Today in History

DNO · Sep 22, 2015

On this day, in 1897, in response to a letter from Virginia O'Hanlon, Francis Church published the famous editorial in the New York Sun in which he assured her that "yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus".

DNO · Oct 15, 2015

October 14th...quite the day!

Poor Harold met his grisly end at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and in 1947 Chuck Yeager finally managed to break the sound barrier.

cm289 · Oct 15, 2015

10/14/47 @ 10:24 a.m. Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 "Glamorous Glennis".

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DNO · Oct 25, 2015

600 years ago, this very day...St. Crispin's Day, 1415: The Batlle of Agincourt.

"And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day."

Henry V, Act IV, scene iii

Stanley Doble · Oct 29, 2015

How did we miss Back To The Future Day - October 21 2015 -

V.C. Brunswick · Oct 29, 2015

On this Day, October 28

1919 -- The US Congress passes the Volstead Act ushering in Prohibition

DNO · Oct 30, 2015

V.C. Brunswick said:
On this Day, October 28

1919 -- The US Congress passes the Volstead Act ushering in Prohibition

Much to the delight, I'm sure, of Canadian distillers and rumrunners!

DNO · Nov 2, 2015

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2, containing the first animal in space: the dog named Laika.

GHT · Nov 3, 2015

DNO said:
600 years ago, this very day...St. Crispin's Day, 1415: The Batlle of Agincourt.

Shakespeare, the master of spin, his version was pure myth.
The battle will always be remembered by the tactic of Henry in lining up his archers in rows and had them shoot their arrows by rank. As in: Number one rank, shoot. Number two rank, shoot and so on. The English archers were so strong that they could pierce an oak door with one arrow. Henry knew this and had his archers aim at the knights' horses. Bringing the horses down created a barrier for the next wave of knights, as well as making those same knights useless for battle. Try clambering over dead horses in full body armour. The French were fully aware of the strength of the English archers, so confident of victory, the French said that they would, when victorious, cut the draw string fingers off of every English archer. At the end of the battle, the archers taunted the French by waving their draw string fingers at them. It's where we get the V sign from. Agincourt has another distinction: It was the first battle on European soil where cannons and gunpowder were first deployed.

MisterCairo · Nov 3, 2015

Captain Pedantic moment:

Archers "loose" arrows, they don't "shoot" them!

GHT · Nov 4, 2015

Not really pedantic, it inspired me to look it up. One thing that I learned was that a torpedo, fired from a U Boat, on the command of: 'Los,' didn't mean loose, as I had always thought. Given that "Hölle brach los" = hell broke loose. Los is a word that varies in it's meaning and depends on the content. In the case of the torpedo it's: "Torped los !" = Torpedo go !
The reason that I looked all that up was because loose is so plausible, it sounds so close to Los, and with so much Saxon in our language, I thought that loose might have become a corrupted variation of Los.
(Am I sad, or what?)

DNO · Nov 6, 2015

Moving to a more modern period, today in 1917 the Canadian Corps, lead by the 1st and 2nd Divisions, finally captured what was left of the village of Passchendaele finally bringing to an end (well, almost) one of the nastiest actions of the modern age.

DNO · Nov 9, 2015

Sometimes it's good to remember that that the 'golden era' wasn't always so golden. November 9th, 1938: Kristallnacht. We forget at our peril.

DNO · Dec 2, 2015

It was this day, in 1955, that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus.

DNO · Dec 7, 2015

Halifax...December 6, 1917: S.S. Mont Banc, heavily laden with explosives, collided with S. S. Imo in the 'Narrows' in Halifax harbour resulting in the largest man-made explosion prior to the atomic bomb. Around 1,950 people were killed and 9,000 injured.

In memory of the medical aid sent to the devastated city by the Boston Red Cross, Nova Scotia sends a large Christmas tree to Boston each year. The tree is the city's official Christmas tree and is set up and lit in Boston Common. An act of kindness not forgotten.

DNO · Dec 8, 2015

December 8th, 1941. This is the date that one usually sees in history books for the Japanese attacks on Malaya, Hong Kong, Thailand and the Philippines but it was actually the same time as the attack on Pearl Harbour. We can thank the international date line for the confusion, I believe.

Fading Fast · Dec 9, 2015

DNO said:
December 8th, 1941. This is the date that one usually sees in history books for the Japanese attacks on Malaya, Hong Kong, Thailand and the Philippines but it was actually the same time as the attack on Pearl Harbour. We can thank the international date line for the confusion, I believe.

It was a grab-as-much-as-you-can-while-the-grabbing-is-good mentality. Many in the Japanese military knew a blow back was coming and they knew that, if the US was fully committed, they couldn't hold off the US onslaught, but hoped they could sue for peace and figured the more they had the more they would have to negotiate with.

MisterCairo · Dec 9, 2015

On December 8th 1980 John Lennon was murdered.

DNO · Dec 14, 2015

On December 13th, 1937 the Japanese Army finally captured Nanking, China. What followed is well described in Iris Chang's 1997 book, The Rape of Nanking. It is not reading for the faint of heart.

MisterCairo · Dec 14, 2015

On December 14th, 1920, in Bombay, India, Josephine Harriet Raleigh, nee Rosario, was given birth of a baby boy, Patrick Anthony Noel (as in the Christmas noel), my father!

Rest in peace, Dad.

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