A Brief History On August 3, 1946, post-war Americans were ready for a good time and were able to find it at the country’s first “theme-park” type of amusement park at Santa Claus Land in southern Indiana. Digging Deeper Surprisingly, today, the park, which is now known as Holiday World, is not only dedicated to Christmas, as it was originally, but also to the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Halloween!  The name change occurred in 1984 to better reflect the park’s diversity.  Holiday World is constantly being upgraded and just keeps getting better and better.  If you like dogs, the Fourth of July section even has a…

A Brief History On August 2, 216 BC, the Carthaginian army of Hannibal defeated the larger Roman Army at Cannae, a major battle during the Second Punic War.  This battle was one of the most humiliating defeats in the history of Rome and is considered one of the great strokes of tactical military genius of all time. Digging Deeper After losing 2 major battles to the Carthaginians at Trebia and Lake Trasimene (218 and 217 BC respectively),  the Romans had regrouped and sought a decisive battle against the invaders.  Able to field an army of  86,000 men against only 50,000…

A Brief History On August 2, 1916, the Italian battleship Leonardo da Vinci was sunk in its own harbor at Taranto courtesy of Austrian sabotage.  The mighty battleship was only 2 years old and was sunk by a magazine explosion, a sorry end to a capital ship.  The Italian military and its Roman predecessors have had plenty of notable military triumphs over the years, but seem to have a reputation for disaster despite that.  Here we list 10 Italian Military Disasters or Catastrophes.  (Note: We are tempted to count World War I and World War II as 2 complete disasters…

A Brief History On August 1, 1911, Harriet Quimby of Michigan became the first woman in the United States to be awarded an Aviator’s Certificate by the Aero Club of America (ACA).  She had become interested in aviation and first started flying in 1910 after working as a New York theater critic and screenwriter for 7 Hollywood silent movies, all directed by the famous D.W. Griffith. Digging Deeper Quimby became the first woman in history to fly across the English Channel in 1912, with her great accomplishment overlooked by a public engrossed in the news story of the sinking of…

A Brief History Captain Humayun Saqib Muazzam Khan (September 9, 1976 – June 8, 2004) was a Pakistani American Muslim soldier of the United States Army who was killed in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom.  Khan’s parents later appeared at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, where his father, Khizr Khan, spoke of his dead son and controversially rebuked the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump.  Our hearts of course go out to the father of a soldier who died for our country, but there clearly seems to be some kind of double-standard at play in this latest controversy concerning the 2016 U.S.…