The Wright Brothers were based in Dayton, Ohio, but they experimented with gliders and powered flight near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina because they needed the windiness. On Dec. 14, 1903 (the 121st anniversary of the first hot air balloon flight), Wilbur won the coin toss to be first to Read more…
Henry VIII had six wives. The best was his first. Catherine of Aragon was born on Dec. 16, 1485 and went on to live a tragic life. She was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain and that made her a valuable commodity. She was betrothed to the Read more…
“The Battle of the Dark” occurred on Dec. 15, 1890. That battle ended in the deaths of twelve Native-Americans. One of them was the famous chief Sitting Bull. Tatanka Iyotake had been the most famous hostile since the Battle of Little Big Horn. His refusal to come in to Read more…
Ernie Pyle, the most famous war correspondent of WWII, gained his fame from writing columns of the average G.I. Joes. His most famous column was about the reaction to the death of Capt. Henry Waskow. It was reenacted in the movie “The Story of G.I. Joe” which is about Pyle’s Read more…
Today is the anniversary of the start of a typically horrible Nazi program. In 1935, the Nazis began to worry about the birthrate of Aryans in Germany. The Lebensborn (“Spring of Life) program was initiated to facilitate more babies. It was initiated on Dec. 12, 1935 by Heinrich Himmler. Read more…
When credit cards first came out, single and divorced women had to get a male co-signer in order to get one. This ended with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. Until 1975, it was legal to ban women from juries. In 1879, the Supreme Court supported the common law Read more…
Here are some interesting facts about one of the most fascinating men of the 20th Century. He had a speech impediment – a lisp. He worked to improve it by reciting the phrase: “The Spanish ships cannot see for they are not in sight.” He struggled in school, mainly because Read more…
The Japanese got the idea for the attack from a book by Hector Bywater, a British naval authority. “1931: The Great Pacific War” describes a surprise attack on the Pacific Fleet, followed by attacks on Guam and the Philippines. Another inspiration was the British attack on the Italian fleet at Read more…
In 1877, Thomas Edison began experimenting with a hybrid of the telephone and telegraph. He was hoping for a message that could be transmitted repeatedly over the telegraph. The message was to be a series of indentations on a spool of paper. This evolved into embossing on a tin Read more…
On Feb. 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order #9066 which called for the internment of Japanese-Americans as a matter of strategic military necessity. 110,000 – 120,000 were rounded up on the West Coast and shipped to the ten camps that were located in drab areas. In the process, Read more…