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Reign of Terror
What is the history behind the Reign of Terror or simply the Terror? The time period was from Sept. 5, 1793, to July 27, 1794. The Terror took place in France during the revolution, when democratic reform turned into executions by guillotine. The former ruling royals King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette met their death via Madame Guillotine in 1793. “Let them eat cake!” words alleged to have left the lips of Marie Antoinette upon being told that starving French peasants lacked bread to eat has never been proven. Maxime de la Rocheterie wrote of her: ‘She was not a guilty woman, neither was she a saint; she was an…
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150 years since Abraham Lincoln’s death
The gunshot that killed Lincoln came from John Wilkes Booth’s .44-caliber derringer as the president and his wife watched “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre. At 7:22 the following morning, April 15, 1865, in the Petersen boarding house across from the theatre, the 16th president of the United States took his last breath, but not before making his mark in history. Who the Secretary of State Edwin M. Stanton called “the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen.” Ford’s Theatre is hosting a comprehensive series of Lincoln memorials, which it calls Ford’s 150: Remembering the Lincoln Assassination. The commemorations will be on Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington, D.C.…
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Napoleon’s Failed War: Factors and Foes
Logistics In Lynch Bennett’s article The Grand Failure: How Logistics of Supply Defeated Napoleon in 1812, he points to logistical errors as a primary and often overlooked reason for Napoleon’s “Grand Failure” to invade Russia in 1812. As the popular idiom states “the devil is in the detail”; devilish details grew large and unruly, details that Napoleon neglected to anticipate. He was blinded by ambition and hubris, fed by his past accomplishments of conquest; he had by 1812 conquered the whole of continental Europe. The logistical difficulties involved in supplying his Grande Armeé of over 600,000 men were multiple and grave. By the time the French retreated Russia in a devastating defeat…
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History of the Personal Computer
Alan Kay considers the LINC (1962) the first Personal Computer. But most people think of Gates and Jobs when associations are made to the personal computer. This association is well deserved. Gates and Jobs developed major innovations that literally put the PC on the everyday person’s desk and made it mobile from there. Bill Gates had the goal to put the personal computer into every home. It was at the young age of 13 that Gates began programming in Basic. Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal The computer programming language acronym BASIC stands for “Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code” The combination of Gates and BASIC started…
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The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956
The first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956, a history and memoir of life in a Soviet Union prison camp, written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, was first published in Paris in the original Russian on Dec 28, 1973. “… authorized for Western publication only after the Soviet secret police seized a copy of the manuscript last August, …” The Soviets arrested Solzhenitsyn on February 12, 1974 taking away his citizenship and deporting him. Solzhenitsyn warned the Russian people, citizens of a severely, censorial, 1973 Russia, in the preface of his book The Gulag Archipelago (a three-volume work), that they must consider the reading of his writings as a “very dangerous” act. Learn more about life in Stalin’s Gulag.
