A Brief History On November 30, 1939, Soviet forces crossed the Finnish border in several places and bombed Helsinki and several other Finnish cities, starting the Winter War. (NOTE: For the sequel to this article, please click here.) Digging Deeper In the aftermath of Poland’s collapse in September, 1939—a collapse that the Soviet Union had a major role in contributing to—Soviet leader Joseph Stalin quickly turned his ambitions towards gobbling up even more of eastern Europe. Turning his attention toward the Scandinavian country of Finland—a nation which had the audacity to secede from Russia during its Communist revolution twenty years…

A Brief History Hardly able to pass up the rare opportunity to use such bizarre names in the same article, this date in history gives us two wacked stories! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find the slave ship Zong engaged in the evil business of slavery, and the Atari game Pong making its debut as the first successful video game. The Zong, an English slave ship formerly owned by the Dutch, made infamous, even sickening history in 1781 when the crew threw 142 African slaves overboard to their deaths because the ship had run low on provisions due to misnavigation.  The…

A  Brief History On this date, November 28, 1942, in the middle of World War II, the United States suffered mass carnage on the home front! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find that November 28, 1942 was the date of the infamous Cocoanut Grove fire, a blaze that took 492 lives. This horrible fire remains the second deadliest single building fire in U.S. history, second only to a theater fire in 1903 Chicago that killed 602 people.  Of course, the human toll did not end with those deaths, but also included many more (hundreds?) burned or otherwise injured non-fatally. Since…

A Brief History On this date, November 27, 1978, Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk were gunned down by an irate former supervisor. Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find mentally distraught Daniel White was a police officer prior to becoming a supervisor, and after quitting that job due to ill will generated by his reporting on another officer for beating a suspect, White became a firefighter for the city. Elected as a supervisor in 1977 (similar to councilman in other cities), White had to give up his firefighter job as holding those two positions was not allowed.  At…

A Brief History Okay, so we know Abraham Lincoln created the Thanksgiving holiday on this date in 1863, but what do Wallachians have to be thankful for? Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find Vlad Tepes, later referred to as Vlad the Impaler, known to us more popularly as Dracula, having declared his third reign as ruler of Wallachia (modern Romania) winning the battle that made him ruler for the third time. Vlad had actually been ruler and been deposed twice before, re-seizing power each time. His father was Vlad II Dracul, making The Impaler technically Vlad III Dracula.  The name…