Worldohistory

Canadian History Quiz

2010-02-27T18:46:00.000-08:00

Source: Citytv

1) Which country took control of Quebec away from France, by winning the battle of the Plains of Abraham?
2) Who was Canada's first francophone Prime Minister?
3) What term is used to describe the severe economic hardships of the 1930's?
4) In the 19th century, some inhabitants of what is now Quebec rebelled against the colonial government of the time. Who was the leader of that rebellion?
5) What was the name of the route to Canada taken by blacks escaping slavery in the US? 6) Name one group of Canadians who were evacuated from the West Coast during WWII because of their ethnic origin?
7) What Canadian city was severely damaged by a massive explosion in its harbour in 1917?
8) Which province was the last one to join Canada?
9) In 1944, Canadians joined in an event called D Day. What happened on that day?
10) Remembrance Day in Canada falls on November 11. November 11 was the last day of which war?
11) In what year were all Canadian women eligible to vote in federal elections?
12) Many of the early settlers of what is now New Brunswick and Nova Scotia spoke French and were resettled by the British government. What are those people and their descendants called? 13) The members of which ethnic group were once forced to pay a head tax to immigrate to Canada?
14) Name one of the wars in which Canada was invaded by the United States.
15) What is the name of the Metis leader who was hanged by the federal government in 1885? 16) What economic issue between the US and Canada dominated the Canadian Federal elections of 1891, 1911 and 1988?
17) What American war helped convince Canadians and their leaders to unite and form a federation in the north?
18) What name is commonly used to refer to the British subjects who fled to Canada during and after the American Revolution?
19) Name two countries Canada fought against during World War I?
20) What term is commonly used to refer to early French fur traders in Canada?
21) Name the Canadian who received the Noble Prize for Peace in 1957 for his efforts to peacefully resolve the Suez Crisis and then went on to become Prime Minister.
22) What is the name commonly given to the political and social movement that swept Quebec in the beginning of the 1960's?
23) Who was the first Canadian in space?
24) What year was Canada's constitution patriated from Great Britain?
25) Name a Canadian who received the Noble Prize for the discovery of insulin?
26) What is the name of the native people of Newfoundland who were hunted to extinction by Europeans?

Answers:

1) England
2) Wilfred Laurier
3) The Great Depression
4) Louis-Joseph Papineau
5) The Underground Railway
6) The Japanese
7) Halifax
8) Newfoundland
9) Invasion of Europe/ France/ Normandy
10) World War I
11) 1921
12) Acadians
13) Chinese Canadians
14) War of 1812/Revolutionary/War of Independence
15) Louis Riel
16) Free Trade
17) The Civil War
18) Loyalists /United Empire Loyalists
19) Germany/Austria/Austro-Hungarian/Turkey
20) Voyageurs/Coureurs des bois
21) Lester B. Pearson
22) The Quiet Revolution
23) Marc Garneau
24) 1982
25) Banting/MacCloud/Collip
26) Beothuks

What really ended the Great Depression?

2010-02-27T18:37:00.001-08:00

Written by: Burton W. Folsom

What finally ended the Great Depression? That question may be the most important in economic history. If we can answer it, we can better grasp what perpetuates economic stagnation and what cures it.

The Great Depression was the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. From 1931 to 1940 unemployment was always in double digits. In April 1939, almost ten years after the crisis began, more than one in five Americans still could not find work.

On the surface World War II seems to mark the end of the Great Depression. During the war more than 12 million Americans were sent into the military, and a similar number toiled in defense-related jobs. Those war jobs seemingly took care of the 17 million unemployed in 1939. Most historians have therefore cited the massive spending during wartime as the event that ended the Great Depression.

Some economists—especially Robert Higgs—have wisely challenged that conclusion. Let’s be blunt. If the recipe for economic recovery is putting tens of millions of people in defense plants or military marches, then having them make or drop bombs on our enemies overseas, the value of world peace is called into question. In truth, building tanks and feeding soldiers—necessary as it was to winning the war—became a crushing financial burden. We merely traded debt for unemployment. The expense of funding World War II hiked the national debt from $49 billion in 1941 to almost $260 billion in 1945. In other words, the war had only postponed the issue of recovery.

Even President Roosevelt and his New Dealers sensed that war spending was not the ultimate solution; they feared that the Great Depression—with more unemployment than ever—would resume after Hitler and Hirohito surrendered. Yet FDR’s team was blindly wedded to the federal spending that (as I argue in New Deal or Raw Deal?) had perpetuated the Great Depression during the 1930s.

FDR had halted many of his New Deal programs during the war—and he allowed Congress to kill the WPA, the CCC, the NYA, and others—because winning the war came first. In 1944, however, as it became apparent that the Allies would prevail, he and his New Dealers prepared the country for his New Deal revival by promising a second bill of rights. Included in the President’s package of new entitlements was the right to “adequate medical care,” a “decent home,” and a “useful and remunerative job.” These rights (unlike free speech and freedom of religion) imposed obligations on other Americans to pay taxes for eyeglasses, “decent” houses, and “useful” jobs, but FDR believed his second bill of rights was an advance in thinking from what the Founders had conceived.

Roosevelt’s death in the last year of the war prevented him from unveiling his New Deal revival. But President Harry Truman was on board for most of the new reforms. In the months after the end of the war Truman gave major speeches showcasing a full employment bill—with jobs and spending to be triggered if people failed to find work in the private sector. He also endorsed a national health care program and a federal housing program.

But 1946 was very different from 1933. In 1933 large Democratic majorities in Congress and public support gave FDR his New Deal, but stagnation and unemployment persisted. By contrast, Truman had only a small Democratic majority—and no majority at all if you subtract the more conservative southern Democrats. Plus, the failure of FDR’s New Deal left fewer Americans cheering for an encore.

For the rest go to the source

Messages from the Stone Age

2010-02-18T18:52:00.000-08:00

From New Scientist

THE first intrepid explorers to brave the 7-metre crawl through a perilously narrow tunnel leading to the Chauvet caves in southern France were rewarded with magnificent artwork to rival any modern composition. Stretching a full 3 metres in height, the paintings depict a troupe of majestic horses in deep colours, above a pair of boisterous rhinos in the midst of a fight. To the left, they found the beautiful rendering of a herd of prehistoric cows. "The horse heads just seem to leap out of the wall towards you," says Jean Clottes, former director of scientific research at the caves and one of the few people to see the paintings with his own eyes.

When faced with such spectacular beauty, who could blame the visiting anthropologists for largely ignoring the modest semicircles, lines and zigzags also marked on the walls? Yet dismissing them has proved to be something of a mistake. The latest research has shown that, far from being doodles, the marks are in fact highly symbolic, forming a written "code" that was familiar to all of the prehistoric tribes around France and possibly beyond. Indeed, these unprepossessing shapes may be just as remarkable as the paintings of trotting horses and tussling rhinos, providing a snapshot into humankind's first steps towards symbolism and writing.

Until now, the accepted view has been that our ancestors underwent a "creative explosion" around 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, when they suddenly began to think abstractly and create rock art. This idea is supported by the plethora of stunning cave paintings, like those at Chauvet, which started to proliferate across Europe around this time. Writing, on the other hand, appeared to come much later, with the earliest records of a pictographic writing system dating back to just 5000 years ago.

Few researchers, though, had given any serious thought to the relatively small and inconspicuous marks around the cave paintings. The evidence of humanity's early creativity, they thought, was clearly in the elaborate drawings.

For the rest go to the Source: New Scientist

What if the South won the Civil War?

2010-01-24T09:42:00.000-08:00

Its all speculation...

Confederacy forms alliance with the United Kingdom

Mexico attacks the Confederacy in an attempt to win back territory in the South Western United states.

Mexicans are driven backward and defeated.

US and Confederacy clash in the 1880's in a Second War. Conflict ends in stalemate. The War is fought over Expansion rights in the Western Half of North America.

Politics in the Confederacy is dominated by two groups: The Industrialists, who feel that the Confederates should focus on growing an industrial base to rival the North and the agriculturists, who still view the South as an agrarian society. The Industrialists will eventually succeed and as a result of necessity the Confederacy will become more industrialized than it did in Plane-zero USA.

The North (or the US) will continue to grow industrially fueled of course by the influx of European immigrants in the 19th century.

US and Confederacy agree to divide the Western states amongst each other. The Northwestern States and California will fall under US Domination. The southwestern and several mid-western states will join the Confederacy.

Slavery will eventually be abolished in the Confederacy but only in the 1920s after several devastating slave rebellions bring chaos to the Southern States. International pressure and a changing political scene will force the Confederacy to drop its pro-slavery stance.

Texas will break away from the Confederacy in the 1910s and form a new nation the Republic of Texas.

Without a dominant power in North America, the European countries will become more involved in South America. Major players will include Britain, France and Germany.

The Confederacy will enter the First World War at an earlier stage than the US did in reality.

The reason for this early entry by the Confederacy is motivated by a need to assist the British Empire, the South's most significant trading partner.

30 Greatest Breakthroughs in Mathematics

2010-01-24T09:34:00.000-08:00

Ancient Humanity develops the know how to reason and comprehend numbers.
Development of the standard operations of Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division.
The development of Fractions.
The development of the concept of the positive and negative integer.
Euclid formalizes Geometric Knowledge.
Early Development of Algebra by the Ancient Greeks and Arabs.
The development of the number zero by the Ancient Indians.
Arab Numerals make their way into the Western World.
Rene Descartes creates the discipline of Cartesian Geometry. Birth of the Era of the Graph.
Issac Netwton and Gottfried Leibnitz independently invent the calculus.
Birth of the discipline of trigonometry.
Indians develop what will later become known as Pythagoras's Theorem.
Development of the concept of the vector and n-space: Birth of Vector Algebra and Vector Geometry.
Blaise Pascal's work gives rise to Probability Theory.
The development of logarithms as a calculating technique by John Napier.
Development of Statistics as a mathematical discipline.
Development of the discipline of Numerical iteration by messrs: Newton, Simpson, Euler and Runge-Kutte.
Development of Matrix Algebra by Messrs Gauss, Jordan.
Geometrical work on the Theory of Conic Sections.
Development of the concept of Irrational numbers.
The Development of Set Theory.
Number Theory comes to light in the 19th century.
Invention of the concept of the Imaginary Number.
Invention of the discipline of game theory.
The development of Chaos Theory in the 20th century.
Birth of the discipline of surface topography.
Development of the concept of infinity.
Development of the mathematics of Solids and Crystals.
Omar Khayyam Develops the Binomial Theorem.
Formalization of Fermat's Last Theorem (by Pierre Fermat) and its eventual proof by Andrew Wiley.

Early French History

2010-01-01T12:50:00.000-08:00

Many English speakers don't know much about French history....here is a snapshot of some key milestones prior to 1328.

1.Prehistoric activity in Early France as is evidenced by caves paintings at Lascaux and Gargas.
2. The Celts settle France (Gaul). City of Paris founded by Parsii tribe. Other cities founded by the Celts are Bordeaux and Toulouse.
3. Greeks found the port of Marseilles.
4. Gauls sack Rome in the 4th century BC
5. Caesar launches his Gallic Wars. Gauls defeated Romans at Gergovia but Caesar wins at Alesia and captures Gaulish chieftain Vercingetorix. Gaul is assimilated into the Roman Sphere of Influence.
6.Romans Latinise the Gauls. Growth of Paris (known as Lutetia by the Romans)
7. Cities founded by the Romans include Lyon and Narbonne.
8. Germanic (Franks) tribes invade France in the 5th century. Clovis defeats the Romans at the Battle of Soissons (later a World War One site).
9. Paris established as capital by Clovis I in 508AD
10. Clovis I introduces Christianity to France. He is the First King of the Franks.
11. Merovingian dynasty founded by Sailian Franks.
12. Clovis battles his Burgundian rivals in the early 6th century.
13. Merovingians rule France between 481-751CE.
14. Charles Martel defeats the Muslims at the Battle of Tours in 732 saving Christian France from Islam.
15. Pippin the Short establishes the Carolingian dynasty in 751AD.
16. Carolingian dynasty reaches the zenith of its power under Charlemagne.
17. Charlemagne defeated the Lombards, the Avars and the Saxons. He extended the frontier of his kingdom as far south as Barcelona and succeeds in uniting the Franks.
18. Golden age of learning under Charlemagne.
19. Charlemagne is crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800AD (by Pope Leo III)
20. Louis I the Pious, Charlemagne’s son inherits kingdom. After Louis’s death the kingdom is divided after a series of military clashes and the Treaty of Verdun between Louis the German, Charles the Bald and Lothair.
21. Carolingian power declines under Viking attacks.
22. Vikings under Rollo establish kingdom of Normandy.
23. Carolingian dynasty ends in 987 AD.
24. Hugh Capet – The Duke of Franks becomes king of the Franks in 987 AD. His kingdom does not extend much beyond Paris. This does mark thebeginning of Capetian dynasty.
25. Abbey of Cluny becomes more influential in France Religious and Political circles.
26. French knights lead the successful First Crusade.
27. Louis VI extends Royal power at the expense of popularity, He is assisted by the talented politician Abbot Sugar (forerunner to Richelieu)
28. Sugar arranges for the marriage between Louis VII and Eleanor of Aquitaine – more consolidation of Royal power.
29. Louis VII involves France in the disastrous Second Crusade.
30. Much of France is under control of the Plantagenet dynasty, which controls the English, thrown (through Henry II and his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine – she had split with Louis VII by then of course).
31. Reign of Philip II Augustus. France enters diplomatic period. Philip involves France in the Third Crusade and wins back territory from the English king John.
32. Louis IX (later St. Louis) defeats rivals and begins French expansion in Europe. Gothic architecture and biblical gain significance during his reign. Louis regains territory from English King Henry III but also involves France in the failed Seventh and Eight crusades. Louis, himself died in the eighth crusade.
33. Charles IV the Fair dies in 1328. He is the last Capetian ruler.

History in the News

2009-12-24T13:09:00.000-08:00

Celebrating Stalin
He is arguably one of the most evil individuals in history but he is still has his supporters. The Boston Globe has another take on the issue.

How the Left Turned on Israel
The left has a strong anti-semitic history as well as a tendency to support totalitarianism. The fact that it has turned against the a Democracy in the Middle East is therefore not surprising.

Japan and China continue talks on World War II History
Their view of events couldn't be more polarized but at least they are talking.

Looking at the Japanese Meiji Period
During this period Japan transformed herself into a power. The philosophy inherent in the change is therefore worth looking at.

Auschwitz sign recovered

2009-12-24T13:01:00.000-08:00

This has been an utterly disgraceful episode but at least the sign has been recovered
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6967449.ece

The Nazi gang that ordered the theft of the infamous 'Arbeit Macht Frei' sign from the gates of Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland planned to sell it to fund violent attacks against the Swedish Prime Minister and Parliament, it was claimed today.

A spokesman for the Swedish security police confirmed that the authorities were taking seriously a threat by a militant Nazi group to disrupt national elections next year.

"We are aware of the information about the alleged attack plans," said Patrik Peter, the security police spokesman.

We have taken actions. We view this seriously.”

The wrought-iron sign, whose inscription – translated as 'Work sets you free' – was viewed by hundreds of thousands of Jews as they entered the Nazi death camp where they met their deaths during the Second World War. It was stolen from the camp – now a museum – last Friday, provoking worldwide expressions of dismay and revulsion.

For the rest go to the Source:

US Civil War Some Facts

2009-12-15T18:04:00.000-08:00

1. It was the bloodiest war in American history. 620,000 people died or 2% of the population.
2. Eleven states withdrew from the Union to form the confederacy. They were:
South Carolina (first to secede), Mississipi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas - first round - followed by Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina.
3. First Battle of the War - Attack on Fort Sumter (April 1861)
4. Strength of the Union forces: 2.1 million. Strength of the Confederacy troops: 1.1 milion.
5. Number of Union dead: 360,000. Number of Confederacy dead: 260,000. On both sides about a third of these deaths were a direct result of KIA (Killed in Action).
6. Key Union Generals: Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, George Meade, Winfield Scott, Joseph Hooker, George McClellan, John Pope, William Rosecrans and Ambrose Burnside.
7. Length of the War - Almost 4 Years - April 12, 1861 - April 9, 1865.
8. Last battle - Battle of Palmito Ranch was actually fought after the war ended in May 1865.
9. States loyal to the Union: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachussets, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.
Nevada and West Virginia also joined the Union.
10. Territories on the Union side included: Colorado, Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mesxico, Utah and Washington.
11. Major Confederate Battle Wins: Chickamauga, Chancellorsville, First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas), Fredericksburg, Second Battle of Bull Run (Virginia).
12. Inconclusive Battles: Spotsylvania, Antietam and Wilderness.
13. Major Union Battle Wins: Gettysburg, Stones River, Shiloh, Vicksburg and Fort Donelson.
14. Three Battles with the biggest number of casulaties: Gettysburg (51,112), Chickamauga (34,624) and Chancellorsville(30,099).
15. State where the most number of battles were fought: Virginia
16. Place where the South surrended (under Robert E. Lee) - Appomattox Courthouse (1865)
17. Key Generals of the Confederacy: Robert E.Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Braxton Bragg. James Longstreet, John Hood, John Pemberton and Pierre Beauregard.
18. At the Battle of Shiloh - more Americans fell than in all previous wars combined.
19. Over 3500 Native americans fought in the war for the Union. Just less than a third were killed.
20. Disease killed twice as many men as did actually battle wounds.
21. The US Congress issued the first ever paper currency - Greenbacks.
22. African Americans made up 1% of the northern population but supplied 10% of the Union's troops.

Presidential Facts

2009-12-03T14:38:00.000-08:00

First President: George Washington
Second President: John Adams
President involved in the Declaration of Independence: Thomas Jefferson
President considered Father of the Constitution: James Madison
Father and Son Presidents: John Adams + John Quincy Adam, George H. W. Bush + George W. Bush
Grandfather and Grandson Presidents: William Harrison and Benjamin Harrison
Only President with two non-consecutive terms: Grover Cleveland (22nd and 24th President of the US).
First Democratic Party President: Thomas Jefferson (although technically he was a Democratic-Republican). Andrew Jackson was the first to call himself a pure Democrat.
First Republican President: Abraham Lincoln
Presidents who died in office of natural causes: William Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Warren Harding and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Presidents who were assassinated while in office: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy.
Presidents who resigned: Richard Nixon
Shortest term in office: William Harrison (31 days)
Number of Presidents sworn into office: 43
Total number of Presidents: 44
Last Federalist President: John Adams
Last Whig President: Millard Fillmore
Impeached Presidents: Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton
Longest Serving President: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945 – Four Terms)
Median age of accession: 54 years and 11 months
Youngest President to take office: Theodore Roosevelt (42 years, 322 days)
Youngest Elected President: John F. Kennedy (43 years, 236 days)
Oldest President to take office: Ronald Reagan (69 years, 349 days)
President with the longest lifespan: Gerald Ford (93 years, 165 days)
Oldest Living President: George H. W. Bush (85 years +)
Most Common profession of US Presidents: Lawyer (20 altogether)
Only Bachelor President: James Buchanan
Only Engineering President: Herbert Hoover
Presidents who were Generals (or Brigadier Generals): George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Benjamin Harrison, Dwight Eisenhower
Presidents who taught school: James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Lyndon Johnson
Presidents with a Navy background: Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush (navy pilot – youngest during WWII – age 19)
Only Actor President: Ronald Reagan. President of Screen Actors Guild.
Presidents in the clothing industry: Andrew Johnson (tailor) and Harry Truman (owned a hat store)
President who was an architect: Thomas Jefferson
President who became chief Justice of the Supreme Court: William Howard Taft
Post World War II Presidents with no military experience: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama
President with the Most Children: John Tyler (15 children – 8 with his first wife and 7 with his second wife).
President who used the veto the most: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (635 vetoes – the next is Grover Cleveland with 584, followed by Harry Truman with 250). Grover Cleveland holds the record for the most vetoes in a single session – 414.
Presidents who used the veto the least: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, William Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore and James Garfield. All of these presidents never used the veto. George W. Bush never used the veto once in his first term
President who had the greatest percentage of vetoes overridden: George W. Bush (33%). The president with the greatest number of overrides by Congress though is Andrew Johnson with 15.
Only Child born in the White House: Esther Cleveland – daughter of Grover Cleveland (born September 9th, 1893).
Three Presidents who married in office: John Tyler, Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland
Only President to serve without being elected to the presidency or vice presidency: Gerald Ford
Only President to Finish Third in a Second Term Election: William Taft. He ran third behind Woodrow Wilson (Democrat) and Theodore Roosevelt (Bull Moose) in 1912.
President during Mexican-American War: James Polk
President during Spanish-American War: William McKinley
President during WWI: Woodrow Wilson
President during WWII: Franklin Roosevelt
Presidents during Korean War: Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower
Presidents during Vietnam War: Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon
President during First Gulf War: George H.W. Bush
President during Second Gulf War: George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama
President elected to House of Representatives after term: John Quincy Adams (was also the defence lawyer in Amistad Case).
President elected to Senate after term: Andrew Johnson
President during Stock Market Crash (1929): Herbert Hoover
Four Presidents who won the Electoral College Vote but not the popular vote – (winner of popular vote is shown alongside in brackets):
John Quincy Adams (Andrew Jackson) in 1824
Rutherford Hayes (Samuel Tilden) in 1876
Benjamin Harrison (Grover Cleveland) in 1888
George W. Bush (Al Gore) in 2000.
President at the time of Alaska purchase from Russia: Andrew Johnson
President at the time of Louisiana purchase from France: Thomas Jefferson
Only President not to represent a political party: George Washington
First president to reside in the White House: John Adams
Two presidents who died on the same day: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (1826 – 50th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence)
Shortest President: James Madison 5ft 4 inches
First President born in a log cabin: Andrew Jackson (Old Hickory). The last president was James Garfield.
First President to give a speech on TV: Harry Truman

Canadian History - Quick Facts

2009-12-01T06:49:00.000-08:00

I prepared this for my Reach for the Top Students. Others may find it useful.

First PM: John A. Macdonald (Conservative)
Second PM: Alexander Mackenzie (Liberal)
Prime Minister during Boer War: Wilfred Laurier (Liberal)
First francophone PM: Wilfred Laurier
PM during WWI: Robert Borden (Conservative/Unionist)
Longest serving PM: William Lyon Mackenzie King (22 years in total)
PM during WWII: William Lyon Mackenzie King (Liberal)
PM to win Nobel Peace Prize: Lester Pearson (Liberal – UN peacekeeping)
Youngest Canadian PM: Joe Clark (age 39) (Progressive Conservative)
Total Number of Canadian Prime Ministers: 22
First and only Female PM: Kim Campbell (Progressive Conservative -1993)
PM during Great Depression: Richard Bennett of Bennett Buggy Fame.
Oldest Canadian PM: Charles Tupper (Age 74)

Issues Associated with John A. MacDonald: Creation of North-West Mounted Police, Red River Rebellion, Hanging of Louis Riel, North-West Rebellion, Pacific Scandal, Confederation of British Colombia, National Policy (Economics)

Issues Associated with Alexander Mackenzie: Pacific Scandal, Creation of the Supreme Court, Creator of Post of Auditor-General, Creation of Royal Military College

Main Issue Associated with PM’s Thompson, Bowell, Tupper (all Torys):Manitoba School Question

Issues Associated with Wilfred Laurier: Manitoba School Question, Boer War, Confederation of Alberta and Saskatchwan, Creation of Royal Canadian Navy, Reciprocity with the US. Laurier was PM at the turn of the century. He said that the 20th century belongs to Canada.

Issues Associated with Robert BordenL: WWI , Conscription Crisis (1917), Introduction of Income Tax Act, Military Wserfvice Act, Winnipeg General Strike, Creation of National Research Council, Nickle Resolution.

Issues associated with Mackenzie King: Creation of CBC, Nationalization of Bank of Canada, Trans-Canada Airlines, WWII

Issues associated with Louis St. Laurent (Liberal) (1948-1957): NATO and the UN, Suez Crisis, London Declaration, Newfoundland Act, Equalization, Trans-Canada Highway, Trans-Canada-Pipeline.

Issues Associated with John Diefenbaker (Progressive Conservative) (1957-1963): Avro Arrow cancellation, Cuban missile crisis, Canadian Bill of Rights

Issues Associated with Lester Pearson (1963-1968): Introduction of Universal Healthcare, Creation of a New Canadian Flag, Canada student loans, Canada Pension Plan, Creation of Canadian Forces, Auto Pact, Bormarc missile program. No to troops in Vietnam.

Issues associated with Pierre Elliot Trudeau (Liberal) (1968-1979), (1980-1984): Just Society, October Crisis (FLQ) , War Measures Act, Official Languages Act, Repatriation of the Constitution, Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Access to Information Act, 1980 Referendum, Western alienation, National Energy Program (NEP)

Issues Associated with John Turner (Liberal) (1984): Trudeau patronage appointments

Issues Associated with Brian Mulroney (Progressive Conservative) (1984-1993): Cancellation of NEP, Meech Lake Accord, Charlettown Accord, Canada-US Free Trade, NAFTA, GST, First Gulf War, Environmental Protection Act, Oka Crisis, Petro-Canada Privatization, Airbus Affair (Karl-Heinz Schreiber)

Issues Associated with Kim Campbell (Progressive Conservative)(1993): Somalia debacle.

Issues Associated with Jean Chretien (Liberal) (1993-2003):
Red Book (Economics), HST, Clarity Act, Kosovo War, Red River Flood, Creation of Nunavut Territory, Youth Criminal Justice Act, Helicopter Crisis, Opposition to invasion of Iraq, Invasion of Afghanistan, Shawinigan handshake, APEC Summit Crisis, 1995 Referendum.

Issues Associated with Paul Martin (Liberal) (2003-2006): Sponsorship Inquiry, Gomery Inquiry, Civil Marriage Act, Kelowna Accord, Rejection of US Anti-Missile Treaty, Formation of G20, Atlantic Accord.

Issues Associated with Stephen Harper (Conservative) (2006-)
GST reduction, Apology for Chinese Head Tax, Afghan Mission Extension, Quebecois nation motion, Veteran’s Bill of Rights, Residential Schools Apology, Federal Accountability Act.

A Few Important Figures in Canadian Politics (who were not PMs)

Ed Broadbent – Influential former NDP Federal Leader. Human Rights Champion.
George Etienne Cartier – Leading 19th century francophone politician at the time of Confederation. (Minister of Defence in Macdonald government).
Tommy Douglas – Saskatchewan Premier. Father of Universal Healthcare. Voted Greatest Canadian ion a recent poll.
Maurice Duplessis – Anti-Communist Premier of Quebec. Led the Union Nationale Party. Opposed military conscription and Canada’s role in WWII. Padlock Laws.
Frank McKenna – Highly acclaimed former New Brunswick Premier. Former Canadian Ambassador to the US.
Preston Manning – Former Head of the Reform Party. Son of Ernest Manning. Opponent of Brian Mulroney.
Joseph Papineau – Influential francophone politician in Lower Canada. Championed Jewish citizen rights.
Louis-Joseph Papineau – Son of Joseph Papineau. Leader of Patriotes. Fled to the US. Involved in 1837 Rebellion against the British.
Robert Stanfield – Former Progressive Conservative Party leader and opponent of Pierre Trudea. Served as premier of Nova Scotia as well.
Joey Smallwood – Premier of Newfoundland. Brought Province into Confederation in 1949.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall

2009-11-02T15:04:00.000-08:00

Nov. 9 marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Noel D. Cary, professor of German and European history, shares his thoughts on this historical event.

The Berlin Wall fell during my first semester of teaching at Holy Cross. During my job interview the previous spring, the dynamic chair of the history department, Professor William Green, asked what appeared to be an over-the-top question: What did I think the West Germans would do if Gorbachev offered to tear down the Wall in exchange for Germany abandoning the Western alliance? Some maneuver of that sort was just about the extent of what was even imaginable at the time.

What many people no longer remember is what a huge surprise all these events were. Nowadays, many students are inclined to think that the fall of communism was inevitable. That’s not at all how these events felt at the time. I remember driving home after a long day of teaching my first classes that autumn and hearing on the radio that the entire East German Politburo had just resigned. This was an absolutely electrifying event, an event that no one expected. 1989 was a year filled with such events, each one more surprising than the one before.

The speed of communism’s collapse sometimes misleads young people into thinking that the Cold War was not about anything real. The dogmatic ideological militancy of the communist movement, and the heavy price in human rights that it demanded from the human beings it affected, should warn us to think twice before accepting such a view. The death toll from self-consciously executed communist policies numbers conservatively in the tens of millions. Nevertheless, the anticommunist excesses that sometimes marked the Cold War seem to be better known among today’s students than do the far greater excesses of the communists. Most students know much more about McCarthyism than they do about the Cultural Revolution. Some confuse liberalism’s imperfections with communism’s norms. Knowing too that the infamous dominoes eventually fell in reverse, many people read the outcome back into the events and conclude by debunking the concerns of the contemporaries.

Historians, however, must always contextualize. When they do, what emerges is the combination of policies and people that made the fall of the Wall possible. It is a complex and contested story — far too complex and contested to be summarized here. Among its clearest lessons, however, is this one: Far from being inevitable, the fall of communism was a profile in the courage of those men and women who dared, in the words of the Czech dissident playwright and statesman Vaclav Havel, to deploy “the power of the powerless.”

Source: Holy Cross

Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin - Mass Murderer

2009-11-02T14:58:00.000-08:00

Vasili Mikhailovich Blokhin (1895 – February 1955) was a Soviet Major-General who served as the chief executioner of the Stalinist NKVD under the administrations of Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov and Lavrenty Beria. Hand-picked for the position by Joseph Stalin in 1926, Blokhin led a company of executioners that performed the majority of executions carried out during Stalin's reign (most during the Great Purge). Claims by the Soviet government put the number of NKVD official executions at 828,000 during Stalin's reign,[1] and Blokhin is recorded as having personally executed tens of thousands of prisoners by his own hand over a 26-year period—including 7,000 condemned Polish POWs in one protracted mass execution[1][2]—making him ostensibly the most prolific official executioner in recorded world history.[1] He was awarded both the Order of the Badge of Honor (1937) and the Order of the Red Banner (1941).

Blokhin, born into a Russian peasant family, had served in the Tsarist army of World War I, and had joined the Cheka in March 1921. Though records are slim, he was evidently noted for both his pugnaciousness and his mastery of what Stalin termed "black work"; assassinations, torture, intimidation, and execution conducted clandestinely. Once he caught Stalin's eye, he was quickly promoted and within six years was appointed the head of the purpose-created Kommandatura Branch of the Administrative Executive Department of the NKVD. This branch was a company-sized element created by Stalin specifically for "black work" missions. Headquartered at the Lubyanka in Moscow, they were all approved by Stalin and took their orders directly from his hand, a fact that ensured the unit's longevity despite three bloody purges of the NKVD. As senior executioner,[4] Blokhin's official title was that of Commandant of the internal prison at the Lubyanka, which allowed him to perform his true job with a minimum of scrutiny and no official paperwork.

Although most common executions were delegated to local Chekists or subordinate executioners from his unit, Blokhin personally performed all of the high-profile executions conducted in the Soviet Union during his tenure, including those of the Old Bolsheviks condemned at the Moscow Show Trials and two of the three fallen NKVD Chiefs (Yagoda in 1938 and Yezhov in 1940) he had once served under.[5] He was awarded the Badge of Honor for his service in 1937.[6]

Blokhin's most notable performance was the April 1940 mass execution by shooting of 7,000 Polish officers, captured following the Soviet invasion of Poland, from the Ostashkov POW camp, during the Katyn massacre.[7] Based on the 4 April secret order from Stalin to NKVD Chief Lavrenti Beria (as well as NKVD Order № 00485, which still applied), the executions were carried out in 28 consecutive nights at the specially-constructed basement execution chamber at the NKVD headquarters in Kalinin (now Tver), and were assigned, by name, directly to Blokhin, making him the official executioner of the NKVD.[8]

Blokhin initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night, and engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to a small antechamber—which had been painted red and was known as the "Leninist room"—for a brief and cursory positive identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next door. The room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against. Blokhin—outfitted in a leather butcher's apron, cap, and shoulder-length gloves to protect his uniform[9]—then pushed the prisoner against the log wall and shot him once in the base of the skull with a German Walther Model 2 .25 ACP pistol.[10] He had brought a briefcase full of his own Walther pistols, since he did not trust the reliability of the standard-issue Soviet TT-30 for the frequent, heavy use he intended.[9][11] The use of a German pocket pistol, which was commonly carried by Nazi intelligence agents, also provided plausible deniability of the executions if the bodies were discovered later.

Between 20 to 30 local NKVD agents, guards and drivers were pressed into service to escort prisoners to the basement, confirm identification, then remove the bodies and hose down the blood after each execution. Although some of the executions were carried out by Senior Lieutenant of State Security Andrei M. Rubanov, Blokhin was the primary executioner and, true to his reputation, liked to work continuously and rapidly without interruption.[9] In keeping with NKVD policy and the overall "black" nature of the operation, the executions were conducted at night, starting at dark and continuing until just prior to dawn. The initial quota of 300 was lowered by Blokhin to 250 after the first night, when it was decided that all further executions should take place in total darkness.[5] The bodies were continuously loaded onto covered flat-bed trucks through a back door in the execution chamber and trucked, twice a night, to Mednoye, where Blokhin had arranged for a bulldozer and two NKVD drivers to dispose of bodies at an unfenced site. Each night, 24 to 25 trenches, measuring eight to ten meters total, were dug to hold the night's corpses, and each trench was covered up before dawn.[12] Blokhin and his team worked without pause for ten hours each night, with Blokhin executing an average of one prisoner every three minutes.[2] At the end of the night, Blokhin provided vodka to all his men.[13]

On 27 April 1940, Blokhin secretly received the Order of the Red Banner and a modest monthly pay premium as a reward from Joseph Stalin for his "skill and organization in the effective carrying out of special tasks".[14][15] His count of 7,000 shot in 28 days remains one of the most organized and protracted mass murders by a single individual on record.[6]

Blokhin was forcibly retired following Stalin's death, although his "irreproachable service" was publicly noted by Lavrenty Beria at the time of his departure.[6] After Beria's fall from power (June 1953), Blokhin's rank was eventually stripped from him in the de-Stalinization campaigns of Nikita Khrushchev. He reportedly sunk into alcoholism, went insane, and died in February 1955 with the official cause of death listed as "suicide".[7]

Source: http://dissectleft.blogspot.com/

History in the News

2009-10-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

Buffalo Soldiers gather to remember
They fought bravely for the US despite the discrimination that they faced

US Debt reaches historical high
9.1 trillion over the next decade...that is simply insane.

Mini-Colosseum Unearthed near Rome
Must of been the home ground for the reserve team.

Nero's fabled banqueting hall discovered
Apparently he didn't enjoy the hall for two long. It was completed in the same year that he was overthrown and then committed suicide.

John Brown - 150 Years Later
Brown's famous raid on Harper's Ferry will be re-enacted this weekend.

Jewish Culture in Medieval Spain
Article explodes the myth of Muslim tolerance of Judaism in Spain.

Decline of British History in Education

2009-09-19T17:53:00.000-07:00

Source: Telegraph
Author: Dominic Sandbrook

In April 1942, the Luftwaffe launched a series of night bombing raids against the historic cathedral cities of Exeter, Bath, Norwich, York and Canterbury. The targets had been picked out of the Baedeker Guide to Britain, not because they were militarily important or commanded crucial transport routes, but because they represented something vaguer but more profound.

The Nazis' aim was to smash Britain's moral and historical heritage – and, of course, they failed. More than 1,500 people were killed, but York Minister and Canterbury Cathedral still stood proud and unbowed amid the flames, symbolising the long centuries of England's past. Not even the might of the Nazi empire, it seemed, could break the thread of our national history.

What a tragic irony, then, that where Hitler's bombers failed, a generation of home-grown political meddlers and "progressive" educationalists have succeeded all too well. For to anyone with even a passing interest in the teaching, reading and writing of our national past, the Historical Association's massive new survey on history teaching in secondary schools reads like the report of some callous, devastating military barbarism.

Across the board, history teaching is in retreat. Seven out of ten teenagers say they enjoy the subject, yet barely three out of 10 study it to GCSE level. Among younger children, the hours set aside for history are being slashed to make way for supposedly vocational subjects. And almost unbelievably, 12-year-olds in half of Tony Blair's beloved academies study history for just one hour – one! – a week.

An entire generation, in other words, is leaving school ignorant of what their parents and grandparents once took for granted: the solid, reassuring knowledge of what we all once recognised as our national story.

Terrible as they are, the Historical Association's figures come as little surprise. A few years ago, when I was a lecturer at one of northern England's biggest redbrick universities, I quickly realised that it was a mistake to assume any prior knowledge of British history on the part of our 18-year-old students. Most had studied the Nazis and the American civil rights movement in great detail at A-level, but few had heard of, say, David Lloyd George or Stanley Baldwin, or could explain why Britain had won and lost a global empire.

They were bright and keen to learn, but had been betrayed by a system that fed them titbits of knowledge, and by a culture of continuous testing that left little time to appreciate the broad sweep of our national past. But by today's standards, they were lucky. For as the Historical Association points out, if the trend continues, history may well decline into virtual irrelevance as a school subject, overtaken by Media Studies and Beauty Therapy.

It is too easy to blame the students, who find themselves under intense pressure to get the best possible grades for their university applications – which inevitably means that they pick subjects that are seen as "easier" or that offer more "value". And it is too easy, I think, to blame their teachers.

Whenever I give sixth-form talks, whether in private or state schools, I am always struck by the sheer love of history shown by most teachers, whose attitudes often put academics themselves to shame. Only a few weeks ago, giving a lecture to a talented and engaging group of A-level students on the Isle of Man, I felt almost humbled by the enterprise and sheer commitment of their history teachers, a husband-and-wife team who might have been an advertisement for education as one of life's most enriching vocations.

But there is no doubt that something has gone badly wrong when seven out of 10 schoolchildren are no longer studying history at the age of 16, when two out of 10 think Britain was once occupied by the Spanish, and when some identify Sir Winston Churchill as the first man on the moon. And the blame lies at the very top, shared by politicians of both parties, who have been systematically cheating and betraying our children since the 1980s.

During the Thatcher years, it was meddling from the top that downgraded history from a compulsory to an optional subject at the age of 16 – which, because it was seen as "difficult", made it easy pickings for Mickey Mouse subjects such as Beauty Therapy. It was supposedly "progressive" interference, meanwhile, that did away with old-fashioned essay questions and replaced them with empathy exercises and multiple-choice quizzes that sacrificed any sense of intellectual depth or discipline.

And perhaps above all, it was in Westminster and Whitehall that officials designed our absurd Yo! Sushi approach to history, in which schools randomly pick unrelated historical topics like saucers from a conveyor belt, instead of studying our national story as a continuous narrative, which is how any sensible person sees it.

What makes this betrayal all the more depressing is that in society at large there is clearly such an eager appetite for historical narrative. Even now, 20 years after I was forced to do empathy exercises ("Imagine you are a housewife in Hamburg in 1932 …") as part of my history GCSE lessons, British readers devour more popular history than almost any other nation, helping to keep Andrew Roberts in silk pyjamas and Simon Schama in leather jackets.

With almost four million members happily forking out to visit its country houses, castles, factories and workhouses, the National Trust is the biggest membership organisation in the country. Even the latest Booker shortlist reflects our deep shared thirst for history, from A S Byatt's lovingly evoked Edwardian social landscape to Sarah Waters's haunting recreation of Attlee's Britain and Hilary Mantel's coruscating portraits of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII. And, of course, it was the readers of this very paper who contributed £25,000 to the reprint of H E Marshall's Our Island Story, the children's history of England first published in 1905 that still gives a more entertaining overall account of our national story than most modern textbooks, even if it is a bit dated.

Any sensible government, recognising the extent of the popular enthusiasm for history, would have intervened long ago to restore the subject as a central, compulsory element of the national curriculum. Instead, Labour have flapped and floundered, bleating about Britishness lessons and citizenship classes instead of doing the one thing guaranteed to inculcate a sense of community and identity: teaching children their national history.

One reason that America has proved so successful as a melting pot for immigrants, after all, is that its schools give their children a solid and reassuring sense of themselves as Americans, embedded in a shared national past which is studded with patriotic landmarks from the Declaration of Independence to the Gettysburg Address. And we have only to look across the Irish Sea, where schools in the Republic patiently trace their national story from Ireland's first Christian missionaries to its bloody struggle for independence, to see that teaching your national history from start to finish is hardly rocket science. Nor is it necessarily reactionary or old-fashioned or even conservative, as its critics suggest. It is simply common sense.

"The past is a foreign country," L P Hartley famously wrote at the beginning of his great novel The Go-Between. "They do things differently there." Exploring that vast and impossibly rich continent ought to be one of the most exciting intellectual adventures in any boy or girl's lifetime: a chance not just to tread the fields of Hastings or Bosworth, or to see Shakespeare and Milton at work, but to encounter an enormously, uproariously diverse range of characters, to make lifelong acquaintances, to draw lessons and parallels, to meet humanity in the raw.

In any sane and decent society, that journey ought to be the centrepiece of the education system, a long and thoughtful expedition, not a botched and half-hearted day-trip to which most children are no longer invited. And one day, I suspect, we will look back and judge that our Government's ignorance and neglect of that wonderful, dazzling, irresistible country was among the greatest of its failures and the most unforgivable of its many betrayals.

20 Key Events in the Neurosciences

2009-09-11T16:34:00.000-07:00

1. Mapping of the Human Cortex.
2. Discovery of the roles of the Medulla Oblangata and the Cerebellum in brain functioning.
3. Invention of the CAT and PET Scans as well as the NMR for brain observation.
4. Discovery of the Brain Wave and the Invention of the EEG.
5. Elucidation of the process of information flow through the visual cortex.
6. Understanding of the Pain pathway through the Central Nervous system.
7. Identification of Broca and Werniecke region for Speech and Language Processing.
8. The discovery of neurotransmitter chemicals such as Dopamine and Seritonin.
9. Discovery of the pineal controlled biological clock mechanism.
10.Identification of the physiological nature of depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Mania and other forms of mental illness.
11. The Establishment of Psychology as a science outside the realm of philosophy.
12. Birth of the science of psychopharmacology. Includes the development of Anti-Depressants, SSRIs and Barbiturates.
13. Development of the Science of Psychoanalysis.
14. Discovery of the conditioned reflex response.
15. Understanding of the different types of sleep. Includes the discovery and analysis of Rem Sleep. Birth of Dream Therapy.
16. Birth of the discipline of Behaviorism.
17. Carl Jung develops the concept of the Collective Conscious/Unconscious.
18. Development of the Science of Personality study, an outflow of Carl Jung's work.
19. Birth of the science of Psychometrics includes the testing of intelligence and learning.
20. Development of Gestalt Therapy.

Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire

2009-09-07T06:25:00.000-07:00

Source: http://mises.org/story/3663
by Joseph Peden

Two centuries ago, in 1776, there were two books published in England, both of which are read avidly today. One of them was Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and the other was Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon's multivolume work is the tale of a state that survived for twelve centuries in the West and for another thousand years in the East, at Constantinople.

Gibbon, in looking at this phenomenon, commented that the wonder was not that the Roman Empire had fallen, but rather that it had lasted so long. And scholars since Gibbon have devoted a great deal of energy to examining that problem: How was it that the Roman Empire lasted so long? And did it decline, or was it simply transformed into something else (that something else being the European civilization of which we are the heirs)?

I've been asked to speak on the theme of Roman history, particularly the problem of inflation and its impact. My analysis is based on the premise that monetary policy cannot be studied, or understood, in isolation from the overall policies of the state.

Monetary, fiscal, military, political, and economic issues are all very much intertwined. And they are all so intertwined because any state normally seeks to monopolize the supply of money within its own territory.

Monetary policy therefore always serves, even if it serves badly, the perceived needs of the rulers of the state. If it also happens to enhance the prosperity and progress of the masses of the people, that is a secondary benefit; but its first aim is to serve the needs of the rulers, not the ruled. This point is central, I believe, to an understanding of the course of monetary policy in the late Roman Empire.

We may begin by looking at the mentality of the rulers of the Roman Empire, beginning at the end of the 2nd century AD and looking through to the end of the 3rd century AD. Roman historians refer to this period as the "Crisis of the 3rd Century." And the reason is that the problems of the Roman society in that period were so profound, so enormous, that Roman society emerged from the 3rd century very different in almost all ways from what it had been in the 1st and 2nd centuries

To look at the mentality of the Roman emperors, we can look just at the advice that the Emperor Septimius Severus gave to his two sons, Caracalla and Geta. This is supposed to be his final words to his heirs. He said, "live in harmony; enrich the troops; ignore everyone else." Now, there is a monetary policy to be marveled at!

Caracalla did not adhere to the first part of that advice; in fact, one of his first acts was to murder his brother. But as for enriching the troops, he took that so seriously to heart that his mother remonstrated with him and urged him to be more moderate and to restrain his increasing military expenditures and burdensome new taxes. He responded by saying there was no longer any revenue, just or unjust, to be found. But not to worry, "for as long as we have this," he insisted, pointing to his sword, "we shall not run short of money."

His sense of priorities was made more explicit when he remarked, "nobody should have any money but I, so that I may bestow it upon the soldiers." And he was as good as his word. He raised the pay of the soldiers by 50 percent, and to achieve this he doubled the inheritance taxes paid by Roman citizens. When this was not sufficient to meet his needs, he admitted almost every inhabitant of the empire to Roman citizenship. What had formerly been a privilege now became simply a means of expanding the tax base.

He then went further by proceeding to debase the coinage. The basic coinage of the Roman Empire to this time — we're speaking now about 211 AD — was the silver denarius introduced by Augustus at about 95 percent silver at the end of the 1st century BC. The denarius continued for the better part of two centuries as the basic medium of exchange in the empire.

By the time of Trajan in 117 AD, the denarius was only about 85 percent silver, down from Augustus's 95 percent. By the age of Marcus Aurelius, in 180, it was down to about 75 percent silver. In Septimius's time it had dropped to 60 percent, and Caracalla evened it off at 50/50.

For the rest go to the Source

Some World War II Updates

2009-09-07T06:04:00.000-07:00

Looking for Remains of the War Dead
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/world/europe/06search.html?hp
I was surprised to find out that there were 74,000 missing American servicemen from WWII.

Pope decries Holocaust
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09250/996159-82.stm
But will he admit that the Vatican should have taken a stronger stance against Nazism during the War?If Pius XII had issued a Bull arguing that anyone who supported the anti-semitism of the Nazis (or any of their other genocidal policies) was a disgrace to the religion it may have reduced the grass roots collaboration that facilitated the Nazi driven holocaust.

Wars of Choice and Wars of Necessity
http://www.canada.com/news/choice+fight/1965833/story.html
A good boost in an era when so many seem to have forgotten the reason why Hitler had to be stopped.

Great Rivals in History

2009-08-21T06:09:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading an incredible book by Joseph Cummins on some of the Great Rivalries in History. The work is detailed and easy to read and is available at Amazon. (isn't everything).

Rivalries documented are:

Alexander the Great and Darius III
Hannibal vs Scipio Africanus
Juilius Caesar vs Pompeius
King Henry II vs Thomas Becket
Richard I vs John
Pope Boniface VIII vs Philip IV
Pizarro vs De Almagro (Conquistadors)
Elizabeth I vs Mary Queen of Scots
Charles XII vs Peter the Great
Benedict Arnold vs Horatio Gates
Aaron Burr vs Alexander Hamilton
Napoleon vs Wellington
Earol of Lucan vs Earl of Cardigan (Crimean War)
Disraeli vs Gladstone
Pancho Villa vs Emiliano Zapata (Mexico)
Hitler vs Rohm
Stalin vs Trotsky
Chiang Kai-Shek vs Mao
Chuikov vs Paulus (Battle of Stalingrad)
Patton vs Montgomery
Truman vs Macarthur
Giap vs De Casteries (Battle of Dien Bien Phu)
Kennedy vs Nixon

An Amazing Military History Website

2009-08-12T18:37:00.000-07:00

This site has exactly what I crave in a history source...detail. On top of that it is extremely well organized.

http://www.historyofwar.org/index.html

The Storm of War by Andrew Roberts

2009-08-06T08:49:00.000-07:00

Looking forward to reading this book.........

I have posted a review with its link.

The Second World War was undoubtedly the greatest conflict in history and probably the worst single catastrophe the human race has suffered. For people today, 70 years after the start of that conflict, it is almost impossible to imagine the scale of the war. Some 50 million people were killed between 1939 and 1945 – or, to put it another way, one person every four seconds for six long years. In the west, where the Nazis controlled an area twice the size of the Roman Empire, the fighting took place almost everywhere from the northernmost tip of Finland to the edges of the Sahara Desert. In the Far East, it raged from China all the way to the shores of Australia, as the Japanese conquered more than 32 million square miles of the Earth’s surface. There was barely a man, woman or child on this planet who was not affected.

Source: Storm

Harry Patch, last British WWI soldier, dies at 111

2009-08-06T08:45:00.000-07:00

LONDON — Harry Patch, the last British army veteran of World War I, has died at 111, the nursing home where he lived said Saturday.

The Fletcher House care home in Wells, southwest England, said Patch died early Saturday.

He just quietly slipped away at 9 a.m. this morning," said care home manager Andrew Larpent. "It was how he would have wanted it, without having to be moved to hospitals but here, peacefully with his friends and carers."

Source: Patch

Dreyfus in Rehearsal

2009-08-06T08:41:00.000-07:00

One of the first plays I reviewed was "Dreyfus in Rehearsal," which was about a troup of amateur actors in a small town in Poland rehearsing a play about the Dreyfus Affair, about which they knew surprisingly little. The action takes place in 1931 when flames of anti-semitism are being fanned all over Europe.

That original production, which opened in the fall of 1974, starred Sam Levene and Ruth Gordon. It had an actor named Allan Arbus (who, though he had a very strong career, will probably always be better known as the husband of Diane.) It also had a young actress named Tovah Feldshuh.

"Dreyfus" was produced by David Merrick, part of a long collaboration he had with writer/director Garson Kanin, who adapted the play from the French of a playwright named Jean-Claude Grumberg. I don't remember what I wrote 35 years ago, but I do remember praising the drop curtain by Boris Aronson in the style of Marc Chagall, a poetic evocation of the richness and tenuousness of European Jewish life. Like the sets for most flops ("Dreyfus" barely ran two weeks), I suspect it was just taken out and burned. Today there would be any number of museums thrilled to have it.

Source: Dreyfus

End of an Era: Mississippi Steamboats

2009-08-06T08:37:00.000-07:00

The overnight steamboat, a majestic feature of the Mississippi since before the days of Mark Twain, has been forced off the river by the current recession after nearly two centuries of continuous service on the river.

This year, there are no river boats offering Mississippi cruises that come with night cabins and last more than a few hours.

It was in 1811 that the New Orleans, the first steamboat in western waters, was piloted down the Mississippi. For nearly two centuries, steamboats plied the waters from St Paul, Minnesota down to New Orleans. During the late 19th Century, there were some 10,000 of them.

But the last remaining successors of the storied vessels that Twain, himself a riverboat pilot, immortalised in his 1883 work Life on the Mississippi, are now out of commission and may never again leave their berths.

Source: Mississippi

Ancient Ruins uncovered in Lebanon

2009-08-06T08:34:00.000-07:00

BEIRUT, Aug. 6 (Xinhua) -- A British Museum delegation have excavated a large number of valuable ruins in an archaeological site in Sidon, south Lebanon, which date back to the Canaanite period of Sidon, one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities, local Daily Star reported on its website Thursday.

"We uncovered the biggest number of ruins this year and this helped complete the cycle of historic periods discovered in the site," Dr. Claude Doumit Serhal, head of the British delegation, was quoted by the paper as saying.

The delegation, consisting of 90 Lebanese and foreign professionals, uncovered this week 13 burial sites, temples and personal items, which "reveals the religious rituals and lifestyle during the Canaanite period (3,500 BC - 1,150 BC)," according to Serhal.

Source: Lebanon

The Roots of Beer in Ancient History

2009-08-06T08:31:00.000-07:00

Beer is one of the oldest foodstuffs produced by human beings; it shows up in written history as early as 6000 B.C. Ancient Sumerians actually developed a prayer to the goddess Ninkasi that doubled as a beer recipe. This prayer is the oldest surviving beer recipe in existence.

The discovery of beer was probably an accident, with some wild, airborne yeasts interacting with stored barley and then spontaneously fermenting. Beer quickly grew to become an important part of many developing cultures. Anthropologists have uncovered evidence dating back to 3000 B.C. that in ancient Iraq, each city-state had its own brewmaster who was responsible for all of the beer production in that city.

For the rest go to Beer

Ranking of Secretary of States (US)

2009-07-28T13:24:00.000-07:00

Source: http://www.rankopedia.com/ZoneID=3/22713/Step1/4978.htm
(In brackets is the President they served under)

I have some reservations about this list but its worth looking at:

1. William Seward(Lincoln)
2. George Marshall(Truman)
3. Thomas Jefferson(Washington)
4. John Q Adams(Monroe)
5. Henry Kissinger(Nixon,Ford)
6. Colin Powell(George W Bush) - seems too high
7. Condi Rice (George W Bush) - way too high
8. James Madison(Jefferson)
9. James Monroe (Madison)
10. Madelaine Albright(Clinton) - too high
11. Daniel Webster(Harrison,Tyler, Filmore)
12. George Shultz(Reagan) - too low
13. Henry Clay (John Q Adams)
14. James Baker (Bush I)
15. John Hay (T Roosevelt)
16. Dean Rusk(Kennedy)
17. John Foster Dulles(Eisenhower)
18. Dean Acheson(Truman)
19. Cordell Hull(FDR)
20. Hilary Clinton (Obama) - yeah right

Ranking of Britain's Prime Ministers since 1940

2009-07-28T13:16:00.000-07:00

According to BBC Newsnight Poll 2008 (27,000 people responded)

1. Winston Churchill
2. Margaret Thatcher
3. Clement Attlee
4. Harold Macmillan
5. Harold Wilson
6. Tony Blair
7. Edward Heath
8. John Major
9. James Callaghan
10. Alec Douglas-Home
11. Anthony Eden
12. Gordon Brown

The Worst Speech of All-Time

2009-07-21T18:09:00.000-07:00

by Daniel Dale

There are product failures and there is New Coke. There are bad movies and there is Plan 9 From Outer Space. And there are bad presidential speeches and there is Jimmy Carter's "malaise" speech, the July 15, 1979 address so legendarily horrendous it still elicits disdainful superlatives on the week of its 30-year anniversary.

"This is a speech I consider one of the worst speeches in the history of the presidency," says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. "There are many pedestrian speeches. You can say, `Well, they're just bad speeches.' No, they're pedestrian speeches; they're not bad, they're just ordinary. This speech actually has serious inherent rhetorical failures. Usually speechwriters protect a president from that."

It eloquently illuminated complicated problems, then offered no actual solutions. It directly criticized average folks but only indirectly criticized their flawed president.

It was, many scholars of political rhetoric say, an epic, perhaps unprecedented disaster. Mary Stuckey, professor of political science and communication at Georgia State University, says the only speech she can think of that may rival its dreadfulness is Bill Clinton's lying "I did not have sexual relations" address of 1998. That one, of course, came at a pressure-packed press conference amidst a scandal.

For the rest go to the Toronto Star

The Real Tragedy of Vietnam

2009-07-21T18:00:00.000-07:00

by Conrad Black

The death of former U. S. defence secretary Robert S. McNamara has caused a good deal of retrospective comment regarding his influence on American defence and strategic policy in the 1960s, and especially the Vietnam War. In writing on the subject for last Saturday's National Post, I found myself with more material than I could get into a single column. What follows below picks up on Saturday's effort.

The horrible nightmare of Vietnam was a long time coming. Franklin D. Roosevelt, unlike Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, knew that Western colonial empires couldn't last, and was afraid the communists would take over of much of them, exploiting discontent against the colonial occupiers. He proposed a scheme whereby power in these areas would be administered in the name of the United Nations, until the territories met agreed criteria for self-government. Britain, France and the lesser empires would not hear of it. No substitute plan emerged, and there were endless colonial wars in Indochina, Kenya, Algeria, Cyprus, Angola, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Malaya, the Congo and elsewhere --and prolonged disputes over the post-colonial borders, especially in the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent.

Roosevelt's successors, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, were not prepared to fight for the French colonial regime in Indochina. If there was ever a time for the United States to give battle there (and there probably wasn't), it was after France promised independence but was still prepared to fight Indochina's communists. It might have been possible to create a Korea-like coalition and replicate the success of the British and local anti-Communists in Malaya. But neither Eisenhower nor Churchill was prepared to do this in 1954, and Eisenhower was not even prepared to assist the French in escaping the debacle at Dien Bien Phu, which only required a little air transport and close air support to avoid. This, and the gratuitous U. S. response to the Anglo-French Suez shambles two years later, spelled virtually the end of the U. S.-French alliance until the Gulf War of 1991. Alliances are supposed to be reciprocal.

For the rest go to the National Post

Apollo Astronauts Bemoan Space Program

2009-07-21T17:55:00.000-07:00

by Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., July 20 (Reuters) - The U.S. investment in the Apollo space program, which landed men on the moon, paid off handsomely, unlike the $100 billion plowed into the International Space Station, Apollo's pioneering astronauts said on Monday.

"We opened the door to future of exploration by touching down on another body," Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon, said at a press conference commemorating the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing.

The United States staged six successful missions to the moon between 1969 and 1972, then developed the space shuttles and later, the space station.

NASA is finishing construction of the station, a $100 billion project of 16 nations, and plans to retire the shuttle fleet next year. After that, the United States plans to pay Russia to ferry crews to the outpost, which orbits 225 miles (360 km) above Earth.

"We've spent a lot of money up there for almost nothing. It's almost a white elephant," Apollo 13 commander Jim Lovell said. "Until we can really get a return on our investment on that particular project, then it was money wasted."

The United States spent about $25 billion, in 1969 dollars, on the Apollo project. The investment, which consumed about 4 percent of the federal budget, was returned many times over, the astronauts said.

"We now seem to think it's too much to put 0.6 percent into the NASA budget," said Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham. "That is idiotic in my opinion."

"The investment that we made back in the 1960s was paid back. You got the return on the investment for the next 30 years. It was a driver of technology that really helped make us the leading, driving economic force of the world," he said.

"What are we doing today, what investment are we making today that will ensure that we have that kind of return for the next 30 years? I don't see it out there," he added.

COMPELLING GOAL NEEDED

For more go to Reuters

20 Greatest Swedes of All-Time

2009-07-21T17:51:00.000-07:00

1. Carolus Linnaeus - Taxonomist.
2. Carl Wilhelm Scheele - Chemist (Swedish although born in Germany).
3. Alfred Nobel - Inventor of Dynamite. Began Nobel Prize.
4. Gustavus Adolphus - Swedish King and Military Innovator.
5. August Strindberg - Playwright.
6. Jons Berzellius - Chemist.
7. Svante Arrhenius - Chemist.
8. Axel Oxenstierna - Statesman.
9. Raoul Wallenberg - Diplomat and Humanitarian
10. Queen Christina - Monarch.
11. Emanuel Swedenborg - Philosopher.
12. Torsten Wiesel - Neurobiologist.
13. Theodor Svedberg - Physical Chemist.
14. Dag Hammarskjold - United Nations Secretary General.
15. Arne Tiselius - Biochemist.
16. Karl Branting - Politician And Diplomat.
17.Par Lagerkvist - Author, Poet and Playwright.
18. Nathan Soderblom - Theologian.
19. Gunnar Mydral - Economist.
20. Selma Lagerlof - Author.

South American History Key Events

2009-07-21T17:47:00.000-07:00

1. European Invasion and the Subsequent Indian Genocide.
2. Creation of the vast Inca Empire.
3. Creation of Chibcha Empire.
4. Conversion of Indigenous South American population to Catholicism.
5. The Anti-Spanish Rebellions of Bolivar and San Martin.
6. The Granting of Independence to the South American countries in the 1820s and 1830s.
7. Discovery of vast tin and silver deposits in South America.
8. Early Colonization of South America possibly from a Polynesian source.
9. Pope divides South America between the Spanish and the Portuguese.
10. Don Pedro II becomes King of Brazil.
11. Bernardo O'Higgins rebels in Chile against the Spanish.
12. Black Slaves arrive in Brazil to work on the plantations.
13. Chaco War.
14. Beginning of the modern Deforestation of the Amazon.
15. Period of Juan Peron's rule in Argentina.
16. Period of the Vargas dictatorship in Brazil.
17.Splitting off of Panama from Columbia to create the Panama Canal.
18. Discovery of Oil in Venezuela.
19. Formation of the MERCOSUR trading group.
20. Menem introduces Fiscal conservatism into the Argentine economy.
21. British attack Buenos Aires in the 19th century.
22. The Period of the Dirty Wars in Argentina.
23. The Falkland War and the Collapse of the Ruling Junta in Argentina.
24. The Collapse of the Pinochet Regime in Chile in the 1990s.
25. The South American Foreign Debt crisis of the 80s.

American History in the News

2009-07-01T16:11:00.000-07:00

Fulton to celebrate Churchill

FULTON - Jefferson City is known as the Capital City, Columbia is known as the college town, and Fulton is known for -- Winston Churchill.
This weekend marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain. The very term "Iron Curtain" was first introduced by Winston Churchill in Fulton. His "Iron Curtain Speech" at Westminster College became famous in 1946.
For the rest go to Fulton

A Tribute to Teddy Roosevelt

It’s impossible to examine the life of Theodore Roosevelt and not feel a certain degree of envy. The man was so prodigious in his pursuits and accomplishments it humbles everyone who comes close. He wrote books seemingly at will, thirty-five in all, some even while he was serving as president. He traveled back and forth across the country and around the world like a modern day jet-setting businessperson—before jets were around, of course. He persevered through a catastrophic loss that could easily have crippled him emotionally for life. He single-handedly remade the biggest and possibly most corrupt police department in the country. He busted monopolies. He fought wars. He served two terms in the White House—then tried to run again. And, oh by the way, he saved 230 million acres of land for future generations. It’s impossible to examine the life of Theodore Roosevelt and not feel a certain degree of envy. The man was so prodigious in his pursuits and accomplishments it humbles everyone who comes close.
For the rest go to Teddy

George Washington on Leadership
Review of Richard Brookhiser`s biography of Washington

Brookhiser draws upon a wealth of historical material to identify and then discuss leadership lessons to be learned from George Washington’s life and career, lessons that remain relevant after more than 200 years. All leaders attract followers but only great leaders sustain the support of their followers. That is certainly true of Washington who was, according to contemporary accounts, an extraordinarily attractive man with a commanding presence whom everyone trusted, even those who strongly disagreed with some of his military decisions and later, with other of his decisions when serving as the first president of the United States.

for the rest go to Washington

Valuable Lincoln document found in Hawaii

A priceless document that was hidden away in the Hawaii State Archives for decades has finally been explained. It is a historical treasure signed by Abraham Lincoln as part of his plan to free slaves during the Civil War. Someone found the document on a shelf in a vault at the archives in 1935. They recognized Lincoln's signature on the lower right corner, but did not know what the document was. It remained a mystery until a historian with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois visited the archives a few months ago.
For the rest go to Lincoln

Victor Davis Hanson

2009-04-26T05:24:00.001-07:00

Victor Davis Hanson is one of my favourite historians. The following is a list of some videos of the man himself in intellectual action.

On Pat Buchanan's WWII historical revision book

On the Peleponnesian War

Conversations with History at Berkley (yes Berkley...)

War in a classical context

The Great Depression - An Alternative view

2009-04-26T05:17:00.000-07:00

Source: The Right Nation
By Howie Rich

History is written by many people, but those who write government school textbooks tend to hold disproportionate sway.Sadly, their vision of America – which has driven conventional wisdom and popular opinion for decades – is built on many myths.The biggest myth of them all?

That capitalism and our free market system caused the Great Depression – and that only a massive expansion of the federal government saved America from permanent economic ruin.Nothing could be further from the truth – and yet as the true history of government meddling repeats itself all around us (with the direst of consequences for future generations), America seems incapable of learning from these mistakes for the simple reason that no one has ever taught them how destructive interventionism has been in the past and present.

Over a decade ago, Lawrence Reed of the Mackinac Center – a Michigan-based research and educational institute – penned an important analysis of the Great Depression.
Written at the height of the dot-com boom (and shortly after President Bill Clinton told us that “the era of big government is over”) Reed’s treatise breaks the Depression down into sections and analyzes the cause and effect associated with each new development.His conclusion? It’s a complete reversal of the textbook myth, an unflinchingly-candid, meticulously-documented proof that “government intervention worsened (the Depression) and kept the economy in a stupor for over a decade.”

“The calamity that began in 1929 lasted at least three times longer than any of the country’s previous depressions because the government compounded its initial errors with a series of additional and harmful interventions,” Reed writes.Anyone who follows things like money supply and interest rate adjustments knows that the Federal Reserve’s policies in the months leading up to the Great Crash of 1928 courted disaster.But it was the effect of government interventionism after the crash that did the real damage – which given the unprecedented $13 trillion intervention currently underway in our country should send shivers up and down every American’s spine.Perhaps most importantly, Reed’s paper shatters once and for all the myth that President Herbert Hoover was the laissez-faire capitalist recalled by American textbooks.

For starters, Hoover’s administration – with Congressional support – dramatically increased government spending from 16.4 percent to 21.5 of GNP in one year. Hoover also signed a foolhardy tariff that crippled trade, as well as the largest tax hike in American history in the spring if 1932.On top of that, during Hoover’s tenure the Federal Reserve imposed the biggest interest rate increase in its history.High tariffs, huge subsidies, deflationary monetary policy, tax increases – does that sound like a laissez-faire capitalist to you?

Ironically, Franklin Delano Roosevelt – whose New Deal policies were later revealed to have been taken straight out of Hoover’s playbook – won election by blasting his predecessor as “reckless and extravagant,” and presiding over “the greatest spending administration in peacetime in all of history.”Roosevelt, the “limited government” advocate, even bemoaned Hoover’s desire to “center control of everything in Washington.”Obviously, Roosevelt flip-flopped after he was elected and put Hoover’s interventionist approach on steroids – much as President Barack Obama has done with the failed bailout mentality of his predecessor.The reality, though, is that none of these leaders differ all that much in their ideological approach to recession.Now the question is this – does the big government approach work?Absolutely not.

Prior to the Great Depression, no American recession had lasted longer than four years. Most were over in two. The Great Depression dragged on for nearly twelve years, however, with unemployment reaching as high as 25% at one point. And just as it is doing now, government over-taxed and over-regulated the economy the whole way through, starving it of desperately needed capital while consolidating frightening levels of power in Washington.But that’s not the story told by government textbooks – just as it’s not the story that’s being told today by the America’s mainstream media.Politicians are relying on big government’s myth to make – and promote – some of the most monumentally foolhardy economic decisions in our nation’s history.

Frankly, it’s past time that we started telling the truth about our past – and applying common sense to the future.

Arab Israeli Conflict - forgotten facts

2009-04-12T08:36:00.000-07:00

Source: Steve Shamark

The term "Palestinian" is itself a masterful twisting of history. To portray themselves as indigenous, Arab settlers adopted the name of an ancient Mediterranean tribe, the Philistines ("Invaders" in Hebrew), that disappeared almost 3000 years ago. The connection between this tribe and modern day Arabs is nil. Romans, in order to conceal their shame and anger with rebellious regions, changed the references to Judea and Samaria by naming them Palestine.

1. Nationhood and Jerusalem - Israel became a nation in the 14th century B.C.E. Two thousand years before the rise of Islam.

2. Since 1272 B.C.E. the Jews have had dominion over the land for up to 1,000 years with a continuous Jewish presence in the land for the past 3,300 years.

3. The only Arab dominion since the Arab invasion and conquest in 635 C.E. lasted no more than 22 years.

4. King David founded the city of Jerusalem. Mohammed never came to Jerusalem.

5. For over 3,000 years, Jerusalem has been the Jewish capital. Jerusalem has never been the capital of any Arab or Muslim entity. Even when the Jordanians occupied Jerusalem, they never sought to make it their capital and Arab leaders did not come to visit.

6. Jerusalem is mentioned over 700 times in Tanach, the Jewish Holy Scriptures. Jerusalem is not mentioned once in the Koran.

7. Jews pray facing Jerusalem. Muslims pray facing Mecca (often with their backs toward Jerusalem).

8. In 1854, according to a report in the New York Tribune, Jews constituted two-thirds of the population of that holy city. (The source: A journalist on assignment in the Middle East that year for the Tribune. His name was Karl Marx. Yes, that Karl Marx.)

9. In 1867, Mark Twain took a tour of Palestine. This is how he described that land: "A desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds. A silent, mournful expanse. We never saw a human".

10. In 1882, official Ottoman Turk census figures showed that, in the entire Land of Israel, there were only 141 000 Muslims, both Arab and non-Arab.

11. A travel guide to Palestine and Syria was published in 1906 by Karl Baedeker; The book estimated the total population of Jerusalem at 60,000, of whom 7,000 were Muslims, 13,000 were Christians and 40,000 were Jews.

12. As the Jews came and drained the swamps and made the deserts bloom, Arabs followed. They came for jobs, for prosperity, for freedom. And, they came in large numbers.

13. In 1922, with what was widely acknowledged as the illegal separation of Trans-Jordan, the Jews were forbidden to settle on almost 77 per cent of the Palestine, while Arab settlement went unrestricted and encouraged by British mandatory authority.

14. Prior to the Second World War Mojli Amin, a member of the Arab Defense Committee for Palestine, proposed the idea "that all the Arabs of Palestine will leave and be divided up amongst the neighboring Arab countries. In exchange for this, all the Jews living in Arab countries will leave and come to Palestine."

15. Did you know that Saudi Arabia was not created until 1913, Lebanon until 1920? Iraq did not exist as a nation until 1932, Syria until 1941; the borders of Jordan were established in 1946 and Kuwait in 1961. Any of these nations that would say Israel is only a recent arrival would have to deny their own rights as recent arrivals as well. They did not exist as countries. They were all under the control of the Turks. Over 80 per cent of the original British Mandate land was given to Arabs without population transfer of Arabs from the land designated for Jews.

16. In 1947, the Jewish state huddled on 18 per cent of the original British Mandate land. The Jews accepted it gratefully. The Arabs rejected it with a vengeance and seven Arab states immediately declared war against Israel.

17. In 1948, the Arab refugees were encouraged to leave Israel by Arab leaders promising to purge the land of Jews. Most of them left in fear of being killed by their own Arab brothers as traitors.

18. Some 850,000 Jewish refugees were forced to flee from Arab countries, due to Arab brutality, persecution and pogroms.

19. The number of Arab refugees who left Israel in 1948 is claimed to be around 630,000 (where did they get this number?). Based on population census, estimated number of Arabs who left Israel was around 460,000. They were ordered to leave by Arab leaders at the time.

20. From 1948 till 1967 Arabs made no attempt to create a Palestinian state. Under Jordanian rule, Jewish holy sites were desecrated, 58 synagogues in Jerusalem were destroyed and the Jews and Christians were denied access to places of worship. Under Israeli rule, all Muslim and Christian sites have been preserved and made accessible to people of all faiths.

21. Arabs began identifying themselves as part of a Palestinian people in 1964 only, on the initiative of Egyptian-born Yasser Arafat. The idea became popular Arab propaganda tool after Israel re-captured Judea, Samaria and Gaza in the defensive 6-Day War of 1967.

22. Out of the 100,000,000 refugees since World War II, Arab-Palestinians are the only refugee group in the world that has never been absorbed or integrated into their own peoples' lands. Jewish refugees were completely absorbed into Israel.

23. Arab refugees INTENTIONALLY were not absorbed or integrated by the rich Arab oil states that control 99.9 per cent of the Middle East landmass. They are kept as virtual prisoners by the Arab power brokers with misplaced hatred for Jews and Western democracy.

24. There is only one Jewish state. There are 60 Muslim countries, including 22 Arab nations.

25. The PLO's Charter still calls for the destruction of the State of Israel.

26. Pan-Arabism or the doctrine of Muslim Caliphate declares that all land that used to belong to Muslims must be returned to them. Thus, Spain, for example, must eventually be re-conquered.

An Eye Witness Account of the Armenian Genocide

2009-04-12T08:27:00.000-07:00

As written by Grigoris Balakian

The German officers on their way to Palestine and the Mesopotamian front had no choice but to pass before the Bagche [Asia Minor] station [train]. All of them used offensive language with regard to the Armenians. They considered us to be engaging in intrigue, ready to strike the Turkish army from the rear, and thus traitors to the fatherland…deserving of all manner of punishment.

Although most of the Armenians living in Turkey had been deported, scattered, and martyred in the spring of 1915, a few hundred thousand survivors still perishing in the deserts to the south—wasting away to nothing. Nevertheless the German officers’ Armenophobic fury continued, and not a word of compassion was heard from their lips. On the contrary, they justified the Ittihad government, saying, “You Armenians deserve your punishment. Any state would have punished rebellious subjects who took up arms to realize national hopes by the destruction of the country.”
When we objected, asking if other states would dare to massacre women and children, along with men, and annihilate an entire race on account of a few guilty people, they replied: “Yes, it’s true that the punishment was a bit severe, but you must realize that during such chaotic and frightful days of war as these, it was difficult to find the time and means to separate the guilty from the innocent.” This was also the merciless answer of the chief executioners—Talaat, Enver, Behaeddin Shakir, Nazim—and their Ittihad camarilla.

The German officers pretended ignorance of the widespread slaughter of more than a million innocent Armenians, irrespective of sex and age, and referred only to deaths by starvation and the adversities of travel during the deportations. Thus they exonerated the Turkish government, saying that its inability to provide for hundreds of thousands of deportees in a disorganized land like Asia Minor was not surprising. Meanwhile Turkish government officials prevented the starving refugees from receiving bread distributed by the Austrians and Swiss, stating, “Orders have come from Constantinople not to give any assistance. We cannot allow either bread or medicine to be given. The supreme order is to annihilate this evil race. How dare you rescue them from death?” The German officers would often speak of us as Christian Jews and as blood sucking usurers of the Turkish people.

What a falsification of the wretched realities prevailing in Asia Minor, and what a reversal of roles! Yes indeed, there was an oppressor. Either the Germans were consciously distorting the facts and roles, or the Turks had really convinced them that the Turks were the victims and the Armenians were criminals. How appropriate it is to recall here this pair of Turkish sayings: “The clever thief has the master of the house hanged” and “The one who steals the minaret prepares its sheath in advance, of course.”

Many German officers had no qualms about turning over to the Turkish authorities Armenian youths who had sought refuge with them; they knew full well that they were delivering them to their executioners. If an Armenian merely spoke negatively about a German—be he the emperor or [Baron] von der Goltz Pasha [a German military aide to the Ottoman Empire], or the average German—or dared to criticize German indifference toward the Armenian massacres, he was immediately arrested and turned over to the nearest Turkish military or police authority. And if the Germans found a certain Armenian particularly irritating, they pinned the label of spy on him.

Mistaking me for an Austrian, a few German officers boasted of having turned over several Armenians to the Turkish police, adding with a laugh, “Only the Turks know how to talk to the Armenians.”

Bias in the Movie Kingdom of Heaven

2009-04-12T08:22:00.000-07:00

Taken from Zombie Times

The Controversy Begins The controversy over this film was first revealed in this eye-opening article in the British newspaper The Telegraph in January of 2004. In it, highly respected historians are quoted as saying the film is "complete fiction" and "panders to Osama bin Laden":
Sir Ridley Scott, the Oscar-nominated director, was savaged by senior British academics last night over his forthcoming film which they say "distorts" the history of the Crusades to portray Arabs in a favourable light.

The £75 million film, which stars Orlando Bloom, Jeremy Irons and Liam Neeson, is described by the makers as being "historically accurate" and designed to be "a fascinating history lesson". Academics, however - including Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, Britain's leading authority on the Crusades - attacked the plot of Kingdom of Heaven, describing it as "rubbish", "ridiculous", "complete fiction" and "dangerous to Arab relations". The film, which began shooting last week in Spain, is set in the time of King Baldwin IV (1161-1185), leading up to the Battle of Hattin in 1187 when Saladin conquered Jerusalem for the Muslims.

The script depicts Baldwin's brother-in-law, Guy de Lusignan, who succeeds him as King of Jerusalem, as "the arch-villain". A further group, "the Brotherhood of Muslims, Jews and Christians", is introduced, promoting an image of cross-faith kinship. "They were working together," the film's spokesman said. "It was a strong bond until the Knights Templar caused friction between them." The Knights Templar, the warrior monks, are portrayed as "the baddies" while Saladin, the Muslim leader, is a "a hero of the piece", Sir Ridley's spokesman said. "At the end of our picture, our heroes defend the Muslims, which was historically correct." Prof Riley-Smith, who is Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge University, said the plot was "complete and utter nonsense".

He said that it relied on the romanticised view of the Crusades propagated by Sir Walter Scott in his book The Talisman, published in 1825 and now discredited by academics. "It sounds absolute balls. It's rubbish. It's not historically accurate at all. They refer to The Talisman, which depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality." Prof Riley-Smith added: "...There was never a confraternity of Muslims, Jews and Christians.

That is utter nonsense." Dr Jonathan Philips, a lecturer in history at London University and author of The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople...said: "The Templars as 'baddies' is only sustainable from the Muslim perspective..." Dr Philips said that by venerating Saladin, who was largely ignored by Arab history until he was reinvented by romantic historians in the 19th century, Sir Ridley was following both Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assad, the former Syrian dictator. Both leaders commissioned huge portraits and statues of Saladin, who was actually a Kurd, to bolster Arab Muslim pride. Prof Riley-Smith added that Sir Ridley's efforts were misguided and pandered to Islamic fundamentalism. "It's Osama bin Laden's version of history. It will fuel the Islamic fundamentalists." ...Sir Ridley's spokesman said that the film portrays the Arabs in a positive light. "It's trying to be fair and we hope that the Muslim world sees the rectification of history."...

This article was noted briefly in the blogosphere (most notably on Dhimmi Watch, and a short but funny parody of the script by Blogger Ben Kepple, who tossed a Buddhist into Scott's "nonsensical" religious Rainbow Coalition), but the film was still a year and a half away from release at that point, so there was otherwise little comment in the media.

Dor the rest go to: http://www.zombietime.com/kingdom_of_heaven/

Top Forty Chemists of All-Time

2009-03-02T18:50:00.000-08:00

Just my Opinion....

1.Dmitri Mendeleyev - Russian - Devised the Periodic table of elements. Predicted that several more elements would be discovered.

2.Antoine Lavoisier - French - Showed that air is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen. Disproved the old Theory of phlogiston and determined the nature of combustion. Lavoisier wrote the first modern book on chemistry and explained the law of conservation of matter.

3.Henry Cavendish - English - Showed that water could be produced from two gases. Discovered hydrogen.

4. Amedeo Avogadro - Italian - First to distinguish molecules from atoms. Developed Avogadro's Constant (The number of particles of a substance in a mole). Studied the effect of combining volumes.

5. Jons Jakob Berzelius - Swedish - Developed the symbols for many of the chemicals. Calculated the atomic weights accurately of many of them and discovered Selenium, Silicon and Thorium.

6. John Dalton - English - Developed an atomic theory of matter and explained the laws of partial pressure.

7. Robert Boyle - Irish - Studied gases and showed how Pressure and volume at constant mass were indirectly proportional to one another.

8. Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac and Jacques Charles - Both French - Studied gases. Showed that gas volume at constant pressure increases with Temperature.

9. Friederich Wöhler - German - Father of Organic Chemistry. He was the first chemist to synthesize an organic compound, Urea.

10. Carl Scheele - Swedish - Co-discover of oxygen with Joseph Priestley. Also discovered chlorine, manganese and molybdenum.

11. Marie Curie - Polish - Isolated radioactive elements radium and polonium.

12. Josiah Gibbs - American - Founder of Chemical Thermodynamics.

13. Jacobus van't Hoff - Dutch - Thermodynamicist. He was one of the earlier chemists to speak about the 3-D nature of molecules.

14. Frederick Sanger - English - Biochemist. Revealed the Amino sequence for insulin. Worked out methods for determining the molecular structure of nucleic acids. Two time Nobel Prize winner.

15. Humphry Davy - English - Showed the connection between electrochemistry and the elements. Discovered the elements Potassium, Sodium, Barium, Calcium and Magnesium amongst others.

16. Joseph Priestley - English - Oxygen co-discoverer. See Scheele.

17. Henri Le Chatelier - French - Developed principle that every change in a stable chemical equilibrium will result in a shift in the direction of the equilibrium to reduce the effects of the change.

18. Frederick Soddy - English - Introduced the isotope theory of elements.

19. Svante Arrhenius - Sweden - Established modern electrochemistry.

20. Germain Hess - Swiss/Russian - Introduced Hess's Law for determining the heat of reactions.

21.Wilhelm Ostwald - Latvian - Discovered Dilution law. Invented process to make nitric acid by oxidizing ammonia. He also developed a theory of colour.

22. Daniel Rutherford - Scottish - Discoverer of Nitrogen.

23. Friederich Kekulé - German - Organic Chemist. Described the ring structure of benzene.

24. Stanislao Cannizzaro - Italian - Established the use of Atomic weights in Chemical formulas and calculations.

25. Linus Pauling - American - Applied Quantum Theory to determine Chemical Structure (especially of proteins). Showed how electrons effect the formation of molecules.

26. Johannes Brønsted - Danish and Thomas Lowry - English - Independently introduced the Brønsted - Lowry definition of an acid as something that donates a proton and a base as something that accepts a proton.

27. Leo Baekland - Belgian/American - Father of the Plastics Industry.

28. William Ramsay - Scottish - Co-discovered Argon with Lord Rayleigh. Was first to identify, helium, neon, krypton and xenon.

29. Henri Moissan - French - Isolated fluorine. Invented the electric furnace. Discovered carborundum and produced artificial diamonds in a laboratory.

30. Theodore Richards - American - Performed extensive work on atomic weights to reveal the existence of isotopes.

31. Dorothy Hodgkin - English - Crystallographer. Used x-ray crystallography to reveal the structure of such molecules as penicillin and insulin.

32. Thomas Graham - Scottish - Developed Graham's Law of Diffusion. Founder of Colloidal Chemistry.

33. Fritz Haber - German - Invented the process to make ammonia from nitrogen in the air. Known as the Haber process. Invention allowed Germany to continue making explosives after World War I ban in spite of the blockade on the importation of nitrates.

34. Irving Langmuir - American. High Temperature chemist. Work lead to the development of the tungsten lamp. Also studied gases. Research in this field would have practical implications with respect to the use of atomic hydrogen in welding torches.

35. Peter Debye - Dutch - Worked as well on molecular structure. Pioneered x-ray powder photography.

36. Harold Urey - American - Isolated Heavy water and discovered deuterium.

37. Paul Flory - American - Leading figure in the field of Polymerization. Studied properties of plastics, ribbers and fibers.

38. William Perkin - English - Chemist noted for his work on dyes. Invented mauve.

39. George Washington Carver - American - Agricultural chemist. Research involved the synthesis of products from peanuts, sweet potatoes and soybeans.

40. François Raoult - French - Developed law which relates vapor pressure of a solution to the number of molecules of solute dissolved in it.

Honouring Cuba's Heroes

2009-02-21T05:16:00.000-08:00

Author: Humberto Fontova
Source: http://brookesnews.com/091602castrocemetry.html

You'll often find people with itchy noses and red-rimmed eyes ambling amidst the long rows of white crosses at Miami’s Tamiami Park on Coral Way and 107 Avenue. It's a mini-Arlington cemetery called the Cuban Memorial, and it stands in honor of the tens of thousands of murder victims of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. It is a tribute, too, to those who fell while trying to free Cuba from the barbarism that the two imposed with their Soviet overlords while America’s "best and brightest" dithered, bumbled and finally betrayed the Cuban people. The tombs are symbolic. Most of the bodies still lie in mass graves.

Some of these Cuban Memorial's visitors will be kneeling, others walking slowly, looking for a name. You may remember a similar scene from the opening frames of Saving Private Ryan. Many clutch rosaries. Many of the ladies will be pressing their faces into the breast of a relative who drove them there, a relative who wraps his arms around her spastically heaving shoulders. Try as he might not to cry himself, he usually finds that the sobs wracking his mother, grandmother or aunt are contagious. Yet he's often too young to remember the face of his martyred uncle, father or cousin — the name they just recognized on the white cross. "Fusilado" — firing squad execution — it says below it.

There are 14,000 crosses in all, symbolizing those executed on the orders of the man being swamped and feted by U.S. trade delegations from Louisiana to Nebraska to Maine. Even many of the older men walking among these crosses will be red-eyed, choked up. No denying it, we Cubans are an emotional people and not ashamed to show it, at the proper time.

The elderly lady still holds a tissue to her eyes and nose as they wait to cross the street after leaving the memorial. Her red-eyed grandson still has his arm around her. She told him about how his freedom-fighter grandfather yelled "Viva Cuba Libre!" and "Viva Cristo Rey!" the instant before the volley shattered his body. They cross the street slowly, silently, and run into a dreadlocked youth coming out of a music store. His T-shirt sports the face of her husband's cowardly executioner, Che Guevara. They turn their heads in rage toward the store window. Well, there's the murderer's face again, on a huge poster, $19.95 it says at the bottom, right next to the inscription "Fight Oppression!" You, friends, tell me how she might feel.

Another woman will go home after placing flowers under her father's cross — a father she never knew. "Killed in action, Bay of Pigs, April 18th, 1961" reads the inscription on his cross. She was 2 at the time. "We will not be evacuated!" yelled her father's commander into his radio that day, as 41,000 Red Troops and swarms of Stalin tanks closed the ring on her father and his 1,400 utterly abandoned Band of Brothers. "The Best and Brightest" all had important social engagements that day.

"We came here to Fight!" her father's commander kept yelling at the enraged and heartsick CIA man offering to evacuate them from the doomed beachhead. "Let it end here!" was his last yell, barely audible over the deafening blasts from the storm of Soviet artillery. Her 23-year-old father — an accountant in Cuba a year before, a dish washer in a Miami Hotel only two months before, and now grim-faced, thirst-crazed and delirious after three days of continuous ground combat — heard the order from his commander: "No Retreat! We Stand and Fight!" and rammed in his last clip. By then he'd long realized he'd never see his daughter's graduation.
His ammo expended, he fell among the bodies of 100 of his comrades, after mauling his communist enemies to the score of 20 to one. "Wimps! Yes, Wimps!" the woman hears Michael Moore label her father and his Band of Brothers in one of America's best-selling books. "Crybabies too!" Again, friends, you tell me how she might feel.

Castro murdered her relatives, shattered her family and plunged a nation — which had double Japan's per capita income in 1958, plus net immigration from Europe — into a pesthole that repels even half-starved Haitians. He jailed, tortured and murdered more political prisoners than pre-war Hitler, and about 20 times as many as Mussolini. He asked, pleaded and finally tried to cajole Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, the “Butcher of Budapest,” into a nuclear strike against America. Failing there, he tried to blow up Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomingdales and Grand Central Station with more TNT than used by the Madrid subway terrorists.

Yet Fidel Castro is still hailed as "One Helluva Guy" by Ted Turner; as "Very likable, a man I regard as a friend!" by George McGovern; and "Way Too Cool!" by Bonnie Raitt, among dozens upon dozens of other accolades by dozens of other liberal scoundrels and imbeciles. Today the U.S. is his biggest food supplier.

Tens of thousands of Cubans (and dozens of Americans) fought him. "We were fighting for Cuba's freedom as well as America's defense. To call us mercenaries is a grave insult," says Alabama Air Guard officer Albert Persons about his and his Alabama comrades' heroism during the battle of The Bay of Pigs. The Kennedy administration might abandon our comrades out, they snorted. We sure as hell won't.

It was more than bluster, too. Four U.S. volunteers — Pete Ray, Riley Shamburger, Leo Barker and Wade Grey — suited up, gunned the engines and joined the fight. These were Southern boys, not pampered Ivy Leaguers, so there was no navel-gazing. They had archaic notions of right and wrong, of honor and loyalty, of who America's enemies really are. Their Cuban comrades — men they'd trained and befriended — were being slaughtered on that beachhead. Knowing their lumbering B-26s were sitting ducks for Castro's unmolested jets and Sea Furies, all four Alabama air guard volunteers flew over the doomed beachhead to lend support to their betrayed brothers in arms.

All four were shot down. All four have their names in a place of honor next to their Cuban comrades on The Bay of Pigs Memorial, plus streets named after them in Little Havana, plus their crosses at the Cuban Memorial. When Doug MacArthur waded ashore on Leyte, he grabbed a radio: "People of the Philippines: I have returned. By the grace of Almighty God our forces stand again on Philippine soil – soil consecrated in the blood of our two peoples." Cuban soil was similarly consecrated.

"My hatred of Bolshevism and Bolsheviks is not founded on their silly system of economics or their absurd doctrine of an impossible equality," wrote Winston Churchill. "It arises from the bloody and devastating terrorism which they practice in every land into which they have broken, and by which alone their criminal regime can be maintained." Sir Winston Churchill did not lose a single family member or close friend to that "bloody and devastating terrorism."

Yet to this day his every utterance and note is revered as an exemplar of judiciousness and heroism. But let a Cuban-American who lost half his family to Communist firing squads and prisons express the identical sentiment and he's promptly denounced by liberals as a "screaming, irrational hothead!" "Disgusting!" spat Bryant Gumbel while watching Cuban-American demonstrators in front of Elian Gonzalez's uncle's house six years ago.

Some very dedicated and selfless folks are holding a memorial service, including a Mass and vigil at the Cuban Memorial in Miami's Tamiami Park this weekend. The service is open to the public. Attend and you'll be surrounded by a sea of crosses, many heroes and heroines, along with their surviving friends and kin. If ever a group merited a memorial service, it's those here honored. Even if you're not related to any of these folks, even if their story is new to you, attend and you'll honor heroes who fought America's most rabid enemy — and for good measure poke a sharp finger into the eye of the establishment Left.

KGB killers enjoy life in Canada

2009-02-21T05:09:00.000-08:00

Author: Lubomyr Luciuk
Source: Winnipeg Free Press

They called themselves Chekists -- the sword and shield of the Soviet Union. They were proud of what they were. Some served as concentration camp guards. Others were executioners. Many were just clerks or cooks or those ordinary guys who mop up the mess after the torturers are done.

Over the years they had different names -- Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, SMERSH and, most notoriously, KGB. Yet their job description didn't change. They were killers. They murdered whomever their masters wanted dead. Their victims numbered in the many millions.
There were decades when they were more active, years when they were less so, but they were always there. Some of their leaders were sadists, like Nikolai Yezhov, a bisexual dwarf who told Nikita Khrushchev during a Kremlin meeting that his shirtsleeves were speckled because he had spent the night torturing an "enemy of the people." Yezhov was later shot, at Stalin's command.
In Yalta, chatting with President Roosevelt, Stalin described Lavrentii Beria, Yezhov's successor, as "our Himmler." Beria was later executed on Khrushchev's orders.
Those who live by the sword die by the sword is a sharp saying. Unfortunately, it's not always true. Not only are some veterans of Stalin's secret police alive, but they are in Canada. One could be your neighbour.
Their presence among us is not news. It has been known for years. How many there are is not certain. Probably not hundreds. Yet even one is one too many.
Remarkably, they haven't been hiding. A few have boasted publicly about what they did. One wrote a book, obligingly including a photograph posing in his NKVD lieutenant's uniform. Another described her role in a SMERSH execution squad.
An intrepid journalist broke this story in a national Canadian newspaper in April 2005. Yet after that original exposé, all followup stories were spiked. Even more intriguing is that the RCMP's war crimes unit, asked to investigate allegations about Communist collaborators in Canada, responded with the rather limp finding that they had insufficient evidence upon which to act.
That reply took more than three years to draft. Apparently when a man admits he was in the NKVD and brags about the people he did in and provides his memoirs in English in a book available in libraries across the land, the Mounties don't define that as proof of any wrongdoing. Maybe they're waiting for Hollywood to turn the manuscript into a movie.

After the Second World War, screening procedures were supposed to exclude Nazis and Communists from Canada, with no exceptions. So if a man declares he was in the NKVD and broadcasts that fact from Toronto, either he is a liar or else he lied to get into Canada, probably disguising his own complicity in war crimes by pretending to be a victim. The only other explanation for him being here is that Ottawa allowed such ruffians to immigrate. In any case, we know some Communist killers are here. Legally, they shouldn't be.

All of Stalin's minions are now elderly. Yet it's not too late to see justice done. They deserve no more mercy than they meted out. And remember, they were not forced to serve -- they volunteered. Since they have no right to be here, they should be expelled to whence they came. They can then finish out their lives as burdens upon those they served. I'd bet they won't find Moscow or Minsk as comfortable as Montreal.

Canadians are a compassionate people. Not only do we strive to do what's right, we also honour the righteous. We did in 1985, when Canada conferred honourary citizenship on Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. Yet it was not the Nazis who did him in. SMERSH agents abducted Wallenberg in Budapest in January 1945, then carted him off to the notorious Lubyanka prison.

Probably no one now here was directly involved, yet all who served Stalin in those days are complicit. Whatever they did elsewhere indirectly made it possible for their comrades to kidnap and kill Wallenberg. No one wants such scoundrels here. You'd think a Conservative government would get that. Apparently they don't. They will.

On Muslim Science

2009-02-21T05:05:00.000-08:00

TAKEN FROM:
http://www.csicop.org/sb/2002-03/inklings.html
Author: Lewis Jones

Muslim science? On the face of it, it seems as incongruous as Christian physics or Jewish oceanography. But can Islam plead a special case? A popular element along these lines has always been Islam's historical track record. When Ziauddin Sardar published his thoughts on the subject in New Scientist almost a quarter of a century ago, he titled his article, not "Can science come to Islam?" but "Can science come back to Islam?"
In the words of F.R. Rosenthal (The Classical Heritage of Islam): "Islamic rational scholarship, which we have mainly in mind when we speak of the greatness of Muslim civilization, depends in its entirety on classical antiquity . . . Islamic civilization as we know it would simply not have existed without the Greek heritage."
Ibn Warraq, author of Why I Am Not a Muslim, points out: "Islamic science was founded on the works of the ancient Greeks, and the Muslims are important as the transmitters of Greek (and Hindu) learning that may well have been lost otherwise" (Aristotle, Plato, Galen, Hippocrates, Archimedes, Euclid, Ptolemy). And even so, "most of the translators were Christian."
Warraq writes: "There is a persistent myth that Islam encouraged science. Adherents of this myth quote the Koran and hadith [traditional sayings of Muhammad] to prove their point . . . 'Seek knowledge, in China if necessary'; 'The search after knowledge is obligatory for every Muslim.' This is nonsense, because the knowledge advocated in the previous quotes is religious knowledge. Orthodoxy has always been suspicious of 'knowledge for its own sake,' and unfettered inquiry is deemed dangerous to the faith. . . . All sciences are blameworthy that are useless for acting rightly toward God."
"Those who kill do not think they are committing any crime," said Girija Shankar Jaiswal (a lawyer who argues cases for victimized women). "They think they are becoming martyrs. They do not mind going to jail."
Al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham was one of the greatest scientists of medieval Islam, and his "Optics" strongly influenced Kepler. The French philologist Ernest Renan wrote: "A disciple of Maimonides, the Jewish philosopher, relates that he was in Baghdad on business, when the library of a certain philosopher (who died in 1214) was burned there. The preacher, who conducted the execution of the sentence, threw into the flames, with his own hands, an astronomical work of Ibn al-Haitham, after he had pointed to a delineation therein given of the sphere of the earth, as an unhappy symbol of impious Atheism."
One is reminded of the nineteenth century English politician John Morley, discussing the life of Voltaire: "Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat."
In the twelfth century Averroes studied medicine and philosophy, and his work on Aristotle was responsible for the development of the inductive, empirical sciences. His reward was to be tried as a heretic, condemned, and exiled. Yet his name is often put forward as being at the forefront of the Islamic history of science.
Renan begged to differ: "To give Islam the credit of Averroes and so many other illustrious thinkers, who passed half their life in prison, in forced hiding, in disgrace, whose books were burned and whose writings almost suppressed by theological authority, are as if one were to ascribe to the Inquisition the discoveries of Galileo, and a whole scientific development which it was not able to prevent."
There is also a current line of thought that assumes Islamic science has been "hijacked" by fundamentalists, and that all ills can be conveniently attributed to them. But shifting the burden of anti-science to an isolated hard-core fundamentalist group evades the central issue. Taslima Nasreen had a government warrant issued for her arrest in Bangladesh (for "outraging religious feelings"), and has some experience of official Muslim displeasure. "I don't find any difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalists," she says. ". . . I need to say that, because some liberals always defend Islam and blame fundamentalists for creating problems."
In New Scientist (15 December 2001), Ziauddin Sardar reported: "One particular study, sponsored by the International Federation of Institutes of Advanced Studies (IFIAS) in Stockholm brought together Muslim scientists and scholars worldwide in seminars held between 1980 and 1983. The IFIAS study, published as The Touch of Midas, concluded that the issue of science and values in Islam must be treated within a framework of concepts that shape the goals of a Muslim society."
Sardar also reports that the early 1990s brought a shift into obscurantism by the defenders of Muslim science: "it began to be argued that all knowledge, including scientific knowledge, could be found in the Koran. This thesis received a tremendous boost from the well-funded Saudi project, Scientific Miracles in the Qur'an (Koran). The project spanned both empirical work, involving comparisons of those verses of the Koran that deal with astronomy and embryology with the latest discoveries, and popularizations through conferences and seminars. Relativity, quantum mechanics, big bang theory, embryology-practically everything was 'discovered' in the Koran."
In summary: "science becomes not a problem-solving enterprise or objective enquiry, but a mystical quest to understand the Absolute. Conjecture and hypothesis have no real place; all enquiry must be subordinate to the mystical experience."
Nor are there any visible prospects that there will even be open debate in print on the subject. It is a numbing thought that there does not exist a single secular Arabic periodical. In any case, debates that revolve around the concept of heresy are unlikely to lead anywhere worth reaching.
"The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas-uncertainty, progress, change-into crimes." Those are the words of Salman Rushdie in his Herbert Reade Memorial lecture in February of 1990, while in hiding from a fatwa for blasphemy.

90 Most Influential philosophers of All-Time

2009-01-22T18:19:00.000-08:00

My Opinion Again:

1. Socrates - He Taught us to question.
2. Abraham - Father of Western Monotheism.
3. Confucius - Created the structure upon which China is modeled.
4. Jesus Christ - The Center Point of Christianity.
5. Mohammed - Father of Islam.
6. Buddha (Siddhartha Gatama) - He taught us about moderation.
7. Aristotle - A wonderful classifier of knowledge.
8. Plato - Author of the Republic.
9. Georg Hegel - Champion of the Dialectic.
10. Martin Luther - He galvanized the Reformation.
11. Voltaire - One has to love his satire.
12. St. Augustine - The central qualifier of Church orthodoxy.
13. Friederich Nietzche - Journeyed with us Beyond Good and Evil . He threw Absolute Morality on its head.
14. John Locke - Empiricist writings are crucial to Western Democracy.
15. Niccolo Machiavelli - In the Prince he described the rationale of the power holders.
16. Rene Descartes - In a sense Descartes and Cartesian thought are the basis for Modern Science.
17. Francis Bacon - A pioneer in the legal world he also stressed the importance of inductive methodology in scientific research.
18. Immanuel Kant - No, he wasn't a real 'pissant' as the Monty Python Song goes but a critical figure in our understanding of reason, ethics and aesthetics.
19. Adam Smith - He put in words the workings of the market economy.
20. John Stuart Mill - Great voice on liberty and utilitarianism.
21. Karl Marx - Birth figure of Dialectic Materialism.
22. Carl Jung - One of my favourite philosophers. Spoke about the collective unconscious and the psyche as a self regulating system.
23. John Wycliffe - Early Church reformer.
24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Author of the Social Contract.
25. Mohandas K Gandhi - Indian Champion of Passive Resistance.
26. St. Thomas Aquinas - Wrote Summa contra Gentiles and Summa theologiae. The latter has a five point proof for the existence of God.
27. David Hume - Empiricist philosopher. Extended work of Locke and Berkley.
28. Mary Wollstonecraft - Feminist. Wrote Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
29. Sören Kierkegaard - Danish Philosopher. Specialized in existence making choices.
30. Martin Heidegger - Changed philosophy with his classification of 'being'.
31. Baruch Spinoza - Dutch Rationalist.
32. Erasmus - Scholar. One of the leading figures in renaissance philosophy.
33. Zeno - One of the leading proponents of Stoicism.
34. Philo - Hellenistic Jewish philosopher. Works bought together Hebrew scripture and Greek writings.
35. Lao-tzu - Early Chinese Libertarian.
36. Maimonides - A wonderful voice for Jewish thought.
37. Thomas Hobbes - Political Philosopher. Famous for the Leviathan.
38. Mencius - He took the mantle of Confucius to the next level.
39. Pythagoras - Polymath. His work influenced music, math and the concept of the soul.
40. Arthur Schopenhauer - He rejected Hegel's idea and emphasized the role of human will.
41. Ludwig Wittgenstein - His Tractatus logico-philosophicus looked at the role of language in philosophy.
42. Gottfried Leibniz - Well Renowned generalist. Rationalist Philosopher.
43. Edmund Husserl - Founder of the School of phenomenology.
44. Plotinus - Father of Neoplatonism. Advocated asceticism and the contemplative life.
45. Thomas More - Humanist scholar. Wrote Utopia.
John Calvin - Church reformer. Proclaimed a Protestant Confession of Faith. Emphasized moral severity.
46. David Hume - Empiricist philosopher. Extended work of Locke and Berkley.
47. Sigmund Freud - Father of Psychoanalysis.
48. Edmund Burke - British statesman. Writings influenced the American revolution.
49. John Dewey - Philosopher and Educator. Leading thinker in pragmatism school.
50. Tom Paine - Revolutionary Philosopher. Wrote the Rights of Man.
51. Bertrand Russell - Philosopher/Mathematician/Pacifist. Wrote Principia mathematica with A.N. Whitehead.
52. Thales - Greek natural philosopher. Some see him as the first philosopher.
53. William of Ockham - Scholastic philosopher. Said that 'entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.'
54. Peter Abelard - Philosopher and scholar. Was condemned by the Church for his Nominalistic doctrines.
55. Auguste Comte - Father of Sociology.
56. Diogenes - Ancient Greek Cynic and austere ascetic.
57. Averroes - Arab philosopher. Wrote commentaries on Aristotle and effected both Jewish and Christian thought.
58. Simone de Beauvoir - French Feminist. Wrote The Second Sex.
59. Henri Bergson - French philosopher. Contrasted the fundamental reality of the dynamic flux of consciousness with the inert physical world of discrete objects. Wrote about the 'creative impulse'.
60. Boethius - Roman philosopher. Spoke about the mutability of all Earthly fortune. His book Consolation was the most widely read book for its time after the Bible.
61. Heraclitus - Early Greek philosopher. Argued that all things consist of opposites eg. hot/cold, wet/dry etc.
62. Max Weber - Sociologist and economist. Spoke about the Protestant Ethic.
George Lukacs - Marxist philosopher. Influential in literary criticism and Socialist Realism.
63. Epicurus - Greek Philosopher. Argued that pleasure is the chief good, By pleasure he meant the absence of pain.
64. Jean-Paul Sartre - French Existentialist Bulldog.
65. Avicenna - Arab Philosopher/physician. Interpreted the works of Aristotle.
66. Protagoras - Greek sophist. Presented a system of practical philosophy designed to train people for their duties as citizens.
67. Jeremy Bentham - An important Utilitarian figure.
68. George Santayana - Philosopher, writer and novelist. Wrote The Life of Reason.
69. Antonio Gramsci - Political Philosopher, Important socialist figure.
70. Baron Montesquieu - Liberal philosopher influenced French Revolution.
71. Marcus Aurelius - Roman Emperor. Stoic. Influenced both law and philosophy.
72. St Jerome - Early Christian philosopher.
73. Georges Sorel - Social philosopher. Argued that serious political opposition must resort to violence.
74. Kurt Gödel - Logician. Showed that any formal logical system adequate for number theory must contain propositions not provable in that system.
75. Thomas Kuhn - Philosopher. Historian of science.
76. Henry Thoreau - American essayist and transadentalist.
77. Willard Quine - Philosopher and logician. Challenged distinction between analysis and synthetic truths and between science and metaphysics.
78. Karl Popper - Philosopher of Science - Fasification Notion.
79. Franz Brentano - Developed doctrine of 'intentionality' characterizing mental events as involving the 'direction of the mind to an object'.
80. George Berkley - Philosopher/Anglican bishop. Argued that 'to be is to be perceived'.
81. Michel Foucalt - Modern French philosopher. Wrote Madness and Civilization and The Order of Things.
82. Seneca - Roman Stoic.
83. William James - Pragmatist. Involved in both philosophy and psychology.
84. Martin Buber - Zionist thinker and existentialist.
85. Friederich Hayek - Economist/Philosopher. Strong opponent of government intervention in free market.
86. Jurgen Habermas - Philosopher and social theorist.
87. Alfred Whitehead - Philosopher and Mathematician. Worked with Bertrand Russell on Principia mathematica.
88. Gottlob Frege - Set up a complete system for symbolic logic
89. Jacques Derrida - French Deconstructionist.
90. Thomas à Kempis - Religious writer. Wrote The Imitation of Christ (1415-1424).

African-Americans

2009-01-22T18:13:00.001-08:00

Other than Barack Obama here is a list (in my opinion) of the 40+ Most Influential African-Americans of All-Time

Martin Luther King - Clergyman and Civil rights Leader. Won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Rosa Parkes - Civil Rights figure. Actions led to Selma bus boycott.
Thurgood Marshall - First Black American to sit on US Supreme Court.
Louis Armstrong - Pioneering Jazz Musician.
Muhammed Ali - Greatest Boxer of All Time.
Harriet Tubman - Founder of Underground Railroad.
WEB Du Bois - Civil Rights Advocate.
George Washington Carver - Scientist.
Frederick Douglass - Writer, Abolitionist and Political philosopher.
Colin Powell - General and Secretary of State . First Black American to head US Armed forces.
Coretta Scott King - Civil Rights advocate.
George Washington Carver - Scientist. Specialized in Agricultural problems.
Malcolm X - African-American nationalist leader.
Benjamin Banneker - Mathematician and Astronomer.
Ralph Ellison - Author. Wrote the Invisible Man.
James Baldwin - Author. Wrote Go Tell it on the Monuntains.
Jackie Robinson - Baseball Player. First Black American to play in the Major Leagues.
Marcus Garvey - Founder of the Back to Africa Movement.
Medger Evers - Civil Rights Leader.
Jesse Owens - Athlete. Embarrassed Hitler in 1936 Olympic Games.
Nat Turner - Slave Rebellion Leader.
Duke Ellington - Jazz Musician.
Hank Aaron - Baseball's All Time Great.
Oprah Winfrey - Talk Show host and cultural phenomenon.
Maya Angelou - Writer/Poet. Wrote I know why the Caged Bird Sings.
Alex Haley - Author. Wrote the novel Roots.
Andrew Young - Politician. Former US representative to the UN.
Asa Randolph - Labour and Civil Rights Leader. Formed the first African-American trade union known as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.
Michael Jordan - Greatest Basketball player of All Time.
Jessie Jackson - Civil Rights leader. Former presidential candidate.
Ralph Abernethy - Clergyman and Civil Rights leader.
Arthur Ashe - Tennis great and civil rights advocate.
Toni Morrison - Nobel Prize Winner. Author. Wrote Song of Solomon.
Black Panthers (Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and gang) - Political Activists.
Jim Brown - Greatest Football star of All-Time.
Ralph Bunche - Diplomat. Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Tiger Woods - Golfing sensation. Maybe the greatest Golfer of All Time.
Chuck Berry - Rock Musician.
Whitney Young - social reformer. Wrote To Be Equal and Beyond Racism.
Bill Cosby - Comedian.

An Exclusive Club in the White House

2009-01-21T12:11:00.000-08:00

THE CLUB that Barack Obama now joins has traditionally been far more exclusive than just all white and all male. There has never been an Italian, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Russian, Greek, Spaniard, or Hispanic elected to the White House. No descendent of the great waves of immigration from southern and eastern Europe that washed over this country in the 19th century has ever made it. Most presidential ancestors came from earlier, 18th- and 17th-century British immigrations in which the few names ending in vowels were mostly Scottish or Irish.

Michael Dukakis, of Greek ancestry, went up to the clubhouse door but wasn't allowed in. Nor have there been any Swedes, Danes, or Norwegians. Walter Mondale, of Norwegian descent, didn't come close. In more than 200 years there has never been a Jew, and only one Catholic, John Kennedy.

The genealogical background of presidents has been conspicuously narrow. Many are distant relatives of each other. The Bushes are allegedly related to 16 presidents and Franklin Roosevelt to 17.

All presidential surnames, save five, derive exclusively from the British Isles. The exceptions are the two Roosevelts and Martin van Buren from Holland; and Herbert Hoover (Huber) and Dwight Eisenhower (Eisenhauer) from Germany. And even then, both Teddy Roosevelt and FDR were only one-quarter Dutch. Most of their ancestors were English, Irish, or Scot.

Glance into the deep gene pools of our presidents and you will see the majority of their ancestors clustered into this same northwestern corner of Europe, with a few Frenchmen, mostly Protestant Huguenots, thrown in.

Even the two presidents whose presidential names were not their original surnames fall into the same ancestral corridor. President Clinton, originally William Jefferson Blythe, and Gerald Ford, originally Leslie Lynch King, took the names of stepfathers, but the old names, like the new, came from the British Isles.

There may be no more roots-conscious group in America than the Irish, and politicians are quick to claim Irish connections. The Blythes may have come over from England, but Bill Clinton said: "I've always been conscious of being Irish . . . It means a lot to me." Ireland lays claim to anywhere from 16 to 23 American presidents, depending on who is doing the counting.
Protestant Northern Ireland, however, has the edge, many presidents having descended from the traditionally feisty Scots-Irish. They originally came from the Scottish borders, where they were deeply involved with fighting the English. Recruited to put down the Catholics in Ulster, many then participated in one of the earliest mass immigrations to America, where they were in constant conflict with Native Americans. John McCain says he is descended from Scots-Irish stock.

Genealogy shops in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic are often competitive, but there was a time when both were willing to let the other have Richard Nixon.
Genealogists say that both Adamses, Taylor, Grant, Garfield, and FDR were descended from the Mayflower settlers in 17th-century Massachusetts. Nixon, Ford, and the two Bushes have Mayflower connections.

Some presidents can claim royal blood. Clinton is said to share ancestry with Henry III on his mother's side, and may be related to both presidents Harrison as well as Ford and Carter.
George Washington, FDR, both Bushes, and Coolidge are said to descend from a 15th-century Englishman named John Spencer from Warwickshire - as was Diana, the late Princess of Wales.

For the rest go to the Source of this post: Exclusive

Presidential Trivia Humour

2009-01-21T12:01:00.000-08:00

Source: Go Now

Barack Obama is the 44th U.S. president, which means there were countless presidents before him. So before we embark on this new four-year journey, which unbiased media reports tell me will be characterized by everyone’s dreams coming true and an end to all bad things, let’s look back at the presidents who came before Obama:

1: George Washington: He did not really chop down a cherry tree and tell his father the truth. This was a tale created by writer Mason Weems, who wrote a book that glorified the first president. The Bush administration is actively trying to hire him. Faulty intelligence led them to believe he is still alive.
2. John Adams: A key opponent to the Stamp Act who presided over the Alien and Sedition acts. He was also the cousin of Samuel Adams, who had a beer named after him. Guess which one more Americans admire.
3. Thomas Jefferson: The longtime bachelor once said “many and great are the comforts of the single state.” He did eventually marry, though, to a woman twice as rich as him. He’d have my vote.
4. James Madison: Napoleon Bonaparte was making short rulers all the rage. The U.S. followed suit by electing its own pocket-sized president. The shortest and smallest president was said to be the first to wear long pants rather than knee breeches. How do we know he wasn’t just wearing Jefferson’s oversized hand-me-downs?
5. James Monroe: When he ran for his second term, no one was named as an official candidate opposed to the popular Monroe. He received all but one electoral vote. That vote came from Florida, for Pat Buchanan.
6: John Quincy Adams: His election was unlike others because none of the candidates declared a party. He ran against independents Andrew Jackson, William Crawford, Henry Clay and Ralph Nader, who has run in every election since.
7: Andrew Jackson: He was a prisoner of war and killed a man in a duel. He’s like a combination of John McCain and Dirty Harry. The forceful leader vetoed more bills than anyone else, survived an assassination attempt, and his favorite hobby was cockfighting. If the presidents were in a yearbook, Jackson would be voted most likely to punch you in the face.
8: Martin Van Buren: The origin of the word “OK” is believed to come from Van Buren, who was nicknamed Old Kinderhook. He married Hannah Hoes, a relative of Van Buren’s mother — not OK, dude.
9. William Henry Harrison: Was more dead in the first 30 days than any other U.S. president, unless you count brain-dead.
10. John Tyler: Claimed to be the reason Texas became a state. But in an even greater achievement for a dude, he was 54 when he married his second first lady, a 24-year-old. This is the last time I’m going to tell you this, kids: BECOME PRESIDENT.
11. James Polk: The first “dark horse” president was remembered for keeping all of his campaign promises, at least according to Mason Weems.
12. Zachary Taylor: Once said, “It would be judicious to act with magnanimity toward a prostrate foe.” Which proves he had access to both the phrase “Don’t kick a man when he’s down” and a thesaurus.
13. Millard Fillmore: Inherited the presidency after Taylor’s death and ran for re-election with the Know-Nothing Party. He was predictably defeated by the candidate from the Nothing is Outside the Realm of Our Experience Party.
14. Franklin Pierce: I honestly forgot that this guy was president.
15. James Buchanan: His presidency featured economic recession and several states seceding from the union. Fact: On his way out, he said, “I at least meant well for my country.”
16. Abraham Lincoln: Loved the theater.
17. Andrew Johnson: The first president to be impeached didn’t feel too bad about it, considering the way the previous guy was removed from office.
18. Ulysses S. Grant: President when the 15th Amendment passed, saying no one could deny anyone the right to vote based on race. Sex, of course, but not race. He also created the first national park in 1872 — distant relatives of Rod Blagojevich immediately tried to close it.
19. Rutherford B. Hayes: His election opponent Samuel Tilden won the popular vote. Hayes, a Republican, needed only one electoral vote from three Republican-controlled states to win the presidency. If you know our electoral system well, you can probably guess that democracy prevailed and a fair election was able to proceed. I’m kidding, of course. Actually, many Democratic ballots were ruled invalid and Hayes entered the White House with the nickname “His Fraudulency.”
20. James A. Garfield: Was shot by Charles Guiteau in July 1881, but didn’t die until two months later. Doctors had the ability to save him, but his health plan at the time only covered bullets that didn’t come from an assassin.
21. Chester A. Arthur: Nicknamed “Elegant Arthur” because he was known to change his outfit several times a day. He had 15 personal groomers for his mustache alone.
22. Grover Cleveland: We’ll get to him later.
23. Benjamin Harrison: He was the first to have electricity in the White House and the first to have his voice recorded, a momentous occasion that he marked with his most notable quote, “Oh my God, is that what I really sound like?”
24. Grover Cleveland: See, here he is.
25. William McKinley: Passed the Gold Standard, which meant the dollar was backed by gold, versus what it is backed by today. (Hint: It’s worth about as much as what it’s backed by.)
26. Theodore Roosevelt: Survived an assassination attempt because he had a 50-page speech in his pocket that slowed the bullet down. For other examples of this phenomenon, see every Hollywood movie ever made where the main character is shot.
27. William Howard Taft: The fattest president in U.S. history once got stuck in the White House bathtub. His cabinet included Secretary of State Philander Knox, Ho Hos, Twinkies, cupcakes, Twizzlers ...
28. Woodrow Wilson: Made Mother’s Day a national holiday and was president when women were given the right to vote. And all I got my mother was a card. Way to set the bar too high.
29. Warren G. Harding: During prohibition, he served alcohol at weekly poker games. Was brought down by scandals from members of his administration famously saying, “I have no trouble with my enemies ... But my friends ... they’re the ones who keep me walking the floors at night.” So, let me get this straight, he was surprised that people who would drink and gamble — both of which were illegal — inside the White House also turned out to be untrustworthy?
30. Calvin Coolidge: Fact: A woman once bet “Silent Cal” she could get three words out of him. His response: “You lose.” His actual campaign motto “Keep Cool with Coolidge” was either written by an eighth-grade student council campaign manager or he really cared about global warming.
31. Herbert Hoover: The richest president during the nation’s poorest time. Hoover refused to accept his own salary, a move that all 535 members of Congress responded to immediately, and without hesitation, by asking if they could then give themselves raises.
32. Franklin Delano Roosevelt: The press at the time agreed not to photograph FDR in his wheelchair. In a similar measure, the modern media has agreed only to photograph Obama while he’s walking on water.
33. Harry Truman: “Give ‘em hell Harry” is best known for dropping “little boy” and “fat man” on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But, when Madison and Taft’s bodies had no effect, he decided to drop actual atomic bombs.
34. Dwight Eisenhower: He believed in the “domino theory” of communism, which meant that if one Southeast Asian country fell to communism, the others would follow in 30 minutes or less or their communism was free. How many years did this avid golfer serve as president? Foouuuuuuur! OK, actually, eight.
35. John F. Kennedy: Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he shot and killed President Kennedy. You heard right, he only “acted” alone. Kennedy is responsible for the space race to the moon and the Civil Rights Act, which are separate, but equal, moments in history.
36. Lyndon B. Johnson: Led the nation through two wars: Vietnam and his own “war on poverty.” The latter of which was far more successful because none of them were armed.
37. Dick Nixon: Improved relations with the USSR and China, ended the military draft, established the Environmental Protection Agency, and signed the Clean Air Act and the Nuclear Weapon Non-Proliferation Treaty. But all this doesn’t overshadow his biggest mistake — making Columbus Day a national holiday. I mean, seriously, the guy found America by accident.
38. Gerald Ford: Pardoned Nixon, I assume for the Columbus Day thing.
39. Jimmy Carter: He spent his post-presidency building for homes for Habitat for Humanity. You’ll recognize those as the only homes that aren’t actively being foreclosed on.
40. Ronald Reagan: He was never actually president. He’s just that damn good an actor.
41. George H.W. Bush: Was known for three things: The phrase “read my lips, no new taxes,” his ventriloquism and raising taxes.
42. Bill Clinton: First Baby Boomer president and very likely responsible for his own personal baby boom.
43. George W. Bush: Brought global relief for AIDS victims, saving thousands of lives in Africa. Some said he was the greatest U.S. president for Africa and the fight against AIDS in history. (See, sometimes we can be nice.)
Sources: “U.S. Presidents Factbook,” “The Everything American President’s Book” and a bunch of lies I made up.

On the Necessity of World War II

2009-01-11T17:55:00.000-08:00

Victor Davis Hanson is a wonderful history mind. In this video clip he discusses, with Christopher Hitchens, Pat Buchanan's new book on World War II. Buchanan has as his central thesis the idea that World War II was an unecessary war. Both Hanson and Hitchens argue otherwise.

To check out the video go to: Victor Hanson/Chris Hitchens

Both thinkers also comment on Niall Ferguson's analysis of World War II and its causes as well.

On Jewish Survival

2009-01-03T14:54:00.000-08:00

The following is the next installment in my Reply to John Ray of Dissecting Leftism fame.

On Jewish Survival

To John

It is certainly on the mark to argue that Jewish history has been cursed with a litany of horrors. It is also correct to note that the Judaism with a history over three thousand years ultimately survived these horrors. What is open for real questioning (as you duly infer) is whether this survival has been one of style and from a strategic standpoint could it have been more impressive in both number and in form. Your argument makes a good point in noting that the Jews, from a numerical perspective are a relatively small population. I agree less than fifteen million in a world closing in on seven billion souls is clearly small potatoes. Many a biologist would scoff at such notions of real survivability especially in a world where offspring numbers seem on the surface to be a clear indicator of success in nature.

However numbers, particularly in a biological framework, can mislead perhaps just as easily as they affirm. The Passenger pigeon for one dominated North American skies up until the 18th century, but today it is extinct. The same fate would likely have befallen the American Bison if it not for the brave work of conservationists. Biological history is suffused with other creatures whose numerical advantage proved to be of little ultimate value in the duration of the survival game. On the other hand the rare Coelecanth has survived from Ancient times outliving a plethora of other fish that once dwarfed it in abundancy. The same is true of that living fossil, the crocodile. (While it is true that crocodiles sit at the top of the food chain and therefore have no predators, as a top predators it is even more likely to face extinction as its energy requirements aren’t usually tolerant of a compromise in the trophic levels below them).

So what do these life science examples mean for the Jews? We know that temporally related number counts are not everything. The Great Empires of the past boasted large numbers but most lie on the scrap heap of history today. Each of the Akkadians, Hittites, Lydians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Ancient Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Seljuk Turks, Nazca, Mayans, Aztecs, Incas all fall into this category. Not to mention the Old Celtic and Harappan civilizations. All had their style once but now that style is more of a curiosity than anything else. One could say that some have survived under a different guise: The Zoroastrian Persians are now predominatly Shi’ite Muslims - an outsider cultural takeover if ever there was one - while the Ancient Egyptians have been assimilated into an Arab World that for all intent of purpose has regressed considerably from the Golden Age. I am therefore not convinced that this qualifies as survival at all. The Jews on the other hand stared down many of their adversaries (and pf course suffered for it at times), but the core of the culture, the very basis that certainly defines it has emerged largely intact despite the turbulence.

Yes Ashkenazic Jews do differ from Sepharidic Jews. In fact each of these categories have sub-categories within them (leave it to the Jews to find some minor points to squabble over) rendering such a classification system partly meaningless. However at its core (among Judaism’s adherents) lies a commonality which champions free will and the responsible philosophy of ethical monotheism. This is part of the Jewish survival strength. Not easily quantifiable but certainly background significant.

One additional point you mention that Christianity has expanded in number to the point where its followers number around a billion. However what you didn’t mention is that Christianity’s rapid expansion (a physicist may call this inflation) was largely due to its vigilant promotion by the Roman Emperor Constantine, following his defeat of his rival Maxentius at Milvian Bridge in 312AD. Constantine was a zealot in his stance. He actively worked to eradicate paganism and promoted Christian bishops to high positions in his court. There is some arguments as to why he adopted this pro-Christian stance. One school argues that it was for the sake of political unity (Rome was divided by a multitude of conflicting beliefs…Constantine may have been an original opponent of multi-culturalism…and needed a new glue to bind his subjects to a common cause). Others believe that his transformation was genuine and of spiritual significance. Regardless how one sees it, the end result was Christianity received the single greatest growth boost in its history.

A further milestone was reached when Theodosius, the Eastern Emperor and Gratian, his counterpart in the West, recognized Christianity as the official Religion of the East (380 AD) and Western portions of the Empire respectively. The religion’s dominance was now solidified. Judaism on the other hand would never be the recipient of such official sponsorship from such influential figures. European History is filled with further examples of local leaders first converting to Christianity (for one reason or another) and then bringing the bulk of their populace into the umbrella of the church in the follow-up.

I will not enter into the ‘people without a state argument’ as it has already been dealt with in earlier posts by others. However I will take up the ‘choice of allies argument that you put forth’. The Jews I believe have traditionally looked for allies…however where they have erred is that in doing so they often compromised their beliefs to fit in with the nuances of the so-called brothers in arms. This has almost always backfired. The Marxists/communists/socialists offered them lip service (behind a veneer of anti-semitism) in exchange for a divorce from their religious soul while a rush to join the ranks of capitalism has had the consequence of catalyzing a materialistic assimilation. In addition the Christian churches traditionally turned a cold shoulder to any advances.- preferring conversion to accommodation. In short where were the Jews to turn?

Now its true in contemporary times that Evangelical Christians (particularly in the US) have offered a hand of friendship, which I believe that Jews should take. Many have, especially those on the conservative real of Jewish politics (Israel itself has a multitude of programs that encourage Evangelical Christians to visit the Holy Land). The fact that some in the ADL chooses to see otherwise, in turning a blind eye to such assistance, is more of its leadership sinking into the sludge of anti-clerical secularism than anything else.

Cheers

Gavin Kanowitz
Worldoreason
A South African- born Jew in a Canadian court.

On the English Survival with Style

2008-12-29T18:21:00.000-08:00

John Ray, a strong friend of the State of Israel, runs the excellent Dissecting Leftism Blog that I requently read. Recently he published a series of articles on the fate of the Jews and the survival of the English...The articles can be found on http://tongue-tied2.blogspot.com/2008/12/fate-of-jews-some-of-things-i-have.html

Here is my reply - Part I

To John

I am a regular reader of your blog, as mentioned in earlier correspondence, and have much admiration for your way of thinking especially your strict adherence to logic and reason. While I don’t agree with you on some points (usually economics) I find your insight into history refreshing. It’s a shame that you have received some abuse (probably from a few of my co-religionists) with respect to the ‘Success of the Jews’ theme that you have been expanding on but cooler heads are too often a rarity these days.

Nevertheless I wish to add some objections to your core thesis that agues that the English have survived in style for the last millennium and a half. While on the surface this carries with it an apparent truism it overlooks the fact that English history, despite a popular misconception, has not been in and of itself peaceful. Looking at the period after 1066 (the time when England was last successfully invaded) Albion has witnessed on local soils rebellions by the Saxons against Norman Feudalism, the Baron Wars, Peasant Rebellions, the War of the Roses (which really spanned the era between Richard II and Henry VII), the English Civil War, the Jacobite War and the insurrection of Monmouth. If one adds in the American Revolution (which for all intent of purpose can be looked at as an internal struggle between English speaking people) it is evident that the English have had a long history of warring amongst themselves.

In addition if you add in the numerous English lives (mostly commoners) that have been lost in the pursuit of Empire on a global basis –not to mention those lives foregone in conflicts with Spain, the Netherlands, France, Scotland, Denmark, the United States etc – the idea of surviving with style, at least how it reflects down to the bulk of the populace, is found wanting.Now I will not deny the fact the English have been very successful in transmitting their culture on a worldwide basis. The dominance of the English language and systems of education and governance attest to this phenomenon but it has come at a price which I believe cannot be swept so easily under the proverbial rug.The English are a very admirable people (I have been somewhat of an anglophile for most of my life although my enthusiasm has waned as of late as British institutions which I once respected continue to shed ground to the Stealth Jihad) but the accident of geography that has afforded them island status clearly played a large role in their success (yes the Scots and Welsh could harass the English but by shear force of number were unlikely to ever win the upper hand….).

Winston Churchill was correct in arguing that the island situation was an advantage that could not last forever and that Britain would need to work on establishing alliances to ensure survival. This was not a novel idea at the Empire level (regional alliances with the Iroquois, the Basuto, the Sikhs were common) but in the more critical area of European politics it was particular loathsome to the English mindset. After the Napoleonic Wars and the obvious realization that the European Powers (Russia, Prussia and Austria) were intent on turning back the forces of liberalism and nationalism (via the Concert System) Britain retreated into a type of ‘splendid isolation’ where it focused on growing its Empire alone without outside interference. With the possible exception of the Crimean War this attitude characterized British geo-politically thinking up to the Second Anglo Boer War.

It was only after the South African conflict, where British resources were stretched to breaking point by the guerilla tactics of well organized militia that the need for global allies would become a necessity. In fact one can pinpoint this change in policy to the signing of the Anglo-Japanese Agreement of 1902, a framework that set the foundation for the Entente Cordiale with France and the Anglo-Russian Entente.However even in this regard the Brits were slow to the post, for one the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy was already well established. Germany also had cultivated an ally in the Ottoman Turks. One could even argue (with hindsight) that Britain’s decision to enter into a system of alliances and thereby join the trend was ultimately what caused the weakening of the Empire by forcing London to engage in a vortex of events leading to the disastrous Great War (although I suspect that you will argue otherwise using the pretext that the growing influence of German Naval Power made war inevitable).

I believe that the success of the English people resides with a combination of factors. They are a very resourceful people (their pragmatic creativity during the First Industrial Revolution and beyond bears this out) but so does a commitment to the free inquiry. The former has its structural origins in the English Reformation, but was further augmented by the battle against autocracy during the Civil War and the Hanoverian transfer of power during the reign of George I. These changes were not as forthcoming amongst Britain/England’s continental rivals who were forced to delay the coming of modernism to the Enlightenment Period.

However what has most served the English is their ability to adapt – to take the best from the outside and make it somehow English. They did this with the Roman system of laws, Grecian Rationalism, Judeo-Christian Ethics, Stoicism and Iberian naval proficiency. It is this same characteristic that the family branch of the English, the Americans, have utilized with remarkable success today (Another island nation the Japanese are similar to the English in this regard).

It is this adaptation that has created the illusion that the English have resisted invasion. While no army since William the Conqueror have overwhelmed the English on the home front since the 11th century (although the Hungarians humbled the English football team at Wembley in the 1950s) it is equally true that the English monarchy has resided in the hands of foreigners since then. The Normans were of a Franco/Norse stock, the House of Plantagenet, and its spin offs in Lancaster and York were all Gallic, the Tudors were Welsh, The Stuarts - Scottish and Hanover, Saxe-Coburg and Windsor were/are all German. Yes not since the ill-fated Harold Godwinson (aka Harold II) has England had a monarch of English ethnicity and before that power was invested for some time with Danish kings such as Canute and Hardicanute.

What is most remarkable though is that within a short period the English turned these foreigners into extensions of England itself…..so that their ethnicity is more a matter of historical detail than anything else.

However with each addition and influx of change a point of saturation is neared. Changes are rarely neutral with respect to key factors. The utility of adaptation carries with it a double-edged outcome. At what point in a series of changes is the system or the people no longer English?

British Internationalism, the overriding policy of adaptation, that dominates the nation in 2008 is a consequence of this underlying tendency, however in subjecting itself to the relativism of multiculturalism the Brits seem to have shot the bolt and traded away the base in one foul swoop. Could it be that the English will simply whither away? Over adapted themselves to death? …Maybe there is a grace in this style but I am at a loss to find it. I am working on the Jewish side of the argument and will send you a reply soon……….

Sincerely

Gavin Kanowitz
Worldoreason

On a White President in South Africa

2008-11-22T06:12:00.000-08:00

Source: http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/sandilememela/2008/11/19/the-anc-may-not-be-ready-for-a-white-president-in-a-100-years/

Taken from Article by: Sandile Memela

The ANC’s commitment to non-racialism is unquestionable but it may need another 100 years to deliver a white president. This is not a problem of the organisation’s principles and ideals per se. Instead, it is the legacy of colonialism and apartheid.
Of course, when it first started out in 1912, the ANC was an exclusive African liberation movement. Its primary purpose was the total liberation of African people. So, whoever joined the organisation later was required to put the interests of African people, first.
What that means is that if you were Indian, coloured or white who joined the ANC, you accepted that you were part of the family because you truly believed that Africans had a right to self-determination, especially the leadership of their own indigenous organisation.
Significantly, in the late 1950s, the ANC experienced an ideological split when Robert Sobukwe suspected that non-Africans exerted too much influence and thus were taking over the leadership of the ANC. According to him, this compromised the rights of Africans to fight for the return of their land and for political self-determination. As far as Sobukwe was concerned, this South Africa was, essentially, a black man’s country and whoever chose to live and die here would do so under the terms of African people.
In the 1950s the ANC would not budge from non-racialism and thus Sobukwe was allowed to leave with those who did not buy into the notion of non-racialism. Thus in 1959 the PAC was launched.
The ANC survived it first major split and grew stronger because of its unwavering commitment to non-racialism. In fact, it was African nationalists in the ANC who suggested that Indians, coloureds and whites should organise themselves (along racial lines,) first, to join what later became known as the Congress Alliance. But this was a partnership that would, primarily, work towards African liberation and political liberation.

For the rest go to the source

Those almost Jewish Puritans

2008-11-22T06:03:00.000-08:00

Source: http://www.jewishledger.com/articles/2008/11/21/news/on_the_cover/news01.txt

by Ted Roberts

Why is it important for us American Jews of 2008 to know that in 1649, a Puritan couple, asked for a repeal of Edward I's Act of Jewish banishment - in effect for 350 years?The key fact is their Puritanism - a form of Christianity - that accented the Old Testament and drove them to sympathy with Judaism. It was the core of the faith of those who founded our America.All this reminds me of the best theological secret of the past millennium - especially to Jews. It concerns those wandering, persecuted Puritans. Strange people. Revolutionary in their religious beliefs. They loved the Old Testament - our Humash - unanimously swear to it.Before you slice into your traditionally rare, half-done turkey, next Thanksgiving give a thought to those strange birds, the Pilgrims. What a rare breed they were - typical of the exotics who stand the world on its head. Hacking, sniffing, trembling with chills in the late New England Fall, they sat down to the first Thanksgiving. They gave thanks, as we do, before every meal. More prayerful than usual because it was their Seder equivalent. And so what if half of them had fluttered skyward that year? Those celestial beings were happier than the earthy survivors, since they were wrapped in warm clouds and dined to their full at heavenly tables. So, laugh and dance like the Chasids. You see, they believed in Heaven.The secret of their Jewish leanings is not widely known to most rabbis and their flock. These alienated folks left the 17th Century urbanity of London for the stone-cold wilderness of savage North America. The "New Zion", they called it - does that give you a clue? "The Puritans' mania for the Old Testament developed directly out of their experience of persecution by the established church." So says the renowned historian Barbara Tuchman in her 1957 book Bible and Sword.. She verifies my vague suspicions that our American forefathers were SO Jewish that you wonder why the old pictures don't show them in yarmulke and tiffilin.

According to Tuchman, fleeing persecution, the Puritans saw themselves as 16th Century Israelites; named their kids Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Rebecca. Did you know that the seal of Yale and Harvard is in Hebrew of all things. "They paid a respect to the Hebrew language that they refused to the language of their gospels...." Tuchman tells us. Even McCauley, the greatest of English historians, rants about their "Hebraic leanings". It was no secret - they flew the flag of Moses and metaphorically, culturally waged war with episcopal Christianity. Another historian, Cunningham, sums it up neatly: "The general tendency of Puritanism was to discard Christian morality and to substitute Jewish habits in its stead".

For the rest go to the source

A Quick Look at Piracy

2008-11-22T05:58:00.000-08:00

Taken from Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/22/piracy-somalia

Pirate is a forgiving word. Thanks to at least two centuries of British and American romanticism - Lord Byron to Johnny Depp - it implies a man (or in two famous instances, a woman) who is not wholly bad and many moral levels professionally above footpads, rapists and serial killers. For instance, is there an epoch known to historians as the Golden Age of Rape? No, but sometimes in books about buccaneers you will find the Golden Age of Piracy, which in British terms lasted from the 1650s till about 1725.
In some respects, the pirates of Somalia are behaving in the classic tradition. According to reports, they are spending millions of dollars of ransom money on imported food, alcohol, drugs and prostitutes, just as predecessors debauched and befuddled themselves whenever possible with tobacco, rum and whoring. In other ways, though, their behaviour (so far) matches the romantic ideal rather than the brutal reality.
More than 200 kidnapped sailors are being well looked after on a dozen hijacked ships that have been moored at the fishing port of Eyl; or, in the case of the Sirius Star, their biggest prize, a few hundred miles down the Somali coast at Harardheere. No harm has been done to them. What their captors want are dollars from the ships' owners, not the blood of their crews. With this in mind, a Somali pirate with historical leanings might scoff at the outrage of David Miliband and consider the case of Thomas Avery, whose old exploits in the present Somali hunting ground, the Gulf of Aden, make modern piracy look like peacetime manoeuvres by a marine branch of the Fabian Society.
According to the historian David Cordingly's account, in his book Life Among the Pirates, Avery was a typical British pirate - "of middle height, rather fat, with a dissolute appearance". He was born in Plymouth in 1653, served in the Royal Navy, and then seized command (the captain was drunk at the time) of an English privateer - a privately owned ship licensed by the government to attack the state's enemies. By 1695, he was prowling at the entrance to the Red Sea waiting for the pilgrim fleet that sailed every year from India to Mecca, filled with valuables, because pilgrimage was also an opportunity to trade, and protected by the heavily armed ships of the Great Mogul in Delhi. Avery got lucky. One of his cannonballs dismasted the Great Mogul's flagship, which was not only carrying piles of gold and silver but also many slave girls and, it was said, one of the Great Mogul's daughters. What Cordingly calls "an orgy of rape, torture and plunder" lasted days and Avery's crew got away with the equivalent of £1,000 each.
The English government was embarrassed - it needed to preserve the East India Company's relationship with the Mogul emperor - and eventually caught six of the pirates and had them hanged. Avery himself vanished; rumour suggests he died in poverty in Devon, rather like Ben Gunn at the end of Treasure Island who spent a thousand pounds in 19 days and was "back begging on the twentieth". Like most pirates, Avery was an amoral opportunist who switched easily among the blurred divisions between privateering, buccaneering and sailing as a navy or merchant seaman (by the end of the 17th century the average age of a pirate was 27 - roughly the same as Somalia's modern pirates - and almost all had begun their working lives in the Royal Navy or on cargo ships).
Still, his legacy was profound: you might even argue that he began the process that enabled the careers of Byron's Corsair, Long John Silver, Captain Hook and Errol Flynn, and has brought us to the recently announced Pirates of Caribbean, Part IV. A now obscure dramatist, Charles Johnson, took the story of Avery's barbarous raid in the Gulf of Aden and turned it into a play, The Successful Pyrate, in which all the horrid facts were left behind.
Avery, now King Arviragus of Madagascar, became the first of piracy's noble outlaws. A captured ship is brought to him. It contains the Mogul's granddaughter, the fair Zaida. Arviragus falls in love, but Zaida loves another: one of her fellow captives, the young Aranes. Disaster! Revelation! Aranes turns out to be Arviragus's long lost son.
The play opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, in 1713, the first in a succession of pirate melodramas that went on being produced well into the 19th century, until Gilbert and Sullivan's satirical The Pirates of Penzance put an end to them. But where did writers do their research, supposing any were needed? The answer comes from the same period in a book by a Captain Johnson, who in 1724 published A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, which ran to several editions and was translated into French.
Nobody knows who Johnson was: a theory that Daniel Defoe was the author has now been discredited. But his book became the seminal text. Out of it came the public's first appreciation of Blackbeard and Captain Kidd and the two women pirates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny. Robert Louis Stevenson consulted it, when, in a Highland cottage during the wet and chill summer of 1881, he began to devise an entertainment for his stepson. Nobody in Johnson's book says "yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum" but there is a vivid description of "a fellow with a terrible pair of whiskers, and a wooden leg, being stuck around with pistols ... swearing and vapouring on the quarter deck".
By the time Stevenson invented John Silver, real pirates were at best a folk memory in the western world. A few might survive in the South China Sea, but efficient navies had destroyed them elsewhere. Motivation had also been reduced. Pirates often fenced their stolen cargoes to smugglers, but free trade had dramatically lowered import duties and smuggling died as an occupation.
The way was open for the pirate as an antihero, the rebel against society, or simply a comic character as in Captain Hook. As Pieter van der Merwe of the National Maritime Museum says: "Blackbeard was a terrible man - a psychopath - but piracy had been effectively wiped out in the 18th century. You forgot the fact that it was a curse.'
It became a hobby. Philip Gosse, the son of litterateur and memoirist Edmund Gosse, was a doctor who collected nearly 500 books on piracy and in 1932 published an authoritative history of the subject (his library is now the Gosse collection at the National Maritime). And next it became a study, with historians anxious to revise or enlarge our previously simple ideas. Some pirates were proto-feminists and others gay (Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition, 1983). In The Many-Headed Hydra, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker define pirate ships as "multinational, multicultural and multiracial" institutions - fine little democracies - that resisted the oppression of the capitalist merchant shipping industry. Pirates were "egalitarian, class-conscious and justice-seeking" and always shared their spoils.

For the rest gp to the source

Tomb of real Gladiator found

2008-10-27T17:59:00.000-07:00

Source: http://news.scotsman.com/world/Tomb-of-the-real-Gladiator.4602320.jp

By Nick Pisa

ARCHAEOLOGISTS have unearthed the tomb of the Roman warrior who inspired the title role in Ridley Scott's epic Oscar-winning film Gladiator, starring Russell Crowe.Marble columns and a Latin inscription to Marcus Nonius Macrinus have been uncovered at a 1,800-year-old stone mausoleum built in his honour on the banks of the River Tiber at Saxa Rubra, not far from the headquarters of Rai, Italy's state-run television station.The site, which also includes friezes and stone blocks, was discovered as a warehouse was being demolished to make way for a housing development.The remains are located north of Rome, near the ancient road, the Via Flaminia, which once connected the city to the Adriatic, on Italy's east coast.

Although parts of the tomb have crumbled into the Tiber over the centuries, enough has been recovered during months of excavation that experts are discussing the possibility of rebuilding the tomb as the centrepiece of an archaeological theme park. This would also include the house of Empress Livia, the wife of Emperor Augustus, at Prima Porta nearby.

This villa occupied the high ground dominating the view down the Tiber valley to Rome and some of the walling that retained its terraces can still be seen. Except for the terracing – the gardens are currently being excavated – all that can be seen today are three vaulted subterranean rooms, from the largest of which the fresco decor of an illusionistic garden view was removed to Rome, where it has recently been installed in the Palazzo Massimo, following cleaning and restoration. Marcus Nonius Macrinus was from the northern Italian city of Brescia.He was consul in AD154 and proconsul of Asia from AD170 to 171. Consuls were the highest civil and military magistrates in ancient Rome.

His villa on the shores of Lake Garda is also under excavation. Macrinus was said to have been a particular favourite of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who ruled Rome between AD161 and 180, and became part of the emperor's inner circle after he won numerous battles for him.

For the rest go to the source

Memorial in Berlin for WWII Germans who helped Jews

2008-10-27T17:50:00.000-07:00

Source:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hotXbksm71R6tObAUjehxdGqhKwwD942U9VG0

BERLIN (AP) — The "Silent Heroes" now have a voice.
A new memorial center in Berlin pays tribute to the thousands of German gentiles who risked everything to save Jews from persecution by the Nazis and documents the stories of those who sometimes spent years in hiding.
The "Silent Heroes" memorial center opens to the public Tuesday amid a new focus in recent years on the legacy of the "good German" — those individuals who resisted Hitler and his policies, were labeled as traitors by the Nazis and were often shunned in decades after the war.
"Their accomplishments were totally forgotten, and this is an initiative to bring them back into our memory," said Johannes Tuchel, director of the German Resistance Memorial Center Foundation, which is behind the new memorial.
Some 5,000 Jews were able to survive the war in hiding in Germany but it is not clear how many people were involved in helping them, Tuchel said. Research suggests that for each person in hiding, around 10 people were involved in aiding them.
Peter Michalski, whose family went into hiding in 1944, said it was a long overdue tribute to the Germans who helped people like him escape almost certain death, even if it meant putting their own lives in jeopardy.
"Where would you be now if these people hadn't existed?" he asked contemplatively while looking at an exhibit focusing on his family's plight. "The answer is simple: We wouldn't be."
The three-room exhibition relies heavily on multimedia displays in both English and German — audio accounts, touch-screen computers focusing on 18 aspects of survival, and computers with more detailed information on those in hiding and their rescuers. Original artifacts include personal photos, diaries and letters.
The best-known subject is Oskar Schindler, whose story was made famous by Steven Spielberg's 1993 Oscar-winning film "Schindler's List," which chronicled the German businessman's efforts to shield more than 1,000 Jews from Nazi death camps by hiring them to work in his factories.

For the rest go to the source

Battle of Agincourt...Our Finest Hour

2008-10-26T17:53:00.000-07:00

Written by Bernard Cornwell...

Source:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1080764/War-crime-Battle-Agincourt-finest-hour-says-author-Bernard-Cornwell.html

Legend says the Battle of Agincourt was won by stalwart English archers. It was not. In the end it was won by men using lead-weighted hammers, poleaxes, mauls and falcon-beaks, the ghastly paraphernalia of medieval hand-to-hand fighting. It was fought on a field knee-deep in mud and it was more of a massacre than a battle.
Laurence Olivier's film of Shakespeare's Henry V shows French knights charging on horseback, but very few men were mounted at Agincourt.
The French came on foot and the battle was reduced to men hitting other armoured men with hammers, maces and axes.

A sword would not penetrate armour and did not have the weight to knock a man off his feet, but a poleaxe (a long-handled axe or hammer, topped with a fearsome spike) would fell him fast, and then it was easy to raise the victim's visor and slide a knife through an eye. That was how hundreds of men died; their last sight on earth a dagger's point.
It is not a tale of chivalry, but rather of armoured men hacking at each other to break limbs and crush skulls. At the battle's height, when Henry V expected an attack on his rear that never materialised, he ordered the newly captured French prisoners to be killed. They were murdered.
Over the weekend, during a conference at the Medieval History Museum in Agincourt, French academics met to declare that English soldiers acted like 'war criminals' during the battle, setting fire to prisoners and killing French noblemen who had surrendered. The French 'were met with barbarism by the English', said the museum's director Christophe Gilliot.
The French pronouncement smacks of bias, but what is certain is that Agincourt was filthy, horrible and merciless. Yet it is still celebrated as a golden moment in England's history.
Why do we remember it? Why has this battle galvanised English hearts over the centuries? These are questions I came to ask as I researched my new novel Azincourt - spelled as it is in France - and discovered just what an extraordinary event it was.
Part of the legend about the archers is certainly true. Most of the English army were archers and their arrows caused huge damage, although they never delivered the knock-out blow it is claimed.
Henry V was also an inspirational leader. He fought in the front rank and part of his crown was knocked off. Eighteen Frenchmen had taken an oath to kill him and all of them died at Henry's feet, slaughtered by the King or by his bodyguard. And, despite recent claims to the contrary, it seems the English were horribly outnumbered.

In the cold, wet dawn of October 25, 1415, no one could have expected Henry's army to survive the day. He had about 6,000 men, more than 5,000 of them archers, while the French numbered at least 30,000 and were so confident that, before the battle was joined, they sent away some newly arrived reinforcements. By dusk on that Saint Crispin's Day, Henry's small army had entered legend.
But the English should never have been at Agincourt, which lies 25 miles south of Calais. England was in the thick of the 100 Years' War with France, and Henry had invaded Normandy in the hope of making a quick conquest of Harfleur, a strategic port. Yet the town's stubborn defence delayed him and by the siege's end his army had been struck by dysentery.
Sick men were dying and the campaign season was ending as winter drew in. Sensible advice suggested that Henry cut his losses and sail back to England. But he had borrowed huge amounts of money to invade France and all he had to show for it was one gun-battered port. Going home looked suspiciously like defeat.
He instead marched north to Calais with probably nothing more in mind than cocking a snook at the French who, though they had gathered an army, had done nothing to relieve the brave defenders of Harfleur.

For the rest go to the source

On the Dresden Bombings

2008-10-26T17:35:00.000-07:00

The Death Tolls are now believed to be considerably less than is often reported

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1078529/WW2-Dresden-bombing-killed-far-fewer-people-half-million-new-records-show.html

For more than 60 years Britain's Bomber Command led by Arthur 'Bomber' Harris has been vilified for causing up to 500,000 deaths in the carpet bombing of Dresden during World War II.But now, after a four-year investigation, a panel of German historians has said that the true number of dead from the Allied air raids in January 1945 was between 18,000 and 25,000.They reached the figure after combing through death certificates, hitherto sealed eyewitness reports, registration cards for people made homeless and hospital records.

It now emerges that the high number of deaths from 'Operation Thunderclap' was a myth invented by the Nazis, perpetuated by Communists and re-born in the past decade to serve the aims of ultra-nationalists.The myth took form barely after the vapour trails of the bombers disappeared in the skies over the city.It suited the Nazi propaganda machine to claim that half-a-million women and children had been incinerated in the firestorm. It helped persuade a struggling population that this was awaited them all unless they fought for Nazism with their last breath.

Then the Communist East Germans perpetuated the myth, mindful that it served their purposes by showing the destructiveness of capitalism and fascism combined.In the last decade neo-Nazis have sought to keep the lie alive as they praise many of the policies of the Third Reich.By the mid 70’s historians were beginning to question the real total of casualties. Although many records lay in the still-Communist archives of Dresden, the accepted figure dropped to between 50, 000 and 150,000 deaths, based on Nazi German records and declassified Allied intelligence reports.Then, when the wall fell and more records became available, the accepted number dipped even further, to 35,000.

A fortnight ago the myth was revealed as just that. A panel of German historians tasked by the modern-day rulers of Dresden said the dead numbered between 18,000 and 25,000.They worked through miles of archived paperwork for the past four years to arrive at their figures, using death certificates, hitherto sealed eyewitness reports, registration cards for people made homeless and hospital records.The historians found most people died in cellars, suffocated when the oxygen was sucked out of their hiding place or killed by the concussion of the falling bombs.Strange climactic conditions combined to create 2,000 degree centigrade “firestorms” which whipped walls of flames through the heart of the city, incinerating everything in their path.By contrast Operation Gomorrah, the saturation bombing of Hamburg, did indeed cause at least 50,000 deaths.

US Presidential Rankings - Felzenberg View

2008-10-13T06:09:00.000-07:00

For more on this read the excerpt in the post-gazette

Alvin Stephen Felzenberg's 20 Twenty Presidential ranking reads as follows:
(My Comments in Red)

1. Lincoln - Correct
2. Washington - 7 or 8 perhaps
3. Theodore Roosevelt - Top 10 but not #3
4. Reagan - 8th or 9th not 4 and I say that as a Reagan fan
5. Eisenhower - Not Top 10 Material...maybe 15
6. Franklin Roosevelt - Should be Second
7. Taylor - not top 20 , Grant - 20 to 30 range , McKinley - top 20 not top 10 , Truman - deserving , Kennedy - about right
12. Polk - Bang on
13. Benjamin Harrison - 22 sounds better
14. John Adams - fair enough . Jefferson - easy top 10 , Monroe - Spot on , Quincy Adams - about right , Wilson - 9 0r 10 , Bush Snr - I can live with this
20. Ford - yeah right - more like 35.

Rosenberg Case Closed

2008-09-23T12:29:00.000-07:00

Source: Houston Chronicle

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed 55 years ago, on June 19, 1953. But earlier this month they were back in the headlines when Morton Sobell, the co-defendant in their famous espionage trial, finally admitted that he and his friend Julius had both been Soviet agents.
It was a stunning admission; Sobell, now 91 years old, had adamantly maintained his innocence for more than half a century. After his comments were published, even the Rosenbergs' children, Robert and Michael Meeropol, were left with little hope to hang on to — and last week, in comments unlike any they've made previously, the brothers acknowledged having reached the difficult conclusion that their father was, indeed, a spy. "I don't have any reason to doubt Morty," Michael Meeropol told Sam Roberts of The New York Times.
With these latest events, the end has arrived for the legions of the American left wing that have argued relentlessly for more than half a century that the Rosenbergs were victims, framed by a hostile, fear-mongering U.S. government. Since the couple's trial, the left has portrayed them as martyrs for civil liberties, righteous dissenters whose chief crime was to express their constitutionally protected political beliefs. In the end, the left has argued, the two communists were put to death not for spying but for their unpopular opinions, at a time when the Truman and Eisenhower administrations were seeking to stem opposition to their anti-Soviet foreign policy during the Cold War.
To this day, this received wisdom permeates our education system. A recent study by historian Larry Schweikart of the University of Dayton has found that very few college history textbooks say simply that the Rosenbergs were guilty; according to Schweikart, most either state that the couple was innocent or that the trial was "controversial," or they "excuse what (the Rosenbergs) did by saying, 'It wasn't that bad. What they provided wasn't important.' "
Indeed, Columbia University professor Eric Foner once wrote that the Rosenbergs were prosecuted out of a "determined effort to root out dissent," part of a broader pattern of "shattered careers and suppressed civil liberties." In other words, it was part of the postwar McCarthyite "witch hunt."
But, in fact, Schweikart is right, and Foner is wrong. The Rosenbergs were Soviet spies, and not minor ones, either. Not only did they try their best to give the Soviets top atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project, they succeeded in handing over top military data on sonar and on radar that was used by the Russians to shoot down U.S. planes in the Korean and Vietnam wars. That's long been known, and Sobell confirmed it again last week.
To many Americans, Cold War espionage cases such as the Rosenberg and Alger Hiss cases that once riveted the country seem irrelevant today, something out of the distant past. But they're not irrelevant. They're a crucial part of the ongoing dispute between right and left in this country. For the left, it has long been an article of faith that these prosecutions showed the essentially repressive nature of the U.S. government. Even as the guilt of the accused has become more and more clear (especially since the fall of the Soviet Union and the release of reams of historical Cold War documents), these "anti-anti-communists" of the intellectual left have continued to argue that the prosecutions were overzealous, or that the crimes were minor, or that the punishments were disproportionate.
The left consistently has defended spies such as Hiss, the Rosenbergs and Sobell as victims of contrived frame-ups. Because such a demagogue as Sen. Joseph McCarthy cast a wide swath with indiscriminate attacks on genuine liberals as "reds" (and even though McCarthy made some charges that were accurate), the anti-anti-communists came to argue that anyone accused by McCarthy or Richard Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover should be assumed to be entirely innocent. People such as Hiss (a former State Department official who was accused of spying) cleverly hid their true espionage work by gaining sympathy as just another victim of a smear attack.
But now, with Sobell's confession of guilt, that worldview has been demolished.
In the 1990s, when it was more than clear that the Rosenbergs had been real Soviet spies — not simply a pair of idealistic left-wingers working innocently for peace with the Russians — one of the Rosenbergs' sons, Michael, expressed the view that the reason his parents stayed firm and did not cooperate with the government was that they wanted to keep the government from creating "a massive spy show trial," thereby earning "the thanks of generations of resisters to government repression."
Today, he and his brother, Robert, run a fund giving grants to the children of those they deem "political prisoners."
Ironically, if there was any government that staged show trials for political ends, it was the government for which the Rosenbergs gave up their lives, that of the former Soviet Union.

Source:

Re-thinking Gandhi

2008-09-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

What Did Gandhi Do?
One-sided pacifist.

By David Lewis Schaefer

n the weeks leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, American college campuses were plastered with posters asking “What Would Gandhi Do?” The implication, of course, was that the U.S. should emulate the tactics of the celebrated Hindu pacifist who successfully led the movement for Indian independence from Britain.

The analogy, it should go without saying, overlooks major differences between the two cases. Whereas the 20th-century British were far too benign an imperial power to choose to slaughter peaceful resisters to their rule, there’s no evidence that Saddam Hussein, already responsible for the massacre and torture of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen (to say nothing of the many more who died in his aggressive wars against Iran and Kuwait) would likewise have succumbed to friendly persuasion — Jacques Chirac to the contrary notwithstanding. (It’s not that we didn’t try!)

It is interesting, in this regard, to recall how Gandhi himself responded to the evil perpetrated by one of Saddam’s role models, Adolf Hitler. In November, 1938, responding to Jewish pleas that he endorse the Zionist cause so as to persuade the British government to open Palestine to immigrants fleeing Hitler’s persecution, Gandhi published an open letter flatly rejecting the request. While expressing the utmost “sympathy” with the Jews and lamenting “their age-old persecution,” Gandhi explained that “the cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me,” since “Palestine belongs to the Arabs.” Instead, he urged the Jews to “make that country their home where they are born.” To demand just treatment in the lands of their current residence while also demanding that Palestine be made their home, he argued, smacked of hypocrisy. Gandhi even went so far as to remark that “this cry for the national home affords a colorable justification for the German expulsion of the Jews.”

Of course, Gandhi added, “the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history,” and “if there ever could be a justifiable war in the name of and for humanity, a war against Germany, to prevent the wanton persecution of a whole race, would be completely justified.” Hitler’s regime was showing the world “how efficiently violence can be worked when it is not hampered by any hypocrisy or weakness masquerading as humanitarianism.” Nonetheless, the Hindu leader rejected that notion, since “I do not believe in any war.” And for Britain, France, and America to declare war on Hitler’s regime would bring them “no inner joy, no inner strength.”

Having rejected both the plea that Palestine should be offered as a place of refuge for the Jews and the idea that the Western democracies should launch a war to overthrow Hitler, Gandhi offered only one avenue for the Jews to resist their persecution while preserving their “self-respect.” Were he a German Jew, Gandhi pronounced, he would challenge the Germans to shoot or imprison him rather than “submit to discriminating treatment.” Such “voluntary” suffering, practiced by all the Jews of Germany, would bring them, he promised, immeasurable “inner strength and joy.” Indeed, “if the Jewish mind could be prepared” for such suffering, even a massacre of all German Jews “could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy,” since “to the God-fearing, death has no terror.”

According to Gandhi, it would (for unexplained reasons) be “easier for the Jews than for the Czechs” (then facing German occupation) to follow his prescription. As inspiration, he offered “an exact parallel” in the campaign for Indian civil rights in South Africa that he had led decades earlier. Through their strength of suffering, he promised, “the German Jews will score a lasting victory over the German Gentiles in the sense that they will have converted [them] to an appreciation of human dignity.” And the same policy ought to be followed by Jews already in Palestine enduring Arab pogroms launched against them: if only they would “discard the help of the British bayonet” for their defense, and instead “offer themselves [to the Arabs] to be shot or thrown into the Dead Sea without raising a little finger,” the Jews would win a favorable “world opinion” regarding their “religious aspiration.”

In a thoughtful personal response dated February 24, 1939, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber — who had himself emigrated to Israel from Germany a short time earlier and combined his Zionism with earnest efforts to peacefully reconcile Jewish and Arab claims in the Holy Land — chided Gandhi for offering advice to the Jews without any recognition of their real situation. The individual acts of persecution that Indians had suffered in South Africa in the 1890’s hardly compared, Buber noted, to the synagogue burnings and concentration camps instituted by Hitler’s regime. Nor was there any evidence that the many instances in which German Jews peacefully displayed strength of spirit in response to their persecutors had exercised any influence on the latter. While Gandhi exhorted them to bear “testimony” to the world by their conduct, the fate of the Jews in Germany was to experience only an “unobserved martyrdom” without effect.

Source: National Review

Historical Lessons

2008-09-05T11:53:00.000-07:00

This article is an 'oldie' but its message is important

Author: Tim Radford

Edward Gibbon opened chapter seven of volume one of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with a set of characteristic sentences about power and stability and hereditary monarchy. In the cool shade of retirement, he mused, one might try to devise an imaginary form of government bestowed on the most worthy by the free and incorrupt suffrage of the whole community: experience, however, teaches otherwise.

"The army is the only order of men sufficiently united to concur in the same sentiments, and powerful enough to impose them on the rest of their fellow-citizens; but the temper of soldiers, habituated at once to violence and to slavery, tenders them very unfit guardians of a legal or even a civil constitution," he wrote.

"Justice, humanity or political wisdom, are qualities they are too little acquainted with in themselves, to appreciate them in others. Valour will acquire their esteem, and liberality will purchase their suffrage; but the first of these merits is often lodged in the most savage breasts; the latter can only exert itself at the expense of the public; and both may be turned against the possessor of the throne, by the ambition of a daring rival."

All this was a preface to the story of Maximin, the giant barbarian who seized the imperial purple from Alexander Severus in AD 235. He might have been talking about Francisco Franco of Falangist Spain, Idi Amin of Uganda, Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, Leopold Galtieri of Argentina, Augusto Pinochet of Chile, the colonels who seized power in Greece from 1967-1974, or the military junta that terrorises Burma now. There, in a few elegant 18th century sentences about 3rd century Rome, is a brief and brutal lesson in the political history of the 20th century.

All scholarship has its rewards, but history is the one that might deliver the richest rewards of all: if we learn from it, we might gain from it.

Source

Bloodiest Wars of the 20th Century

2008-09-05T11:26:00.000-07:00

Bloodiest Wars of the 20th century
Source: Wars
Death toll alongside

1. Second World War - 20 million +
2. First World War - 8.5 million
3. Korean War - 1.2 million
4. Chinese Civil War (1945-49) - 1.2 million
5. Vietnam War - 1.2 million
6. Iran-Iraq War - 0.85 million
7. Russian Civil War - 0.8 million
8. Chinese Civil War (1927-1937) - 0.4 million
9. French Indochina 0.385 million
10. Mexican Revolution (1911-20) - 0.2 million
10(tied) Spanish Civil War - 0.2 million
12. French-Algerian War - 0.16 million
13. Afghanistan (1980-1989) - 0.15 million
14. Russo-Japanese War - 0.13 million
15. Riffian War - 0.1 million
15. First Sudanese Civil War - 0.1 million
15. Russo-Polish War - 0.1 million
15. Biafran War - 0.1 million
19 - Chaco War - 0.09 million
20. Abyssinian War - 0.075 million

Some useful history sites

2008-08-31T17:22:00.000-07:00

BBC History Online - For fans of World and British History (as I am).
HistoryChannel.com - Has a plethora of information and many links.
HistoryCenter.net - I love the international focus on this site.
The History Guy - A site that is very strong in US History.
HistoryWiz - A fun site.
HyperHistory Online - An ongoing project that has the potential to deliver much.
Napoleon.Org - For those that appreciate the Little Corporal.
Nostradamus - For those interested in the prophecies of the Seer.
Spartacus Educational - Great beginner site for World History.
WhoWhatWhen - An excellent Interactive timeline site.

10 Greatest British Prime Ministers of All-Time

2008-08-31T17:19:00.000-07:00

Just my opinion........

1. Winston Churchill
2. William Gladstone
3. Benjamin Disraeli
4. Margaret Thatcher
5. Robert Peel
6. David Lloyd George
7. William Pitt
8. Robert Walpole
9. Viscount Palmerston
10. Harold Wilson

20 Most Important Events in Central American History

2008-08-23T16:47:00.000-07:00

Refer to the links for more detail - they have been carefully selected

1. European Invasion and the Subsequent Indian Genocide (includes the campaigns of the Spaniard Cortes)
2. Creation of the Aztec Empire
3. Creation of the Mayan Empire
4. Fall of the Mayan Empire - see NASA evidence
5. Period of Olmec Rule in Pre-European times.
6. Mexican rebellion against the Spanish and the creation of the Modern Mexican state.
7. Central American states win independence from Spain.
8. Building of the Panama Canal.
9. Key Mexican territory is lost to the US in the Mexican-American War - Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
10. Period of the Diaz regime in Mexico.
11. Invasion of Mexico by the French during the rule of Maximilian I.
12. The Proliferation of the Drug industry in Central America.
13. US attacks Mexico to capture Pancho Villa.
14. Collapse of the Somoza Regime in Nicaragua. Beginning of Sandinista rule.
15. US drive out Noriega from Panama.
16. Death Squads run riot in El Salvador.
17. The Guatemalan Civil War (post WWII).
18. Collapse of Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.
19. Soccer War between Honduras and El Salvador.
20. British Honduras gain independence and becomes Belize.

40 Greatest Western Explorers

2008-08-17T13:53:00.000-07:00

40 greatest Western explorers

1. Lief Ericson - discovered North America
2. Christopher Columbus - discovered West Indies
3. Vasco da Gama - visited India after rounding Africa
4. Marco Polo - reached China
5. James Cook - Crossed Antarctic circle. Visited New Zealand
6. Ferdinand Magellan/Juan Sebastian del Cano - first to Circumnavigate the globe
7. Walter Raleigh - Visited North America. Drew up plans for 13 colonies
8. Abel Tasmin - Visited Australia
9. David Livingstone - Discovered Victoria Falls and Zambezi River
10. John Cabot - reached Newfoundland
11. Robert Peary - First to reach North Pole
12. Vasco Balboa - discovered Pacific Ocean
13. John Speke - discovered Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria
14. Roland Amundsen - First to reach South Pole
15. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark - Explored American Interior
16. Bartholmew Diaz - Sailed around Cape of Good Hope
17. Eric the Red - Viking explorer who visited Greenland
18. Jacques Cartier - explored St Lawrence River
19. Robert Burke and William Wills - explored Australian Interior
20. Ernest Shackleton - explored Antarctica
21. Henry Stanley - traced the Congo River
22. Richard Burton - discovered Lake Tanganyika
23. Francis Younghusband - Explorer. Opened up Tibet to the Western World.
24. Henry Hudson - discovered Hudson's Bay
25. Simon Champlain - explored Canadian interior
26. Vitus Bering - discovered Alaska
27. Fabian von Bellinghausen - circumnavigated Antarctica
28. Mungo Park - explored the Niger River
29. Hernando de Soto - discovered the Mississippi River
30. Ponce De Leon - discovered Florida
31. Alexander Mackenzie - discovered Mackenzie River
32. Nathaniel Palmer - sighted Antarctica
33. Amerigo Verspucci - explored Venezuela.
34. Edmund Hillary - Together with the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay was the first to climb Mount Everest. Was involved as well in expedition that crossed Antarctica for the first time.
35. Robert Falcon Scott - explored the Antarctic
36. Heinrich Barth - explored Sudan
37. John Fremont - Crossed Rocky Mountains to California
38. William Baffin - Explorer. Penetrated to within 800 miles of the North Pole. Closest for 250 years.
39. Semyon Dezhnev - Cossack Explorer. Sailed around eastern part of Asia in 17th century.
40. St Francis Xavier - visited Japan

50 Most Influential Physicists/Astronomers of All-Time

2008-08-08T08:52:00.000-07:00

1. Isaac Newton - English. Quantified and Qualified laws of motion and gravity. Invented the reflecting telescope. Explained the concept of light dispersion and co-invented the Calculus.

2. Albert Einstein - German/Swiss/American - Developed Theories of Special and General Relativity. Described Brownian Motion. Nobel Prize winner for his work on the photoelectric effect. Showed mass-energy equivalence.

3. Galileo Galilei - Italian - Discovered the law of Uniformly accelerated motion. Improved on the refracting telescope. Discovered the Four largest moons of Jupiter. Described projectile motion and the concept of weight. He is however best known for his championing of the Copernican theory of heliocentricity against church opposition.

4. Michael Faraday - Self taught English Physicist - Showed how a changing magnetic field can be used to generate an electric current. This is the Principle of Electromagnetic Induction that is used in today's electric generators. He applied this knowledge to the development of several electrical machines as well. Described principles of electrolysis. Early pioneer in the field of low temperature study

5. Johannes Kepler - German - Outlined Three fundamental laws of planetary motion. Described elliptical motion of planets around the sun. Work served as the precursor to that of Newton's.

6. Archimedes - Greek - Described concept of buoyancy. Developed formulae for the areas and volumes of spheres, cylinders, parabolas, and several other solids. Worked extensively with levers. Also invented the Archimedes screw to raise water. In warfare he developed several siege engines that served to hamper the Roman invasion of his home city of Syracuse.

7. Nikolai Tesla - Yugoslavian/American - Champion of alternating current flow (which is the means by which electric power is carried in our modern network). Improved on the dynamo, transformer and electric bulb and invented the Tesla coil.

8. Max Planck - German - Father of Quantum mechanics. Showed how the energy of a photon is proportional to its frequency.

9. James Maxwell - Scottish - Developed equations for electromagnetism and the kinetic theory of gases. He predicted that other that there were other types of radiation beyond that of visible light. Showed that light was a type of electromagnetic radiation.

10. Marie Curie - Polish - Two time Nobel Prize winner. With Henri Becquerel and her Pierre she discovered radioactivity. She also isolated Plutonium and Radium.

11. Niels Bohr - Danish - Used Quantum mechanical model to show how electron energy levels are related to Spectral lines.

12. Erwin Schrödinger - Austrian - Famous for the equation that bears his name. Describes the wave action and behaviour of matter.

13. Werner Heisenberg - German - Developed method to express Quantum mechanics in terms of matrices. Best known for his Uncertainty Principle.

14. Ernest Rutherford - New Zealander/British - Father of Nuclear Physics. Showed how the atomic nucleus has a positive charge. Was the first to change one element into another by an artificial nuclear reaction.

15. Nicolas Copernicus - Polish Monk - Wrote 400 Page treatise 'On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres' that argued that the Earth revolved around the sun. The book challenged the way the world was viewed leading to much ecclesiastical opposition.

16. Christiaan Huygens - Dutch - Developed Wave Theory of Light and discovered polarization.

17. James Joule - English - Showed that heat is a form of energy. Also demonstrated that gas expansion with no work leads to a fall in temperature. Work led to the Theory of Conservation of Energy.

18. Henry Cavendish - English - Showed that water was made up of the union of two gases. Determined the Universal Gravitation constant.

19. William Thomson Kelvin - Scottish - Major figure in Thermodynamics. Helped develop Law of Conservation of Energy. Studied Wave motion and vortex motion in hydrodynamics and produced a dynamical theory of heat.

20. Thomas Young - English - Furthered the doctrine of wave interference. Famous for his 'slit' experiments.

21. Enrico Fermi - Italian/American - Split the nucleus by bombarding it with neutrons. Built first Nuclear reactor in the US.

22. Richard Feynman - American - Known for his work on quantum electrodynamics, as well as for his visual representation of the behaviour patterns of interacting particles (Feynman diagrams).

23. Alessandro Volta - Italian - Built the first electrical battery. First scientist to do substantial work with Electric currents.

24. Heinrich Hetrz - German - Discovered radio waves and determined their velocity.

25. Benjamin Franklin - American - Worked with electricity. Defined positive and negative charges.

26. John Bardeen - American - Developed the point contact transistor (won Nobel Prize with Walter Brattain and William Shockley in 1956). Won a second Nobel Prize (1972) for work on Superconductivity (shared with Leon Cooper and John Schrieffer).

27. Georg Ohm - German - Determined law in electricity that states that current is equal to the ratio of voltage to resistance.

28. Paul Dirac - English - Developed theory of the spinning electron. Proposed the existence of anti-matter.

29. Robert Millikan - American - Determined the charge on an electron. Did vital work with Cosmic Rays.

30. Edwin Hubble - American - Discovered that the universe is expanding. Established a ratio between the rate of expansion and the distance between galaxies.

31. Pieter Zeeman - Dutch - Discovered the Zeeman effect, whereby a ray of light placed in a magnetic field is split spectroscopically into several components. This has helped physicists investigate atoms, study electromagnetic radiation and for astronomers to measure the magnetic field of stars.

32. Andre-Marie Ampere - French - Worked in field of Electrodynamics. Showed how an electric current produces a magnetic field.

33. Joseph John Thomson - English - Showed that Cathode rays were rapidly moving particles. Worked out that the mass of these individual particles (electrons) was less than 2000 times that of the atom itself.

34. Henri Becquerel - French - Discovered the natural radioactivity of uranium.

35. Louis de Broglie - French - Discovered the wave nature of electrons and particles.

36. Charles Coulomb - French - Determined that positive and negative charges attract one another and showed that the magnitude of the force diminishes with distance.

37. Georges Lemaître - Belgian - Proposed the Big Bang Theory of the origin of the Universe.

38. Christian Doppler - Austrian - Discovered that a wave's frequency changes when its source and the observer are moving relative to one another (the Doppler Effect).

38. Lise Meitner - Austrian - Discovered with Otto Hahn the radioactive element protactinium. Known for her work in Nuclear Physics she developed, with her nephew Otto Frisch, the concept of Nuclear Fission.

39. Hans Oersted - Danish - Discovered magnetic effect of an electric current.

40. Robert Boyle - Irish - Showed that the pressure and volume of a mixed mass of gas are inversely proportional. Was highly active as a Chemist as well.

41. Hendrik Lorentz - Dutch - Clarified Electromagnetic Theory of light. Developed concept of local time. Work would influence Albert Einstein.

42. Joseph von Fraunhofer - German -First to realize that dark lines in spectra of light can be used to determine makeup of celestial bodies.

43. Ludwig Boltzmann - Austrian - Father of Statistical Mechanics. Worked on the kinetic theory of gases.

44. Robert Hooke - English - Formulated the law of elasticity. Invented the balance spring, the microscope and the Gregorian telescope.

45. Evangelista Torrecelli - Italian - Inventor of the Barometer. Father of Hydrodynamics.

46. Wilhelm Weber - German - invented the electrodynamometer. First to apply the mirror and scale method of reading deflections.

47. Ernst Mach - Austrian - Showed how airflow is disturbed at the speed of sound.

48. John Wheeler - American - Theoretical physicist. Coined the terms black hole and worm hole.

49. Wilhelm Roentgen - German - Discovered x-rays.

50. Stephen Hawking - English - Noteworthy for his work in cosmology especially with respect to singularities. Predicts that a Black hole will convert its mass to radiation, then disappear.

Don't worry, kid, you don't need to know that

2008-08-06T14:56:00.000-07:00

I am a strong champion of critical thinking but I also believe (how silly of me) that a solid foundation in facts is necessary when teaching students history. Unfortunately not all teachers are in agreement on this issue as the article reprinted from the Review Journal. shows.

"To understand and explain American exceptionalism, like it or not, it may be necessary to at least understand why aeroplanes were not used in the Civil War, why the British couldn't use the train to get back and forth between New York and Philadelphia in 1788, and why the Jackson Democrats kept making such a fuss about the National Bank.

"Nevada's Council to Establish Academic Standards was scheduled to meet July 21 to adopt new public-school history standards. When some attention was drawn to what they're up to, they promptly postponed their meeting for 'lack of a quorum.'

"Behind all the double-talk about replacing fact-driven, chronological history with a more 'thematic approach,' the unmistakable goal is to dumb down our history classes still further. The draft proposal under consideration is 'gobbledy-gook,' says Carson City School Board member (and former history teacher) Joe Enge. The stated goals are 'so broad I could drive a truck through them,' Mr. Enge says.

"Extrapolating 'themes' from history is great. But a young person cannot possibly judge -- let alone generate -- a useful interpretation of any facet of American history if he or she cannot locate the battlefields of Gettysburg, Pearl Harbor, Bunker Hill, Guadalcanal, Normandy, and Yorktown on a globe ... place them in their proper chronological order ... and name a commanding officer from at least three.
"Go ahead, ask them."

Check out the Review Journal for the rest.

Time Period: 1945-1949 (2 Quizzes and Answers)

2008-07-30T09:05:00.000-07:00

1945-1949 (I)

1. Into how many different Regions was Germany divided into by the Allies at the end of World War II?
2. In which Country was Klement Gottwald elected Premier in 1946?
3. In which City/Town did Winston Churchill give his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech?
4. Which two parties merged in East Germany in 1946?
5. Formed in 1945, it is known as the World Bank. What is its official name?
6. Who was the First United Nations Secretary-General?
7. What did President Truman create in 1946 to regulate the Nuclear Industry?
8. In which City did the Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, who saved countless Jewish lives during the holocaust, disappear in?
9. This energy producing industry in Britain was nationalized in 1947. Which industry was this?
10. What is the more common name for The European Recovery Program?
11. This 1947 Act was passed over President Truman’s veto. It restricted the rights of labor unions. What was this act called?
12. In 1947, the U.S. withdrew as mediator in this Country. Which Country was this?
13. This Slovakian War Leader was executed in 1947. Who was he?
14. Which Country was involved in a Civil war from 1944 to 1949 that involved such groups as EKKA, EAM/ELAS?
15. Who did American troops prevent from grabbing the Port of Trieste from Italy in 1947?

Answers to 1945-1949 (I)

1. Four regions to be controlled by France, the UK, the U.S.A., and the USSR.
2. Czechoslovakia. Gottwald would eventually become President through a communist coup d’etat in 1948.
3. Fulton, Missouri in 1946. (At Westminster College on March 5, 1946).
4. The East German Social Democrats and The Communists.
5. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
6. Trygve Lie of Norway.
7. The Atomic Energy Commision.
8. Budapest. He is thought to have been abducted by the Russians for reasons which even today are still unclear.
9. The Coal Industry.
10. The Marshall Plan.
11. The Taft-Harley Act.
12. China
13. President Tiso.
14. Greece. The war was essentially a fight between the Communists and Monarchist Partisans for control of the Country.
15. The Yugoslavs. People of Trieste would later vote by plebiscite in 1949 to join Italy.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1945-1949 (II)

1. In which Country did Mátyas Rákosi become Premier in 1947?
2. What was ‘Bizonia’? Hint: It is not a 'Sci-Fi' word.
3. This doctine was issued by the U.S. in 1947 in response to Soviet expansion what was it called?
4. Who were the four main candidates in the 1948 U.S. Election?
5. What was the main goal of The Hague Congress of 1948 that was chaired by Winston Churchill?
6. This Dutch Queen abdicated in 1948 and was succeeded by her daughter, Juliana. Who was she?
7. What did the British Citizenship Act of 1948 grant?
8. This man became U.S. Secretary of State on January 7,1949. He succeeded George Marshall. Who was he?
9. Who told the U.S. House of Representatives Un-American Activities Committee on August 2,1948 that 10 years earlier Algar Hiss, had given him secret State Department Documents to pass on to the Soviets?
10. What officially ended on May 12,1949?
11. President of the Parliamentary Council, this man proclaimed the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. Who was he?
12. Which Treaty was signed by 12 Western Nations on the April 4, 1949?
13. This man, the first U.S. Secretaty of Defense resigned in March 1949. He would later commit suicide on May 22nd of the same year. Who was he?
14. Omar Bradley was appoined by President Truman to this position in 1949. It had only recently been established by law. What was the position?
15. This man wrote an article entitled ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, in 1947. It would form the basis for Truman’s Policy of Containment. Who was this Writer?

Answers to 1945-1949 (II)

1. Hungary. He was backed of course by the Soviet troops occupying Hungary.
2. The name given to the combined British and American zones in Germany which were merged on January 1,1947?
3. The Truman Doctrine. It was adopted in response to the Ciommunist insurrections in Greece and Turkey. U.S. offered to support countries threatened by communist insurgencies.
4. Harry Truman, Thomas Dewey, Henry Wallace (the darling of the leftist Democrats), and Strom Thurmond, (who gained Soputher support). Truman won with 24.1 million votes to Dewey’s 22 million.
5. To Promote European Unity.
6. Queen Wilhelmina.
7. British passports to all citizens of the Commonwealth Citizens.
8. Dean Acheson.
9. Whittaker Chambers. His would be indicted on December 15, 1948 on two counts of perjury for lying about his connection to a Soviet spy ring.
10. The Berlin Blockade by the Soviets. It had last for over a year. The airlift into West Berlin, however would only end on September 30,1949, after more than 275,000 flights had been made into West Berlin.
11. Konrad Adenauer.
12. The North Atlantic Treaty which led to the creation of NATO.
13. James Forrestal.
14. Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff.
15. George Kennan. The article was titled by 'X’ and appeared in the magazine Foreign Affairs.

German History - Ranking of Most Important Events

2008-07-29T17:41:00.000-07:00

1. Events of World War II.
2. Unification of Germany by Bismarck.
3. Treaty of Versailles.
4. 30 Years War. Devastation of Germany.
5. Events of World War I.
6. Adolph Hitler becomes Chancellor.
7. Frederick the Great expands Prussian Power.
8. The Berlin Wallcomes down. The End of Communism.
9. The Enlightenment.
10. Frederick Wilhelm I sets up Prussian standing army.
11. Otto I becomes Holy Roman Emperor.
12. Henry Fowler forms Saxon state.
13. Goths defeat Romans at Battle of Teutoburg Forest - 9 AD.
14. The Napoleonic Wars and the creation of the Confederation of the Rhine.
15. Frederick Barbarossa grows Saxon kingdom in Medieval times.
16. Bismarck introduces pensions and social reform.
17. Re-unification of East and West Germany in the early 1990s.
18. Failed Marxist Revolution in 1848.
19. Huns overrun Germany.
20. Nazis burns the Reichstag, instigates Nuremburg Law and clamp down on freedom of speech.
21. German re-armament after World War I.
22. Building of the Berlin Wall. Division of Germany.
23. The Nuremburg Trials.
24. West Germany helps found the Common Market.
25. German Economic miracle following World War II.
26. Teutonic Knights set up state in North Eastern Prussia.
27. Mass Migration to the US during the 17th and 18th centuries.
28. The Dreadnought Naval Race with the British prior to World War I.
29. Kaiser Wilhem II removes Bismarck as the German chancellor in 1890.
30. The Berlin Airlift.

Historical Demographics

2008-07-24T05:58:00.000-07:00

The study of human population growths and shifts is both a fascinating topic as well as a necessary prerequisite in understanding historical dynamics.
The following is a list of some useful sites:

http://desip.igc.org/populationmaps.html
Shows the increase in world population via a series of Maps : 1AD to 2050AD

http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/human_pop/human_pop.html
Has some wonderful graphics - although the analysis seems stalled in the Ehrlich Population Explosion Paradigm where global population is increasing at an increasing rate (J-Curve). Better models argue that the rate of increasing is decreasing.
Nevertheless the website does deal with such issues as human carrying capacity, the AIDS phenomenon and the Demographic Transition

Demographic Transition (refers to type of society)
Stage 1: High Birth rate but fluctuating Death rate eg. 19th century Africa
Stage 2: Declining Death Rates but High birth Rates eg. Mexico
Stage 3: Declining Birth and Death Rates: eg, US
Stage 4: Low Death and Low but fluctuating Birth Rates eg. Sweden

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/49/19214.full
Historical influence of climate change on World Population

The History of the Kabbalah

2008-07-22T13:27:00.000-07:00

The following is an excerpt of the leader into the Jewish Virtual Library's History of the Kabbalah

Kabbalah is the name applied to the whole range of Jewish mystical activity. While codes of Jewish law focus on what it is God wants from man, kabbalah tries to penetrate deeper, to God's essence itself.
There are elements of kabbalah in the Bible, for example, in the opening chapter of Ezekiel, where the prophet describes his experience of the divine: "... the heavens opened and I saw visions of God.... I looked and lo, a stormy wind came sweeping out of the north-a huge cloud and flashing fire, surrounded by a radiance; and in the center of the fire, a gleam as of amber" (1:1,4). The prophet then describes a divine chariot and the throne of God.
The rabbis of the Talmud regarded the mystical study of God as important yet dangerous. A famous talmudic story tells of four rabbis, Azzai, Ben Zoma, Elisha ben Abuyah, and Akiva who would meet together and engage in mystical studies. Azzai, the Talmud records, "looked and went mad [and] Ben Zoma died." Elisha ben Abuyah became a heretic and left Judaism. Rabbi Akiva alone "entered in peace and left in peace." It was this episode, the later experiences of individuals who became mentally unbalanced while engaging in mystical activities, and the disaster of the false Messiah Shabbetai Zevi that caused seventeenth-century rabbis to legislate that kabbalah should be studied only by married men over forty who were also scholars of Torah and Talmud. The medieval rabbis wanted the study of kabbalah limited to people of mature years and character.
The most famous work of kabbalah, the Zohar, was revealed to the Jewish world in the thirteenth century by Moses De Leon, who claimed that the book contained the mystical writings of the second-century rabbi Simeon bar Yochai. Almost all modern Jewish academic scholars believe that De Leon himself authored the Zohar, although many Orthodox kabbalists continue to accept De Leon's attribution of it to Simeon bar Yochai. Indeed, Orthodox mystics are apt to see Bar Yochai not so much as the Zohar's author as the recorder of mystical traditions dating back to the time of Moses. The intensity with which Orthodox kabbalists hold this conviction was revealed to me once when I was arguing a point of Jewish law with an elderly religious scholar. He referred to a certain matter as being in the Torah, and when I asked him where, he said: "It's in the Zohar. Is that not the same as if it was in the Torah itself?"
The Zohar is written in Aramaic (the language of the Talmud) in the form of a commentary on the five books of the Torah. Whereas most commentaries interpret the Torah as a narrative and legal work, mystics are as likely to interpret it "as a system of symbols which reveal the secret laws of the universe and even the secrets of God" (Deborah Kerdeman and Lawrence Kushner, The Invisible Chariot, p. 90). To cite one example, Leviticus 26 records "a carrot and a stick" that God offers the Jewish people. If they follow his decrees, He will reward them. But if they spurn them, God will "set His face" against the people: "I will discipline you sevenfold for your sins...." and "I will scatter you among the nations" (26:28, 33). At the chapter's conclusion, God says: "Yet, even then, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or spurn them so as to destroy them, breaking My covenant with them, for I am the Lord, their God" (26:44).

For more go to http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/kabbalah.html

Source of image (Ten Sefirot) : Ucalgary

1960's Quiz

2008-07-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

The 1960s

1. On August 11, 1966 Indonesia signed a peace-deal ending three years of bush war with this Southeast Country. Which Country is this?
2. This man killed 12 people at The University of Texas in Austin, before being shot dead by a policeman. Who was this man?
3. This U.S. built fighter plane, used by the German Air Force in the 1960s, was noted for its many crashes. What was the plane?
4. Army colonels took power in which Country in 1967?
5. What did Jack Ruby die of?
6. This American Nazi Leader was shot dead in Arlington, Va in 1967. Who was he?
7. This daughter of Stalin fled to the West in 1967. What was her name?
8. In 1967, the Queen met these estranged relatives in public. Who were they?
9. This European enclave voted overwhelmingly to stay with Britain in September 1967. Name this enclave?
10. Che Guevara was shot dead in the jungle of this South American Country. Which Country is this?
11. Who wrote a book about mankind called The Naked Ape?
12. British troops left this port in Southern Yemen in 1967, after 128 years of colonial rule. Name this
port?
13. This Liberal Leader took power in Czechoslovakia in January 1968. Who was he?
14. This American ‘spy ship’ was seized by the North Koreans in 1968. What was this ships name?
15. Who was the U.S. Secretary of State in January 1968?

Answers to The 1960s

1. Malaysia
2. Charles Whitman.
3. The Starfighter.
4. Greece
5. A blood clot to the lung. He was suffering from cancer.
6. Lincoln Rockwell.
7. Svetlana Alliluyeva (give yourself one point if you just got Svetlana).
8. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
9. Gibralter
10. Bolivia
11. Desmond Morris.
12. Aden
13. Alexander Dubcek.
14. Pueblo
15. Dean Rusk.

Modern African History Quiz I

2008-07-22T13:17:00.000-07:00

What are the modern names of these African Countries/Territories:

1. Portuguese West Africa.
2. Bechuanaland
3. German East Africa.
4. Dahomey
5. Northern Rhodesia.
6. French Guinea.
7. German South West Africa.
8. Gold Coast.
9. Upper Volta.
10. Nyasaland
11. Rio De Oro.
12. French Somaliland.
13. Southern Rhodesia.
14. British East Africa.
15. Spanish Guinea.

Answers to Modern African History I

1. Angola
2. Botswana
3. Tanzania
4. Benin
5. Zambia
6. Guinea
7. Namibia
8. Ghana
9. Burkina Faso.
10. Malawi
11. Western Sahara.
12. Djibouti
13. Zimbabwe
14. Kenya
15. Equatorial Guinea

Just the Facts II - The Hittites

2008-07-18T06:38:00.000-07:00

I have always found Ancient History fascinating (although for that matter I find most History fascinating). However Ancient History is unique in that it relies so much on archeaological discoveries and puzzle solvingf to elucidate its chronologies, patterns of events and interpretations. In an earlier post I discussed the Mespotamians - today's post focuses on the Hittites.

Hittites

Dominated Asia Minor (modern day Turkey) between 1750 and 1180 BC
Hittite History is divided into three kingdoms: Old (1750-1500BC), Middle(1500-1430BC) and the New(1430-1180BC)
Were a relatively open minded and liberal civilization in comparisson to those of Mesppotamia - Hittite Laws rarely made use of the death penalty
Had many deities in fact the Hittites were called the 'people of the thousand gods'. These included: Arinna - the sun goddess, Tarhunt - god of thunder who battles the serpent Illuyanka and Ishara - the goddess of the oath
Famous leaders include: Labarnas II(unified people - set up capital at Hattusa), Musilis (grandson of Labarnas - won control of Syrian trading routes and reached Babylon), Suppiluliumas I (defeated Mittanian kingdom - set up Hittite Empire), Muwattlalis (Rival of Egyptian pharaoh Ramases II - fought Ramases' trrops to a stalemate at Kadesh) and Hattusillis III (concluded peace treaty with the Egyptians)
The city of Troy is believed to be a Hittite vassal state
Its Empire was bought down by attacks from the Sea People and Archaen Greeks.
Smaller Hittite kingdoms in Syria and Asia minor surived until the seventh century BC.
Kingdoms were finally overrun by the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
The Hittites spoke an Indo-European language
The Hittites should not be confused with Hattians an earlier population that occupied thec Asia Minor region
Hittites are thought to be an influential force in driving the Iron Age. They were well known for their chariot construction.
Some useful sites on the Hittites include: http://www.mesas.emory.edu/hittitehome/ - has a King's list and an excellent Map of theHittite Empire; http://www.ancientanatolia.com/historical/hittite_period.html and http://www.hittites.info/
The Hittites are mentioned in the Bible - in Genesis Abraham buys land from a Hittite for example, Esau marries a Hittite woman. They are also mentioned in Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Chronicles, Kings, Ezekiel and Ezra. For more read:D. J. Wiseman, Peoples of the Old Testament Times, Clarendon Press, Oxford (1973)
Like the Mespotamians the Hittites used cuneiform letters
The Hittites are thought to have had the first constitutional monarchy
Another imporant Hittite city was that of Nesa

French Revolution - Quiz II

2008-07-14T09:22:00.000-07:00

Its Bastille Day in France - which means that its time for another French Revolution Quiz.

French Revolution II

1. What did the Third Estate form on June 17, 1789?
2. Whose dismissal on the 12th of July 1789 ignited hostility on the streets of Paris?
3. What is the claim to fame of Marquis de Launay?
4. Who was in placed charge of the National Guard soon after the riots of Paris?
5. What was issued on 27 August 1789?
6. What was the ‘Great Fear’?
7. To the nearest 3 million, what was the population of France at the time of the Revolution?
8. To which building did the crowd go to immediately before attacking the Bastille?
9. Which foreign regiment assisted in the defense of the Bastille?
10. What was declared dead on the 4th August 1789?
11. What was mortmain?
12. To whom was the tithe paid?
13. What event occured on October 5-6, 1789?
14. To what Parisian Palace did Louis XIV and his family return to after the event mentioned in
Question 13?
15. What profession were Vernet, Gérard, Vien, and Fragonard all members of?

Answers to French Revolution II

1. The National Assembly. The National Assembly would create a French Constitution on July 9, 1789.
2. Jacques Necker’s.
3. He was governor of the Bastille when it was stormed on the 14th July 1789. De Launay would be killed and his head placed on the end of a pike.
4. Marquis of Lafayette.
5. Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen - proclaiming liberty of thought, property, press and freedom from arbitrary imprisonment.
6. A fear amongst the peasantry of an aristocrat and military backlash against the people, that followed the Storming of the Bastille.
7. Twenty-five million of which 24 belonged to the Third Estate.
8. The Invalides to obtain weapons.
9. The Swiss Guards.
10. The Ancien Régime with the abolishment of privileges.
11. A condition of feudal servitude that made it possible in Ancien Régime times for a serf to sell their own property.
12. The Church.
13. The March of the Women on Versailles.
14. Tuileries
15. They were all famous artists, who were politically involved at the time?

Famous Historians Quiz

2008-07-13T07:59:00.000-07:00

Famous Historians

Who wrote the following Books or series of Books?

1. Hitler and Stalin - Parallel Lives
2. The Guns of August
3. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in The White House
4. The Trouble Makers
5. History of England from the Accession of James II
6. The Creators
7. The Decline of the West
8. Conquest of Mexico
9. The Rise of Christian Europe
10. D. Day and Citizen Soldiers
11. The Mediterranean and The Mediterranean World at the Time of Philip II
12. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
13. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
14. On Heroes, Hero - Worship and the Heroic in History
15. The Holocaust - The Destruction of European Jewry 1933-1945

Answers to Famous Historians
1. Alan Bullock.
2. Barbara Tuchman.
3. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
4. A. J. P. Taylor.
5. Thomas Macauley.
6. Daniel Boorstin.
7. Oswald Spengler.
8. William Prescott.
9. Hugh Trevor-Roper.
10. Stephen Ambrose.
11. Fernand Braudel.
12. Edward Gibbon.
13. William Shirer.
14. Thomas Carlyle.
15. Nora Levin.

Winston Churchill Quiz

2008-07-13T07:56:00.000-07:00

Winston Churchill

1. Where was Churchill born?
2. What was his mother’s maiden name?
3. Against which forces did he fight against in Sudan?
4. During which war was he captured, imprisoned, and then escaped?
5. What constituency was he elected to represent in Parliament in 1900?
6. Which party did Churchill join in 1904?
7. Which position did Churchill hold between 1924 and 1929?
8. Why was Churchill excluded from The War Cabinet in 1915?
9. Which position did he assume when war broke out with Germany on the September 3, 1939?
10. What Charter did Churchill help shape in 1941 ?
11. How many volumes make up his series of books, The Second World War?
12. What did Churchill receive in 1963?
13. Of which famous military figure did Churchill write a biography of during the period 1929-1939?
14. How old was Churchill when he died?
15. There was another Winston Churchill who lived between 1871 and 1947. What was the profession of this other Winston Churchill?

Answers to Winston Churchill

1. Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England.
2. Jennie Jerome.
3. The Dervishes.
4. The Anglo-Boer War.
5. Oldham
6. The Liberals.
7. Chancellor of the Exchequer.
8. He was held responsible for the failed attempt to open the Dardanelles and The Ruinous Galipoli Campaign.
9. First Lord of the Admiralty.
10. The Atlantic Charter with the U.S.
11. Six Volumes.
12. United States Citizenship through an act of Congress.
13. John Churchill, his ancestor (aka Duke of Marlborough).
14. Ninety-one.
15. He was a Historical Novelist.

Great Danes

2008-07-11T09:26:00.000-07:00

In my opinion the ten most important Danes of All-Time

1. Niels Bohr - Physicist. Developed the Bohr model of the atom.
2. Soren Kierkegaard - Philosopher
3. Hans Christian Andersen - Writer of Children’s stories
4. Hans Christian Oersted - Physicist - discovered magnetic effect of electric current.
5. Canute - Medieval King of England and Denmark. United two countries.
6. Christian III - 16th century Danish King. Bought Reformation to the country.
7. Vitus Bering - Explorer. Discovered Bering Sea.
8. Henrik Dam - Biochemist. Discovered vitamin K.
9. Christian X - King of Denmark during World War II. Figure of resistance to German ocupation.
10. Johannes Bronsted - Chemist. Main achievement occurred in the field of Acids and Alkalines.

French Revolution - Quiz I

2008-07-11T09:18:00.000-07:00

The French Revolution

1. What nationality was Jacques Necker?
2. What was the currency in France that was being used c. 1780?
3. Besides Necker name two of the three other finance ministers who worked to secure National solvency?
4. What was the ‘lettre de cachet’?
5. What two wars had effectively bankrupted France by 1785?
6. Who was the editor of the Encyclopédia?
7. Three French philosophers from the Enlightenment are often considered to be driving forces behind the Revolution. Name two of them?
8. What was called by the Louis XVI on the 8th August 1788 to meet on May 1st 1789?
9. Who wrote the Pamphlet ‘What is the Third Estate’?
10. Why did the First and Second Estate want Separate Estate sessions and a block vote by Estate?
11. What ‘jewel’ related incident had earlier in her reign tarnished the reputation of Marie Antoinette?
12. Which famous event happened on the 20th June 1789?
13. This famous astronomer was chosen on June 3rd 1789 to head the Third Estate. Who was he?
14. What disease did the Dauphin die of in 1789?
15. Which sub-class made up most of the political representatives of the Third Estate?

Answers to French Revolution

1. He was Swiss.
2. The livres.
3. Jacques Turgot, Charles-Alexandre de Calonne and Archbishop Etienne de Brienne.
4. A warrant issued by the king that could result in imprisonment without trial. It was usually invoked to suppress criticism of the crown.
5. The ‘Seven Years War’ and the American Revolution.
6. Denis Diderot. The Encyclopédia was a major work of the Enlightenment. By its very nature, it contained anti-absolutist overtones which contributed to the intellectualism of the Revolution.
7. Charles Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire.
8. The Estates-General. It had last been called in 1614.
9. Abbé Sieyes, he would later gain notoriety in the Revolutionary Government.
10. So the two of them together could outvote the Third Estate.
11. The Affair of the Necklace.
12. The Taking of the Tennis Court Oath. The Third Estate agreed not to disperse until a new constitution had been implemented.
13. Jean-Sylvain Bailly. He would conduct himself admirably, but would lose popularity when he ordered the National Guard to fire on anti-royalist crowds. As an astronomer he is famed for writing the ‘Histoire de l’astronomie’ (1775-1787).
14. Tuberculosis
15. The Bourgeoisie.

Just the Facts I - Mesopotamia

2008-07-10T09:54:00.000-07:00

Location: In the Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Mesopotamia means the 'land between the rivers'. An alternative name for the civilization is Sumer (means 'cultivated land').

Key Crops grown: Wheat and Barley

Early Beginnings: 4000-3000BC - Migration of Semitic and Indo-European groups into region. Although settlements such as Ur are thought to have been founded in 6000BC.

Main Cities (Early Stage): Ur, Uruk, Umma, Lagash, Kish, Nippur and Adab. Ur is the city mentioned in Genesis where it is described as the birthplace of the patriarch Abraham.

Key Features of Society: Temple Economy - ruler/king administered lands on behalf of gods. The ruler was responsible for distribution of food. Central graion silos were vital to the economy.
Mespotamian cities were known for their diverse array of artisans abd craftsmen.

Other Important facts

An important literary work associated with the early Mesopotamians is the Epic of Gilgamesh. For more on the Epic go to http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/.
Lugalzaggesi, king of Umma, is one of the more significant rulers of the civilization. He conquered Lagash, Uruk and Adab but was defeated by Sargon I of Akkad, thus ending his dream of uniting Mesopotamia.
The kingdom of Akkad was founded by Sargon of Agade in 2334. The word Sargon means 'legitimate king'.
Sargon's kingdom would eventually spread into Asia Minor (modern day Turkey). He is also credited with smashing the dominance of Uruk. The following site contains an extract of an Akkadian father giving advice to his son (reminds me of Polonius and Laertes in Hamlet) - http://history-world.org/advice_of_an_akkadian_father_to_.htm
One title held by Sargon was 'King of the Four Corners'.
Akkad fell in 2250 a time that coincided with the emergence of the Guti mountain people.
Ur (ruled by the Third Dynasty) was the dominant city in the 22nd century BC but it collapsed as a power in the wake of the Elam invasions. For more on the Elam (Early Iranians) go to http://www.iranchamber.com/history/elamite/elamite.php
The Mesopotamians had many deities. Some of the more well known ones are: Enki (water/wisdom), Enlil (wind/air), Ninhursag (motherhood) and An (father/sky). For a list of Mespotamian deities and their Babylonian equivalents check out http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/Mesochart.html
The type of writing introduced by the Sumerians was Cuneiform - that used a system of pictographs. A blunt reed (stylus) was used to depict the pictographs on a clay tablet. The site http://www.mythome.org/cuniformdevelopment.html has some very useful information on the evolution of this earlier writing style.

An Alternative Early History of WWII

2008-07-02T06:28:00.000-07:00

1940 – Hitler order Panzer division to attack British Troops at Dunkirk. A German victory sees the surrender of the BEF (British Expeditionary Force). Germans initiate Operation Sea Lion – the invasion of the UK.

October 1940 - Pro-German groups in the US urge Roosevelt to cut ties with the UK. He refuses.

December 1940 – Germans invade Britain. Italy with Arab support strike at British possessions in North Africa.

January 1941 – German forces land in Kent. They encounter stiff resistance from English Home guard but advance to London.

February 1941 – London falls to German troops. US pledges to support British government. Oswald Mosely is put in charge of pro-Nazi puppet government. Churchill chosen to head what is left of the British government. He will organize resistance to Germany from base in Northern town of Oldham.

March 1941 – Persecution of British Jews in the London area begins. Oswald Mosely is assassinated by a British resistance figure. Germans pound Oldham, Manchester and Liverpool demanding the surrender of Churchill’s government. Scottish forces and Geordie irregulars beat back a German tank advance.

April 1941 – Roosevelt fails to win Congressional support for a US Expeditionary force to help out the Brits. Birmingham and Coventry now under German control.

May 1941 – American ‘Firsters’ demand a presidential recall of Roosevelt. To which they succeed. Roosevelt chastised for ‘backing a sinking ship’. Republicans win recall vote. Roosevelt government collapses. ? elected President. John Foster Dulles chosen as secretary of state. US in crisis. Dulles negotiates anti-communist pact with Germans. Offers to withdraw US support for Churchill-led British government in exchange for American involvement in the new German order.

Germans launch a sea attack onto Scotland from bases in Norway. Scotland falls in mid June (Surrender of Glasgow).

July 1941 – Churchill’s government falls. Germans now in control of Lancashire, Yorkshire and Northumbria. Churchill flees to South Africa where he is greeted by Smuts. He will eventually settle in New Zealand.

October 1941 – Spain joins war effort on the side of the Axis. Franco’s presence in North Africa takes pressure off German troops in the region.

November 1941 – Ukrainian revolts (encouraged by the Germans) are savagely put down by the Stalinist regime.

US Presidents - Best and Worst (My Opinion)

2008-07-02T06:24:00.000-07:00

10 Greatest US Presidents

1. Abraham Lincoln
2. Thomas Jefferson
3. Franklin Roosevelt
4. George Washington
5. Harry Truman
6. Theodore Roosevelt
7. Woodrow Wilson
8. James Madison
9. Ronald Reagan
10. John Fitzpatrick Kennedy

10 Worst US Presidents

1. Warren Harding
2. Ulysses Grant
3. Gerald Ford
4. Herbert Hoover
5. Jimmy Carter
6. Millard Fillmore
7. James Buchanan
8. William Taft
9. Martin Van Buren
10. Zachary Taylor

Us Civil War Quiz I

2008-06-21T17:15:00.000-07:00

1. Which was the first state to secede from the Union?
2. Who was President of the Confederacy?
3. In which city was the First White House of the Confederacy located?
4. Who was the greatest naval figure to emerge from the war?
5. Which ship sunk the Merrimac?
6. Why did Robert E. Lee side with the Confederacy?
7. Which noted abolitionist founded The New York Tribune?
8. Which city was the site of a major battle fought on July 22, 1864 ?
9. Which General was known as ‘Fighting Joe’?
10. Who said, “It is well that war is so terrible - we should grow too fond of it?”
11. How many men died in the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter?
12. Which General was described as Robert E.Lee’s war horse?
13. Which city in Virginia was General Grant’s headquarters from 1864-1865?
14. What were ‘Popskull’ and ‘Rifle Rock Knee’?
15. With which side did the Five Civilized tribes ally with?

Answers to U.S. Civil War I

1. South Carolina.
2. Jefferson Davis.
3. Montgomery, Alabama.
4. David Farragut.
5. The Monitor. It beat the Merrimac at the Battle of Hampton Roads in Virginia.
6. He could not bare to take up arms against his home state, Virginia.
7. Horace Greeley.
8. Atlanta
9. General Joseph Hooker.
10. Robert E. Lee.
11. Although this event initiated the war, there were no casualties on either side.
12. The Confederate General James Longstreet.
13. Hopewell
14. Civil War terms for ‘liquor’.
15. The Confederacy.

Disasters Quiz

2008-06-21T17:11:00.000-07:00

Name or describe the disaster from the date given:

1. January 28, 1986.
2. March 27, 1977.
3. May 6, 1937.
4. April 15, 1911.
5. February 6, 1958.
6. December 21, 1987.
7. Which river flooded its banks killing 900,000 people in October 1887?
8. Which type of disaster struck Hong Kong on September 18, 1906?
9. What was the name of the hurricane that hit Central America in late 1998, causing 9745 deaths?
10. Why is Chelabinsk, Russia notorious?
11. What did 1426 people die in Saudi Arabia of in a 1991 disaster?
12. What happened in Ramstein, Germany on August 28, 1988?
13. This European city is the largest city at present to be threatened by a volcano?
14. This Asian country has the worst road fatality rate. What is it?
15. Two hundred and twenty-two people died in Sinceljo, Colombia when a stand collapsed. What sport were the people watching?

Answers to Disasters
1. Explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger 51L.
2. Collision of two Boeing 747, one operated Pan Am the other by KLM on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport, Canary Islands. Five hundred and eighty-three people were killed. This is the largest air accident of all-time.
3. Hindenburg Airship Disaster.
4. The S.S. Ttitanic sunk.
5. Munich Air Disaster. A plane carrying the Manchester United Soccer Team and reporters crashes.
6. Ferry Dona Paz collided with the tanker Victor off the Philippines coast. In the worst ferry disaster ever.
7. The Yellow River.
8. A typhoon with winds up to 100 mph. Ten thousand people died.
9. Hurricane Mitch.
10. It is the most radioactive place on Earth. There have been three nuclear disasters in this area.
Five hundred thousand people in the region have been affected by radiation equivalent to Chernobyl.
11. A mass panic stampede in a tunnel between Mecca and Medina.
12. An airplane disaster at an air show. Three Italian jets collided, one jet exploded killing 70 people and injuring 400.
13. Naples
14. India. It has 1% of the world’s roads but 6% of its accidents.
15. Bullfighting (if it is indeed a sport).

Just my Opinion: 30 Most Important Events in Financial and Economic History

2008-06-16T14:14:00.000-07:00

1. The invention of money by the Ancients and its replacement of the barter system
2. The Industrial Revolution and the Collapse of the Domestic Cottage Economy since the 18th century
3. Age of exploration and the Opening up of the New worlds
4. The Birth of Mercantilism in 17th century Europe
5. Invention of the discipline of Accountancy in Renaissance Italy
6. The Increase in Women in the Western World’s Workforce throughout the 20th century
7. Introduction of Income Tax by the British Government during the Napoleonic War
8. Collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929
9. Adam Smith documents the working of the market society
10. Derivation of the Law of Supply and Demand
11. Formation of the First Stock Exchange in Amsterdam c. 17th century
12. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels write the Communist Manifesto
13. Setting up of the First National Pension Plan – 19th Century Germany
14. Introduction of the First Credit Card (Diner’s Club)
15. Formation of the First Guilds and Trade Unions
16. Bretton Woods, the formation of the IMF and the beginning of GATT
17. Formation of the European Common Market
18. Movement on and off the Gold Standard by the various nations
19. The continuous complication of the Income Tax Acts in most Western Countries since WWII.
20. John Meynard Keynes makes the case for Government Intervention and Fiscal Policy
21. Invention of the Macroeconomic discipline of National Incoming Accounting
22. Milton Friedman makes the case for Monetary policy
23. The New Economy Revolution of the 1990s, Rise of the NASDAQ
24. Further Impoverishment of the Third World since the 1970s by the accumulation of debt
25. Development of the Theory of Rational Expectations
26. Signing of NAFTA and the Mercursor Nation Trade Agreements and the Globalization drive.
27. Period of Post Cold War Privatization
28. Alan Greenspan’s success in defeating inflation in the Western world
29. Period of Post World War II Industrial Nationalization
30. Era of Merger and Acquistion’s - 1980s and 1990s

1980s Quiz #2

2008-06-15T05:01:00.000-07:00

1. In which Country did Joaquim Chissano become President in 1986?
2. This Company overtook Exxon as the largest corporation in the world in 1986. Which Company was this?
3. A government report in 1986 indicated that a hydrogen bomb was accidentally dropped near this City in New Mexico in 1957. Due to a stroke of luck nothing happened. Which City was this?
4. What are the English words for ‘glasnost’ and ‘perestroika’?
5. Troops from this Country entered West Beirut in 1987 to end warfare between the Druze and the Shiite militia. Which Country was this?
6. For whom did the U.S. Senate approve $40 million in aid in 1987?
7. This American Ship was hit by two Iraqi exocets in 1987. What was the name this Ship?
8. He landed a Cessna aircraft in Red Square, Moscow in 1987. Who was this man?
9. Why did Ronald Reagan visit Berlin in 1987 (during which he asked Mikhael Gorbachev to tear down the wall)?
10. In which Region of India was Direct Rule imposed in 1987?
11. U.S. Marine Guards at the U.S. Embassy in this City were accused of espionage. Which City was this?
12. E.F. Adams was elected Prime Minister of this Mediterranean Country in 1987. Which Country was this?
13. This Central American Leader was indicted by a U.S. Court in drug smuggling charges in 1988. Who was this man?
14. In which Country was Lt. Colonel William Higgins kidnapped by Islamic terrorists in 1988?
15. This U.S. Ship mistakingly shot down an Iranian airliner over the Persian Gulf causing 290 casualties. What was the name the Ship?

Answers to The 1980s

1. Mozambique. Following the death of Samora Machel in a plane accident.
2. General Motors.
3. Albuquerque
4. Openness and reconstruction.
5. Syria
6. Contra Rebels in Nicaragua.
7. The USS Stark.
8. Mathias Rust. A German teenager. He was jailed for four years, but freed in 1988.
9. To celebrate the 750th Anniversary of the Foundation of the City.
10. Punjab in an effort to weaken Sikh terrorism.
11. Moscow. They were accused of spying for the KGB.
12. Malta. He represented the Nationalist Party.
13. General Manuel Noriega.
14. Lebanon
15. The USS Vincennes.

Under the Thumb of.............

2008-06-15T04:58:00.000-07:00

European Nations which have been controlled in historical times by other Powers.

Country ---- Controller Nation/s

Norway ---- Denmark/Sweden
Scotland ---- England
Ireland ---- England
Poland ---- Russia/France/Austria/Germany
Hungary ---- Austria
Portugal ---- Spain
Netherlands ---- Spain
Finland ---- Russia
Greece ---- Turkey
Serbia ---- Turkey
Northern Italy ---- Austria
Switzerland ---- Austria
Southern Italy ---- Spain
Belgium ---- Netherlands
Bulgaria ---- Turkey
Croatia ---- Austria
Armenia ---- Turkey
Czech Republic ---- Austria
Malta ---- England
Cyprus ---- England
Lithuania ---- Poland
Romania ---- Turkey
Slovenia ---- Austria
Slovakia ---- Austria
Montenegro ---- Serbia

History of Chemistry - Quiz 1

2008-05-10T16:59:00.000-07:00

History of Chemistry I

1. Who is regarded as the Father of the Periodic Table?
2. In 1746, Andreas Margraf re-discovered a metal. What was this metal?
3. Who invented the reverse centigrade scale?
4. The Ancient Greeks said that the Four Elements were Earth, Air, Water and Fire. In 390 BC, Plato added a fifth element to this list. What was it?
5. Which element was discovered on the sun before it was discovered on Earth?
6. Which American has his name associated with the concept of ‘Free Energy’?
7. Which noble gas was identified in 1894?
8. This French chemist isolated Fluorine. He also spent considerable time trying to convert graphite into diamonds. Who was he?
9. What is a REDOX reaction?
10. The name of these two scientists underline the definition of acids and bases. Who are they?
11. This Scientist showed that air was composed of two parts, an active part (oxygen) and an inactive part (nitrogen). Who was he?
12. This substance was the first organic chemical to be synthesized from an inorganic source. What was it?
13. In 1898, Pierre and Marie Curie separated two radioactive elements. What were they?
14. What chemical group lies alongside the nobel gases in the periodic table?
15. In 1898 - a busy year in Chemistry, James Dewar produced the liquid form of a common gas. What was this gas?

Answers to History of Chemistry I

1. Dmitri Mendeleyev.
2. zinc
3. Anders Celsius in 1742.
4. ether
5. helium
6. Josiah Gibbs, who besides being a pioneer in thermodynamics and phase changes, was also heavily involved in vector algebra.
7. argon
8. Ferdinand Moissan.
9. A reaction involving both reduction (gain of electrons) and oxidation (loss of electrons).
10. Johannes Bronsted and Thomas Lowry. Their definition states that an acid is a proton donor and a base is a proton acceptor.
11. Antoine Lavoisier.
12. urea
13. radium and polonium.
14. The halogens.
15. hydrogen

Ancient Greece Quiz - Alpha

2008-05-10T16:55:00.000-07:00

1. Which people could vote in Ancient Athens?
2. Who is considered the Father of History?
3. Which important war is he known for documenting?
4. Give or take 10 years, when did the Battle of Marathon take place?
5. What was the name of the runner who ran the distance to tell the Greeks of their victory at Marathon?
6. Name two of the four buildings that sit on top of the Acropolis?
7. What were the names of the three column structures that are ever present in Greek architecture?
8. Which is the simplest of these three column structure types?
9. Which battle did the Greeks lose as a result of betrayal within their ranks?
10. To which island did the Greek leadership flee to after this defeat?
11. What was the name of the famous sea battle the Greeks defeated the Persians in?
12. Which Persian king watched this battle from the shore?
13. Who was Greece’s 5th Century philosopher king?
14. Who were the two biographers of Socrates?
15. What is the origin of the word “Academy?”

Answers to Ancient Greece II

1. Property holding free men.
2. Herodotus
3. The Persian Wars.
4. 490 BC
5. Phidippides – Don’t ask me what his time was?
6. Parthenon, Propylea, Temple of Athena at Nike, Erictheum.
7. Doric, Ionian, Corinthian.
8. Doric
9. Thermopylae
10. Aegina
11. Salamis - probably one of the greatest sea battles ever.
12. Xerxes I – History’s most important person in the “X category.”
13. Pericles
14. Plato and Xenophon.
15. It is derived from Plato’s philosophy School: Academicus.

Art Museums

2008-03-26T18:46:00.000-07:00

The best to the worst that I have visited. Now let me see. Best one has to be the Louvre (I am a sucker for the classics). Worst the National Art Gallery in Ottawa (drab beyond words).

Top Ten Art Museums visited

1. Louvre - Paris. Visited in 1984.
2. Tate Art Gallery - London. Visited in 1993.
3. Uffizi - Florence. Visited in 1984.
4. Musee D’Orsay - Paris. Visited in 2002.
5. Metropolitan Museum of Art - New York. Visited in 1991.
6. Museum of Modern Art - New York. Visited in 1998
7. Sistine Chapel - Rome. Visited in 1984.
8. The National Art Gallery - London. Visited in 1993.
9. Whitney Art Museum - New York. Visited in 1991.
10. Rijks Museum - Amsterdam. Visited in 2002.

Still on my agenda to one day visit:

1. Hermitage - St Petersburg.
2. Prado - Madrid.
3. Barcelona - The whole city is an art gallery.
4. Van Gogh Museum - Amsterdam.
5. Andy Warhol Collection in Pittsburgh.
6. The city of Sienna in Italy.
7. Milan to see the Last Supper.
8. Ravenna - for some reason I am attracted to Byzantine Art.

Milestones in the History of Ancient Greece

2008-03-26T18:42:00.000-07:00

1. The Rise and Fall of the Minoans (3000-1500BC) – Minoans were the forerunners of the Greeks.
2. The Mycenean Hiatus – This is the Period when the Trojan War took place. The stuff that legends are made up of.
3. Invasion by the Doric Greeks – Although they would set up the foundations for Classical Greeks the Dorians were originally viewed as barbarians. Talk about improving your image.
4. Colonization of Asia Minor – The Greeks colonized modern Turkey. The Turks would make up for this by colonizing the Greek Peninsula almost two millennia later.
5. The Birth of Western Philosophy – nobody can accuse the Greeks of apathy toward knowledge even if some of their theories were way off the mark.
6. The Emergence of the City States – Dawning of the Classical Period – This is the Greece most of us are aware of. Romanticized but palatable.
7. The Persian Wars – The Greeks had to slug it out with the powerful Persian Empire before they could be deemed masters of the Mediterranean.
8. The Age of the Playwright – Some say that Shakespeare, Shaw and O’Neill would be nothing with out Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristpphanes. The Greeks turned the play into an art form.
9. The Golden Age of Pericles – The Golden Age of Greece when the Philosopher king Pericles ran Athens.
10. The Peloponnesian Wars – Athens v Sparta or the Geeks vs the Jocks. No happy ending here as the Jocks win.
11. Macedonian Emergence – A new type of barbarian takes control. No surprise in that it too comes from the North.
12. The Conquests of Alexander the Great – The most Brilliant military commander of the time. Alexander makes short work of his opponents especially the Persians.
13. The Hellenic Period – Greek culture spreads in the post-Alexander era. After the Empire is divided amongst the Macedonian ruler’s generals.
14. Fall to Rome – Greeks are toppled by an old enemy: Rome. Legendary descendants of the Trojans
15. Christianization of the Greeks – Its goodbye to the Olympian pantheon as the Greeks embrace Christianity.

Key Events in Spanish History

2008-03-14T12:37:00.000-07:00

These are in my opinion the key events in Spanish history (not in chronological order)

1. Moorish rule and the mixing of the cultures.
2. Rise of the Christian Kingdoms in the 11th, 12 and 13th centuries.
3. The Marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. Unification of Castille and Aragon.
4. The Spanish Inquisition and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492.
5. Charles V becomes Joint Habsburg and Spanish Empire.
6. The Final Defeat of the Moors in 1492. Last Moor stronghold in Granada collapses.
7. Invasion by the Visigoths during Roman times.
8. Age of Discovery and the conquest of South and Central America in the 16th century.
9. The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).
10. Loss of Colonies in South and Central America in the 1820's and 1830's.
11. Loss of the Spanish Armada (1588).
12. The Carlist War of the 19th century.
13. Financial Collapse in the 17th century.
14. Defeating Napoleon in the Peninsula War (with English assistance).
15. Death of Franco and the coming of Democracy in 1976.
16. The rise and fall of Roman power in Spain.
17. War of the Spanish Succession and the Rise of the Bourbons.
18. Charles V abdicates and hands over power to his son Philip II.
19. 80 Year War with the Dutch in the 16th And 17th century. Leads to Dutch independence from Spain.
20. Loss of the Rock of Gibraltar to the British.

Useful websites on Ancient Rome

2008-03-11T11:08:00.000-07:00

http://www.legionxxiv.org/history/
Has a neat name - tons of info

http://www.roman-empire.net/children/history.html
A worthwhile intro site for the novice

http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/ancient/asbook09.html
Heavy on the information - but certainly worth a visit.

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/romans/history/fall.htm
More insight for the junior mind

http://www.historywiz.com/anc-rome.htm
Another locale for the history junkie

Ancient Hebrew Quiz 1

2008-03-11T11:03:00.000-07:00

Ancient Hebrews I

1. Who was Adam and Eve’s third son?
2. Who was Methusalah’s father?
3. Name eight of Joseph’s eleven brothers?
4. What nationality was Laban?
5. Who are the four mothers of the Jewish people?
6. What was the name of the wealthy businessman who bought Joseph as a slave?
7. Who were Moses’ father and mother?
8. Who were Joseph’s two sons?
9. From which nation was Moses’s wife from?
10. What fell from heaven when the Hebrews complained to god about the manna?
11. Who was the mother of Ishmael?
12. How old was Abraham when he was circumsised?
13. What was the name of the cave that Abraham purchased for his family burials?
14. Who was the only matriarchial figure not buried in this cave?
15. In which town is this cave located?

Answers to Ancient Hebrews I

1. Seth
2. Enoch
3. Asher, Benjamin, Dan, Gad, Issacher, Judah, Levi, Naphtali, Reuben, Simon, and Zebulen.
4. Syrian
5. Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah.
6. Potiphar
7. Avram and Jochebed.
8. Ephraim and Manasseh.
9. Midianites
10. Quail - Maybe they should not have complained so quickly.
11. Hagger
12. 99
13. Cave of Machpelah.
14. Rachel
15. Hebron

The Democrat Party - Support for Slavery

2008-03-02T17:25:00.000-08:00

Reprinted Courtesy of: Intellectual Conservative
Author: Robert Oliver

Before the Civil War, the Democrat Party was united in its support for slavery. After the war, Democrats founded the Ku Klux Klan, established Jim Crow Laws, and repeatedly defeated anti-lynching and other federal legislation that became necessary in order to dismantle Democrat-created segregation in South.

There is a saying – “God cannot change the truth.”

I’m an African-American political independent. The purpose of this article is not to debate the merits of belonging to a certain political party nor to pursue political converts. The purpose is to clarify history and to ask, does the Democratic Party owe African-Americans an apology for past support of slavery and racism?

February is Black History Month. Sometimes Black History needs clarification. For example, a friend told me that an African-American employee in his New York City office thought that President Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat. Another African-American friend, a former liaison between the Democrats in the California State Legislature and the Clinton White House, as well as a campaigner for Bill Clinton’s presidency, thought that the slave owners in the Old South were all Republicans. He thought that the worst Democrat was better than the best Republican. I was even told that an African-American woman in Illinois actually thought that it was illegal for a Black person to vote Republican! Based on that sampling, is it possible that a vast number of African-Americans are laboring under similar false beliefs about Democrats and Republicans?

For the full article go to:

http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2008/02/18/should-the-democratic-party-apologize-for-supporting-slavery

Sad news on British History

2008-02-04T18:32:00.000-08:00

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080204/od_afp/britainpeoplehistoryoffbeat

LONDON (AFP) - Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll out Monday which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real.

The survey found that 47 percent thought the 12th century English king Richard the Lionheart was a myth.

And 23 percent thought World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. The same percentage thought Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale did not actually exist.

Three percent thought Charles Dickens, one of Britain's most famous writers, is a work of fiction himself.

Indian political leader Mahatma Gandhi and Battle of Waterloo victor the Duke of Wellington also appeared in the top 10 of people thought to be myths.

Meanwhile, 58 percent thought Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Holmes actually existed; 33 percent thought the same of W. E. Johns' fictional pilot and adventurer Biggles.

UKTV Gold television surveyed 3,000 people.

History of Boxing Quiz

2008-01-20T13:46:00.000-08:00

1. Who wrote the rules on which Modern Boxing is based?
2. Which famous boxer’s real name was Walker Smith?
3. What was the nickname of Tommy Hearns?
4. His nickname was ‘Boom Boom’. Who was he?
5. Put the following boxers in chronological order (earliest to latest) taking into account the first time they won the World Heavyweight Crown: Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Floyd Patterson, and Ezzard Charles?
6. How many times did Mohammed Ali and Joe Frazier meet in the rink?
7. What does the IBFstand for?
8. Who did Cassius Clay/Muhammed Ali beat to win each of his three World Heavyweight Titles?
9. Who was South Africa’s only heavyweight boxing champion?
10. Put the folowing divisions in order from lightest to heaviest weight: Bantamweight, Featherweight and Flyweight.?
11. Which boxer ended Larry Holmes’ unbeaten run?
12. Who is considered as Boxing’s First Heavyweight Champion?
13. How did Rocky Marciano die?
14. This Panamanian fighter was probably Sugar Ray Leonard’s greatest rival. Who was he?
15. Who dethroned Mike Tyson as Heavyweight Champion in 1990?

Answers to Boxing History

1. Sir John Sholto Douglas, 8th Marquis of Queensberry.
2. Sugar Ray Robinson.
3. The Hitman or the Detroit Hitman.
4. Ray Mancini.
5. Jack Dempsey (1919), Gene Tunney (1926), Joe Louis (1937), Ezzard Charles (1949), and Floyd Patterson (1956).
6. Three times. Ali won two and lost one. The third fight was the renowned ‘Thriller in Manila’.
7. International Boxing Federation. One of several governing bodies. The other governing bodies of boxing are the World Boxing Council (WBC), World Boxing Association (WBA), and the World Boxing Organization (WBO).
8. Sonny Liston (1964), George Foreman (1974), and Leon Spinks (1978).
9. Gerrie Coetzee (1983 - WBA Champion).
10. Flyweight, Bantamweight, and Featherweight.
11. Michael Spinks.
12. John L Sullivan.
13. He was killed in a plane crash in 1969. Marciano fought 49 fights during his professional carreer, winning all of them (43 by knockout). He was nicknamed the ‘Rock from Brockton’.
14. Roberto Duran.
15. James ‘Buster’ Douglas.

Latin American Quiz

2008-01-20T13:42:00.000-08:00

1. This Peruvian civilization was famous for its large designs in the sand using pebbles. The largest design is a bird that is 275m long. Who were these people?
2. This Inca ruler was kidnapped by the men of Francisco Pizarro. He was later garotted. His death would bring speed up the downfall of the Inca. Who was this man?
3. Many people believe that this civilization was behind the legends of Eldorado. Beginning with a letter 'C', these people lived in the Colombian Highlands until they were destroyed by the Spanish in the 16th Century. Who were these people?
4. The Tihuanaco civilization lasted between 800 BC and 1200 AD, its main city was situated near this famous South American Lake in Bolivia. Which Lake was this?
5. This vegetable had been cultivated by the Andean Indians since c. 200 AD. Which vegetable was this?
6. For which god did the Aztecs mistake Hernando Cortes for?
7. This civilizations' Golden Era lasted from AD 250 to AD 900. They lived in Southern Mexico, Guatemala and parts of Belize. Who were they?
8. Who was the Aztec Chief God and God of Matter?
9. Fifteen thousand men were sacrificed to this Aztec Sun God. Who was he?
10. What is the modern name of the City 'Tenochtitlan'?
11. This Ancient Middle American culture dominated the coastal plains between 1200 BC to 400 BC. Their name is the Nahuatl Indian word for ‘inhabitant of rubber country’. Who were they?
12. This warrior culture was based at the City of Tollan. They ruled Central Mexico between 900 to 1200 AD. Their civilization seems to have been created from several ethnic groups. Who were they?
13. What was Tlachtli?
14. This South American civilization called gold ‘the sweat of the sun’ and silver as the ‘tears of the moon’. Who were they?
15. This ‘last’outpost of the Mayan civilization was built in the Yucatan Peninsula. The city had two wells, also known as 'cenotes'. The citizens drank from one well and used the other for sacrifice. Name this city?

Answers to Latin American History I
1. The Nazca.
2. Atahualpa
3. The Chibcha.
4. Lake Titicaca.
5. The potato.
6. Quetzcoatl
7. The Mayans. They were also brilliant astronomers and Mathematicians.
8. Tezcatlipoca
9. Huitzilopochtli
10. Mexico City. It was founded by the Aztecs in AD 1200.
11. The Olmec.
12. The Toltec.
13. An Aztec game with similarities to volleyball and basketball.
14. The Incas.
15. Chichén Itzá.

Holocaust Education in Germany

2008-01-12T16:28:00.000-08:00

Source: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/943953.html

German schools are failing in educating students about the Holocaust, a new study by a political education center has found, as German youth, who one historian said use the word "Jew" as a common curse in daily discourse, are increasingly distant from the suffering of the victims of Nazism.

According to a study commissioned by the Federal Agency for Civic Education, a political education center known by its German acronym BPB, history courses no longer manage to teach Germany's younger generation of the horrors of the Nazis.

In the report, which appeared in the German educational magazine Focus-Shula, teachers are quoted as saying that they are having trouble impressing upon school children the horrors of the Holocaust, and have stated that their tools for teaching about the Shoah are not effective. "The entire time we stood before the crematoriums of Auschwitz, the students took more interest in the types of pipes used to pump in the lethal Zyklon B gas, and not the fate of the Nazis victims," a teacher was quoted as saying. In their words, this generation's students are less sensitive to the horrors of the Holocaust than any before.

The research also examines the role that immigrants have played in the changing attitudes towards the Shoah. Experts are quoted in the study as saying that there is a marked rise in the number of Muslims in Germany, many of whom see the teaching of the Holocaust as a veiled endorsement of the policies of the state of Israel. "Out of fear of the students' reactions, many of the teachers avoid teaching this chapter of history in order to not be viewed by some students as supporters of Israel."

"The word 'Jew' has turned into one of the most common curse words among students in both east and west Germany," said Gottfried Cosler, a Frankfurt-based Holocaust scholar.

Robert Sigel, a historian who contributed to the study, is of the opinion that students are taking a great interest in the Holocaust, but that the methods in which the subject is taught today are in need of improvement. "Often time the teachers, especially the more devoted ones, get carried away, and demand way too much of themselves," Sigel told Focus magazine. "They want to teach the facts and at the same time get across a moral message, call for education and tolerance, deal with the extreme right and prevent anti-Semitism. They put all this material into the subject, and it's too much."

Susan Orban, a historian at Yad Vashem, says that the Holocaust should be taught using methods that have proved successful in the past. "Today's kids live in different times than that of Anne Frank," Orban said. In order to bridge the generational gap, she submits a different approach, "for example, asking them to imagine that they have to abruptly leave their homes and start a new life elsewhere." Such a method, according to Orban, would speak more directly to the children's hearts and minds than descriptions of the horrors of the concentration camp.

Sigel expressed similar sentiments, adding that the children of immigrants have shown particular interest to the victims of Nazism given that many of them suffered from racial persecution, religious intolerance, and even genocide in their native lands.