A Brief History On September 30, 1935, the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River was dedicated, completing one of America’s greatest engineering and construction feats.  Despite the immense fame of the dam and the thousands of people that visit it each year, there seems to be some misinformation about the great structure.  Here we list 10 Things You Might Not Know About Hoover Dam, no significance to the order of the list. Digging Deeper 10.  Due to anti-terrorism concerns, tours no longer include most of the interior of the structure.  The public is no longer welcome to tour any sensitive…

A Brief History On this date, September 29, 1825, American soldier, revolutionary, and farmer Daniel Shays (c.1747–1825) died at age 78 in Sparta, New York.  In those storied 78 years, Shays became most famous for being one of the leaders of Shays’ Rebellion, a populist uprising against controversial debt collection and tax policies in Massachusetts in 1786 and 1787.  The seeds of that rebellion were planted nearly a decade earlier amidst a revolution… Digging Deeper In a bitter struggle against the most powerful industrializing nation on earth, the thirteen colonies that would later be called the United States of America (U.S.)…

A Brief History On September 28, 2008, the history of space exploration reached a new milestone when SpaceX, a private company, launched their Falcon 1 unmanned spacecraft, the first private spacecraft launched into orbit. Breaking News: On Saturday, May 30, 2020, SpaceX and NASA made history together when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried 2 American astronauts into space up to the International Space Station in a successful launch and flight, the first manned flight from the United States in a decade.  This flight is the first time a private company has ever taken NASA astronauts into space.  The crew…

A Brief History On this date, September 28, 48 BC, Pompey the Great was assassinated on the orders of King Ptolemy of Egypt after landing in Egypt.  Although we know of this incident, many open problems concern Ancient Egypt, and some of them may never be solved.  Egyptian archaeology is in a state of constant transition, with much of the terminology and chronology in dispute.  The archaeological record is incomplete, with countless relics and artifacts missing or destroyed.  New archaeological discoveries can call into question previous conclusions about Ancient Egypt.  Furthermore, there are internal problems of overall cohesion of various…

A Brief History On September 26, 1944, Operation Market Garden came to an end, failing to take all the objectives and suffering greater losses than the Germans, a fairly unusual occurrence at that point in the war.  Normally maddeningly conservative, Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery placed his faith in a rapid advance to and across the Rhine by seizing a series of bridges including parachute drops on a large scale. Digging Deeper Particularly unsuccessful was the assault on the bridge at Arnhem over the Rhine, the most important of all the bridges targeted.  British paratroopers briefly held one end of…