Dnieper River in Southern Ukraine.  The dam was breached by the Russians in order to create an obstacle to an expected Ukrainian offensive.  Sadly, 58 people were killed in the resultant flooding. Digging Deeper While dams sometimes fail without human help, during war time the destruction of dams is not an uncommon tactic.  At other times, dams may be intentionally destroyed for environmental reasons or to prevent a potential accident with an old and or failing dam.  An enormous dam removal project…

A Brief History On June 5, 1976, the Teton Dam on the Teton River in Idaho collapsed, a catastrophic failure while it was filling for the first time! Digging Deeper The 3,100 foot long earthen dam soared 305 feet high and was designed to contain over 288,000 acre feet of water.  Sadly, its failure cost the lives of 11 people and over 16,000 head of livestock.  Unsuitable soil used to construct the dam was blamed for the failure. The killer dam has yet to be rebuilt. Far from the worst US dam related disaster, the Teton Dam failure is dwarfed…

A Brief History On June 4, 1989, an estimated tens of thousands Chinese military troops opened fire on perhaps a million Chinese protestors at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the capital of China.  While numbers of troops, protestors, and casualties are only estimates, because historically, governments cannot be counted on to provide accurate accounts of embarrassing events, as many as 10,000 or more of the peaceful protestors may have died in the massacre. Digging Deeper Not only were hundreds or thousands of people shot, but many others were also trampled in the rush to avoid the gunfire or crushed under the…