• Science

    The Oldest Surviving US Shuttle

    Discovery on Thursday(April 20, 2012) became the first spaceship of the retired US shuttle fleet to enter its permanent home as a museum artifact, marking a solemn end to the 30-year manned spaceflight program. The oldest surviving US shuttle, Discovery flew 39 missions to space beginning in 1984 and its transition from space-flying giant to tourist attraction drew mixed emotions from NASA veterans and space fans alike. Discovery ended its last mission to space in March 2011, and the return to Earth of Atlantis in July 2011 marked the end of the US shuttle program, leaving Russia as the only nation capable of sending astronauts to space. “The space shuttle…

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    The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906

    The Atlantic What America Looked Like: The San Francisco Earthquake By Brian Resnick Images from the most destructive earthquake in American history Wikimedia Commons In less than 60 seconds, San Francisco was ruined. At 5:13 a.m., April 18, 1906, the San Andreas fault line ruptured, radiating seismic waves of destruction that are now believed to have measured 7.7 on earthquake scales. But the destruction didn’t end there — the quake spawned multiple fires that burned for days, cementing the event as one of the most devastating natural disasters in American history. It is estimated that 3,000 people died and there were $500 million (in 1906 dollars) in damage. Chaos and…

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    Girl Possibly Murdered During Roman Invasion Found in England

    Published: April 29, 2011 By: JENNIE COHEN Last week, archaeologists in Kent, England, discovered the body of a girl believed to have been brutally murdered by Roman soldiers during their second invasion of Britain, which began under the emperor Claudius in 46 A.D. They made the tragic find on a site where Roman soldiers may have camped during their campaign, burying unwanted items there before moving on. Read Story at History.com

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    Johnson Signs Civil Rights Act

    On this day ,July 2, in 1964, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs into law the historic Civil Rights Act in a nationally televised ceremony at the White House. In the landmark 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The 10 years that followed saw great strides for the African-American civil rights movement, as non-violent demonstrations won thousands of supporters to the cause. Memorable landmarks in the struggle included the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955–sparked by the refusal of Alabama resident Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a city bus to a white woman–and Martin Luther King,…

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    The Writer Margaret Mitchell

    Unless you are very young, or were raised by wolves in the heart of the wilderness, you have heard of the bestselling novel, turned big screen movie, Gone With the Wind. But do you know anything about the book’s author, Margaret Mitchell? Her home town was Atlanta, Georgia, where she grew up in a family of attorneys. She stayed living in her childhood city of Atlanta with her husband in a cramped one bedroom apartment that she called, “the dump”(source:Joanna Arietta, director of historic houses for the Atlanta History Center and Margaret Mitchell House). She not only wrote a bestselling novel, in their small living space, her only published novel, but she also won the Pulitzer Prize in…

  • Firsts in History

    The First Corvette

    On this day in 1953, workers at a Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan, assemble the first Corvette, a two-seater sports car that would become an American icon. The first completed production car rolled off the assembly line two days later, one of just 300 Corvettes made that year. The idea for the Corvette originated with General Motors’ pioneering designer Harley J. Earl, who in 1951 began developing plans for a low-cost American sports car that could compete with Europe’s MGs, Jaguars and Ferraris. The project was eventually code-named “Opel.” In January 1953, GM debuted the Corvette concept car at its Motorama auto show at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York…

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    Big Ben Clock Tower to be Renamed Elizabeth Tower

    By Mohammed Abbas and Alessandra Prentice LONDON |         Tue Jun 26, 2012 2:20pm EDT http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/26/uk-britain-bigben-queen-idUKBRE85P0O220120626 LONDON (Reuters) – It’s one of the most famous names in the world, up there with the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty – but now London’s Big Ben clock tower is to be renamed Elizabeth Tower to mark the queen’s 60th year on the British throne. The announcement on Tuesday followed four days of celebrations earlier this month to mark 86-year-old Queen’s Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee. The landmark, part of Britain’s Houses of Parliament, is officially called the Clock Tower but is commonly known as Big Ben, the name of the giant bell in the…

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    Fifteen Years Since Hong Kong’s Transfer to China

    July 1, 2012 will mark the 15th anniversary of Hong Kong’s being handed over to China. Hong Kong, now called a Special Administrative Region (SAR), that belonged to Britian from  (1950s – 1997), is in a unique relationship to China in that it is semiautonomous. It has tasted freedom and has not forgotten the Chinese Government’s brutal crackdown of the Tiananmen Square protests on June 4 of 1989. In fact, Hong Kong is the only place in China allowed to hold peaceful assemblies to honor the students and citizens that were killed in the supression of the Tiananmen Square protests. In the Series: Brookings Northeast Asia Commentary   |Number 25 of 25  we find a curent…

  • History of Psychiatry

    The Freud Jung Letters

    April 21, 1974 By  LIONEL TRILLING http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/21/reviews/jung-freud.html THE CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN SIGMUND FREUD AND C.G. JUNG Edited by William McGuire. Translated by Ralph Manheim and R.F.C. Hull. The relationship between Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung had its bright beginning in 1906 and  came to its embittered end in 1913.  Its disastrous course was charted by the many letters the two  men wrote each other.  Of these a few have been lost but there are 360 extant, of which 164 are  from Freud, 196 from Jung.  In 1970 the Freud and Jung families made the enlightened decision  that this correspondence was to be edited as a unit, and it is now…

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    Carl Jung

    Carl Jung Biography Motto: “Thank God I am Jung and not Jungian” (C.G. Jung) Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) had a significant contribution to the psychoanalytical movement and is generally considered as the prototype of the dissident through the impact of his scission and the amplification of the movement he created in his turn (analytical psychology). Jung was the son of a Swiss reverend. He completed his medical studies, specialized in psychiatry and joined the staff of Burgholzli, the renowned psychiatric hospital in Zurich, run at that time by the famous Dr. Eugen Bleuler. In 1902-1903 he attended a traineeship in Paris with Pierre Janet, and then returned to Zurich and…