Pop quiz: who was the first woman in space? Many of you probably just answered Dr. Sally Ride, who launched aboard the space shuttle Challenger on June 18, 1983. But you would be wrong: Sally Ride was the first American woman in space, not the first overall. That honour belongs to a now scarcely remembered… Read More »
From October 1945 to October 1948, almost 1,700 Nazi officers and officials underwent the famous Nuremberg trials, charged with committing war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. The trials resulted in 200 death sentences, while 279 defendants were to serve life prison terms. Similar trials for similar charges were conducted in Tokyo, from… Read More »
We all have to start somewhere and the Ancient Greeks didn’t arrive in Greece ready to write world changing epic poems, philosophy, and tragedies. They wandered into the Aegean after splitting from other Indo-Europeans, settled, founded a civilization, saw it collapse, and started again. As you do. The story of how the Greeks became the… Read More »
In May 1855, a 16-year-old girl known to history only as Cornelia called at the office of New York surgeon James Rushmore Wood complaining of severe toothache and swelling in the right side of her lower jaw. Following standard procedure, Wood lanced Cornelia’s jaw, extracted a few teeth, and sent her on her way. But… Read More »
On September 2, 1945, hundreds of servicemen and representatives from every Allied nation gathered on the deck of the battleship U.S.S. Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay. Under the watchful eye of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific, representatives of the defeated Empire of Japan signed the formal instruments of surrender, officially bringing… Read More »
On April 12, 1961 at 9:07 AM Moscow Time, a Soviet Vostok rocket blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, and soared into the sky. Minutes later, the rocket reached an altitude of 200 kilometres, placing its payload, 27-year-old Air Force Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin, into orbit. Gagarin circled the earth once before reentering the atmosphere, landing… Read More »
