A Brief History Named by President Obama as his nominee for Secretary of the Army in November 2015, Eric Fanning, a 47 year old graduate of Dartmouth and a Defense Department employee, was confirmed for the job by the US Senate on May 17, 2016, making him the first openly gay Secretary of a US Military branch. Digging Deeper A sexual identity activist, Fanning supports a policy of allowing transgender persons to serve in the Armed Forces and to prohibit any sort of discrimination based on a person’s sexuality or sexual identity. The US Military had only dropped its controversial…
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A Brief History On May 17, 1970, Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl’s boat made of reeds in the ancient way set sail across the Atlantic Ocean to prove people from North Africa could have reached the New World by boat. Digging Deeper Heyerdahl, born in 1914, was already famous for his 1947 voyage from South America to Polynesia on his balsa wood raft, Kon-Tiki, proving Native South Americans could have traveled to Polynesia, thus being the source for the population there. Making the nearly 5000 mile trip in 101 days, the Kon-Tiki voyage prompted other adventurers to replicate the voyage, and…
A Brief History On May 17, 1943, RAF Squadron 617, later known as The Dambusters, embarked on Operation Chastise, a plan to bomb and destroy two dams to flood the Ruhr Valley in Germany. They were successful, largely because of the wacky weapon they used, a barrel like bomb that was rotated on a carriage under the bomber and then dropped to skip across the water to the dam, and then roll down the face of the dam to blow up right against the structure. Many times in wartime nations will stretch the limits of the imaginations of their inventors…
A Brief History On May 17, 1990, homosexual people around the world breathed a sigh of relief and vindication when the General Assembly of the World Health Organization ruled that homosexuality would no longer be considered a mental illness, paving the way for the culture shaking changes that have followed in the next 26 years. Digging Deeper One major change in American culture was marked when the first legal same sex marriages in the United States were performed on May 17, 2004 in Massachusetts. The Netherlands had broken this taboo in 2001 and as of now a total of 15…
A Brief History On May 17, 1943, the famous 617 Squadron of the RAF conducted a raid against dams on the Eder, Mohne, and Rohr rivers in Germany, using brilliantly designed special “bouncing bombs.” An incredible achievement in ingenuity and bravery, the 19 Lancaster bombers destroyed 2 dams and damaged a third, but lost 8 aircraft in the process, a measure of just how daring this raid really was. Here we list 10 of the most spectacular bombing raids of all time (but specifically of World War II), some famous and some infamous. Digging Deeper 10. Dresden Firebombing, February 13-15,…